Book Thoughts: On Becoming Cuban by Louis A. Perez Jr.
After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit.
Original Sent Date: July 1, 2024
Picked this book up at my library because I just saw it there and thought it might be helpful. It wasn't really, despite being a book with a lot of name and quote dropping. This book honestly would've been better organized as just each main claim followed by 10 pages of quotes (many of which are from books) and names and dates in bullet points under it. It repeated itself so many damned times and had no clear organization. Don't understand why it was written like this in the slightest.
The other big issue is that it only wants to focus on culture and virtually nothing on actual politics so I didn't really learn much. I would've learned more from reading the Wikipedia page on Cuba probably, though that itself would have some distortion I'm sure.
The book covered the years from like 1830~1960 which was right after the Castro revolution. Well, I'm a bit dumb for thinking that it would give me the information I was interested in knowing which was specifically the leadup to communism and the politics / changes of life surrounding that. Not so.
Here is a list of things I actually did learn from this book even though it took 500 pages to say it and could've been condensed to probably 100.
Cuba and the US had an extremely close relationship during the time that Cuba was under Spanish colonialism, and up until Batista became a dictator. Cubans had to live under US ways to succeed due to imperialism and all that, and a lot of them bought into the idea of market culture, democracy, etc. even though they could tell that the US didn't treat them equally and had monopoly on a lot of the market (not to mention all the sugar mills they set up). When the US just whole-heartedly supported Batista's coup a lot of Cubans felt like this was a betrayal of all the things that the US supposedly taught them. A lot of them also fled to the US when Castro took power because they believed in market culture too hard and didn't want to give up their higher standards of living. This flight also let him proceed without much pushback.
Miami in Florida has a huge concentration of Cubans. It was originally built to try to mimic Havana for tropical exocticism / Spanish colonial exocticism in the 1920s, and then Cubans were like "hey that looks vaguely familiar" and then influenced it for real by migrating there in huge numbers (which they had to do because there wasn't much skilled work in Cuba due to American market imperialism) + they liked going there as a vacation spot for lighter summers (& stuff was always cheaper in Miami than in Havana). And then Havana was like, "Hey that looks cool, kind of familiar but with all this up-to-date North American stuff," and then copied Miami back in the 1940s.
Going back to the Spanish colonialism days -- the US close-by presence via trade exposed Cuba to a different way of being and that inspired a lot of them to revolt. Some things this did for them in these early periods:
- Give them the fastest technological updates outside of the US. They had railroads in 1830s (highest ratio of railroad lines to total load mass in Latin America by the 1890s), telegraphs in 1850s, electric power after 1898. They often got things before Spain did. After the Spanish period, they had telephones in 1915 (largest number per capita in Latin America by 1921), radios in 1922, TVs in 1950 (first Latin American country).
- Make gender relations more equal, since women who went to the US saw that they could walk on the streets alone and also drive cars and the like. Women weren't supposed to be seen in the streets in Cuba during Spanish rule.
- Better education, since Spain wasn't interested in investing in Cuban education. Even after the Spanish though, a lot of Cubans would continue to send their kids to the US to be market competitive. Women also got to access education in the US and got to work.
- Protestantism was better than Spanish Catholicism because it would actually let Cubans be part of the ministry. Also missionaries gave better schooling and social services.
- Baseball. Cubans loved baseball so much that they brought it over and it became a symbol of defiance to the colonial system because the Spanish national sport was bullfighting, which was mostly closed off to women even as spectators. Baseball was attended by everyone including Black Cubans. They also connected people to talk revolution. And after independence, African-Americans would actually find it easier to pose as Cuban to gain entrance to the baseball leagues outside of the segregated ones. Figure that. Though, after American interference baseball became sort of a way to distract people. I guess since it supports the US way of being, materially and otherwise, and that wasn't true when the Spanish were in rule so it was subversive to them.
- All of this of course also works to export ideas of liberalism and market capitalism etc.
José Martí is apparently an early revolutionary and also a country hero. What exactly he did, though, this book did not care to tell me.* He also became a huge icon again after Castro took power, less for his actual political ideas and just more for the embodiment of patria, aka nationalism.
- *Wikipedia says that he was a significant figure in the Cuban War of Independence and died in military action. He also wrote a lot and did a lot of political advocacy for Cuban independence. I'm assuming that this is a no-brainer to anyone who is remotely aware of Cuban history, which is why the book doesn't care to explain.
