Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Introduction / 17
additional topics in Cuban archaeology. It is hoped that this publication will
stimulate broader exchange and mutual understanding.
A Puerto Rican Mediator? by L. Antonio Curet
When Shannon Dawdy contacted me in the summer of 2001 to ask me to be
the discussant for the symposium she and Gabino La Rosa Corzo were organizing
on Cuban archaeology at the Annual Meeting of the Society for
American Archaeology in Denver, I did not hesitate to say yes. This was a
great professional honor, as well as an opportunity to interact and learn more
about the ancient history of this island that I knew only from readings of
archaeological works such as those by Tabío, Guarch, La Rosa Corzo, Domínguez,
Dacal, Rivero de la Calle, and others. Needless to say, this was a naive
and innocent approach to a large responsibility that I was taking on. It was
not until months later that Shannon con¤ded to me that more than just a
discussant, she chose me as a cultural mediator between the American and
Cuban archaeologists. As a Puerto Rican who, owing to the colonial situation
of our island, both is and is not an American, she thought I would be a good
person to be this mediator, capable of navigating a new academic dialogue
they hoped to develop. In other words, I was, and at the same time was not,
an insider. At that time I did not know if I should have felt ®attered or frightened
by the unwanted burden that I had agreed to take. This last sensation
did not hit me in reality until I started receiving the papers before the meetings.
It was then that I realized that I was not so much a mediator, as Shannon
put it, but more stuck in the middle.
Because I work in the Caribbean, I know more about Cuban archaeology
than the average American archaeologist, yet because of my training and
working conditions, I know more about American archaeology than the average
Latin American archaeologist. But after reading the papers, I decided
not so much to concentrate my discussion on the content of the papers per se,
since they were self-explanatory and signi¤cant contributions, but instead to
contribute to the dialogue that Shannon and Gabino had started by organizing
the symposium. After reading many of the papers and reading the meager
American literature available on Cuban archaeology (e.g., Davis 1996), I began
to sense that there were considerable misunderstandings and misconceptions
about the realities of the discipline in the “other” country. It seemed to
me that the majority of these misconceptions had resulted either from a lack
of communication between archaeologists from the two countries or from
political and social biases produced by more than 40 years of Cold War propa-