BDB Bertsolaritzaren datu-basea

This project is a comprehensive cultural analysis of Cuban Son and Punto Guajiro performance, situated within the broad socio-historic process of Cuban cultural nationalisms and their more recent manifestations within the Cuban Revolution. This dissertation seeks to understand the interrelationships between aesthetics, music making, and processes of cubanidad (the sense of Cuban-ness). I suggest that the sense of Cuban-ness be productively understood as an aesthetic disposition; one linked through the social practice of music making to a range of ethical and political orientations in the search for, and at times fights over, what it means to be Cuban.
Specifically, this project examines where, when, and how processes of cubanidad have emerged historically in the project of 'nation' building in 20th and early 21st century Cuba. I demonstrate how music making has occupied a privileged role in the construction of cubanidad and the ways in which it continues to exert a powerful frame for contemporary performances of Cuban cultural identity. I assert that the focus on music making provides a window into the struggles of and within Cuban cultural nationalist projects; the social revolutionary process of the last 50 years as manifested in the changing relations between artists and the revolutionary Cuban state evidenced in socialist cultural policies; and the shifting role of the market in shaping the opportunities and constraints of Cuban musicians on the world stage and at home. These structural vantage points are considered in dialogue with the assorted meanings that Cubans invest in their embodied experiences of to cubano. Accordingly, this dissertation provides ethnographic specificity on the racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics of contemporary expressive cultural practices of Cuban Son and Punto Guajiro through the examination of a group of Guantanamero musicians, their familial and community contexts, and the manners in which they are positioned within national and transnational discursive fields of artistic production. I argue that it is within each performative manifestation that such musicians give embodied substance to processes of cubanidad.