Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua (Cultural Politics Series Vol 8)

Socialist Ensembles CULTURAL POLITICS A series from the Social Text Collective Aimed at a broad interdisciplinary a...

Author: Randy Martin

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Socialist Ensembles

CULTURAL

POLITICS

A series from the Social Text Collective Aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience, these volumes seek to intervene in debates about the political direction of current theory and practice by combining contemporary analysis with a more traditional sense of historical and socioeconomic evaluation. 8. Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua Randy Martin 7. The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere Richard Burt, editor 6. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory Michael Warner, editor 5. The Phantom Public Sphere Bruce Robbins, editor 4. On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture George Yudice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores, editors 3. Technoculture Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, editors 2. Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics Bruce Robbins, editor 1. Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism Andrew Ross, editor

Socialist Ensembles Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua

Randy Martin

Cultural Politics, Volume 8

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Copyright 1994 by Randy Martin. Portions of this book that were previously published in Minnesota Review, Social Text, and Socialism and Democracy are reprinted with permission. Material previously published in The Drama Review as "Cuban Theatre under Rectification" (vol. 34) and "Country and City: Theatre in Revolution" (vol. 31) reprinted with permission of the MIT Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55455-3092 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatlon Data Martin, Randy. Socialist ensembles : theater and state in Cuba and Nicaragua / Randy Martin. p. cm. — (Cultural politics ; v. 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2480-1 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8166-2482-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Theater—Cuba—History—20th century. 2. Theater—Nicaragua—History— 20th century. 3. Socialism and theater—Cuba. 4. Socialism and theaterNicaragua. I. Title. II. Series: Cultural politics (Minneapolis, Minn.) ; v. 8. PN2401.M38 1994 792'.097291'0904-dc20 94-3925 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

For Ginger

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Contents

Preface

ix

1. Theater and the Ethnography of Socialism 2. Where's the Theater?

1

25

3. Nicaraguan Theater Goes to Market

45

4. Masquerades of Gender in a Nicaraguan Theater 5. Sources of Socialist Culture in Cuba 6. Cuban Theater under Rectification

112 158

Conclusion: Theater and the Recognition of Socialism Notes

239

Index

257

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78

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Preface

Discussions of socialist development in a national frame have been dominated by a nearly exclusive focus on the state. What has been largely absent in the prevailing discourse on socialism is any consideration of the nature of civil society in such contexts. Too often, civil society is taken as constitutionally absent. For a good part of the world, the matter appears momentarily settled, swept away by sudden collapse. Yet the rhetoric of collapse has obscured much more than it has clarified. By reducing society as a whole to the state, and state to government leaders, such rhetoric has made understanding the history of socialism elusive and has given the impoverished conception that the presence of socialism was only detectable in the name of a party. Surely critical analysis will suffer if such reductionistic terms are accepted as adequate to account for socialism. They imply at least two conflicting positions. One is that the understanding of socialism as it has appeared historically can be detached from the study of the relevance of the popular and the generative capacity for society as displayed in daily life. As a consequence, recent developments in social theory are taken to be strangely irrelevant to socialism as if the object of analysis had somehow arrested the development of analysis itself. Another position is that socialism has no history, or at least has yet to make an authentic appearance in the history of nation-states. In either case socialism exists only as an idealization, awaiting some ix

x

Preface

better breed of historical agents for its conditions of implementation. This places analysis in the curious posture of viewing politics as if it were never adequate to its theory, rather than the other way around. A tempting corrective to these analytic dilemmas would be simply to assert the presence of civil society where there were thought to be only missing persons. Yet as we have learned from recent developments in theory, replacing total absence with pure presence scarcely constitutes a gain, although this is what is ventured in those radical approaches that would essentialize civil society in terms of the people. Rather, state and civil society should be viewed as existing only in tension, in relations of mutual interpenetration and displacement with respect to both capitalism and socialism. The problem then becomes how to study such internal relations of socialism to reveal its dynamics of change, or historicity. This volume proposes to examine the relation between state and civil society through its mediating links, of which theater will be taken to be a privileged object of analysis. Here theater is privileged methodologically rather than politically. Although theater may claim a certain historical agency, it can scarcely be considered central or instrumental to contemporary processes of social change. Rather, its import lies in what it reveals about the processes of mediation between different dimensions of society. My premise is that theater is a particularly elastic expression of aesthetic and organizational form that can prefigure broader social developments. While supported financially by the state to a significant extent, it is dependent in other respects on its public and often situates itself critically with regard to both forces. As such, theater becomes a key site from which to examine the conditions and relations of their interpenetration and displacement. The critical sensibility displayed in the theater, grounded as it is in an appropriation of cultural processes beyond the stage, is taken as indicative of the ongoing reformation of the socialist project. The viability of that project may be difficult to discern through standard social scientific means that measure economic growth or political participation. Socialism must also be appreciated as a principle of human association that develops the capacity for the social, what is here termed ensemble. Theater displays ensemble as its own means of organization and reflects on it as a style of metarepresentation, that

Preface

xi

is, as a device for seeing how representation operates within a cultural context. What is legible in the theater is the socialist inflection of the problem of national identity that has been associated with dynamic moments of the political stage. The conjuncture of performance and reception gives form to the means of identification of and with a given socialist project. The aim of the analysis of theater is to replace an idealization of socialism (that very probably deserves to collapse) with a cultural studies of socialism capable of recognizing the socialism (albeit limited or partial) of any concrete historical instance. To address this larger theoretical concern, I have done an ethnography of theater and political culture in Cuba and Nicaragua. The ethnography is of performance, and takes the performative—the generative processes of social activity embodied in production and reception—as its critical disposition. My own orientation to ethnographic work and part of my access to the theater (I conducted workshops on movement improvisation in both countries) have derived from my experiences in dance and theater. In both sites, socialism has been very much in formation and, in the face of the restructuring of global capital, it seems valuable to shift the historical imaginary of socialism in the direction of the Third World. My fieldwork was conducted over the course of eight trips taken between 1985 and 1991. The Nicaraguan material spans the Sandinista and Chamorro administrations, and the Cuban studies encompass the period of reform known as rectification and the time during which Soviet aid was withdrawn. These circumstances are taken as a context for particular theatrical activities as well as being read through certain performances. Cuba and Nicaragua both experienced the profoundly disruptive presence of the global market during this time and have responded to dramatically different effect. The impact of external forces and internal policies are evident in cultural expressions. Cuba and Nicaragua are offered as distinct situations that share certain features and context, and a critical view is taken toward the strict formalisms of comparison. The central chapters of this book discuss a series of theoretical issues; the question of how the two settings relate to one another is reserved for the conclusion. An attempt is made to situate contemporary theatrical output historically, to relate theater to other cultural media, to relate cultural policy and or-

xii

Preface

ganization to features of the state and political economy, and to consider the impact of international forces (cultural and political) on both countries. The efforts to conceptualize change in a world that is itself in flux raises many questions, uncertainties, and confusions. Fortunately I have not had to grapple with these issues alone. My editorial involvement with Socialism and Democracy, sustained by the energies of Frank Rosengarten, provided the most immediate intellectual context where these ideas germinated. Michael E. Brown and George Yudice were sources of profound influence and contributed incisive input into the project. My colleagues at Social Text, the New York Marxist School, and Pratt Institute were, each in their way, critical in its formation. In several of the chapters, I have drawn on material that previously appeared in TDR, Minnesota Review, Social Text, and Socialism and Democracy, and I gratefully acknowledge the editorial assistance of those publications. The generosity of those I met in Cuba and Nicaragua comprises the real basis of this book. Armando Correa, Albio Paz, Flora Lauten, Victor Varela, Marianela Boan, Williams Horta, Carlos Diaz, Alan Bolt, Gerardo Molineros, Nestor Mendez, Jorge Eduardo Arellano, Salvador Espinosa, and the members of Nixtayolero, Tohil, Teyocoyani, Guachipilin, Justo Rufino Garay, Comedia Nacional de Nicaragua, Buendia, Cuarta Pared, Miron, Cabildo de Santiago, Teatro Estudio, Danza Abierta, Cuerpo Roto, and Ballet Teatro de la Habana, among many others, provide the inspiration for these pages. Finally, I would like to thank Biodun Iginla and Laura Westlund (whose careful editing taught me much about my own writing in addition to strengthening the manuscript considerably) of the University of Minnesota Press, for seeing the book through to fruition. Brooklyn, New York June 1993

Chapter 1

Theater and the Ethnography of Socialism

Entering Nicaragua Studying socialism these days just might take some looking. Perhaps it was always so. Marx saw socialism at the horizon of capitalism. Although it may seem fixed and out of reach, the horizon is constantly shifting as a consequence of different bodies in motion. New silhouettes constantly appear that require special devices to bring them into definition and focus. From the perspective of capital, socialism may always appear far away, and it would seem one would have to travel a bit to get there. No recently emergent situation was as compelling as the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua for refocusing global attention on what socialism might be. Many were drawn to take a closer look. My first trip to Nicaragua was during the summer of 1985. The war against the Sandinistas—organized in Washington with globally diverted resources on behalf of a national bourgeoisie in exile, led by a deposed army, and fought largely by a rural population who had never been incorporated into the framework of any state authority— was in full swing. The U.S. embargo had just been put into effect by a newly reelected administration with little tolerance for the will of legislatures at home or abroad. During my stay, tanks dug in around the perimeter of Managua with turrets lifted skyward in response to rumorous leakage from the North. The claims that invasion was imminent seemed palpably plausible. After all, Nicaragua had already experienced eleven such incursions since 1855. Because the country had the good fortune to be 1

2


designated by the United States as the potential site of a transatlantic canal and as the best of Good Neighbors, Nicaraguan governance was always overdetermined by a foreign power. By ejecting the patriarch, the revolution attacked the very form of dominance over Nicaraguan political economy since colonial times, and simultaneously ruptured the instrument that linked external interest with national rule. Whatever the revolution attempted as a project of social development, it would never be free of the threatened return of the forces of repression it had momentarily repressed. The anxieties of these circumstances, so immediate for Nicaraguans, had their effect as well on those outside the country who identified with the larger revolutionary project and feared its loss. At first glance, it would seem that the sympathizers were in a position like that of certain ethnographers who embark on a journey to salvage what can be recorded before difference disappears. The ethnographer assumes the burden of arresting a culture's authenticity on the page, taking it away from its original site for safekeeping. Yet the solidarity movement already constituted a countercurrent to an ethnographic impulse to appropriate an other without insinuating oneself in the context of exchange. The travels of those in the solidarity movement were aimed at the transformation of their own culture, and specifically its politics of exchange, through the representation of another. Clearly there was the commitment to preserve difference shared by ethnographic work, but in the case of the many who went to Nicaragua during the 1980s, difference was seen as something emergent and still in formation—possibly precious but not necessarily an instance of pristine authenticity. Although there was no doubt a range of relations involved (from those who chose to live in Nicaragua and share technical expertise to those who came for a period of days to study Spanish or work on construction or coffee brigades), the context for these travels already situated the travelers against the powers marshaled in the triumvirate of national state, global dominance, and monopoly of knowledge over the representation of others. Globally, Nicaragua had become a point of reference and assemblage for all sorts of notions of development. This was manifested not simply in material aid but through expertise sent and supported by friendly states from the then-Eastern Bloc but also from such diverse nations as Cuba, Sweden, Libya, and Japan. In this regard, Nicaragua was not suddenly free


3

of global dependencies but represented a site where they might be realigned and renegotiated. Whatever these travelers might bring in terms of technical expertise or might have brought back in terms of alternate sources of information, their own appropriative claims as agents of development could be softened by one of their immediate corporal functions. At the time of my first visit, my fellow travelers said, only half in jest, that with several thousand U.S. bodies moving around Nicaragua, the likelihood of an invasion or aerial attack was somewhat reduced. It was then not simply the smart minds of the Westerners that proved desirable objects for exchange but their dumb bodies as well. By means as diverse as aerial reconnaissance and phone taps, these participantobservers of the revolution were subject to the proclaimed rights of surveillance that ethnography had traditionally reserved for its objects of analysis. My own sense of project and situation in context was less well developed than most. I showed up in Nicaragua on my own without formal connection to either the organized solidarity movements or the Sandinista government. With a Ph.D. less than a year old in hand, I had not yet started my first full-time academic position and was without institutional funding. Yet neither was I wholly outside any of these networks. The socialization began on the flight from Miami with a plurality of brigadistas holding forth against the usual fare of business sojourners. Each had a conceptual and political map of Nicaragua that they were eager to share. These discussions continued in Hospedaje Santos, the two-dollars-a-night hostel where the cab driver took me from the airport when I asked about a cheap place to stay. In a gesture of good faith on his part, he had located me among those he considered my own, for the guest house was populated with those in various solidarity projects. Nicaragua was all around but, without even planning, I was immediately in the midst of those similarly looking for it. The apparently innocent curiosity that initiates much ethnography was turned back on itself in this liminal interpretive community where those who had already spent days or weeks in the country could socialize the neophytes to the intricacies of politics and place.1 In Jean-Paul Dumont's perceptive account of "entering the field," entitled The Headman and I, he achieves the "social insertion" that will grant him access to observation among those he seeks to study only after they can name

4


him in terms of his question "Who was I for them?"2 In an inversion of this formula, the conversations in the Santos' guest house set the search for the representation of the other in motion by asking, "Who are they for us?" The frustrations of the entrance ritual, usually reserved for the privacy of ethnographic confessional, were here rendered as an explicit problem of the travelers shared at day's end as a feature of their own self-construction as a group—despite the distinctiveness of their particular projects or purposes in Nicaragua. For myself, such enclaves were an artifact of Managua, the capital. Wherever I went in the interior of the country, whether to other cities or rural sites, visitors preceded me. I could be readily assigned an interpretive category by those I visited. It was I who had lost my interpretive frame. Far from entering a field in which the effects of U.S. foreign policy or the presence of U.S. citizens were exotic, the place of the visitor was already inscribed in sites that were remote only from the perspective of the familiarity of that enclave, a space of improvised communications that Mary Louise Pratt terms a "contact zone."3 My own rituals of entrance pertained to the possibility of doing an ethnography that emerged only in the course of that initial visit: the representational field was a construct of the process of looking for it. Before going to Nicaragua, I had already engaged in participant observation studies of two factories and a dance company.4 The night before I left, I performed a theater piece about the life of Ronald Reagan that I had created in New York at Charas, a school that had been reclaimed as a community and arts center in the predominantly Latino Lower East Side. The contacts that ironically I had failed to make in that community to draw upon it as audience, I pursued with theater groups in Nicaragua. Looking for the politics in performance shaped my orientation to socialism, yet not until my second trip in the summer of 1986, did I go with the presumptions of professional study. By this time I was inserted into the political economy of the publishing demands and summer funding resources of a small liberal-arts college. I now had not only people but a project to return to. What had begun as political curiosity had become professionalized. To identify the conditions of exchange within academia, however, is not to discount its artifacts, the published versions of which rarely (or barely) become commodities in their own right but are inserted obliquely


5

into the circuits of professorial remuneration that few college teachers can be free of. What gets produced in these circuits also gets disbursed in the classroom, in the not-insignificant self-constituting function that left journals perform (I have maintained editorial associations with two of them), and in the occasional access to the electronic public sphere (such as radio interviews) that a minimally entrepreneurial academic might gain. With political commitments so transcribed into a particular practice, with its modest communicational accoutrements, the theoretical question of just what could be identified as the object of the commitment of that practice was also enlarged. In my own case, what had led me to the field and what I sought to find there formed a certain conjuncture, what I am here calling the ethnography of socialism. Rather than assuming a harmony of means and ends, of methods committed to the illumination of their object, the socialism of the observer and the observed cannot be assumed as an identity. While the culture of observation I encountered in Nicaragua could only be conceived of through a broad framework of socialist politics, its realization served as a momentary intervention in the socialist project of the observed. Those who had come to see revolution for themselves would find it only in moments of engagement with a socialism different from their own. This engagement, in which the ethnographic text emerges, exists only as a contradiction, which specifies the ethnography of socialism — constituted both by socialism and about it— from that of nonsocialism. Just as the object can neither exhaust nor be exhausted by the ethnographic gaze, the activity of looking for socialism generates more of the same. Obviously not all of what Nicaragua was in 1985 (or since) can be understood as socialism, and the question of just what socialism might be there assumes and generates further desire to grasp what it might be elsewhere. If the presence of socialism cannot be assumed to be attached to a place, it must be located in a given situation. For me, that site and attendant viewpoint was theater. Into Cuba If the bellicosity of my own government brought me to a Nicaragua that was struggling to survive unwanted attentions, Cuba, practically

6


since the time I was old enough to know I was watching television, had become a veteran of such wars. Whereas Nicaragua was ruled for a year (1855-56) by a North American mercenary, William Walker, Cuba was colonized in the midst of its own war of independence by the United States (1898-1903). U.S. marines left Nicaragua in 1933, but they remain at Guantanamo. At the time of the revolution, much of Cuba's infrastructure, its telephone and utility companies, banks, and sugar and oil refineries, was owned by northern capital. This has to be placed into the equation of the obsession with Cuba, beyond—as recent revelations make plain—whatever limited risk short-range Soviet missiles may have posed to the prosecution of hemispheric dominance. The strategy of the Reagan administration to kill Nicaragua through nefarious intimacy was in Cuba's case, after invasion, uprising, and assassination failed, a matter of no less hostile isolation. The free traffic of revolutionary-inspired travel was the price that Reagan paid to keep the U.S. embassy open, so instrumental to the Nicaraguan counterinsurgency. The Cubans had less opportunity to explore the Sandinistas' penchant for negotiations with the government that had declared itself their enemy. The detente in Cuban relations was quickly frozen when Reagan took office. Travel to Cuba from the United States threatened to unravel the ideological purity of an instance of containment complicated by proximity that would call the absolute divide of capitalist self and communist other into question. For U.S. citizens to undertake such travel, exceptionalism had to be demonstrated. The Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Treasury Department was the regulatory mechanism of this exceptionalism. Its name, in my mind, evoked some hybrid of colonial administration and a temp agency for spies. In practice, it only rules on use of government property (dollars) in places outside that government's jurisdiction. After a series of exchanges that resulted in a letter with legal citations too cryptic for me to decipher, I decided that I had my permission. Without a single contact in Cuba, I was able to procure a three-week tourist visa without difficulty from the government there provided I booked my hotels in advance (arrangements I proceeded to change upon arrival). The mutual misrecognition of my status as a professional researcher (from the U.S. perspective) with a tourist visa (from the Cuban) defined my conditions of entrance into the field in the summer of 1987.


