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Focusing on the representations of carnival and its comparsas (carnival bands and music), this book offers new readings of poems by seminal Cuban poets, examining how their poetic work illustrating these traditions both contributed to and detracted from the growth of a tangible Afro-Cuban identity. All of these poems relate in some way or the other to the cultural and intellectual phenomenon known as Afrocubanismo. This phenomenon thrived in Havana, initiating in the late 1920s. The book examines, from a literary perspective, the long-running debate between the proponents of Afro-Cuban cultural manifestations and the predominantly white Cuban intelligentsia, who viewed these traditions as “backward” and counter to the interests of the young Republic.

Art historian and curator E. Carmen Ramos focuses on the pioneering but problematic work of the nineteenth-century Spanish painter and caricaturist, Víctor Patricio de Landaluze, who spent much of his adult life in colonial Cuba. Despite his opposition to Cuba’s independence from Spain, Landaluze was one of the leading practitioners of costumbrismo (genre painting, or the literary and artistic representation of local customs) on the island, portraying human “types” such as Creole landowners, slaves, former slaves, mulatas, and guajiros (peasants). By the end of the nineteenth century, Landaluze had documented many aspects of Afro-Cuban daily life—including religion, music, and dance—all while, according to Ramos’s analysis, perpetuating the racial stereotypes of African savagery that was common in other former slave societies such as Brazil, the United States, and Puerto Rico. A close look at one of Landaluze’s most famous paintings, Corte de caña (Cutting Sugar Cane, 1874), reveals the racial anxieties among the peninsular Spanish, as well as some members of the Creole elite, provoked by the slaves’ emancipation and the war of national liberation in Cuba.

This book examines the intersection of Afro-Cuban and Latino/a culture and religiosity through the study of a particular group, the Cuban-American community. It proposes a theological analysis of the everyday faith of Cuban-Americans, informed by the political, cultural, and economic markers that characterize this community and explains that the underlying thesis of this study is that Afro-Cuban culture saturates Cuban culture. It examines the notion of identity within Afro-Cuban and Latino/a theologies, explores Cuban-American theology and discusses Cuban and Cuban-American identities, both historical and contemporary.

In a 2007 issue of Ediciones Vigía’s magazine for young people, Barquitos del San Juan, Rolando Estévez Jordán pays homage to Elegua, one of the most important orishas in the transcultural religious system of Santería. Through visual and cultural analyses of the journal, this chapter shows how Vigía became an Elegua within Cuban culture. Ediciones Vigía opened doors between Cuban national identity and Afro-Cuban culture, a contentious but interdependent pairing that has animated Cuban life since the liberation wars in the second half of the nineteenth century.