66 The New York Reviewfrom official accounts—while islanders
watched.
Bustamante suggests that this fleet-
ing exposure to the anti- Communist
point of view constituted a breaking of
taboos. “In real time,” he writes, “the
exile prisoners’ interjections into their
interrogators’ lines of questioning dis-
rupted rather than reinforced any easy
partition between Cuba’s prerevolu-
tionary elites and its deserving socialist
citizenry.” It seems improbable that is-
landers would have been much affected
by hearing discordant views about
Girón: they had just been obliged to
take up arms to defend their country,
and they knew of the arrests of thou-
sands of suspected counterinsurgents
and the expulsion of Catholic priests.
That a variety of positions may have ex-
isted for a brief moment does not repre-
sent pluralistic debate or guarantee the
right to hold opposing views.
In the 1970s, Bustamante argues,
the majority of Cuban exiles gave up
hope of returning to Cuba and began
to adapt to life in the United States.
He treats the PBS sitcom ¿Qué Pasa,
USA? (1977–1980), the first bilingual
sitcom in the US, as an accurate re-
flection of this assimilationist turn in
Cuban exile family life, writing that
“the show treated the ‘Cuban Ameri-
canization’ of the quintessential Cuban
immigrant household not as a liability
but as nature’s course.” But given how
many exiles retained the Spanish lan-
guage, married inside the community,
and considered US policy toward Cuba
central to their American voting pref-
erences, I am skeptical of his claims
that most of the community assimilated
quickly—exiles made Miami more like
Cuba rather than making themselves
more like Americans. An import-
ant film that counters his assumption
about Cuban exile assimilation is El
Super (1979), the first independent
feature made by exiles Leon Ichaso
and Orlando Jiménez Leal. It offers
a far bleaker view, telling the story
of a homesick, uprooted Cuban living
in a Manhattan basement, toiling as a
superintendent, getting trapped in re-
peated conversations about the Bay of
Pigs invasion, and struggling to under-
stand his Americanized daughter.
Bustamante contrasts what he sees
as the assimilation of Cuban exiles
with the political activities of two small
Cuban- American student groups, Ab-
dala and Areíto. These groups diverged
from the dominant political stance of
Cuban exiles in advocating for direct
involvement with the Cuban govern-
ment. He notes that these groups were
made up of young people who arrived
in the US as children, some on the CIA-
backed Peter Pan flights of the early
1960s, though all of them felt the de-
cision to leave Cuba had not been their
own. The short- lived Abdala group was
primarily active in New York City and
New Jersey, and is most famous for its
1971 act of civil disobedience, in which
sixteen members chained themselves
to chairs in the UN Security Coun-
cil chambers and demanded a meet-
ing with officials to discuss political
prisoners in Cuba. Areíto published
a magazine about Cuban society and
the revolution’s accomplishments. The
groups’ acceptance of Cuban socialism
and their pro- rapprochement stance
contributed to the opening of visits
to the island for thousands of exiles
in 1979, which had significant conse-
quences for both Cuba and Miami.Bustamante’s account of these fam-
ily reunification visits is the only part
of the book that relies heavily on in-
terviews, and as a result this section
is the most rich in telling detail, most
of it contradictory. Between 1979 and
1982, for the first time since the revolu-
tion, about 150,000 exiles were allowed
to return to the island to visit relatives
for up to two weeks. Those who visited
were charged exorbitant fees for Cuban
passport renewals, hotels, and airfare,
but this did not stop them. The Cuban
government found itself compelled to
change its tune about the people it had
once called “scum” because it needed
an influx of hard currency.
Bustamante quotes a contemporary
interview with an eighteen- year- old
named Ernesto Hernández—“I would
not go as long as Fidel Castro is over
there”—as “typical of the majority,
young and old, who equated travel to
the island with lending support to the
Cuban government.” The islanders who
had refrained from communicating
with exiled family members out of fear
of reprisal were suddenly interested in
them, and the gifts they brought, de-
spite years of indoctrination against
capitalist materialism.
The profoundly emotional nature of
family visits, as well as the political ma-
neuvering they involved, make it hard
for me to understand how Bustamante
can argue that the reunification flights
did not yield any visible response in
Cuba: “Whether in relation to family
reunions joyous and fraught, or the
jealousies engendered among friends
who did not receive gifts from Miami
guests, the island’s public sphere (to
the extent that one existed) was mute.”
Yet stores in hotels became stocked
with consumer goods that no tour-
ist was likely to buy for themselves;
to this day many locals linger outside
shops and dream up shopping lists. The
Cuban writer Jesús Díaz made a movie
about this national drama called Le-
janía (The Parting of the Ways)—not
mentioned by Bustamante—that was
named the most important film of 1985
by Cuban film critics.While Bustamante uses many types
of cultural artifacts to illustrate polit-
ical attitudes, Elizabeth B. Schwall’s
new book, Dancing with the Revo-
lution, focuses on dance and its rela-
tionship to the Cuban state, from the
1940s through the first three decades
of the revolution. A visiting lecturer in
Latin America and Caribbean history
at Berkeley, Schwall concentrates on
ballet, modern, and folkloric dance,
charting how a handful of highly influ-
ential proponents of each form created
world- renowned ensembles, cultivated
audiences at home and abroad, and al-
lied their endeavors with the political
agendas of the Cuban state. She notes
how a Eurocentric attitude that still
prevailed on the island after the revo-
lution meant that ballet received more
funding, better facilities, more access
to international tours and dedicated
television programming than modern
or folkloric dance.