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The small hotel where I stayed was out of the loop of its more substantial cousins that could play host to political delegations. It tended to be peopled by teenaged European tourists and Latin Americans in Cuba for medical treatment, and as such there was no enclave of self-reflection that the Nicaraguan hostel had provided. I barely spoke to the other guests and spent little time there. Cuba's tourism industry, among other things, is significantly more organized and centralized than Nicaragua's, yet not until my third trip to Cuba did I discover that I had access to the network of dollar-exclusive restaurants and other similar institutional sites that were quite easy to avoid, despite my official tourist status. Clearly, I was a poor ethnographer of Cuban tourism. Without the assisting mediation of state (mine or theirs), professional associations or contacts, or travel subculture, my means of entering the field were wholly pedestrian. My first days in Havana were spent walking the streets. I would stroll for a while until I saw a building with the word Cultura on its identifying sign. I would walk in and explain my project to whomever was there to listen. Sometimes they explained the nature of their work in terms I could not immediately appreciate for the furtherance of my project, which I explained in varying degrees of detail as the relation of theater to the larger political process. At other times, I would be directed to someone who was connected to theater and almost invariably generous about informing me of what they and others had to do with it. In this manner (later with the aid of cars, buses, trains, and planes) I constructed a map of Cuba as a grid of its theatrical connections animated by a series of recommended contacts. Although I always traveled at the same time of the year and missed all of the major theater festivals where the nation's most prominent groups were amassed, I managed to sample a good number of the professional theater and dance groups in Cuba. All told, in my yearly trips from 1987 to 1990,1 saw dozens of performances, an extent of exposure that was not possible in Nicaragua for reasons that will become evident in chapters 3 and 4. The initial randomness of this process was greatly transformed when I met Armando Correa, then of the theater department of the Ministry of Culture, on my first trip. Correa, a young critic, was more than an informant who shaped the parameters of the field I attempted to map; he was also a critical respondent to my own emerging conceptualization of what I observed. Through Mandy I was not

8


simply inserted into a network of artists whose work would constitute the object of mine, but rather became involved with people who would engage me in the terms of my project with a political perspective that I shared and a familiarity with many of the theoretical materials that provided my own foundation. These terms of exchange modified some of the exteriority I might claim for my ethnographic authority, but I became further insinuated into the Cubans' artistic process. During a pause in a rehearsal I was watching on my initial visit, an actress asked me what I did in the United States and why I was interested in theater. I explained my joint sociology and performance background. She raised this with the rest of the group, and I was asked to share some of the information I had about dance and theatrical improvisation in New York with them. The next morning I began teaching a series of movement workshops. The request multiplied and, by my third trip to Cuba, I had been exposed to a variety of groups and was leading up to three classes a day, which took place in spaces that varied from small storefronts to the rehearsal studios and stage of the national theater. In addition to having my own work critiqued, I was asked at times to critique others, thereby adding voices to the dialogic exchange in the field. I also did some teaching in Nicaragua, but there conditions such as rehearsal space and time did not permit anywhere near the range of contact through teaching that I obtained in Cuba (though I did benefit in Nicaragua from very sustained critiques of my previously published work). The nature of these multiple interventions served as a highly productive disruptive force within my work. They rendered the commitment to self-consciousness that Paul Rabinow claims is intrinsic to fieldwork, contingent on recognizing the interventions of others into the possible consciousness of self.5 These different conditions of identification, contact, entrance into the field, undoubtedly shaped how I looked for things and what I observed. To that extent they were figurative of the socialism I might imagine in the two countries. In a more difficult sense, however, the places and the relations they held with my own cultural contexts bore responsibility for these figurations and conditions. From this perspective, the circumstances produced the ethnographer. There is more to ethnography, it would seem, than combining two perspectives different from one another, participation and observation.


9

As Michael Burawoy recently argued in privileging ethnography as the paradigmatic methodology of the social sciences, it is not adequate to assign the status of scientific explanation to observation and hermeneutic understanding to participation.6 The distinction quickly evaporates within and between disciplinary boundaries. The opposition of participation and observation is far better grasped by the ethnomethodological perspective (which Burawoy critiques for ignoring context) as contradictory activities that cannot be sustained in the face of one another, hence requiring tacit acknowledgments and strategies of mutual incorporation.7 Burawoy understands the object of ethnography as a "social situation" that can be differentiated from its context as an opposition of micro and macro. In this he reproduces the text-context opposition of a literary theory he had himself rejected, assuming a clear boundary between two orders of social scale that in practice is impossible to sustain. Here the implication of the term micro is an interaction small enough to be seen or held by an observer's gaze; macro would be what lies beyond that. Obviously, this is a conceptual, not a physical, distinction. The paradox of social structure, fundamental to the sociological imagination, is that it is only knowable-through its effects. Social practices or processes, however, suspend recognition of structural principles to accomplish the fluency of interaction. This would seem true for large as well as small events. Indeed, this opposition of structure and process, the only sensible frame in which to interpret the otherwise nontheorizable couplet of micro and macro, applies also to participant observation or ethnography. If ethnography can be privileged as Burawoy suggests, it is because it is a moment of this contradiction. Conversely, archival, demographic, and survey research, what he identifies as sources of context or macro analysis, more closely approximate a miniaturizing of process (what people do) than provide an account of the structuring principles of that activity. Patricia Clough goes much further in accounting for ethnography's centrality to the discourse as opposed to the practice of sociology (for which ethnography is currently a minor literature). Ethnography enacts the "authority of the storyteller in the figure of the heroic ethnographer."8 She refuses the dualism of explanation and interpretation to inquire how the former is accomplished through the narrative means of the latter. In this she sees the conceptual pov-

10


erty of the sociological commentary of ethnography that separates fieldwork or method and writing, and she therefore emphasizes the experimentation with writing rather than interrogating the relation of representation to its object. Although the very critical resources that Clough draws our attention to have appeared across disciplinary boundaries in a way that has helped to transcend them, the most sustained theoretical discussion of the methodological issues raised by ethnography has been affiliated with anthropology.9 Disciplinary appellations refer both to administrative partitions within institutions and to historically constituted intellectual formations. The fit between the two can be more or less uneasy. Between Colonialism and Socialism The image of the ethnographer working alone to illuminate the mysteries of the field fits a popular conception and a certain professional self-concept.10 If the idea of solitude gained in the company of strangers appeals to and supports the myth of a highly individualistic sense of self, it also begs many questions, among them the social links that brought the ethnographer into the field. Historically, fieldwork resulted from and proceeded through the mediation of the relation between observer and observed by a colonizing state, a state whose own specificity and formation was intricately bound with the emerging global dominance of capital.11 The very possibility of a field that could be entered and explored by an ethnographer rested on a prior colonial establishment of areas bounded against the ambitions of other colonial powers. The claims of territory, and hence the need for clear boundaries, were made against other European nation-states. The native peoples, who were being subject to these boundaries, were politically denied an equivalent national possession. Yet paradoxically, the conditions imposed on territory were translated into cultural terms as if they were internal attributes of the colonized. At least in the work of some anthropologists, the native peoples could now be seen as contained socially and historically within their geography.12 E. E. Evans-Pritchard's study of the Nuer, an East African social group he observed in the 1930s, would appear at first glance to embody the ideal of a society as a well-bounded social system. Evans-


11

Pritchard's own account of his entrance into the field, however, is replete with indications of the colonial context that has conditioned his visit. It is the "Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" that requests him to undertake the study.13 He is frustrated upon entering the field that "my Zande servants were not instructed to meet me."14 Although his work was directly prompted by colonial authority, minimally, Evans-Pritchard is aware of how the colonial context that enabled him is also an obstacle to his research: It would at any time have been difficult to do research among the Nuer, and at the period of my visit they were unusually hostile, for their recent defeat by Government forces and the measures taken to ensure their final submission had occasioned deep resentment. Nuer have often remarked to me, "You raid us, yet you say we cannot raid the Dinka"; "You overcame us with firearms and we had only spears. If we had had firearms we would have routed you"; and so forth. When I entered a cattle camp it was not only as a stranger but as an enemy, and they seldom tried to conceal their disgust at my presence, refusing to answer my greetings and even turning away when I addressed them.15

He returns to the Nuerland only after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia interrupted a "survey of the Eastern Anuak."16 When he finally gains the attention of those he seeks, he hints at what insertion in the field costs in terms of a loss of self: "The chief privation was the publicity to which all my actions were exposed."17 More profoundly, his study can be understood as an extended reflection on the persistent formation and rupture of boundaries expressed in what he refers to as the functional basis of social conflicts articulated through terms of kinship among the Nuer and between the Nuer and the Dinka, a socially and geographically adjacent group that the Nuer raid for cattle, but also that the Nuer assimilate, through raids ostensibly intended to replenish dwindling herds of cattle, into their own internal kin networks. What Evans-Pritchard reveals, then, is a group that is in a continual state of reformation out of its own exterior, rather than a stable and fixed interior social arrangement. What might have been seen as outside colonialism's civilizing reach is in practice already set in motion against it. This motion is registered repeatedly in Evans-Pritchard's study but is never enlisted selfcritically to theorize his own situation, other than to acknowledge his discomfort at being observed through his own private affairs.

12


Both Evans-Pritchard and Claude Levi-Strauss could be found in the field in the 1930s, but the Second World War divided Evans-Pritchard's book (which came out in 1940) from Levi-Strauss's narrative of loss of cultural difference in Tristes Tropiques (first published in 1955). Among the things that the war would disrupt was the colonial order of the nations of the two anthropologists. Against this backdrop, Levi-Strauss is much more self-conscious about the field he entered and frames in his writing. He opens the book by casting doubt upon his enterprise: "I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions."18 He waxes a bit nostalgic for the "historical situation" of the first professional anthropologists in North America when he writes, "It must have been an extraordinary advantage to have access to communities which had never yet been the object of serious investigation and which were still quite well preserved, since their destruction had only just begun."19 For him, no doubt, the cultures he observes are in motion, but because he views them as in imminent eclipse by the very Western rationalism he invokes to recognize their integrity, their motion renders them objects and not subjects of history. Levi-Strauss's own arguments to the contrary at the close of The Savage Mind are perhaps best appreciated as an internal response to the polemic that his earlier work announced. These two anthropologists, among the most discussed in and outside that discipline, have also been the subject of insightful methodological commentary in the turn to reflection on the rhetorical conventions of ethnography.20 This turn exemplifies the more critical response generated within anthropology to the colonial context and the situation of ethnography within it. In the colonial context, the situation of self and other became, in the phrase of a recent analysis by Nicholas Thomas, "entangled."21 The dichotomized opposition between self and other is viewed as a rhetorical construct that speaks about current circumstances. Cultural difference in this perspective is the consequence of the uneven and variable articulation of global processes of exchange with local dynamics mediated by regional historical patterns rather than by stable and immutable identities.22 If the colonially generated encounter with the other was never a moment of discovery between two cultures, one fixed and one in historical motion, the possibility of representing it this way was contingent upon the political outcome of anticolonial struggles.


13

It is not that the assertion of the other in politics and representation eliminates the possibility of further ethnographic work (nor, as Clifford remarks, does it determine the form that such work takes).23 Rather, this situation places demands on ethnography that it attend to the links between the cultures of self and other in its own inscription. At the same time, the limits of representation must figure in ethnographic writing—lest the "exalted experience," in Vincent Crapanzano's words, of capturing the exotic through its appropriation in writing render it a purely aesthetic exercise in the perfectibility of representation.24 For ethnographies of socialism this means appreciating not simply the politics of writing with its attention to the powers of representation, but also a concern with how writing gets inserted into politics and where this intervention can be made. Specifically, such writing must display its own socialist aspirations while it seeks to identify the socialism of its object. These two problems are joined yet irreducible. The intersection between these two problems to the context shared by the First World socialist ethnographer and Third World socialism, namely the practical critique of capital that has provided them with their conditions of contact, introduces an inversion (albeit at a much smaller scale) of the initial conditions of ethnographic work. Of course part of what facilitates the effects of this inversion is the emergence of ethnographers studying their cultures of origin or that of the colonial centers.25 The mastery of Evans-Pritchard and the sense of loss in Levi-Strauss, which rested in different ways on an expansionary dominance in the center, yield to a different perspective. These previous orientations are traded for a concern with how that center might be weakened and displaced by the rise of multiple peripheralities. It is the prospect of such complicating contradictions and not the exhaustion of colonial energies per se that makes sense of the term postcolonialism. At this point it should be apparent that the opposition, both conceptually and in practice, produced by the relations of unequal exchange between First World and Third World only states the global conditions of doing socialist ethnography. The effects of that opposition are increasingly felt throughout the world's nation-states. Cultural difference expressed through particular spatial affinities—be they international (Third World) or intraurban (inner city)—is collapsed with the social conditions subordinated groups find them-

14


selves in, and is used as a marker of uneven development. That culture is used to explain underdevelopment the world over does not begin to differentiate between peoples in the nations of the Third World and those subject to its situation in the so-called First World. The analysis of such differentiation would have to take account of political strategies directed at, to name but one example, mediating the penetration of capital's destructiveness versus moderating the deleterious consequences of its flight. For intellectuals, whatever their geographical location or methodological orientation, insights about their self-constitution can be drawn from the sharpness with which ethnography is poised to confront its global conditions of production. Their relations to others must be assessed in terms that situate their commitments with respect to social mobilizations, both nationally and internationally.26 The political economy of ethnography has also tended to rest on sources of funding and processes of formation that are rarely either financially or ideologically independent of the state, whether in the form of the large research university or museums that give anthropologists their leave or the grant sources themselves. Affinities need not be as instrumental as those of Project Camelot's ethnographic counterinsurgency in the 1960s to locate the contextualizing role of the state in framing the activities of knowledge production. Here too, however, ethnographers, especially in the latest decades, have written against these burdens of patronage even as they received support through them.27 The ethnography of socialism introduces yet another twist into this complex history of structuring conditions and resistant practices. The presence of socialism in countries that had been marked by colonialism already interferes with the global authority that had brought ethnography into the Third World by situating a particular country as capable of responding to colonialism systematically and not simply serving as its object. The ethnographer faces an environment that has already realized, at least in the form of a project though not as its practical fulfillment, a critique of ethnography's historical geopolitical sources and epistemological claims to speak for those who could not speak for themselves.28 The political self-assertion of the Third World in a global frame has led to an appreciation of the indeterminacies of the conventions of representation in Western human sciences. This has been generative


15

of an "experimental moment" that can serve as an "engaging provocation" with those still-dominant conventions.29 Yet it also points to where representation and politics may part company. In the words of June Nash, "The world is no longer our laboratory . . . but a community in which we are coparticipants with our informants."30 Such an assertion of community rests upon alliances forged politically when the state activities of the ethnographer and her "informants" become intertwined, rather than exist as an empathic identification on the basis of a globally isolated proximity. Certainly such a distinction was operative in those instances of intervention and assistance of Third World revolutionary movements (mobilizations not without their own intercultural complications) that punctuated the final decades of the Soviet Union. What ethnographers can expect to find in the manifestations of socialist development, therefore, is a critique of the very state that had, albeit often implicitly, been responsible for their own formation. Paradoxically, what these ethnographers first encounter when they travel to the sites of revolution in the Third World is a version of what had occasioned them even as they turned against it. Because the most immediate identifier of what they seek, the socialist state, or at least its emblems and tokens, is what is first seen but also what the ethnographer is invited to look through or beyond. Without doubt, all ethnographers have political dispositions that in their conventional forms could rest silently and privately behind a commitment to locate and identify the other. That the other, a term whose uncritical use implies a figure of absolute cultural difference, instead winds up being a particular displacement of the self, is now well rehearsed in social theory.31 The other in its most conventional articulation gets defined as a set of attributes positioned negatively (the exotic, the irrational, the primitive) that leaves the content of self unspecifiably positive (the normal, the reasonable, the modern). For the ethnographer whose political commitments are explicit, socialism presents the prospects of the other as an aspiration for the self. This situation constitutes a peculiar complication for what has been termed ethnographic authority—the conjugation of the writing of other into self (authorship) and the perspectival claims that enable representation (authorization). Socialism introduces a recognition of the desire for the other into the ethnographic gaze at the same time that it disrupts that desire by asserting its own authority of represen-

