Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #4: nation 145
ercised and encountered and, in the end, the way power was registered and
resisted. The vitality of North American forms was derived from their capacity
to shape consciousness, to remake people by redefi ning the common
assumptions of their everyday life.
These were not efforts devised explicitly to control Cubans. On the
contrary, they were many of the same ways by which North Americans
themselves were formed. And therein lay the power of things and ways
North American. Due in part to historical circumstances and in part to
geography, Cubans happened to have been among the fi rst people outside
the United States to come under the infl uence of North American material
culture.
The success of U.S. hegemony in Cuba was less a function of political
control and military domination than a cultural condition in which meaning
and purpose were derived from North American normative systems.
U.S. infl uence expanded from within, usually in noncoercive forms, just
as often introduced by Cubans themselves as by North Americans. U.S.
culture spread rapidly across the island and emerged as one of the most accessible
means by which to aspire to well-being and thus was a powerful
motivator in the acceptance of new social norms and new cognitive categories.
This was the principal way that Cubans entered the postcolonial order,
the circumstances under which social institutions were formed and moral
hierarchies established, the means by which many citizens arranged the
terms of their familiarity with the world at large.
This is not to minimize the role of coercion and violence in defense of
the status quo. U.S. armed intervention occurred periodically. Political intermeddling
was constant. Nor were these methods of social control and
political domination unimportant. Economic control and political power
served to obtain some measure of Cuban acquiescence, and could—and
did—act as powerful forces to secure Cuban emulation of what was increasingly
becoming known as the “American way of life.” [. . .]
These relationships endured varying degrees over the course of a century,
often in ways that ceased to be apprehended at all. They operated as a system
possessed of its own logic. Because that system lacked organization does
not mean that it was without order. The power of North American forms
resided expressly in their capacity to assume the appearance of normal and
ordinary, the ease with which their major elements could be appropriated,
and the degree to which these elements infl uenced the standards to which
Cuban men and women aspired to achieve self-defi nition and self-worth.
It is not clear that Cubans fully discerned the sources of their own formation.
What is apparent, however, is that U.S. forms penetrated so deeply
through habitual usage and became so much a part of everyday life as to