Schwall writes somewhat rever-
entially about the ballet star Alicia
Alonso, who used her international
fame to forge alliances with Batista and
then switched over to the revolutionary
cause in the late 1950s, securing excep-
tionally high funding from both sides.
A Communist Party member sincethe 1940s, she was a shrewd dance
promoter: in 1948 she founded Cu-
ba’s first ballet company and named it
after herself, though she later changed
its name to the Ballet de Cuba and, in
1961, to the Ballet Nacional de Cuba.
Ultimately Alonso ensconced herself
within the upper echelons of the rev-
olutionary power structure in a way
that only a handful of cultural arbi-
ters—such as Cuban Film Institute
founder Alfredo Guevara and Casa de
las Americas founder Haydée Santa-
maría—ever managed.
Schwall cannot ignore the extraor-
dinary political influence that Alonso
enjoyed, and acknowledges that the
American expatriate Lorna Burdsall, a
leading proponent of modern dance inCuba, was married to Manuel Piñeiro,
the first director of Cuban Intelligence
and mastermind of Cuba’s secret op-
erations in Latin America. (Burdsall
also befriended Mariela Castro, the
daughter of Raúl Castro and niece of
Fidel Castro.) These connections af-
forded ballet and modern dance obvi-
ous political advantages, yet Schwall
insists that ordinary dancers were
the central force propelling their art
form to its privileged relation with the
state.
When Schwall discusses the post-
1959 era, her account is skewed by her
desire to present the revolution as a de-
mocratizing force and dancers as both
loyal soldiers and forceful advocates for
themselves. She goes into great detail
about the establishment of dance com-
panies in the early 1960s devoted to
folkloric and modern dance, the rapid
expansion of dance education, and the
strategic recruitment of people of color,
which led to notable ethnic and eco-
nomic diversity in the country’s dance
ensembles, even in ballet. Schwall finds
evidence of dancers’ militancy at every
turn, writing that they “characterized
their art as embodiments of revolution-
ary politics.”
She describes the work of the cho-
reographer Eduardo Rivero, for ex-
ample, as a “labor of love... filled with
liberating movement and expectation.”
She reads political purpose into the
work of Black dancers who “took ac-
tion by performing to distinguish them-
selves on national and internationalstages,” which resulted in Afro- Cuban
performance remaking “the contours
of revolutionary culture.” She argues
that Cuban dancers “reaffirmed their
significance to revolutionary politics”
by touring. But since folkloric and
social dance were widely practiced
outside the realm of concert dance be-
fore 1959, the argument that the rev-
olution somehow made Cubans more
aware of their dance culture seems
questionable.
The most impressive parts of
Schwall’s book appear in her investi-
gation of Afro- Cuban dance forms,
the cross- cultural exchange between
Cuba and the US, and the challenges
that dancers of color faced in the pre-
revolutionary era. She explains how
the island- based ethnologist Fernando
Ortiz, the poet Nicolás Guillén, and
many musicians and dancers cultivated
serious interest in Afro- Cuban culture
by celebrating vernacular speech and
rhythms and borrowing images and
myths from syncretic religions. They
laid the groundwork for a range of ex-
plorations of folkloric traditions after
the revolution, which resulted in the
incorporation of rumba steps in cer-
tain ballets, modern dances inspired by
African sculptures, and dances set in
working- class neighborhoods.
Afro- Cuban poetry, music, and dance
also caught the attention of the pioneer-
ing African American dancer, choreog-
rapher, and anthropologist Katherine
Dunham, who worked with Cuban per-
formers in New York. Schwall notes
that Dunham accepted Cuban danc-
ers of color into her company when
they had nowhere else to study modern
dance and “influenced Cuban modern
dance... before modern dance for-
mally existed on the island.” Schwall’s
attention to the collaborations between
Dunham, Langston Hughes, Guillén,
and famed declaimer of poems Eusebia
Cosme sheds light on important Afri-
can diasporic dialogues that crossed
national borders in the early twen-
tieth century. Yet in general, before
1959, African- derived religious dance
was made more palatable by featur-
ing light- skinned female performers,
and although Black dancers assisted in
the creation of ballet steps and scenes
drawn from Cuban contemporary
urban life, they were erased from the
historical record.
Although Schwall notes that perfor-
mances were censored, dancers’ mo-
rality strictly policed, and defections
not infrequent, she does not question
whether expressions of revolutionary
devotion were required to maintain
one’s career. When her account gets
to the 1980s, she notes that a younger
generation had begun to incorporate
critiques of the system into their work,
yet she never doubts the sincerity of
dancers’ “revolutionary fervor” during
the earlier period. She seems reluctant
to acknowledge that most of those who
were critical of the system ended up
in exile, preferring to attribute depar-
tures to financial need or professional
advancement.Schwall’s attempts to position dancers
as revolutionaries and makers of their
own destiny grow increasingly strained
in her discussion of gender and sexu-
ality. She examines the Cuban state’s
campaigns against homosexuals in
the 1960s and 1970s and provides de-
tails about the three- part strategy thatIrma Obermayer as an íreme, an Afro-
Cuban masked dancer, in ‘Danza ñáñigo
de Cuba,’ 1950Katherine Dunham Photograph Collection/Southern Illinois University, CarbondaleFusco 65 67 .indd 66 11 / 18 / 21 2 : 37 PM