16


tation against the legacy of colonialism (expressed in the very ideology of the socialist state). A self-critical ethnography offers an insight into the study of socialism missed by other approaches that project themselves onto an imaginary and exalted (idealized) socialist other only to be disappointed by the self they see. Here, socialist development, whatever its form or extent, is treated by a viewer as if it were a mirror on whose objective and finished surface might appear an idealized image of self. Hence, the socialism of the situation of the other and of the self may be readily lost in the imagined reflection of difference as identity. There is no doubt that the social situation of the gaze encourages this reflective exchange. Socialists look away from their own state and their gaze lands first on what is most visible, the state of another. The ethnography of socialism confronts this other, initially in the guise of the socialist state, through a critique of the claim to a completed and perfected self, the colonial ideal. In this way it is poised to look at but also beyond the state, just as it would in a capitalist country, for the very sociality, the ethnos of socialism. But what does life look like beyond the state? To add complexity to state-centered views of socialism that exclusively recognize the representative idea of society only to notice how it is then compromised, the domain of civil society under socialism needs to be explored.32 First, however, it must be identified, something that much writing on socialism has been disinclined to do. Statements such as the following are altogether too characteristic of the literature: "This distinction between the state and 'civil society,' state affairs and private affairs, becomes entirely blurred under the classical socialist system."33 The blurring in question, I would argue, is a function of the vision of the observer and suggests the need for a correction that is both conceptual and methodological. Before taking up the conceptual problems of civil society within socialist countries in the next chapter, I will explore how the methodological issues can be illuminated through the frame of performance. Theater as Ethnographic Frame In his theoretical summation of an entire oeurve of dramaturgical social analysis, Erving Goffman, after anthropologist Gregory Bate-


17

son, invokes the term "frame." It applies to "definitions of a situation [that] are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them."34 The frame, rather than bounding activity, is a conceptual device that emerges at the edge between observation and participation. Goffman applies frame analysis as methodology, but I would like to commit it to an appreciation of what methodology is, for I want to take theater as a frame that conjoins experience and its organization across the divide of self and other. At first sight, theater might seem a curious choice to frame ethnographic activity, given its fleeting temporality. Yet its appeal lies precisely in the way it reveals the very processes of assembling and disassembling a frame. Each theatrical process generates its fundamental elements, performance and audience, within a determinate social space. The task of representing that process, which itself constitutes what Clifford Geertz calls the "construction of representation," demands that each of those elements be attended to in a way that displays their difference.35 Moreover, the theatrical process makes plain that something is lost to representation the moment it has been performed, therefore forcing on representation a recognition of its own limits. These problems confronted me in the course of attempting to represent performances ethnographically. Those works that I have engaged in the most sustained fashion I generally had the opportunity to see only once in performance, making them as nonrepeatable for me as they would be for others in the audience. Discussions with actors, directors, playwrights, and critics were of great benefit to me. At times, I was able to follow the development of a play through the rehearsal process. In my last visits to the field, both in Cuba and Nicaragua, I brought a video camera, where previously my only visual supplements to performances were photographs. These materials were at times combined with nonethnographic sources such as playscripts, reviews, and archival data. The resulting accounts of performance are narratives pieced together from sources that provide very different spatiotemporal maps. This indicates that ethnography is more than the representation of different voices from the perspective of one. That the very representation of these performance narratives is constructed out of elements

18


that are different from one another, approximates the mutually disruptive play of voicings that Bakhtin called polyphony.36 The absence of a single authoritative means of representing the experience of performance simulates the situation of audience that I shared with the cultures I studied. The authority of an audience comes from its capacity to gather, to enable a performance by its momentary presence, and to disperse that experience through a wider social body. In this collective movement the audience commands powers of interpretation without necessarily producing a singular assessment of what it has just experienced. Rather, the process of gathering the collectivity is what amasses its critical capacity. In this sense, audience is an instance of the social materialization of that culture, what could be termed the mobilized publics.37 The relative absence in my ethnographic descriptions of precisely what is conceptually and politically central to my larger theoretical project, the audience as a momentarily gathered collectivity, serves as a limit on what I can theorize about socialism. But that absence is also meant to state the limits of representation in order to display those very phenomena that make representation possible. The audience is read as an absent presence, through the space implied for it in the various performances recounted in what follows. That these spaces could only be implied in the text serves as a reminder of what the impact of audience as a historically significant presence (one Herbert Blau characterizes as "unstable") might be.38 It is a presence that leaves nothing behind—no material traces—except the effects, in this case legible in terms of its impact on future performances, of having once been there. That condition also states the situation of contemporary ethnography. One consequence of the recent critique of ethnography has been to call into question modes of representation that rely on the transcription of what is an observable phenomenon into a text, namely, one that is visually centered. Talal Asad remarks, "Indeed, it could be argued that 'translating' an alien form of life, another culture, is not always done best through the representational discourse of ethnography, that under certain conditions a dramatic performance, the execution of a dance, or the playing of a piece of music might be more apt."39 Asad's model of cultural translation may introduce more distance between forms of life than is possible after the likes of colonialism and socialism have established terms of global contact and


19

opposition. His indication, however, that performance offers some interference with the conventions of ethnographic representation, if not in practice outside it, deserves further consideration. Performance, like ethnographic practice, begins with an observer's gaze—looking done with the intention of taking what it sees— upon an activity that, unlike ethnographic practice, has been developing to meet that gaze. Further, what the observer of performance first gains through sight is lost as the performance draws to a close. Performance invites an observer to engage in an activity different from that of the translation between languages, namely that of a shift between perceptual frames, from the visual into some other medium of memory. In this regard, performance-based practices of writing can offer a corrective to the temptation to total visual appropriation that has inhered in ethnography and in the study of socialism.40 In addition to this promise of methodological gain, there are analytic grounds for privileging performance in the study of socialism, that is, the institutional situation of theater within a socialist context. In its reliance on state funds, and insertion into the whole political economy of planning, theater like other socialist enterprises is an outcome of the state. In its appropriation and representation of everyday life, and its dependence on its popular appeal for any practical survival, socialist theater is a direct address to civil society. The more specific claim of this book is that theater is a mediation of state and civil society. As such, theater displays the fundamental dynamics of that relation for any society. Yet surely the mere assertion of socialist authorial intentions over nonsocialist ones is not adequate to introduce the kind of theoretical sensitivity aimed at here. The appreciation of shared context of self and other, and of certain critical principles of transformation for that context, two aspects of a socialist commitment, needs to be coupled with a methodological revision of what can be appropriated in writing. The gain of this procedure would be to express what context provides to the realization of social activity without reducing the practice of all those who participate in that context to a single position or response. In this regard, performance serves as a useful object of cultural appropriation and as a methodological frame, that is, as a guide to the enhanced reflexivity of representational strategies that also appreciate their own limits.

20


This double function of performance is apparent in the relations of performer and audience. From the perspective of ethnography, the initial relations of performer and audience are reversed in representation. The observational situation of audience with respect to a given activity becomes itself a textualized performance. The ethnographer shifts from audience to performer. Yet without a self-consciousness of appropriation and of how that appropriation gets reinscribed, the gains of this shift can be lost to analysis. Performers' work, perhaps more so than that of writers, proceeds with a self-consciousness of its reception; but it is also only consummated in its reception, unlike the activity of the writer, which exists prior to the reader's activity. The issue for the ethnographer is how the socialisms of self and other can be kept alive without collapsing one to the other. If the ethnographer's socialism is unrecognized, the tactical aspects of the appropriation (the response to the question, "Knowledge for what?") also go unnoticed. If the difference between the socialism of self and other is collapsed, then an idealization based on neither actuality is produced. The performance frame acts as a brake on both temptations by replacing the translation model with that of a radical difference of means between production and reception.41 Even if participation is elicited in performance, the audience in its situated response to the appeal remains other than performers. The performance rests on the transformation of text into play. If the conventional dramatic literature is considered as textual source, the performance process becomes one of aligning narrative shifts with other lines of change such as that of the actors, lights, scenery, music, and so on. The performance momentarily presents these diverse sources as a unity, which can convey the illusion of a singular auteur speaking to the public, consistent with the individualist conception of artistic production. In practice the momentary unity is an ensemble both of performers and of diverse media, and not a singularity of form. The same could be said of ethnography, which can appear as the encounter of a singular voice, the individual ethnographer with an ensemble that must be spoken for. If a multiplicity of voices is difficult to represent in writing without the weight of an author's leering presence, performance makes the presence of difference palpable but more significantly alerts the reader to what is absent, in this case the audience. Recognition of the audience's absence


21

in the text reaffirms an appreciation of the limits of representation and helps subvert ethnography's colonializing inclinations. For though it is true that ethnography no longer emanates solely from the West, the ethnography of the postcolonial is scarcely in a position to turn the gaze of the West back on itself. The technologies of representation in contemporary ethnographic work, however, have become not only complex but also diverse. Writing of orality (itself a problematic distinction if left as a technological determinant) has not just passed from an artisanal to a mechanical to an electronic means of representation in some putative march of progress from pencil to typewriter to laptop computer. Rather, techniques of writing are mixed with tape-recorded interviews, videotapes, writings by the subjects of the ethnography, and critiques of the ethnographer's work by the natives. Taken together, these composite sources of representation present their own internal issues of how an ethnographic text is constructed as an apparent unity (like audience or performers) out of an ensemble whose elements are internally differentiated from one another and therefore cannot be seamlessly edited together. Even in this general account, it becomes apparent that the ethnographic subjects are insinuated in the text in different ways, including in their own critical response to it, hence becoming part of the audience that the ethnographer writes for. Another dimension of the performance frame is the way in which it permits a refiguring of the relations of time and space with respect to ethnographic representation. The spatial claims of the field as a fixed and bounded entity have already been mentioned. Beyond the notion of boundary, however, an ethnographic study of a contemporary nation-state deprives researchers of practical fixed coordinates and sets them into motion within the national terrain. Temporally speaking, the classic convention of a year spent in the field to observe a full agrarian cycle may have provided the ethnographer with a once-secure myth of primitive temporality but loses its force as a myth under present social circumstances. This is not to say that sustained interaction is without benefit to understanding but rather that duration cannot be uncritically transmitted into a theory of cultural temporality that claims to have vitiated differences between observer and observed.

22


The question then concerns the appropriate length of stay in the field. If long stays are desirable because they can introduce complexity into the ethnographic narrative as a function of the changing relation between eye and field, how are they to be funded, particularly when the field is a socialist one? To address this issue, one needs a theory of what it is that field observations are intended to be representative of. This is simple enough if the observer's image of society entails a division of labor that can be observed in its entirety, in the sense of seeing what it is that every person does within a meaningful unit of social reproduction. Even if this was another ethnographic fantasy, it was one that could govern the use of time and the sense of a totalizing appropriation of the other. For any field as complex as even the smallest of contemporary nation-states, there is little sense to asserting such claims of an achievable total intimacy no matter what the duration. The question of representation is posed more forcefully when one cannot pretend any longer to write an entire culture or capture all the socially relevant time and space of its reproduction. One direction for representation, proposed by survey research, is that a sample can be found that is an adequately diverse but reduced version of the population as a whole. Even if it were possible to mimic the demographics of the whole in the part, it remains unclear that demography bears all other relevant social structure. Yet what would still elude representation in the sample is precisely the social scale that, theorists claim, gives contemporary society its distinct dynamics. In ethnographic terms sampling can have even more serious consequences, especially if the belief is sustained that the reduction in scale (which effectively translates a modern imagery of a society into a primitive one) comes without significant impact on the basic orientation to observation itself. Another strategy would be to study the process of cultural representation. This assumes that cultural representations have already been produced within the culture through its internal mechanisms, although the representations might not necessarily be typical of anything like generalized values, mores, or beliefs that a country's population might minimally share. The study of those representations should then reveal something of the larger processes. Clearly this approach is not novel in cultural analysis; one need only consider LeviStrauss's work on myth, for example.42 Yet for a society whose mythic materials are composed in multiple media from diverse identities,


23

the question of which cultural representations are adequate needs to be posed. The privileging of theater as analytic object rests on a claim that even where mass media may predominate, live performance displays more of the process of constructing representation than do other cultural artifacts. Theater is in this methodological view a representation of representation, or metarepresentational. The temporality evident in this study of representation has more to do with the relation between the duration of theatrical performance and the time needed to trace its inputs and effects. As such, a linear and seamless temporality cannot be assumed as a feature of culture. The metarepresentational form ruptures the image of a steadily moving cultural process that the ethnographer must join for a period proportional to the time of social reproduction. Performance, of course, like other forms of cultural representation, also bears a certain artifice. The time span of a performance depicts other culturally relevant time at the expense of a presumed arrest of the external temporality of the audience. The audience enters the performance space and is inserted into its temporal markers. What a performance ethnography that sticks to the internal temporality of representation therefore cannot grasp is the sense of movement in the audience, which it suspends in the process of representation. Only in the ongoing comparison of performance moments can one begin to approximate the experience of movement associated with a sense of the historical. These moments must be viewed as a mutually disruptive rather than continuous series. This is one argument for trading intensive stays in the field for extensive ones,43 particularly if it can be sustained that theater is a sensitive representational barometer to a given historical moment.44 Hence examining shifts in theatrical output over a certain duration should reveal not only shifts in aesthetic or formal trends but—to the extent that theater is representing its public—historical movement itself. This sense of the historical, as an internally generated process, is what has been so difficult to represent ethnographically and what has so frequently eluded analyses of socialism. Performance, despite its bracketing of historical for mythological time, may turn out to reveal more of the historicity of social processes than other objects of representation do.45

24


More questions have been raised in this discussion than could reasonably be addressed in a single study. They are considered here to indicate the larger problematic to which this particular effort is an intervention, namely the effort to develop theory and methods adequate to recognize the historicity—the socially significant and situated internal movement—of socialism. More attention will be given to precisely what is meant by the historicity of socialism in the next chapter, which locates theater as a mediation of state and civil society. The fieldwork of this project entails situating cultural contact in context, and attempts to join the narratives of the theory of representation with the gathered capability for history, what will be inscribed here as a relation between performers and audience.

Chapter 2 Where's the Theater?

Between State and Civil Society Broadway, the capital of theater, has no heart. It is all edges. No sooner do you step into the district than you have passed it by. If you enter the theater, you are sure to have your pocket picked. This of course is possible if you don't enter the theater, but in the former case you may not notice for several weeks, until the bills arrive. So much fantasy out of such faded memory. Extended repetition as a model of success. Only after the lighting cues have burnt marks on the stage does the money begin to flow. The hit musical takes the capitalization of performance to the nadir of competition. The longer a few lights have glowed, the darker the neighborhood has gotten. In some ten years of living within reach of Broadway, and studying sociology and acting on its eastern and western edges, I'd never been to a Broadway musical. It took the stay of a Cuban friend to occasion a visit. Cats in Cuba at the time had assumed mythological proportions. So we went. It is difficult to see how the audience actually gathers for the performance. People appear to materialize spontaneously without ever having passed by the adjacent fast-food outlets and porn shops. Most of them acquired their entrance from a considerable distance in time and space, by phone, mail, or some other intervening agency. Seven years of success did not seem to have been kind to the show. The set, intended to represent the discarded artifacts of a back alley, was chipped and cracked, revealing the artifice of its representation. The Tuesday night cast, many of whom seemed compelled by 25

26

Where's the Theater?

a stridency that suggested that they were still being made to audition for their parts, played in the shadows of so many who had come before them. The strain of representing what was in fact immediately behind them—the side streets off Broadway heaped with urban detritus—and what the audience was assembled to escape momentarily, as something quaint, benign, and anthropomorphically feline, narrativized what was supposed to be an abstractly modern spectacle. The abstraction that the performance as pure entertainment was intended to provide from its immediate surroundings turned out to be an abstraction of its own site. It became something sanitized that could be comfortably gazed upon rather than furtively glanced in looks of mutual suspicion common to urban settings. The audience was addressed through several devices—balletic and noncaustic pyrotechnics, dancers entering from the audience, and singers swooning from the stage. None evoked the reciprocity of mistrust the disassembled public might encounter outside the theater that would have enabled the performance to serve as a means of reflection on the affinities of sight and situation. Hence the abstraction offered at the Winter Garden Theater is one that aspires to deny context. Surely all theater achieves representation by some calculus of abstraction and denial of context. The question Cats raises is what the mathematics of this calculus entails. Cries of decline on Broadway, with their nostalgic ring of precinematic hegemony, are commonly heard. Yet the possibility of the ongoing success of Cats, and other like species, needs to be explained in terms of a larger mechanism of reproduction than the sustainability of the show's production values. That Broadway's torch continues to be lit by such contrasting elements asks us to look beyond its immediate topography for an explanation. Cats's success can be offered as an allegory of the unimpeded market, a medium of exchange that steps deftly out of the way to deliver its use values to an available desire. That a play about nonhuman beings in an antihuman environment could gain such sustained circulation says something about the Broadway genre, which ignores content in favor of the uniformities of serialized song and dance numbers. That such direct political statements as Sarafina! (although Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist was killed in its preview infancy) appear as a coequal choice with Guys and Dolls reflects the manifest thematic diversity of Broadway. It also epitomizes


