In the Furnace of the Nineties: Identity and Society in Cuba Today is a discourse written by Fernando Martinez Heredia about the implications of national identity and its profound importance over the years to Cuba. “National identity has been a basic determination in Cuban history for over a century. It is the daughter of profound political revolutions that upset the expected (“normal”) reproduction of social life. National identity made socialism and social liberation its own, and vice versa. National identity is something that Cubans pride themselves of and is what has kept them going through the Revolution and supporting it. “The idea of a nation of Cubans attained much richer and more complex than those before the Revolution. For more than three decades, nation and socialism were united, almost to the point of exclusiveness: Without the two, nothing or nobody was Cuban” (142-143). Martinez goes on to criticize the capitalist mentality and how it is a potential threat to the national identity that is socialism. “The culture of developed capitalism has, in the last few decades, deployed a combination of great maturity to integrate or neutralize past challenges to its hegemony: a qualitatively superior level of control of cultural production and consumption combined with an explicit project of cultural domination” (143). In this quote, Martinez is describing the U.S. and his disdain for the capitalist culture that seems to be taking over the entire world. He thinks that if it were to take over in Cuba, the island would lose its identity and difference from the rest of the world.
The Supervised Party by Antonio Jose Ponte is a bleak look at how Cuba transformed into something darker during the “special period.” He uses descriptive language to set the scene of Cuba at the time. His entire piece is draped over the background of darkness. He focuses in on the prostitution that ran rampant throughout the country. “The female vampire and the urban cowboy, more or less” is how he described the relationship. “The country’ president, who had abolished prostitution decades before, would have to recognize publicly that it had returned. And before the television cameras he would take pride in the fact that the country boasted the most sophisticated prostitution in the world” (216). The country had rid itself of prostitution during the times when the Soviet Union was strong but once it collapsed, prostitution had become the staple of the Cuban economy for those living there. It could not be avoided even if they wanted. “The Revolution manages to make evident, in the same way as the lucidity and hallucinations of misery, the symbolic character of money. It insistently unmasks one of the certainties that any other society needs to forget in order to continue operating: that money, the representation of everything, can also represent nothing, be nothing” (218). Here Ponte is referring to the devaluing of the peso. Dollars were used and allowed in the economy, especially with prostitution. The only reason they entered the business was to secure good money which was no longer available in the form of pesos. “They stopped putting people in jail for walking around with four U.S. dollars in their pockets. In order to be credible again, money had to come from other lands. And the Cuban peso would lose a little of its character as sugar mill scrip, worthless outside the company store” (220). This was a great comparison between the two. The peso had become almost nothing and really had become almost meaningless and this meant hard times for the people of Cuba.
Grilled Shrimp Pasta is a dialogue piece by Jose Prats Sariol. This piece uses a dialogue between a daughter and her husband/fiancé and her father in order to get Cuban rhetoric and feelings across. They go to an American restaurant in the south of the U.S. and the father is somewhat intrigued by a lot of the things that he sees. He decides before he even sits down to dinner what he has to tell his daughter. By the time his meal comes, his grilled shrimp pasta, he has decided to mask his final statement in a long metaphoric dialogue about railways and railway cars. He uses the railway comparison to compare and contrast two or three completely different systems and what they should do to fix them. He seems to be hiding a deeper meaning in what he says but tries to keep the discussion somewhat light since they are at the dinner table. He never allows himself to be distracted from his conversation and tends to push it all the way through when he finally gets to his final thought. He tells his daughter that he is going back to Cuba. He explains it as something he must do for himself, revealing that all the while talking about the different railway systems was merely his way of describing the difference between the U.S. and Cuba in the larger scheme of things. (235-236).
All of these readings are very important to better understanding the topic of Cuba and how it has molded the thinking of different people. The Supervised Party and Grilled Shrimp Pasta are two pieces that portray the situation in Cuba quite differently. The different tones in all the pieces shows that Cuba is a complex place, as is any country. There are many different ideas that have postulated and discussed and put into writing. These reading show the attitude in Cuba toward different subjects such as homosexuality, national identity and how it defines the country, and the false ideas that outsiders have about the country. These readings also show the importance of socialism as a governing system and as a culture that defines them.
I found Heredia extremely hard to comprehend in his ideas at first. They seemed to be very abstract and so different from anything I had read before. The tone was very denunciatory toward the capitalist system. It was a very different perspective from any other I had read before. I was kind of shocked by some of the ideas and perceptions that he had. I didn’t really understand why capitalism would be such a danger in the sense of losing national identity but that could be naïve of me or paranoid of him. Hernandez uses paradoxes, or rather myths, about Cuba in order to discredit outside sources. He also has an extremely different tone from anything I have ever read. Hernandez seems to discredit all those who are not from Cuba, saying that they do not collect enough information or that they are too blinded by something to properly portray the real Cuba. He, however, seems less against the capitalist world as Heredia who I seem to think of as somewhat extreme. Hernandez allows the possibility of change and democracy but with Fidel in power. I found Ponte’s description to be very understandable and not so far out there. He gave a touching account of the downfall of the economy and how it had led to dire circumstances. He showed more how things really were rather than try to force an opinion to the reader of how capitalism was dangerous even though the allusion to the corruption brought by the dollar was subtly stated.