Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Introduction / 3
the island by most U.S. citizens, a move that has lasted in a modi¤ed version
until the present day. For a relatively small nation whose whole industrial
and agricultural infrastructure was based upon U.S. technology and designs,
this sudden and severe break in economic and political relationships was devastating.
For the average Cuban citizen in the 1960s, the embargo meant that
basic products such as medicine, food, clothing, chemicals, fuel, and even
clean water suddenly became unavailable. For the Cuban citizen of today,
“El Bloqueo” means that many of these items are scarce, absurdly expensive,
of poor quality, or available only sporadically. Although Cuba has survived
by creating strong trade relations with other nations, the exclusion from the
world’s largest economy located just 90 miles away still means that the Cuban
people suffer shortages in essential goods. The embargo is now perpetuated
for quite different reasons than it was at the beginning, through the lobbying
of Cuban exiles in the United States who are critical of the Revolutionary
government, many of whom also hope to regain family property (and perhaps
power) lost in the 1960s.
Despite frequent media coverage of the political tensions between the
United States and Cuba and an outpouring of scholarly works on the history
of Cuban-American relations, many Americans remain unaware of the economic,
political, and personal impact of the embargo on everyday life in
Cuba. Even less is said about how the “communication blockade” between
scholars has affected the historical course of academic disciplines and scholarship
in general. Communication between colleagues and the sharing of research
results and ideas are critical to the advancement of all disciplines. The
absence of regular avenues for scholarly exchange can slow the processes of
discovery, theory-building, testing, and critique that are important to the mature
development of a ¤eld. Unfortunately, the lack of communication between
two generations of Cuban and U.S. scholars has led not only to a near
silencing of scholarly exchange but also to a misunderstanding about the conditions
underlying this silence. For example, in his review of archaeology in
post-1959 Cuba, Davis (1996) argues, among other things, that this state of
affairs is due to a voluntary isolation adopted by his Cuban counterparts. Archaeologists
who have traveled to Cuba in the past few years have found this
assumption to be false. Cuban archaeologists are eager, even hungry, for intellectual
exchange and information on the state of the ¤eld in North America.
The perception that Cuba’s isolation is self-imposed rather than a condition
structured by the U.S. embargo is a relic of Cold War rhetoric.
New archaeological ¤ndings and methods have been developed in many