27

the radical separation of circulation and production that characterizes capitalist exchange and accomplishes the ideologically effective conflation of market with democracy. Broadway does not simply display all the features of commodified culture, it also presents a most pristine image of the commodity itself, the untranslatable rift between exchange and use. All this may seem somewhat silly as a way of analyzing Cats, which, after all, does not claim to be meeting people's insatiable need to know the habits of wayward pets. The musical aims precisely to alleviate its public from the burdens of their own mundane content, to serve as pure entertainment. Is not art after all about form? This was supposedly the equation for the modernist avant-garde, and not for popular idioms like Broadway, thus saying something about the theory of that opposition. The two are joined by a common context for the apparently self-circulating and self-consuming artifact; in this regard, Broadway is an allegory for circulation regulated only by desire. Its very existence vindicates a claim for the viability of the market in its purest form. This purity speaks to the possibility of an economy that operates without the intervention of polity. If there are politics to be found on Broadway, they are only the politics of capital, the powers of selection and choice that attend to the commodity. The power lies exclusively in who decides what in an apparent encounter between two free citizens. The first is the producer, here the person with control over theatrical capital (and decidedly not those who produce the theatrical commodity). The second is the consumer, here one whose diversion rests on a diversion of funds. It might be said that the difference in power is considerable but nonetheless a private matter between the two parties of the exchange. The intimacy of the encounter is quickly broken up, however, as soon as we consider the materiality that makes the exchange possible. The myriad zoning, tax, and investment laws that sustain the industry beyond what the rapacity of the market would allow belie the fable of the self-harmonizing market as the absence of the intervention of political externalities.1 As part of the ideology of exchange we are well accustomed to the state's peering from behind the smokestacks and food bins to assure that capital adheres to some ill-defined conception of the social contract. But the right has made a vocation out of the exceptionalism of the arts, claiming that unlike every other

28


instance of circulation and production, industries of art can operate in the absence of the state.2 The exceptionalism of the arts serves well as a fabulation of the equation of market with democracy. Those same noble protectors of public decency would never accede to a populist line item veto on the military budget (a move that by all measures of popular taste would have left nuclear weapons off of the pallet), which is effectively the same stance they take with the arts. As far as these arts are concerned, there is a genuine principle of selectivity. Certainly not all of the artists whose work would offend the aestheticians of morality have received federal funding. It needs to be pointed out that the funding in question never actually covers the costs of production— unlike, say, military contracts, which also assure the realization of profit. In the case of Broadway theater, the write-offs and exemptions, the provision of infrastructure and services that keep the jagged blocks around Times Square safer and cleaner than the market would bear, apply to every production irrespective of content. Government grants, selective as they are, are meant to legitimate an artist's work to other sources of funding, and this is more likely 'why senators and members of Congress are involved. They are defending the state's prerogative to define its own terms of legitimation. It might be insisted at this point that the crucial difference of state intervention into the two circuits of cultural production lies in the commodification of theater itself. Many of the uncountable performance venues that are scattered twoscore blocks (and much, much farther) from the heartless center of national theater are, by choice or by default, noncommercial. Although money changes hands in these theaters in much the same way as it does in their rich uptown cousins, who theoretically but seldom practically are only too happy to relieve their poor relatives of their noncommercial successes, theater away from Broadway smacks of extraeconomic exchange.3 Paradoxically, it is in this exchange, where presumably producer and consumer have gathered sheerly for the ecstasies of communication, that the state is entitled to show its face. Those in attendance are reminded by the presence of state that they should be suspicious of pleasure where there is no profit. Whatever separates commercial from noncommercial theater in this country, and admittedly the line may not always be so easy to draw, it is clearly not the presence or absence of the state in their affairs.


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What may be decisive in the differentiation of the two forms, however, is the recognition or invisibility of the state in the way a given theater constitutes itself. In this regard, the distinction is as much ideological as economic. In both theatrical idioms (between which, incidentally, could probably be described the political economy of the whole range of institutions under capitalism, including those with a socialist inclination), theater lies between state and economy on the one hand, and the public, variously constituted, on the other. This intricate mediation has been theorized by Jiirgen Habermas as defining the public sphere. For him, it is the material means for the formation of "public opinion . . . the functions of criticism and control of organized state authority that the public exercises informally, as well as formally through periodic elections." A public is formed when citizens have influence over and address matters of "general interest" (which he defines as neither instrumentally economic nor political) and "without being subject to coercion."4 Until mass media came to prevail as a means of communication, the public sphere rested on assembly, as a capacity and a right. The more highly mediated space of the public now assembled electronically would seem to be a feature of the scale introduced by modernity. Yet despite the dissipation of the capacity for assembly introduced by mass media, certain events and locations continue to provide the opportunity for people to mobilize their critical energies at a public site. Such occasions as demonstrations and public bars are still with us, even if their relation to institutional politics is more difficult to gauge, especially in an environment of postparty politics. This would suggest that theater may remain a privileged institution of the public sphere long after it has lost its generalized social significance as a means of communication. Part of this has to do with the problem of locating the presence of the state. If the state is difficult to recognize in the theater, it is all the more illusive in the home, in the local watering hole, or at the bus stop. Certainly the state can be known in these sites through its effects, what Louis Althusser termed the ideological state apparatuses that are interpellated (the "hailing" or address that finds its mark in a particular audience or subject) across the Habermasian divide of public and private.5 Yet neither the solidity of that divide nor its total ab-

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sence is theoretically satisfying for a conception of how the state gets insinuated in public life under capitalism. An ambiguity of the terms public and private is partially responsible. On the one hand, public and private refer to a juridical distinction with respect to property relations that in a strong application would distinguish production for use from that of exchange, and in a weaker sense would apply to state ownership no matter what the benefits—or to whom. Sectoral analyses such as those associated with economics thus have less precision than their application would imply; the military-industrial complex serves as just one instance where the state actually reproduces capital and not simply its relations of production. When the fullness of the state's presence in the circulation of capital is expressed, its autonomy from the mastery of economy appears relatively minute.6 On the other hand, public and private refer to an articulation of interest. Public is assembled in response to what the state would address, hence a general will. Private stands as a particularization of interest either as a confinement of need, domesticity or a location with respect to relations of production (class).7 Interest, however, is always a function of a particular representation of outcomes that have not yet come to pass, although they are represented as if they already had, as if what was good for capital or labor could always be projected from a given situation. Habermas claims that the public is assembled out of the private: "Public power became consolidated as something tangible confronting those who were subject to it and who at first found themselves only negatively defined by it."8 This would seem to suggest that not all forms of assembly address the state equally because not all of them can be traced to a particular displacement from within the state. In Habermas's historical imagery the court is replaced by the newspaper. The audience with the king or pope whose private person inscribes the body politic is what subsequently becomes mediated. Here there appears to be some slippage in the analogy. The person who gained an audience with the embodiment of state authority did so by engaging in communicative action, but the owner of mass media seeks to constitute a hold over a distinctive means of communication. In the former case, audience assembles by and before the state; in the latter, the state is replaced by a private ownership of the means of communicative action.


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In practical terms, the material conditions for public assembly or social intercourse cannot be separated from the production of the means of communication. The sites for articulating critical opinion should sensibly extend from the domestic sphere of the family, to scenes of voluntary association, to the workplace. For this reason Marx, in The German Ideology, identifies civil society, in which he sees the "whole material intercourse of individuals" as "the theatre of all history."9 But what is the history of theater if not a narrative of the formation of audience and the techniques of assembly before the state? In the West, the disarticulation of theater from the state is essential to the formation of the institutional apparatuses of the latter (absolutism) and the commodifying mediation of the market mechanism of the former (professionalization). Yet as writers such as Stephen Greenblatt and Walter Cohen inform us, this disarticulation was precisely what theatrical performances like Shakespearean drama "negotiated."10 This is a vital agnate in the lineage of the public sphere, one represented as a passage (conceptual, not historical) between the Athenian amphitheater as an instrument of the polis and the apparent autonomy from the state, politically and aesthetically, of Broadway.11 Literally carved out of the state apparatus, theater displays what is historically significant about the mechanisms of assembly that constitute a public sphere.12 Never fully shedding its legacy, no matter how fully the market intervenes in the state's own powers of intervention, theater is situated institutionally between state and civil society, addressing the former as the audience of the latter. Further, theater is a conjugation of the multiple meanings of public and private, in the affinities between property and interest, production and reproduction.13 Hence, theater's institutional peculiarities are useful in crossing the theoretical divide between a temptation to reduce the public, even if ultimately, to an instance of the economic, as consumers, or to a mere instrumentality of communication, as rational actors. An attention to the specificities of theater confuses any such formalism of means and ends. Theater in Socialism The sketch of Broadway's Cats at the beginning of this chapter, per-

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haps unforgivably terse, was simply meant to point out several features of how theater mediates state and civil society within a context where capitalism prevails. The members of the audience assemble for purposes of exchange by the circulation of the theatrical commodity, and as such have little use for each other as a mobilization of public address. Such cultural commodities tend toward the consumption of their own social product, insofar as the audience's further desire for itself is contained within the spatial and temporal relations of performance. Certainly this is one of the frailties of a particularization of audience that is disjoined from the larger context for audience, as declining total ticket sales might affirm. This is also one differentiating aspect of avant-garde and political theaters within the capitalist context: they presuppose a generative relation between the audience particularized by performance and that generalized by the theatrical project. Broadway theater presents a relatively strong version of a decontextualized and desocialized audience. This expresses something of the wider affinities between theater and other commodified activities that assemble without a political mobilization, and is also typical of the culture of capital that denies the politics and history of its own socializing capacity. This self-denial of theater's own politics of place isolates the experience of performance from anything systematically political and contributes to the effacement of state in the domain of culture. To the extent that Broadway, like other formations of capital, succeeds in masking its own relations of political exteriority, even as it draws a public to witness the fruits of those relations, theater's mediations between civil society and the state become wholly invisible, as does the presence of the state. In this form theater both epitomizes and helps to generate the myth of civil society's absolute autonomy from the state—even while the state makes this autonomy possible. Without any recognizable presence of the state, theater's publicization appears as a purely private matter. Hence it is not that commodified culture denies critical faculties to those subjected to it, a perspective associated with the Frankfurt school;14 it is now apparent from the growth industry of cultural studies that people do all kinds of things with the cultural artifacts they encounter.15 Instead, what is denied is the immediate context for reception that might join socialized means of communication with socialized ends.


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Even in the most minimal socialist context that treats theater as a public rather than a private good, its insertion in and its display of the relations of state and civil society are quite different. Capitalist government funding of the arts may be aimed at legitimating the ideal of a creative and autonomous individuality too extreme for survival on the market. The capacity for self-reflection that culture embodies, however, is not seen as a substantive right in the eyes of state support. To make such acknowledgment public would surely affront the ideology of the self-organizing profit-taking market. The state is to serve as a gracious and silent benefactor, simulating the absent presence of the invisible hand. As the state has followed capital into the organization of private life, we have seen just how frail this net of absent presence has been for support in the arts. Because it begins where productive context and social goods are joined, the socialist state's cultural policy effects a mediation very different from the one just described. State is part of the self-acknowledged context for all production (even private property), so its presence is not effaced in the delivery of public goods, whether health and education or media and the arts. Let me take one example each from Cuba and Nicaragua to illustrate these connections. Havana is as much a national theatrical center as is New York, but, unlike New York, there is no theater district in the city. Prodigious stages, like the Carlos Marx and the Garcia Lorca, can be found at opposite ends of town, as can smaller venues. In the center of Havana stands the National Theater complex. Limned by broad avenues and the expansive Plaza of the Revolution, it has little local traffic, pedestrian or otherwise, to draw from. Once there, the authority of the edifice defines its immediate context: one can do no more or less than go to the theater. This uniformity of purpose—and the fact that, except for the national library that it faces across the Plaza, its neighboring structures are military centers—does little to mediate its positionality vis-a-vis the apparatuses of state. When the public enters the larger of the two theaters of the complex, they literally turn their backs on the political sphere where Fidel Castro enacts many of the key performances of state. When the theatrical performance is over, the audience disperses into the nocturnal phase of that political space (one, it should be noted, that is mostly empty), the space that the staged event unavoidably addresses. As will become increasingly apparent, the positionality of the stage, adjacent as it is to the very

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place of state power, does not determine in any straightforward manner what is placed upon it. Among the performances I saw at the National Theater was a production of Cuba's first rock opera, Violente, which ran several weekends in the summer of 1988. The scale of the production, the way performers and set spilled from the cavernous stage into the audience, and the appetite for theatrical pyrotechnics make certain comparisons with a Broadway show like Cats difficult to resist. But if the marginality that Cats presents as its space and conditions of production is rendered as something wholly benign and readily consumable, the futuristic dystopia of Violente's staged environment is more ambivalent. It is as much cynical of the soft hard-rock culture it appropriates as it is celebratory of it. The Cuban rock opera is only slightly more dependent than Cats on narrative devices and is equally evocative of a general ambience. In Violente, two singers are trapped on a distant planet (or future) by automaton break dancers and a sinister musician cloaked in black. Stage left is an elaborate sculpture of metallic junk, rusted and displaced. A half-dozen oil drums serve as platforms and objects of contact in an incessant aggressivity to which the dancers are condemned. The dancers oscillate between jazzified versions of martial arts and atomized break dancing. Because the only theme of the choreography is combat, all of the call and response, chain or telephonic aspects of break dance that suggest harmonized linkages between dancers' bodies are absent, replaced with a kind of tensely mimed locomotion. Upstage of the litter of oil drums, a multitiered scaffolding allows the singers to give their practically indistinguishable songs in different locales. The male singer is dressed soft punk and has a skunk stripe mohawk of curls and a red dyed beard. He wears black tights and belted strips of leather on his torso, which resembles melted butter, as do many of his gesticulations of hard rockers of the 1970s. The female singer's voice is somewhat improved over his but she has similar problems projecting strength through her body in choreography that consistently demands it. The musician seems no less a parody of the pitfalls of poor reception for northern exposure. He is engulfed by synthesizers on the highest platform. As most of the music is preprogrammed, he plays rather histrionically, the simplest musical lines in the rock collage. Occasionally he leaves his pulpit, armed


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with a guitar that he mimes playing, and descends to the stage to further the musical assault of the singers themselves. The numbers are differentiated mainly by lighting or stage effects. In one, a video of a man's face and a pistol is projected. The singer flees the robotic dancers he initially fights. He is captured and incarcerated and finally eludes them by penetrating the interstices of their mechanic motion. Just after he has taken some strength from his flight, the video projection places him under surveillance. The gun on the video screen follows him and kills him videomatically. He falls, pulls out some bloody intestines, and continues to sing. Earlier in the chase scene, the audience has been invited to sympathize with the singer as a victim by his absence and the presence of the break dancers, who are only slightly more aggressive. Two dancers come out with guns and fire blanks into the audience. Another shines a very bright stage light in our eyes in the process of looking for their prey. Lest the audience be confused by all of this violence, they are given a tag happy ending. The singer, reunited with his mate, comes back to life. The sinister musician is expunged from the set and the dancers peel off their black costume skins, scale a fence that has been put in their path, and flee to rehumanized freedom. It would be tempting to take Violente as a farce if it gave more clues as to its object. It is unclear whether the oppression emanates from the production or from what it represents. If the latter contains the source of horror, is it the repressiveness of some unnamed power or terrain, or of the simulacra of rock itself? The audience appeared both passive and stunned throughout the performance —a response I had never observed in a Cuban audience. On the contrary, I had been struck by publics that would cheer after a grand jete at the ballet, scream with delight at broad send-ups of bureaucratic machinations, gaze intently at environmental theater, and stomp enthusiastically for Latin American rock stars. Surely, young Cubans were as capable as any other audience of being bored by a spectacle that was immersed in its own visuality. As an initial foray into a genre known only indirectly, whatever its appeal to the conventions of that genre (a foible not uncommon to first attempts), Violente's ambition both as a showcase for emerging talent and for a developing audience makes it exceptional to the calculus of risk that commercial theater is willing to assume. The ambi-

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guity as to the object of authority that confounds a foreign culture with the house of the state is matched by the strict adherence to a quite conventional narrative of revolutionary liberation one might expect from an artifact of Cuban culture. I cite this example precisely because it displayed the greatest affinity to something like Broadway theater. Yet even when the form and content of theater in Cuba can be located in relation to familiar conventions, aspects of context impede upon the aesthetic to resituate it for an audience. Principal in that situation is the way in which the theater is insinuated in a dialogue with the state to the point of being poised to confront it critically. This aspect of an internal confrontation is missed when the analysis of theater begins and ends with its sources of funding. If Violente raises the question of what can be mobilized beyond the state through an initiating impulse of state power to address it critically, the Cuban musical also displays one end point of the positionality of theater between state and civil society that could be associated with socialism. In Nicaragua, the development of the state was compromised before such affinities could be tested. In open space adjacent to the National Theater of Nicaragua, completed like Cuba's within the decade prior to the revolution, cows can often be seen grazing, without any signs of humans in attendance. Buildings of state are not far but are less obviously proximate than in Havana, and the space between is interrupted by these bovine indications of the actual agrarian heartland of Nicaragua. The Sandinista state was also present for its citizens in the geographically marginal centers of production in the countryside, most visibly in the form of state farms and cooperatives. Those who picked coffee on the state-run farms could hardly be expected to show up in Managua for an evening of theater, but, at various times during the 1980s, it would not be uncommon for theater to show up where they were. The coffee harvest at Santa Maria del Tuma in the mountains above the town of Matagalpa involves approximately eighty workers. Actors from the theater group Nixtayolero, themselves based on a farm several valleys away, arrive by truck to give a performance of their sketch El carnicero (The butcher). They set up as the workers come in from the field and finish the performance as the sun goes down, then return home.