"Criollo" / "Creole" is apparently used differently than what I tend to think of (which is Creole food from Louisana which makes me think of African + US Southern). in this case referred to an idea of nationalism; Cubans who aren't Spanish, basically. And who are basically white since they were racist against Afro-Cubans and didn't like the idea that they had to band together with them to achieve independence; they mostly just wanted their white peoples to be on par with the US's. Because the US exported racism. Whoppee.
Cuban revolution had 3 wars against the Spanish: Ten Years' War (1868–1878), the Little War (1879–1880), Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898). But they wouldn't win until right at the turn of the century because the US went to war with Spain in multiple fronts including in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. From the Spanish-American war the US gained the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The book did not tell me this, I had to Wikipedia it. I still don't understand this history very well because I'm pretty bad about reading about military history. I do wonder if it would've been possible for the Cubans to win without US interference, though.
After the US interceded it also basically got to call the shots for Cuba's economy and infrastructure and took over a lot of the land. It rebuilt stuff but also set up privileged company mill towns (typically sugar) that had all the latest stuff for North American personnel while Cubans living just outside got nothing. It also transported stuff like Christmas (specifically Santa Claus) and fashion ideas, which later would be reversed during Castro's rise to power. Basically, go North American to protest the Spanish, go Spanish to protest the North Americans.*
The US also changed the education system to talk greatly about North American politics and the like. Which is funny because they would never fully extend this to "lesser" peoples, as we know.- *Reminds me a lot of Taiwanese people with the claiming of Japanese things as a protest to Chineseness when the KMT came in and treated the Taiwanese poorly. Japanese things in Taiwan also just have a better status, though that just may be the case everywhere given the very basic exploitative labor poor Chinese people have to do to make fast, cheap stuff due to global markets.
Americans loved Cuba as a tourist destination and basically caused a huge rise in stuff like bars, casinos, drug dens, hotels and brothels. In the 1950s organized crime from the states came to settle in Cuba and controlled the major hotels and casinos. This is also because Batista let them.
In the 1920s-1950s Cuban music & dance had a lot of influence on American music, if diluted somewhat in form. What caught on with North Americans wasn't what the upper Cuban class wanted though, since they thought these forms were immoral and the like. Some terms:
- son = Spanish melody + African rhythm. The North Americans also mistook this for →
- rumba (spelled rhumba by Americans, which is wrong): African exhibition dance between a man and woman, usually sexual pantomime. I think basically it's conflated with the above in North American thought.
- conga
- mambo
- cha-cha-cha
Didn't realize all of these were Cuban.
Guantanamo Bay basically ended up having life structured around the US naval station. Caimanera in particular had terrible living conditions and was primarily for cafes, cabarets, casinos, bars, brothels, as far as the US military was concerned.
There were so many missionaries in Cuba beginning with the US military occupation in 1898 that they had to have a meeting to agree on which areas their denominations could set up in. Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ (don't know this one), Quakers, Northern Baptists, Southern Baptists, Congregationalists (don't know this one either).
Cuba benefited from the World Wars economically (demand for sugar really increased) and also the Korean War, but those wars also made its trade shift even more to dependence on the United States rather than Europe. Sugar eventually reached its cap demand and it went down and that brought a series of recessions in the 1950s. Unemployment soared as well for all types of jobs.
There's a lot of words that come from English that became normal to say in Spanish. A lot of them have to do with baseball.
Hollywood is truly propaganda machine. Changed beauty standards for women among other things. Radio and TV also. Media has a lot of impact, as we know.
Cubans were kind of obsessed with cars. In 1929 on a per capita basis it had 1 car for every 78.7 inhabitants (only after Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico in Latin America). All of these material things were seen as "progress" and there's even some guy in this book that's quoted about saying how only "backward nations and savage countries" don't have a traffic accident record. "Civilization has a price and it is ridiculous to refuse to pay it." cringe. Castro lambasted how many Cadillacs there were in Cuba.
The I Love Lucy TV show had a ton of impact on how people saw Cubans. Apparently that show had the main character Lucy married to a stereotyped Cuban man named Ricky.
A lot of the reforms after Castro's 1959 revolution were initially devised and implemented by liberals, Protestants, and graduates of US schools who believed in North American value systems and were trying to carry them out. I assume a lot of them fled later as things continued to stay radical, see point one.
This book took me forever to read and I've learned Something but I feel like I also didn't learn a lot. Need to pick up another book on Cuba sometime, hopefully one set later that also talks more about the material slant.