December 16, 2021 67was used to enforce heteronormativity
in dance: training boys separately to
avoid exposure to feminine gestures,
censoring perceived homosexual con-
tent, and punishing dancers and cho-
reographers thought to be gay. After
several male ballet dancers defected in
1966, “dancers were divided by rank,
gender, evaluation of either ‘positive’
or ‘negative,’ and labeled as homosex-
ual.... Ultimately, nine company mem-
bers, including soloists and technical
staff, were not allowed to travel.”
Yet this doesn’t deter Schwall from
arguing for the political significance of
the modest and often thwarted efforts
of targeted dancers. She claims that the
declarations of ballet dancers against
the persecution of nonconformists who
defected in 1966 constitute “evidence
of their unique power to take action,”
even though their statements were
made once they were outside Cuba.
She argues that a sexual satire with al-
legedly queer content “left an imprint”
on Cuban culture even though it was
censored. Schwall also understates the
severity of the sanctions on persecuted
homosexual members of the dance
community. To suggest that the cho-
reographer and folklorist Rogelio Mar-
tinez Furé, accused in the 1960s both of
having gay sex abroad and of Black sec-
tarianism, was able to insulate himself
from harsher punishment because he
remained employed during the 1970s
overlooks the political significance of
his demotion. Being “reassigned” put
him in the same category with “coun-
terrevolutionary” literary figures of the
era who were also banned from public
life and turned into pariahs.
Throughout the book, Schwall ex-
hibits great concern for how racism
affected Cuban dancers’ career ad-
vancement. Yet she doesn’t mention
that the first film to be censored by the
revolutionary government in 1961—
PM by Orlando Jiménez Leal and Sabá
Cabrera Infante—featured working-
class Black Cubans dancing in a port-
side bar, which was interpreted as a
sign of indolence and political disaffec-
tion by the leaders of the national film
institute.
Schwall does note that Black dancers
and religious practitioners received no
credit when their knowledge was ap-
propriated by white choreographers,
but she pays little attention to the po-
litical tensions between the socially
marginalized Blacks who worked as
advisers for dance companies and
state- sanctioned choreographers and
administrators. Some of these men,
hired for their knowledge of Afro-
Cuban spiritual practices, were later
interviewed by the ethnomusicologist
Katherine Hagedorn, who conducted
research in Cuba between 1989 and- They told her that in the 1960s
the leadership of the Cuban Folkloric
Ensemble cooperated with policing ef-
forts aimed at infiltrating Afro- Cuban
religious sects and ferreting out Black
men who were not considered “produc-
tive” enough—which at the time meant
that they were probably not cooperat-
ing with volunteer political activities
and were thus suspect.
Concert dance had a dual function
in Cuba—as a symbol of revolution-
ary benevolence and as a form of so-
cial control—and this becomes most
apparent in the contrast between the
state’s support of concert dance and
its policing of street dance. Schwall
describes elitist Cubans dismissing
popular dancing—practiced by almost
everyone, not only poor Blacks, in bars,
in people’s homes, and on the streets—
as a vulgar activity of the lower rungs
of society. Alicia Alonso disdained it
and wanted to prove to the world that
Cubans could rise above it. But such
denigration of popular dance styles
like danzón, rumba, and salsa also pro-
vided a seemingly apolitical, aesthetic
cover for the policing and repression
of undesirables, and Schwall does not
address that. She celebrates the revo-
lutionary government’s efforts to bring
dance to the masses but fails to men-
tion that popular dances associated
with Cuban nightlife and American
rock and roll were interpreted as signs
of imperialist decadence by the regime
during the 1960s and 1970s.
In her epilogue, written in 2019,
Schwall makes a brief reference to De-
cree 349—a law that was passed the
previous year—as a rejection of “vul-
gar” content in artwork, which is the
government’s dismissive term for cul-
ture produced outside state venues. In
fact, Decree 349 empowers the state to
penalize artists who share their work
with the public without prior authori-
zation—it strengthens the state’s abil-
ity to decide who can be considered an
artist at all, and has been condemned
by international human rights organi-
zations and the European Parliament.
The state’s defense of the law recycled
its long- standing attacks on self- taught
and largely Black rappers and reggae-
toneros whose confrontational lyrics
appeal to disaffected youth. Socially
conscious Cuban cultural workers
quickly pointed out the racist impli-
cations of the government’s argument
and since then have established two in-
dependent groups that are challenging
the law.
Those groups include artists from
several fields, but no dancers. So far, the
official position of the Ballet Nacional
de Cuba has been to defend the govern-
ment, not fellow artists. Instead of con-
sidering why dancers stand apart from
the rising tide of disaffection among
Cuban artists, Schwall offers plati-
tudes about the persistence of dance
in Cuban life despite hardship. Her
exclusive reliance on the Cuban state’s
point of view hints at regrettable self-
censorship, which is similarly evident
in Bustamante’s euphemistic blaming
of “archival silence” for preventing us
from seeing Cuban society in all “its
plurality and depth.” The greatest chal-
lenge to understanding Cuban culture
lies in grasping the dual function of the
state, which supports the same people
it represses, and in whose name the rev-
olution came about. QHoliday Schedule
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