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The play is a brusque send-up of two aspects of sexism, occupational role typing and marital obligations. A mother, Senora Cheche, is a frustrated housewife who dreamed of becoming a ballerina and now wants her daughter to get married instead of pursuing a career. Her daughter Rosita wants to enroll in a mechanics' school, and her mother considers it more proper and less vulgar for her to become a seamstress. Rosita sabotages her mother's intentions by tricking a dumb and horny butcher (carnicero also refers to a man with little more on his mind than an insatiable appetite for meat) into proposing to her and coming home to ask her father's permission. When the ultra-macho father meets the suitor he is appalled, and sends the caller running. Rosita proves that love is not just a slab of meat. The story is based on a situation familiar to the audience both publically (recalling the female tractor drivers of Jinotepa) and privately. Nixtayolero will be the focus of chapter 4, but suffice to say now that this group explored the limits of a critical political distance and economic autonomy from the Sandinista government while dependent nonetheless on the existence of its state project. Similarly, while the group's style of performance has deep historical roots, in terms of the conventions of contemporary theater it is as much an exploratory mode as that of any noncommercial theater in the United States. If groups like Teatro Campesino in California could have difficulties gaining access to their intended audiences because the state upheld their proscription from certain spaces of private property, Nixtayolero met its audience literally on the grounds of the state. The renegotiation of gender and occupational hierarchy would certainly seem consistent with the ideologies of the revolutionary state, although it could certainly introduce complications into the state's particular organizational economy as the audience's employer. The critique of the instrumentalities of marriage is no less complex, for the state remains the arbiter of conjugal bonds and the government sought to harmonize a range of conflicting standards of partnership. Physically and ideologically, then, Nixtayolero is here intervening on the terrain of the state, generating a certain critical distance for its audience that renders its mediating role significant if only transitory. What is critical in that distance depends on the audience's recognition of the state in the course of the theater's mediation. Like the experimental and leftist theaters of the United States, the state may be an object of critical inquiry. Yet to the extent that the

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state is not implicated explicitly in the materiality of performance (although it is invariably there), the politics of performance appears as something artificially autonomous. The state is therefore somewhat magically aestheticized, that is, reflexive only of its own forms. I will attempt to show in the studies of theater that follow that socialist theater is not without its own aesthetics. Rather, the way in which those forms get circulated in an economy of politics is what is fundamentally different about the way theater mediates state and civil society in a socialist context. Certainly there is no discovery in the identification of theater that is critical of a socialist state,16 but both the grounds for that critique and the tendency of its projection have been more difficult to appreciate.17 What has been suggested here anecdotally as a mediating role for theater in a socialist context has scarcely appeared in the literature, at least in part because the possibility of something to mediate has not been recognized by those theorists who have most fruitfully applied the critical analysis of state and of civil society to a socialist environment. When discussions of socialism are formulated in general terms for western audiences, such theorists usually invoke Europe (including here the Soviet Union) as the center of their imaginary.18 The decentering of that figure to Latin America may have a positive effect on the fixity of those images, but the literature, because it has remained close to European examples, deserves some scrutiny. In those studies that go furthest in understanding the socialist state as dynamic rather than inert, as changing in the face of new problems rather than assuming a given form, the reduction to a statist analysis becomes most apparent. George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, whose Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, as much as any other single work, reinvigorated the debate on the socialist state, also defined socialism as a fundamentally managerial problem, one of "rational redistribution" whose fate lies with the future of intellectuals' ability to command state power. Yet their map of the organizational contours of the state is taken for that of society as a whole: Thus a unique Eastern European socialist bureaucracy is developing, characterized by both vertical and horizontal continuity and by a hierarchical structure rising to a single apex. Everyone, from the First Secretary of the party to the engineer employed in the planning office, is an officer in the service of the state. The


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Party Secretary is paid to represent the state as a whole, the engineer the planning office alone; but in the last analysis both represent the whole state-society (for state and society are one).19

Clearly this formulation captures the displacement of capital by the state in the employment of labor power and the potential for rationalizing the coordination of production that this displacement entails. Yet, while the socialist state displaces private ownership, this does not turn it into labor any more than capital actually produces, even though both claim responsibility for production. The problem of administering production, whether it takes a bureaucratic form or not, cannot be confused with production itself, a social principle lodged with those who, as Michael E. Brown has argued, by providing material wealth also make society.20 To collapse state and society, and to call the resulting entity bureaucratic, reduces living human labor to the problem of its administration. It is difficult to argue with the notion that the socialist state concentrates and centralizes power. But asserting that the socialist state therefore monopolizes all power, that no sources of power exist outside or beyond the parameters of the state, is a considerable leap. The claim that the state embodies tensions between conflicting formations in society, without being reducible to or reducing their politics to the state, is now familiar to both Marxist and non-Marxist analysts of capitalism. Few would assert that the capitalist state exercises power without internal or external tensions, or indeed that all forms of power are concentrated within the state. Recent Marxist theories of the capitalist state have elaborated the internal dynamics of that state and developed an analysis of power beyond it, hence preserving the nonreducibility of state and society.21 In his last and most provocative political analysis, Nicos Poulantzas suggests that the contemporary capitalist state too "concentrates the various forms of power to an ever-increasing extent. . . . All the same, class powers —and not just economic ones—still stretch beyond the State. For instance, even if we take into account its ideological apparatuses, the State's discourse does not exhaust all political discourse; and yet it includes a class power in its structure."22 Curiously, the few words that Poulantzas reserves for socialist countries lose this richness. Granted, his book was written in polemic with the French Communist Party of the seventies but the

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implication that existing socialisms are aspects of "modern totalitarianism" to be understood alternately as "capitalist survivals in a particular kind of authoritarian socialism, effects of a capitalist environment-encirclement on socialist countries, or rather the arrival of these countries at a new but very real form of state capitalism," hints at an analytic double standard.23 The point is not that these conceptions shed no light on the socialist state, but that Poulantzas is willing to let state stand for society under socialism in a way he would never grant for capitalism. Equally insistent on a turn to nonstatist conceptions of power and socialist transformation in the West, Glaus Offe seems to feel that such notions are inapplicable to socialism: Socialism, according to Max Weber, would not mean something different and progressive but more of the same—that is, more of the same inescapable element of bureaucracy that, according to him, capitalist liberal democracy, at least, is able to curb by institutions securing individual freedom. In view of this almost ubiquitous fear, and amid a perception of the social and political realities of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states which renders this suspicion highly plausible, socialist and communist parties in Europe have considered it their major task to develop convincing alternatives to the statist models of socialist transformation.24

Here too it is odd that Weber is applied less critically to socialist countries than Offe would admit to any capitalist context. Given that the same questions are not applied to the East as to the West, it is unclear whether the "statist model" exists chiefly in the minds of theorists and politicians in either camp or whether it is an account of social relations under socialism. At the very least, it complicates the investigation of the kinds of questions Offe wants to ask about the Soviet Union: I once spent a short period of time in Moscow, and the impression I formed was that state socialist regimes are enormously repressive. Two questions were constantly on my mind. Why do people accept the omnipresence of the instruments and symbols of state violence, the enormous privileges of the military, at the expense of virtually everything else in the Soviet Union? And why is this open authoritarianism and militarization necessary? One possible answer to the latter question is that this militarization is a condition of


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keeping people at work, especially considering that there is such an explosive amount of discontent. One possible response to the first question, which of course does not apply to Eastern European countries, is that the Soviet populations have not known anything else in their recent history.25

This passage elicits many methodological queries that Offe has posed to mainstream political theory. Why is the Soviet Union considered a regime when on the same page he refers to the corollary Western institutions as governments? How do people both accept omnipresent state violence and display explosive amounts of discontent? How can people continue to work only under the threat of violence (implying a resistance that must constantly be held in check) and at the same time be so inured to that violence that they know and expect nothing else (suggesting that they are incapable of such resistance)? Indeed, Offe's questions make it very difficult to imagine who or what the Soviet people might be. At once entirely docile and volatile they exhibit none of the features of human beings we might know anywhere else. Offe's impressions are formed not simply by his observations but also by his prior conceptions of what he expected to find. What these impressions warn of are certain conceptual problems in the study of socialism, namely the very statist approach that Offe eschews for the West. The acceptance or rejection of the state by the people cannot be understood simply from the perspective of the state but, as Offe would have it, from that of the people. Theatrical Mediations in Latin America Locating where theater joins the popular to illuminate the contours of civil society affords a fundamental revision of the conception of socialism. This revision comes, however, with its own set of complications. The Cuban example mentioned in the previous section left open the question of where the socialism in its aesthetic form could be found, and the Nicaraguan case raised different issues about how the example given departed from traditions of popular spectacles that far antedate the Sandinista government. Precisely what of the theatrical dynamics of Cuba and Nicaragua can be attributed to their respective revolutions is a question whose response will be un-

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packed over the next five chapters of this book. The attempts at socialist development that have taken place in both countries provide only one dimension for the context of theatrical expression, however. The context that the revolutions as well as the theater need to be placed in could be abbreviated as Latin America. That abbreviation above all is historical in a way that it articulates certain geographical, cultural, economic, and political affinities. Recall that Habermas's historical argument for the development of a public sphere privileged the press as an arena formative of public opinion. In selecting this media of assembly he is, of course, also identifying a setting where literacy could be used as a homogenizing force to consolidate a social group. For Latin America the situation was quite different. Colonialism would defer the consolidation of a national bourgeoisie over government for many decades, and its legacy would subvert the appearance of the kind of state Habermas has in mind considerably longer (perhaps indefinitely). The extent to which the press acts as a privileged forum in Latin America depends on who is being privileged and when. Colonialism had a powerful effect on differentiating urban and rural life, defining the latter as the absence of certain forms of culture, literacy prominent among them. That colonialism's contemporary equivalents have generated massive migrations from country to city have certainly not ended the process of differentiation. Yet what this uneven process has produced is certainly not a mirror of the European model of publicness, which depends on its own differentiation from the space of the private, an articulation associated with modernity. There are, no doubt, sectors of the Latin American population in each of its nations that conform to the Habermasian model. What seems more significant is that many more do not, precisely because of the way modernization (as practice as opposed to theory) has proceeded in the hemisphere. The fullness of the public in the arenas of social reproduction is not some quaint remnant of tradition—there is nothing traditional about shantytowns,favelas, or squatters' settlements. Instead, the persistence of certain cultural forms, some of which are dated prior to the conquest, attest to processes of cultural production that were already in motion at the moment of European colonization and whose motion has not been terminated by it.


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The persistence of forms, what is often misrecognized as tradition, can only be appreciated as the remainder of opposing trajectories of difference. The colonized also possess a framework for the appropriation of what is other to them, and the whole range of cultural activities—from processionals and feasts to carnival and deistic rites, sometimes referred to as paratheatrical, so prevalent in the imagery of Latin America—needs to be understood as an aspect of this framework. Such activities are also manifestations of the development of a public sphere with a historical trajectory that is not reducible to the one that Habermas imagines. The theater in Latin America draws its sustenance from this presence of publicity that is constantly being rearticulated. But not all of Latin American theater or every instance of it relies on this publicity. The clearest lineage for such contemporary claims would be what has been termed the theater of collective creation. As in other artistic movements in Latin America during this century, the collective creation theaters emerged out of the conjuncture of foreign avant-gardes and domestic experiences.26 The reception of Brecht, Barba, Brook, Grotowski, Bread and Puppet, Living Theater, and Theatre du Soleil was a vehicle for the global student rebellion of 1968.27 The former constituted an exploration of participation of actors and audience in the creative process of theater and the latter a theatricalization of participation beyond it. The theater of collective creation displayed the susceptibility of art to participation. Identifiable by 1970, with significant antecedents (e.g., Augusto Boal's Teatro Arena founded in 1956 in Brazil), groups like Argentina's Libre Teatro Libre, Esscambray in Cuba, and Candelaria and Teatro Experimental de Cali in Colombia suggested a transnational movement in theater whose appearance lay at the midpoint between the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions.28 Like representation, participation also has its limits, within which theater is produced. Herbert Blau, in his theorization of the audience, appreciates that this relation is a conjunctural one: "whatever the virtues of participation, the virtue of theater remains in the activity of perception, where participation is kept at a distance and— though it has come to be thought a vice—representation has its rites."29 Theater is the being of participation that ceases at the moment it achieves its becoming. The participation available to theater

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very often is quickly mobilized elsewhere, as appears to be the case in Latin America. Hence the ability of theater to serve as a specification of the public in Latin America cannot be assumed as a stable feature of either term of the conjuncture of art and society. The theaters that comprise the focus of this study hint at how that conjuncture is formed. In so doing the burden of this study is to articulate the relations between three registers, at once analytic and objects of analysis, without reducing one to the other: theater, socialism, and Latin America.

Chapter 3 Nicaragua!! Theater Goes to Market

At the beginning of 1991, the streets of Managua were filled with millionaires—and not just the coyotes waving flaccid bundles of cordoba notes, shouting "dolores" at passersby and hoping for exchange. With the Nicaraguan currency floating on a desert of dollars, the official exchange rate went up in increments of a couple hundred thousand every few days. The dollars were always hidden away, a clandestine force presumably driving the economy. The cordoba notes themselves seemed to strain under the dizzying five-digit inflation. Bills of 1,000 cordobas printed in 1985 with verso and recto images of Sandino and a plaza filled with revolutionaries were recirculated by printing over them denominations of 200,000. On much of the currency, the registers were not aligned precisely, resulting in an overlay that covered but did not fully conceal the bills' prior identity. Yet such notes were worth scarcely more than a nickel and, in the newer bills of five and ten million, Sandino's image appeared in a watermark visible only upon careful scrutiny. The printed images portrayed national heroes General Jose Dolores Estrada and Cleto Ordonez, who predated Sandino and seemed to draw his image away from the recent past into an earlier revolutionary tradition. These prodigious denominations were in pursuit of parity with hard currency. In practice, however, the reformed currency, the cordoba oro, turned out to be merely a euphemism for the dollar. For some banks and for numerous goods, the Nicaraguan currency had lost its convertibility altogether. Given these difficulties, it was not surprising to see the cordoba oro advertised on billboards throughout town, competing for attention with computer stores, discos, ra45

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Nicaraguan Theater Goes to Market

dio stations, and airlines. If the new cordoba, billed on the outdoor advertisements as necessary "to construct the future," bore designs that buried the Sandinista past, the billboards themselves served as platforms for other readings. Just a block from the presidential offices on Avenida Bolivar, one such billboard is splashed with green paint, as if to show the national currency hemorrhaging in its true colors. Next to the paint, a graffiti statement advises President Chamorro to remember the poor. This message is painted on other billboards and walls in the city and signed "El Guegiience," the trickster figure of a popular drama said to have been performed since the days of the Spanish conquest. While millions of cordobas were in abundance, the commodity was king. During the Sandinista reign when the supermercados were the distribution points for subsidized foodstuffs, the emptied shelves and long lines of purchasers awaiting their allotment were widely broadcast beyond Nicaraguan borders as an ensign of socialist scarcity. Now those same shelves are full but the stores are empty. The super at the shopping center in the Managua neighborhood of Linda Vista had more vendors selling fruit, gum, and donuts outside its doors than there were shoppers within. Inside, single rows of vinegar bottles, or small cans of pear nectar, or packages of sanitary napkins, stood undisturbed along the wide, silent aisles. The commodities that had come to rest in Managua were not limited to packaged goods. The newly opened Toyota, Hyundai, Lada, and other car showrooms were equally unpopulated, and the corners that sported more than one of the newly arrived Esso, Shell, Texaco, or Chevron stations rarely had cars at all pumps. Plastic liter bottles of Coca-Cola lined the corners of major intersections collecting condensation in their necks but attracting few customers. Most Managuans still drink the popular brown liquid from ancient bottles recycled because there are no bottles to replace them if these are thrown away. If the drinkers leave the shade of the vendor's stand it is with their beverage in a small plastic bag with a chunk of ice floating in the middle. Withdrawing the liquid from the plastic bolsa (the Spanish word means both bag and purse) until only the empty membrane remains is an icon for the activity of consumption under conditions of hyperinflation. The Eastern Market was overwhelmed with goods. Refrigerators, radios, running shoes, and fans choked the streets surrounding the


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huge outdoor market, always teeming with unfettered exchange but now displaying the bountiful international crop of goods that few could afford to harvest. Yet the market was dense with human traffic beyond what anyone could expect if buying and selling were the only activities that occurred there. Along the swollen arteries of this center of commerce it was difficult to measure what motivated the movement of bodies pressed against each other. Some were obviously trying to move from one place to another, although people never seemed to enter or leave the market from the adjoining streets but rather just maintained a hum of Brownian motion. Nor was it easy to discern when someone was stopping a cart to peruse its sundry goods and when the cart was stopping people from perusing elsewhere. The pleasures of the market as a public place, its rich polychromatic palette, its endless obstacles around which crowds had to weave, also braided people together into a sensorial epiphany. The listless, almost winsome quality within this heart of dark instrumental reason hinted at pleasures that would be curtailed as soon as a purchase was made. The informal in the informal economy centered around exacerbated distribution preserves a place for people to keep in actual practice what the presumed logic of the market could only deny them, a real site where exchange is only a means. No matter how high the stack of millions expanded, the commodities raised their heads a little higher. Previously scarce by virtue of their absence in the country, they were now present but out of reach, providing a visual feast of prosperity slipping over the horizon. The prevalence of the market had returned to Nicaragua with a vengeance, not as a source of goods but as a site of employment. Officially, unemployment stood at 40 percent, but estimates on the street ran it up to 70 percent. With a poor harvest year, depressed global prices, and stymied land reform, eight thousand agricultural workers were laid off and people continued to pour into the cities. Ten years of decapitalization and constricted investment in industrial capacity had made Nicaragua virtually noncompetitive with other Central American economies. Government discussions had targeted twentyfive thousand people to be dismissed from civil and military service.1 These were among the factors that had driven people to market and pushed the most paltry bundle of consumables into the role of pseudocapital. A carton of cigarettes, a dozen eggs, a package of toilet paper, a bushel of oranges could be purchased at the market and

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resold anywhere—on the street, in a restaurant, at someone's house. In all but the fanciest neighborhoods, signs were hung on doors announcing goods for resale, or tortillas, nacatamales, or fruit drinks for sale to those who had not bought theirs a few doors down. With these images in mind, perhaps the massive unemployment figures could be reinterpreted. People were not unemployed or underemployed. Rather, they were self-employed in the business of providing services to others. If these trends continue, Nicaragua might be a fully postindustrial economy by the end of the millennium. Yet such conditions are surely not unique to Nicaragua; the streets of Lima, for example, might reveal similar sights. More generally, frenzied circulation that creates no value and the shift from productive to service sectors coming with diminished buying power have typified the U.S. economy since the midseventies. Quite the contrary, if these perfidies of the Nicaraguan market were strange, they were strange only to Nicaraguans' recent experience, and emblematic of the normalization of their life conditions with the tendencies of the international economy. This normalization did not neatly coincide with the electoral shift of 1990 from the Sandinistas to the Chamorro government but rather was reflected in it. Since 1988 the Sandinistas' ability to mediate these conditions declined, and cuts in subsidies and services as well as layoffs became more dramatic. Conversely, the Chamorro government's ideological embrace of austerity measures and currency alignments is tempered by the social demands articulated during Sandinista rule and the paucity of aid coming from the voices of internal labor discipline like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the United States itself. People are in close contact with the commodities that have newly made their appearance. That the commodities appear to be working confounds the realization that people are just moving around. Hence the paradox of the Eastern Market's teeming with life as the placeless and generalized market increasingly diluted people's livelihood, and the flood of millions that left people flush with poverty. The throbbing human essence of the Eastern Market is particularly striking when set off against the physical center of Managua that lies immediately to the west. After the commercial district was leveled for a second time in the earthquake of 1972, international aid coordinated by the government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle did not


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find its way into reconstruction. Clusters of ruins remain, some occupied by squatters, some bearing signs of repair, and some serving simply as latticework against the sky. Much more of the rubble had been cleared away, leaving open fields that are now being settled by colonies of rather heterodox architects. The newly built homes are invariably square, but building materials range from cardboard boxes to cement bricks to rough-hewn boards to old automobile parts. Spliced bits of wire bring borrowed current into most of the structures and a single house number may bring water to any number of spigots. Bright alternations of blue and yellow paint or carefully aligned trademarks on boxes of formula that compose outer walls display an aesthetic concern with the materials at hand. Some of the more complex cardboard compositions provide an inventory of brand names that have recently entered the country: Kellogg's, GE, Phillips, Nestle's. Freshly planted saplings or banana trees seem to project a future for the residents, but this future is contingent on their continued ability to resist eviction as public seizure presses against private property. It may also be that tolerance toward this repopulation of central Managua is more cost effective, economically and politically, than agrarian land reform. The space that Somoza left open continues to elicit a popular response. There is a temptation upon first visiting Managua to view it as a largely undifferentiated and empty center, easily inscribed with whatever cultural forms have been most recently imported. This perspective would be fortified by buildings that survived the local effects of the quake. A network of cinemas with fissured walls and long-extinguished neon on their marquees projects on the enormous screens an admixture that includes soft pornography from Latin America, Asian martial-arts films, and North American blood splatterers of various genres. The Hotel Intercontinental looks as if it were designed from a postcard of a terraced Mayan temple and brings the erstwhile visitor into immediate contact with a generic indigenous culture from elsewhere. The offices of the Central Bank are in the lone building tall enough to be visible from the adjoining squatter communities, appearing in its phallic singularity to parody the metropolitan cityscape. That parody could even be possible within an apparently evacuated cultural domain suggests an unevenness to that landscape that retains the capacity for a variety of influences and expressions. One

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example can be found in Managuans' spatial orientations, which preserve Cartesian coordinates while shifting their implications. Arriba and abajo, up and down, correspond to east and west but refer to solarcentric preconquest cosmology rather than the geocentric plot of the colonizers. South is retained in the Spanish word sur but it is juxtaposed to a local referent, al lago (toward the lake), for north. The lake is named after the city and is also known as Xolotlan. Street signs are scarce in Managua, so directions are given by naming a current or former local landmark (a pharmacy, pizzeria, gas station, bank) as an axis point and then the number of blocks from it along two of the four coordinates. Because half of a block is the smallest unit of measure for such directions and numbered houses are rare, the searching party is led to inquire among neighbors or persons on the street for the precise location. Therefore locating oneself means passing through a variety of spatial rubrics that refer to a historical past, presumably universal geocentric coordinates, and an ultimately determining purely local but nonetheless public spatial knowledge. These spaces are to a limited degree discontinuous in that directions lead one to people and not precisely determinable places, and in that an adequate map begins with references to where the sun comes from and where it goes and leads to conversation. The conversations may identify the party being looked for by name or by social type. A search for a director from the province of Matagalpa encountered the label "foreigner" from the resident of a Managua barrio: "Oh yes, there are a lot of foreigners who live here." This identifier led to a house for church workers and then, when qualified by the term "artist," to a filmmaker who lived across the street from the person being searched for. What is evident in this locating process, akin to that of identification, is a series of linguistic translations that demonstrate work done by participants. In turn, many words are artifacts of such labor, such as hinodoro (indoor) for a flush toilet, that involute the cliched devices for English speakers approaching Spanish for an object that remains fairly eccentric to most Nicaraguans' daily life. This capacity for cultural activity is perhaps most striking in annual festivals for patron saints. Here one observes within the apparent reaffirmation of order and virtual reverence for authority, traces of popular participation that present certain discontinuities with those very regimens of control. There are the mischievous habits, like spreading


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axle grease on those dressed in the finest white garments during the annual procession through Managua, and the normative transgressions, such as the men dressed in drag during the Torovenado of Masaya. Torovenado is literally a ligation of bull (toro) and stag (venado), the former associated with Spanish culture and the latter indigenous. One account of the mythic origins of the festival tells of a tiger that preyed on cattle until a rancher enhanced the horns of his bravest bull. When the tiger was found dead, the bull was credited with the agility of a deer and was dubbed torovenado. The ability to charge and deflect tied together. An adversary was destroyed by combination. The myth also links an obligation (the rancher had asked the patron saint San Jeronimo for assistance) to a transgression (the use of non-Christian cosmology or magic to attack evil). Food prepared and distributed by residents of Masaya during the festival represents tribute to San Jeronimo and constitutes a sacrifice of working days and resources. Torovenado is a performative, an utterance that marks an activity that crosses linguistic streams and displays the creativity involved in placing diverse influences in use.2 Whatever complexity lies in the mixing of cultural influences during popular festivals, the celebrations must also be appreciated as a literal form of mass mobilization. These mobilizations are not the same as a social movement, which is oriented by a given focal point that lies beyond it. Yet insofar as they make evident processes of social identity, the popular festivals help account for the possibility of people's moving into politics. The insurrectionary tendency (the Terceristas) of the Sandinista front took its cue from popular uprisings against Somoza in the late seventies in places like Masaya (especially the uprising in the district of Monimbo in February 1977) and Diriamba, one of several sites of spirited protest after the assassination of newspaper publisher Pedro Joaquin Chamorro in January 1978.3 Diriamba lies to the southwest of Managua in the province of Carazo and shares with the capital its roots as a population center for the preconquest Chorotegan peoples, a population that was enslaved and nearly extinguished in the middle of the sixteenth century before Panama replaced Nicaragua as a trade route and mules carried the spoils that had previously been strapped to human backs.4 Yet the demographic depletions of genocidal proportions did not eliminate all cultural traces. Such traces continued to represent the

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problem of subjugating a people to harsh conditions. The native peoples were administered by caciques or chiefs designated by the Spaniards. Under the influence of the Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas, "peaceful Christianization" combined limited recognition of preconquest cultural expressions with ultimate subjugation to a divine and distant domination. The reorganization of communities along "tribal" lines, an ancestor of apartheid, replaced enslavement with tribute in kind as the primary use of domestic labor. Tribute served as a payment of debt to the Audiencia, the colonial government, and also, to the extent that production was adequate, as a recognition of the indebtedness of the native peoples for their own measure of self-sufficiency. The failures of direct enslavement meant that the productive capacity of the domestic population had to be simultaneously recognized, encouraged, and limited in the political implications that such recognition might bear. Popular festivals could be said to have thrived under these mixed demands for celebration and depoliticization of productive capacity. But such a project is intrinsically compromised. The very process of displacing productive capacity to a nonproductive realm, even if it means shifting from field to church plaza, displays the capacity for translating the mobilization of labor into the labor of mobilization, a process basic to political activity because it keeps open the dimensions and uses of public space. On the morning of the Diriamba festival, the park in front of San Sebastian church fills slowly. Street vendors arrive and begin to set up their stands. At eight o'clock, a mass is in progress in the church. Within two hours groups of dancers have arrived and the square begins to fill. Several groups of dancers, accompanied by musicians playing marimbas, guitars, and shakers, generate oval-shaped openings in the human field. These dancers are all men, their faces masked with the colonial figure of macho, a fair-complexioned, mustached, blue-eyed visage. Behind their heads hangs a mane of long, straight black hair, giving a different impression of these figures from behind. They wear top hats covered with bright flowers; pinks, aquamarines, and chromium yellow that have accents in the crowd's own attire (one woman's plaid shirt fits this color scheme well, but these colors are especially visible in women's clothing as contrasted with the generally pale shirts of the male public). Projecting straight out of


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the flowered top hats are plumes of peacock feathers. Sashes and capes are offset by jeans and white leather hightop basketball shoes. Two dancers will approach each other in the middle of the open space in a backward crossing sliding step, tilting to one side and another, circling each other mask to mask, before returning to their places. The backward crossing step is said to mix the diverse elements that have gathered in the crowd. Behind the ring of dancers, spectators come and go, shifting from one group to another as the dancers' activity collects and eddies. The movement of dancers and public is mutually enabling and without apparent coordination. The groups of dancers are distributed through the crowd and provide an occasion for pause without supplying a center. The dancers constitute an arrangement for a continual collection of public as more crowd participants arrive. After almost two hours of this gathering process, the dancers and public, now signaled by the ringing of bells, are drawn inside the church. The dancers parry through the aisles, intermittently drawing swords, whooping, and shouting. The church continues to fill and people cheer on the fights and applaud the dances. When the dancers have circumnavigated the pews several times, they lift the statue of San Sebastian from the altar and carry it out of the church to the exaltation of skyrockets and a marching band anchored by a dented silver tuba. Outside the church the crowd already is distributed beyond the square and extends as far as the eye can see down the street. In doorways, along the road, through the crowd, nuts, drinks, baked goods, and varieties of food move with the people. The procession takes to the highway that leads out of Diriamba, past the marketplace to the other provincial centers of San Marcos and Jinotepe. These towns have been mobilized through the same means and carry in procession their respective patron saints, San Marcos and San Jeronimo. The highway fills and the groups of dancers become walkers. Similarly, those parked on the side of the road take the procession as the occasion for a picnic, a diffuse spectacle that relies on presence rather than a differentiation of roles between performers and audience. Several kilometers away from Diriamba the procession veers off the highway to the hamlet of Dolores, a community with a small and modest church and a relatively large central park in front of it. This is where the three saints meet, El Tope, in a demonstration of mutual obligation to the region.

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The mobilizations that began as concentrations of the three towns' populations have now led them literally to cross their (municipal) boundaries and collect in a place that is equally marginal to the respective populations. When the three statues meet, they appear to dance on the heads of the crowd, more skyrockets flare, and the three communities hold their mass together inside the church of Dolores. The statues do not occupy the front of the church but are held off to the side. The previously empty space of the church is now divided between groups of people facing one another and singing each other a mass in a mournful harmonic minor round. Outside the church, a far more numerous crowd wades in the festivities. If so many are left outside, then what has been brought into the service? Daniel Brinton mentions in the introduction to his 1883 translation of Gueguence that all native singing was in a minor key. He then seeks to distance the play from any Christian authorship: "But in the Gueguence there is absolutely no moral purpose or religious tone; so much, indeed, of the reverse, that we cannot conceive of its introduction by a priest."5 Strange, then, that El Tope begins when the masked assistants of Gueguence dance into the Diriamba church and take San Sebastian, and culminates with a mass sung in a minor key. The question of authorship has dubious relevance for popular culture but more curious is Brinton's effort to separate the indigenous from the exogenous in a work so intent on narrating their contact. Gueguence today is considered a quintessential national character embodying a practice that identifies the Nicaragiiense. Yet the troubled project of locating the cultural essence of a nation in the figure of a dramatis personae is amply displayed in the case of Gueguence. The roots of the play have been located in the sixteenth century. Its passage into dramatic literature occurred when Brinton obtained two transcriptions of the play from a German, Carl Hermann Berendt. Brinton translated the Nahuatl into English, and this became the source of its canonization by Nicaraguan scholars in the twentieth century. Like other canonizations, Gueguence's ascent was retrospective and its tradition remarkably contemporary. In the streets of Diriamba, the play is only quoted by the costumes and dances; its integrity as a text is not represented. A highly praised version performed as a work of theater was mounted by Alberto Ycaza and Oscar Mendez with the local acting group of Carlos Sotelo on April 7,


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1978.6 Sotelo, a resident of Sandino's birthplace, Niquinohomo, comes from a long line of theatermakers and was referred to as someone closest to the popular traditions. He has been performing popular drama since the thirties and identified the sources for these plays as chiles or indio tales that he heard on the radio and then transcribed. Like Brinton's Gueguence, tradition must be brought into its local sites of production. All of this is to say that Gueguence invites a variety of readings, perhaps as diverse as its uses. If the claim is accepted that it is set in the sixteenth century, certain light can be shed on who the characters are. Minimally, a second reading is necessary to suggest what those characters might be doing on the streets today. Gueguence is taken from the Nahuatl Huehuentzin, which is translated as "honored elder" or "dear old man" by Brinton. Yet it is precisely the honor of Gueguence that is called into question during the course of the play. He is brought before the council of Governor Tastuanes, a reference to the cacique of the tributary system and literally in Nahuatl "one who speaks." The failure of the tributary system to provide conspicuous wealth could indeed render the colonial courts parodies of their absolutist versions. For the Spanish Crown, which, by the end of the sixteenth century already had defaulted twice on its debt, such failure was endemic to its system of colonization.7 This is the very situation of the opening scene of the play, in which Tastuanes complains of his administration's poverty to his bailiff, Alguacil, and places the blame on Gueguence. Gueguence appears to be the master of exchange, but exchange of various sorts, and the play is driven by a barter of misapprehensions. The medium of exchange in this case is not money (which is largely absent in the colony) but dance, which is plentiful and well-nigh universal. The colonial administrators dance onto the stage and forbid dancing. Gueguence crosses words in the manner of the paired dance steps seen in Diriamba. These words break the ban, yield the governor to the dance, and make of him a tributee. The play opens with Alguacil and the governor dancing. In their mutual address is an exchange of prayer of protection for prosperity, which is repeatedly uttered by characters throughout the text: "I pray God to protect you, Governor Tastuanes." "I pray God to prosper you, my son . . . "8 Another figure repeated through the text is the command to "suspend in the quarters of the leading men the music,

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dances, songs, ballets, and such pleasant matters of amusement to the Royal Court." The Nahuatl wordsimocague, Brinton informs us in his notes, means to suspend when taken as a verb, but it is also connected to a noun that signifies "pauses or intervals in music."9 Hence what appears to be a moment of prohibition actually announces the transition that enables a new dance to commence. The interval also permits the interdiction of the speaker (Tastuanes) into the otherwise ongoing musical chorus. The power of the chief (cacique) emerges in speech as an interval to the chorus or "leading men." Music is tied to order when Alguacil, the bailiff, is instructed by the governor to sustain the suspension or interval "unless the patrol gives a permit to enter my royal province"—whereupon the patrol is summoned and Alguacil and the governor proceed to dance. Following the dance, however, Alguacil informs the governor that his administration is in fact too poor to have a patrol or even, we find out shortly, a staff: "Governor Tastuanes, I am here, as is proper, but the patrol is not; their girdles are in rags and tatters, and their hats smashed in from their frays, and we have not a single saddle cloth or red cloak better, perhaps, than that good-for-nothing Giiegiience, Governor Tastuanes."10 Giiegiience, a merchant, is here made the equivalent of what the court lacks, and his summoning to the court is meant to give that absence presence. Summoning Giiegiience proceeds to call social order into question, as Alguacil is misapprehended as a servant such as "the chocolate maker" or "the grub-fixer," mocking the service that a bailiff might provide. When Giiegiience finally recognizes the command, he feigns ignorance as to the proper way to greet a royal emissary, thereby forcing Alguacil into his service as an instructor of etiquette. For this Alguacil persistently demands a salary through a series of misauditions, such as "dishes and plates" for "pieces of eight," and misrecognitions, such as tolling the bell of mourning for "toll of gold and silver."11 After the bailiff finally receives payment from Giiegiience, it becomes apparent how little Alguacil actually understands of financial affairs. Well here then. [Guegiience shows four coins.] One, two, three, four. Ha! my money, boys! Four hundred and some odd dollars I


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have given to my friend, the Captain Chief Alguacil. But you, friend Captain Chief Alguacil, you don't know a real from a half a one.

A real, that is, a real de vellon, in old Spanish currency was the equivalent of eight U.S. cents. Giiegiience deceives Alguacil in the process of circulation: "The half of this half real makes two cuartillos; a cuartillo is two octavos; an octavo is two quartos; a quarto is two maravedis; and each maravedi is two blancos."12 The four medios turn out to be about sixteen cents, all for instructions that Giiegiience does not require. Yet upon properly addressing the governor, Giiegiience is confronted with a demand for a permit to enter and do business in his province. He responds that elsewhere exchange has gone on unimpeded by the presence of law or his absence of capital. God bless me, Governor Tastuanes, as I was coming up a straight street, a girl who was sitting in a golden window descried me, and says to me: "What a fine fellow is Giiegiience; how gallant is Giiegiience; here's the shop for you, Guegiience; come in, Giiegiience; sit down, Giiegiience; there's sweetmeats here, Giiegiience; there's a lemon here." And as I am such a funny fellow, I jumped off, with my riding cloak on, so full of ornaments that you could not tell what it was, covered with gold and silver to the ground; and that's the way a girl gave me a permit.13

Giiegiience is a site of accumulation who is given the law (the permit) by those who have not the word (women are mutis personae in the play). The governor wants Guegiience to hand over this wealth, but Giiegiience can do no more than submit the governor to its means of production, linguistic exchange. The governor pursues this conversation in search of "pretty things" for which he seeks verification. Governor Tastuanes turns to the brothers who accompany Giiegiience. Don Forcico, loyal to his father, is also practiced in his ways and corroborates his father's claims. Don Ambrosio impugns Giiegiience with malicious intent yet this is attributed to his being a bastard son and branded a "bad breed." The doubt created by the two boys' accounts only generates the demand to see the goods themselves. The presentation of the things becomes the occasion for a dance. The three visitors hold up a tent and open its flaps to offer the governor "this star of the morning" visible through the opening.

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Here again Giiegiience offers everything and gives nothing, while he succeeds in trading and dancing in violation of the law. The claims of excess are turned from the imaginary bounty to the equally fictitious capacity of Don Forcico. Here too the governor demands proof as is appropriate to a court, but as Forcico cannot demonstrate that he is a "pilot to the heights which rise above the clouds," among other such temporary employments, the only thing he can actually deliver is a series of dances for the amusement of Tastuanes. The last of these dances is the macbo-raton, a dance that brings the mules onto the stage. While the mules dance, a bargain is struck "offstage" by Forcico in which he would marry Tastuanes's daughter Suche-Malinche and receive a generous dowry. Hence the only actual exchange occurs outside the imaginary world constructed by the banter of Giiegiience and Tastuanes. The governor demands a reception for his parting daughter and declares that Giiegiience must produce some wine. This too has been procured by Don Forcico from a "friend," a reference to his ability as a new member of the court to have secured a patron. The wine must be transported, and the final trick of the play is to have it loaded onto Giiegiience's own mules and in such an obscene way that none of the courtesans cares to partake of it. Giiegiience and his sons depart on the line: "Pues nosotros, a la gorra, muchachos" — "We'll get it for nothing and drink it ourselves."14 With this last line, performance breaks into festival as the occasion for and possibility of bacchanal celebration is announced. The wine bequeathed to the festival comes from an invisible patron yet Giiegiience appears to have severed the obligation associated with such patronage. The performance of Giiegiience is in practice a regional phenomenon based in southwestern Nicaragua, yet as a literary form the play is taken as the quintessential national expression. In the words of Jorge Eduardo Arellano: For our part, we would like to reiterate the point that El Giiegiience is the key work of national identity of our people. In what sense? In that the character Giiegiience exemplifies the essential features of the collective being of our land, conditioned by a heritage of frustration of colonial origin; a heritage that characterizes the mestizo whose population began with the imposition of other racial groups. This new being, obliged to


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confront a difficult situation, had no alternative but to develop these features—enumerated in part by Cuadra—to escape, surpass, sublimate the social, economic and political situation. Thus began the existence of a Nicaraguan character that identifies the majority of our compatriots, (emphasis in original)15

Not just humor but linguistic command, namely, insult, exaggeration, prevarication, and burlesque irony comprise Giiegiience's, and the Nicaraguan national character's, arsenal against colonialism. These devices are woven with references to the indigo plantations, the initial commodifying gesture of the Spanish, and centered around the orders to suspend the dances taken from the mouths of the administrators into those of Giiegiience and his brotherhood. The play presents a figurative overturning of the word of law to portend its actualization. Yet, as Arellano notes, armed rebellion did not have this efficacy for the seventeenth-century Nahuas. Rather, he claims it serves as a more transcendental expression against domination when a political opposition is not realizable: "Finally, as testimony of an emergent culture, it [Giigiience] affirms the full mestiza identity of the future Nicaraguans; but it reflects as well their timely secular attitudes: rebelliousness in words and deeds, irrespective of the authority, defensive mischief and deprecation of sophistication, pugnaciousness before injustice and denunciation of servitude, sly language, fantastical irony, interested misunderstanding and boundless imagination."16 Here Giiegiience turns from a critique of colonial administration to an attack on administration per se. Appreciating that "rebelliousness . . . irrespective of the authority" was undoubtedly penned in the waning months of Sandinista governance only partially specifies this elaboration of the Nicaraguan national character. Surely the indomitable spirit of resistance as productive of a national experience has much to recommend it. Yet Arellano, like the national poets Urtecho and Cuadra whose writings on El Giiegiience he cites, has a more focused project for national identity than generalized rebelliousness. Superficially, the claim that Giiegiience signifies a national essence is ironic. The mestizo or mix of indigenous and European fits oddly with the singularity of form suggested by the term essence. Given the regional diversity of culture in Nicaragua there is nothing privileged about Giiegiience other than his capacity to mix in such a way that

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authority is undermined and his own characteristics, including those of being an opponent, are preserved. Yet if this is what is meant by national essence there is nothing essentially Nicaraguan about it, given that the trickster can be found across colonial situations, and the mix of Nahuatl and Castilian could situate the play in many former Spanish colonies of the New World. Hence the play is less a national essence than an essence of nationalism. The naming and assertion of a people against the agents of a distant authority did enable struggles for national liberation in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The politics and governance that flow from these struggles can be quite diverse. The specification that Arellano introduces is implicit in the closing lines to his own essay: the assertion of the productive forces marshaled by Giieguence against the political per se. Recall that Giiegiience is a merchant by trade and the administration seeks its tribute as mandated by its laws. Giieguence stages a situation that is ungovernable by providing nothing but fictitious capital. This was not so distant from the strategy of the national bourgeoisie during Sandinista rule and continues as the master narrative of the perfectible national economy based on its severance from any political meddling. Indeed, there are many aspirations for Giiegiience. His vocation to part polity and economy as read by Arellano and others does not preclude the production of culture evident in the popular enactments. Like Ruben Dario, the other national figure of equivalent recurrence, Giiegiience seems to be used by everyone. One Nicaraguan critic commented that Don Quijote and Giiegiience were brothers, sharing a rich and fevered world of craziness. One Managuan theater group has attempted to secure this relationship. For a time the group was known as Teatro Experimental Miguel de Cervantes; prior and subsequently it was called Grupo Tohil, under the direction of Nestor Mendez. Tohil was one of the few groups to predate the July 19 triumph of the revolution and survive the Sandinistas' electoral defeat. In this aftermath the group mounted an adaptation of Los habladores by Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, liberally interspersed with fragments from Cervantes's interludes such as El viejo celoso (The Jealous Old Man} and references to Giiegiience. The beginning and end of Tohil's version are set in seventeenth-century Spain, and the middle in a "twentieth-century Latin American city." A man of seventy,


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Sarmientos, sequesters his fifteen-year-old wife, Dona Beatriz, from the gaze of outsiders. Beatriz and her maid Ines prove more clever than the old man and succeed in smuggling a man into the house. In the original Cervantian interlude, their speech serves as a screen to deceive the covetous husband by castigating him for questioning their fidelity while the gentleman secretly comes and goes. In Tohil's production, however, Sarmientos's suspicion limits the ruse and he threatens Beatriz's life. The jump to the contemporary scene sees Sarmientos, cash in hand, taking out insurance from a lawyer to indemnify himself against the harm he is about to cause the interloper and his wife. At that moment the gallant appears to save Beatriz only to be chased away by the guard. At this point, Roldan, the picaresque character and youthful equivalent of Giiegiience, having furtively observed the scene, senses opportunity and interjects himself. He snares Sarmientos in a web of Spanglish: "Mira mi hermano, el que verdaderamente anda en las malboro soy yogi, me comprendes. No te chivies que no te voy a dar con el de aluminio. Mira brothercito . . . " ("Look brother, in the true way of the Marlboro [the coveted cigarette], I'm a yogi, got me? I wouldn't jive you or give you no aluminum. Look lil' bro . . . "). Roldan then insinuates himself in Sarmientos's affairs by occupying his time with hyperinflated word montages. As with Guegiience and Tastuanes, talk turns out to be expensive, and the more words are sustained in circulation, the more they may yield. Sarmientos has money but nowhere to go with it. Roldan offers (linguistic) connections of discontinuous images, drawing time and space together into a word map: You put it well my brother, because he who has a tongue can do much and go to Rome: I've been in Rome and in La Mancha, in Transylvania, in Choluteca and Cholutequita and in Pueblo de Montalban. Montalban was a castle that Reynaldo (Hernandez, that is) came from; Reynaldo was one of the Twelve Pairs of France, that as his name indicates, there were twenty-four, of those that ate with Emperor Charlemagne at the round table (it was known that this emperor was a carpenter), as it was made round because it was neither square nor octagonal; octagonal is ancient because before with seven cordobas you could buy a dollar [un lolo], now not even with three melons [million]; the best you can do is to sheathe

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Nicaraguan Theater Goes to Market yourself in patience like a desert shield [this is January 1991] because there are shields of shields, as for example . . .

The mixture of references far and near rewrites the longing for the classics indicated in the Cervantian turn. The chivalrous days of the round table turn out to germinate nostalgia for the currency reforms of several years back, before the four million cordoba dollar and patience are all one can hide behind waiting for the promised assistance engulfed by U.S. sojourns elsewhere. As Roldan's litanies continue, Sarmientos attempts to extract himself from this economy of words. Only when Roldan is quoting the suspension of dances that recurs throughout El Gueguence and addressing Sarmientos as Governor Tastuanes does Sarmientos appreciate the worth of Roldan's gifts—and Roldan himself begins to realize their value. Sarmientos's scheme is to neutralize la parole feminine that dominates his house with Roldan's male version. With this account of mutual cancellation in mind, Sarmientos invites Roldan to his house to offer his wife Beatriz a talking cure. To subvert Sarmientos's own ban on male visitors, Roldan will pose as his cousin. Meanwhile, Beatriz and Ines promulgate a scheme of their own to risk virtue on pleasure, which anticipates the arrival of Roldan, but not as an invited guest. Although Ines is Beatriz's servant, the service she provides is complicity in the deception of Sarmientos and experience of the world beyond domesticity. It is as much the ability to draw from the world of exchange as the fruit of that exchange, the youthful lover, that constitutes the women's pleasure and secures their class alliance. In either scheme, that of the women or the men, neutralizing the voice of domestic production or giving voice to its desire, importing Roldan's machinery of exchange figures centrally. When Roldan finally appears in the house, it is in the guise of this double agency that he is able to effect his own. Beatriz slyly challenges Roldan's intelligence by asserting that in this house no one can be deceived. Roldan, appreciating that he is merely a conduit for her remarks, agrees that only the ignorant would impede the natural passage of things, their rise and fall. She feigns offense at his projection of her decline and protests Roldan's presence to her husband, who takes this as a measure of his guest's success and bids him to stay for seven years, a


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length of time Beatriz decries as insufferable. In practice, under the veil of insufferability all parties will be satisfied. He who had come with only words turned them to corporal pleasures. These pleasures provided a silence that countered Sarmientos's surveillance. What he could not see in his own house made him happy as well as Beatriz and Ines, whose use of Roldan stymied the paternal gaze. At this point, Roldan's stay is carried backward to the seventeenthcentury setting that initiated the play. No sooner have all parties expressed their satisfaction with the existing arrangements of the house than its sanctity is broken by a knock on the door by the local constable, Alguacil, the same character that apprehends Giiegiience to bring him to court. Alguacil now demands Roldan, a rogue accused of promising marriage to twenty women. In his hiding place underneath a mattress, Roldan is beaten by Beatriz and Ines, who say that they are cleaning house. He runs out from hiding, preferring the law to domestic discipline. Sarmientos comes to his acquired cousin's defense and explains to Alguacil how Roldan "cured" the women of the "terrible malady of the attorneys." Roldan, appreciated by the men for having apparently defeated the law of women, is suddenly exonerated by Alguacil, who asks Roldan if he can provide the service again. Roldan replies the same as Giiegiience does at the end of that play when he steals off with everything of value in Tastuanes's court: "Yes, we'll do it [get it] for nothing." Unlike Giiegiience, however, Roldan escapes into the abundant presence of Coquito, Alguacil's wife, presumably an abundance that will outweigh Roldan's own pleasures. Perhaps Roldan's capacious desire for exchange will be laid to rest. The play's return to the setting of the seventeenth century is complex in what it signals. It is there (or then) that Roldan's seemingly infinite credit is abated after enjoying a period of uninterrupted prosperity. Yet if this past represents a moment less hospitable to the principle of the market, the return to it may have a special significance in the Nicaraguan context. The condition of a nation when the socialist project has been a part of its history, rather than an aspiration of its people, is largely unchartered territory. The tinges of nostalgic longing for times when inflation was driven by an absence of goods rather than a tantalizing but unattainable presence of them could align itself with a certain accounting of Sandinista rule close in time but seemingly so far away.

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The use of Cervantian texts is also an appeal to the most prevalent component of TohiTs audience: high-school students. The preparation of Los habladores for performance came at a time when the entire curriculum was being retooled to blanch it of texts prepared during the past decade and to reconstruct an image of a classical education that canonizes Nicaraguan and world literature. In the past, when Tohil was called Teatro Experimental Miguel de Cervantes, it had also targeted high-school students and performed in their auditoriums, classrooms, cafeterias, and campuses, as well as in cinemas, streets, and factories. A piece that I saw in 1986,Apocalipsis, seemed to be entangled more directly in the melange of imported radio, television, and cinematic figures that comprise, then as now, the field of popular culture. Apocalipsis was a highly interventionist form of theater that brought these symbols of distant origin into fungible contact with their audiences, reminiscent of The Living Theater and Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino. A five-foot wooden tower on wheels—the source of numerous aggressive pyrotechnics—moves ominously across the stage in a highschool hall. A general decked in white and a CIA agent in a red and yellow polyester suit emerge from behind the tower. They squabble over who is best equipped to command the tower and control the world. When their conflict seems irreconcilable, the tower produces an interlocutor, a bishop who complicates their quest with his own aspirations. Their conflict takes the form of a dance contest. As the bishop gyrates his pelvis and outsteps the others, the crowd screams and whistles. The bishop wins the right to ignite the tower's secret weapon. A small cannon hurls a real projectile at the spectators. They recoil. Someone picks it up and throws it back on stage, and the three characters begin to shake, running wildly with streamers across the stage. The Apocalypse had come. In the second act, the general and the CIA agent awaken after the catastrophe unaware of whether or not they had dreamt the whole thing. With the bishop gone, they bemoan the loss of some higher authority. Strains of the theme from the movie Ghostbusters are heard. On a small, two-wheeled scooter draped with bleached-white bones, a character we will come to know as Hitler intercedes in the confusion. He chides the two characters for their incompetence and promises to teach them how to become truly immortal leaders. He claims to be timeless, a part of all cultures past and present—but


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when he attempts to dazzle the two by break dancing and winds up on his back, his claims are discredited before the audience. Hitler is embarrassed and takes it out on his newfound underlings, abusing them to the point where the general challenges him to a duel. They fight with two U.S. flags that have swastikas in place of stars. Hitler falls to the general, but before the general can gloat over his victory, Hitler rises and laughs, asking how he ever thought he could kill a dead man. Now Hitler will show the two how to command. Outfitted with an even larger cannon, Hitler mounts the tower, and the general and the CIA agent propel him toward the audience in a series of charges. The playing space opens up and closes again around the tower. The cannon is shot, the public is physically assaulted, and Hitler withdraws before he can be overcome. In its context, Apocalipsis may have been as complementary to the high-school curriculum as Habladores. Yet the two plays anticipate very different situations for performance. The former was a collective creation generated by actors who were in or had recently left high school. Habladores was adapted by Franz Galich, a Guatemalan expatriate who teaches literature at Central American University. For many years Galich wrote theater criticism for the Sandinista paper Barricada and was critical of the tendency for the products of collective creation to overparticularize their material and generate a purely local form. Cultural policy under the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN, the Sandinista National Liberation Front) had emphasized participation and the collective creation process that was well established in Latin America by the 1970s. Such policy was appropriate to the extensive and spontaneous eruption of theatrical activity inspired by the revolution in the early eighties. Yet, as so many of these groups experienced, theatrical activity was difficult to maintain under deteriorating economic conditions. Keeping groups of young people of any sort together was contingent upon the demands of the draft during the war. A theater that promoted national authors, many of whose works had never been brought before Nicaraguan audiences, had scarcely been able to develop during the eighties. Galich hoped that Habladores would be a nod in this direction and would help professionalize a group that had not had the opportunity to engage dramatic texts.

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Nonetheless, this movement toward the nationally authored text, which the Chamorro government's cultural policy has supported in the form of a theater festival of Nicaraguan authors, has shifted the tenor of theatrical activity evident in Managua. If the problem of intervention had produced a highly interventionist theater, the abatement of the military threat to national sovereignty shifted the problem of development to one focused within national boundaries, not unlike the way in which a dramatic text bounds a performance. Nicaraguan sovereignty in the aftermath of direct intervention is far from secure. It is compromised by the conditions of availability of developmental resources—resources that remain promissory notes. It would seem that in Habladores this problem is signified by the elusiveness and mobility of exchange—Roldan's appeal gains him entry to the productive abode of Sarmientos, Beatriz, and Ines, only to have him withdraw under similar pretenses of unmet opportunities. In the staging of the play the lovers come from the audience, rather than attacking it as the actors do in Apocalipsis. The temptations to participate are alienated to a few actors in Habladores, signaling the limits to the pleasures of exchange and pointing to a politics situated within the larger predicament of the uninvited guest called the market. Clearly this is a politics far more subtle and unarticulated with an existing mobilization of people than had been evident in the earlier work of Tohfl/Cervantes and, as we will see in the next chapter, of the tendency of Nicaraguan theater more generally under the Sandinistas. Yet this aestheticization of theater, whatever its political dispositions, does appear to be the common impulse of much theatrical activity under Chamorro's reign. Some of these trends were detectable in the cultural situation of the Sandinistas' last years in power. In February of both 1988 and 1989, budget cuts or compataciones were accompanied by massive reductions in state personnel. The Ministry of Culture was collapsed into a department of the Education Ministry and then reconstituted as an Institute of Culture, nominally independent of the government and therefore able to raise its own funds. Cultural policy underwent several transformations during the ministry's existence. Not only had cultural activity exploded on a popular level after the revolutionary triumph, but it received institutional encouragement through the creation of a Ministry of Culture under the administration of poet Ernesto Cardenal. Initially, the ministry was di-


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rectly responsible for promoting a range of nonprofessional activities through a network of Popular Culture Centers throughout the country. Within five years after the revolution, the number of theater groups alone had grown to over four hundred. In 1986, fiscal strains shifted emphasis from the ministry as a centrally coordinated producer to a decentralized promoter of cultural events and strengthened professionalization of the arts through the Association of Sandinista Cultural Workers (ASTC), the union of writers, visual artists, and performers. For two years, the ASTC provided salaries to the eight theater groups that it considered the closest to professional stature. Professionalization tended to favor groups in the city over those in the provinces and to give attention to directors with theatrical formation outside of Nicaragua. Even during this brief period subventions could only cover minimal salaries, and production costs had to be underwritten by international solidarity groups, like those of the Dutch, who funded the Justo Rufino Garay under the direction of Mexican Lucero Millan, or the Swiss sponsorship of annual theater festivals. The links between professionalization and patronage are complex and have a history that clearly predates Sandinista cultural policy. The oldest continuous theater group in Nicaragua is the Comedia Nacional, founded in 1965 by Socorro Bonilla Castellon. She received training as a teacher and executive secretary before studying at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (primarily a school for painting) with Argentine Ricardo Quinteros, Chilean Tacho Sanchez, and Italian Franco Cerutti. These three men had directed various projects in the 1950s. Bonilla received a grant to study in the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramatico de Espafia in Madrid and returned to Nicaragua after several years to mount a play, Los drboles mueren depie, by her teacher Alejandro Casona. The first season of the play in August 1965 included seventeen performances at the Red Cross theater in Managua, and a tour of seven towns (Leon, Masaya, Chinandega, Diriamba, Masatepe, Jinotega, and Esteli) that altogether generated enough income to provide some compensation for the thirteen actors involved. Bonilla remarks: The aid from private initiatives had been decisive but limited for the cultural and artistic development of our group. . . . Our repertory is limited by the conditions of a semiprofessional group.

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Nicaraguan Theater Goes to Market The participants are people who work and study. The little free time that remains is dedicated to dramatic study and investigation. We haven't done more than one work a year, a few times we have brought out two, but with much difficulty. Nonetheless, we have put on the stage time-honored works of universal theater that have permitted us to improve our formation and enlarge our aspirations of cultural diffusion.17

Yet these subventions were not enough to free actors from their other occupations, and the Comedia was limited to Saturday morning rehearsals. Performances had to be underwritten commercially, which in one year (1970) combined some twenty local companies, including Banco Nicaragtiense, Compama Nicaragtiense de Seguros (insurance), Inversiones Financieras, S.A., as well as an assortment of travel agencies, pharmacies, restaurants, bookstores, and dress shops. That year the Comedia Nacional presented Graham Greene's The Living Room. The group had performed the works of Spanish playwrights Alejandro Casona and Antonio Gala in its first two years, followed by Jean Anouilh's Antigone, Proceso a cuatro monjas by Vladimiro Cajoli, and Harold Pinter's The Lover, as well as plays by Moliere and Aristophanes. This repertory was representative of what was understood as teatro universal and strikingly, during the group's first decade, did not include any Nicaraguan playwrights. This gap was not uncommon to Nicaraguan theater; some of those now considered to be national playwrights never lived to see their work performed in the country. Perhaps the most significant of these writers was Rolando Steiner. Steiner commented on this problem in an interview conducted in 1971: Popular theater companies don't exist, theater where the people can learn dramatic art. Nor are there groups that permit the possible popular or learned authors to exercise their theatrical vocation or profession. The public has been converted into a silent and passive spectator; now there is no author. . . . And so it is that the author of Nicaraguan theater is the most solitary in the country. Pieces are written under the weight of knowing beforehand that no one will view the work. . . . I don't believe that [my work] will ever be presented in Nicaragua. And for me personally, it doesn't interest me that it is presented. The work exists. The work is good and that


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is enough for me. . . . All of the scenic force of the theater groups deserve my applause, independent of the merits or defects of the productions. Further, without the existence of a theater academy, with actors lacking specialized professional studios, it would be unjust or pedantic to exercise a severe criticism upon the theatrical presentations of the diverse groups.18

There is a drama to these pronouncements that highlights a problem of national cultural development beyond the difficulties of an individual artist's survival. Many of Steiner's works were performed in Nicaragua, but only after being premiered, and often honored, in Spain, Mexico, France, and Guatemala. La puerta, for example, was written in 1966, first produced in Mexico in 1968, and performed in Managua in 1972 and 1982. The author's second play, Antigonia en el infierno, written in 1958 when Steiner was in his early twenties, was performed that year only in the regional capital of Boaco by a group of high-school and university students called Grupo U. His reflections on the prospects for a realization of a national voice in the theater are perhaps expressed most forcefully in his homage to Ruben Dario, La agonia del poeta, published in 1977 but not staged until after his death (1987) in 1991. The autonomy of dramatic literature from the theater to which Steiner resigns himself speaks to the frustrated social project of the national bourgeoisie, his intended audience, and the embattled protagonists of his plays. The 1950s and 1960s saw a number of theater groups form as an articulation of this project, but they invariably looked beyond national borders for aesthetic validation. One of the first such plays produced was Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, performed in English by the members of the Managua elite who later would form Teatro Experimental de Managua (TEM), best appreciated as a theater club that came together intermittently for projects through the 1980s. Several of the participants in that theatrical impulse rejoined forces to stage their late colleague Steiner's Agonia del poeta. Alfredo Valessi, then as now director, Mimi Hammer, an actress who now sits on the governing council of the Institute of Culture, and Gladys Ramirez de Espinosa, head of the Institute and a past participant in TEM, could be seen as continuing the interrupted project of 1958; in that year work had been suspended during preparation of Steiner's first piayjudtt for production under the direction of English actor Peter Cook when the latter died.19

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Ruben Dario was a prodigy and a sojourner. After a diplomatic and literary tour of the capitals of Europe and the Americas, he returned to Nicaragua to die of an excruciating stomach ailment. Agonia del poeta opens with this mortal return, and Valessi's production places the suffering artist on his back, lying on a platform in the middle of the vast stage of the eponymous National Theater in Managua. On a ramp behind the poet (who in the play is named Felix) a wiry dancer bounds in angular jumps and stretched eccentric extensions. Silent, clad in black, he pays a visitation of death that only its recipient can perceive. Much of the play is a dialogue between the poet and his wife. He tries to convince her of the immanence of death, and she attempts to counteract with her distractions from his pain. She accuses him of being an egoist and admonishes him not to drown in the poet's agony. He seems little moved by her offering of hearth and home; only spirits move him from his deathbed. His mother visits him from the past and he calls for his wife to witness the intervention of history. His wife returns only to try and calm his fevered visions. His actual relations cannot affirm his aspirations. While he literally rots from within, he lies impotent, suspended between forces from afar that he cannot grasp and living relations who do not share his vision. The poet also experiences this frustrated communication with the physician who visits him and wants to locate his pain to a specific site within him. The doctor's arguments are inadequate to restore a will to life. Only the return of the dancing figure of death evokes a shout of a will to live. At the end of the play, when the doctor and the wife have made their final appeals, the poet renounces his corporal existence and affirms himself only in art: "I will raise my song despite death." He expires and the priest enters to intone his last rites. The frustrated poet, unable to find an understanding audience at home, invests his lifework with the value of artistic transcendence. Clearly, this is Steiner's own predicament as an unperformed playwright in his native land, yet it could also be the predicament of the project of national identity for which he writes. His wife is faithful to him but sees not what stirs him. As easily as he abandoned her in pursuit of his distant visions, he will leave her his corpse to dispose of while his suffering lives on through his artistic estate. She who provides him with a home, a nation, to return to cannot be of use in sustaining his project. Steiner presents forcefully this vision of na-


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tional sovereignty that rests on a domestic appropriation that it has no use for and an external recognition that has no use for it. The impossibility of realizing this project only sustains the necessity of the poet's agony, and justifies the renewal of his voice as disembodied from its local unity but persistent in its authority. So too the national bourgeoisie has never been able to form fully in Nicaragua; it has been frustrated by intervention and dictatorship. Now, on the heels of a public formed through participation in Sandinista theater, the poet's agony can be borne witness, even if its metaphysical pain is fundamentally different from that of those who watch its enactment. The actor who plays the Dario character Felix in Steiner's play, Salvador Espinosa, exemplifies the debt post-Sandinista theater has to its predecessor. Espinosa was a functionary in the theater department of the ASTC. In 1989, he left his post to act in "El Caso 315," a monologue based on a testimonial of a contra prisoner forced to carry the limbs of his comrades through the woods. The play ran for over forty performances that continued through the transition of governments. After this strongly Sandinista-identified play, and continuing as a militant of the Frente, Espinosa had to defend his decision to take a contract as an actor under the new regime. In an interview he emphasized the need for Sandinista artists not to isolate themselves, to defend their conquests or risk losing the places they had created through their struggle to those more than willing to replace them. It was with the revolution, he said, that this space had been gained and most young artists had their formation.20 Only by occupying that space could they test what the current government would consider political culture. With the exception of two groups who have their own spaces, all the other Nicaraguan theater groups depend on the government for support. The desire for a theatrical space, usually a converted house, has translated into the only assurance of artistic autonomy. This in turn assumes that a particular group can get support from outside the country and, given the absence of conditions for theater historically, often has meant relying on non-Nicaraguan directors to form groups. This, it would seem, is Steiner's problem of national identity in reverse. The international frontiers of any country lie just beyond its own margins. Nicaraguan theater had long drawn on outsiders to direct it, but in the 1980s the revolution drew many directors to Nicaragua,

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some displaced from their own national political context. Gonzalo Cuellar was an activist in Bolivia who, after coming to Managua, founded the puppet theater Guachipilin (the name refers to a wood impenetrable to insects), which trained young Nicaraguan actors, enchanted children in day-care centers, and produced a respected puppet version of Giiegiience. Baltazar Lopez is a Salvadoran who has directed a number of projects. Grupo Talia was formed by Argentine Pedro Galarza (a director with diverse credentials in Latin America and Europe) along with a number of more experienced Nicaraguan actors and actresses such as Evelyn Martinez, who played the title role in the group's production of The Rifles of Mother Courage. Enrique Polo and Lucero Millan came from Mexico in November 1979 to create programs for Nicaraguan television. Their group, Justo Rufino Garay like so many others, soon was performing sketches in the countryside. In 1985, Justo Rufino Garay obtained a house in Managua with funding from Holland and Mexico, and converted it into a theater for weekend performances, with room for an audience of fifty. The group has staged Chekhov and Dario Fo, but its focus has been on the collective creation process that emphasizes sociological investigation of the community (as in Escenas de mi ciudad). In this process, local observations generate improvisations on the situations of social types with given physical expressions that provide the structure for the work. In 1990, with monies from a foreign tour and from European cultural associations, Justo Rufino Garay moved to a larger house and converted it into a 100-seat theater and a restaurant. As with other theatrical institutions, however, subsistence always remains a battle. The foreign aid is at times reflected in the composition of the audiences of performances. Despite ads in the dailies and announcements on the radio, getting Nicaraguans to the theater is difficult. Ticket prices of one dollar are minimal but still unaffordable for many. Justo Rufino Garay is attempting to form a theater school for young people in an endeavor to help develop new audiences as well as provide training. The professionalizing of Nicaraguan theater has often foundered on the problem of training. The same conditions that have generated gaps between Nicaraguan playwrights and foreign directors have stymied development of a drama studio. Training has tended to occur within groups in the absence of an ongoing theater school. Efforts to establish such a school have been persistent since 1980, when Alan


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Bolt, of whom more will be said in the next chapter, was first asked by the ASTC to take on the project. After a year he left to focus on his own work, and the school that he started closed in 1984. It reopened in 1988 with assistance from Sweden, and moved to the National Theater in 1989. Although the government pays the salaries of two administrators, money for teachers is limited. A four-year curriculum of study was devised that included acting, directing, and theater history for twenty hours each week, but teachers are not available for all of the practical areas.21 Under these conditions of scarcity, the question of what would constitute an appropriate technical basis for the Nicaraguan context is difficult to pose. To the extent that professionalization depends on the importation of foreign resources, it raises the same issues of development as the reliance and absence of other externally formed technologies. Yet although theater shares this predicament with national development most generally, the problem is more acute in theater than in the other arts. La Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, the seat of Nicaraguan modernism in painting, was founded in 1939 and was given its decisive direction when Rodrigo Penalba assumed the helm in 1950.22 The gallery and group of artists called Praxis continues a political tradition in painting that it established in the sixties, whereas theater has wavered in sustaining its developments. In a 1964 manifesto Praxis declared that "art and culture for us will not be an untouchable taboo; they will be nothing more than forms, without exceptional importance, like every human manifestation, that are a function of determinate social assumptions."23 The graffiti by Praxis that attacks Chamorro's cultural policy is amply in evidence on Managuan walls. Both within the school and without, ties of mentorship were sustained and a more reciprocal relation to the international scene expressed through participation in exhibitions was possible than in the theater. Further, pre-Columbian motifs and nativist primitivism (like those paintings associated with Ernesto Cardenal's project in Solentiname in the 1970s) had both formal and technical implications that grounded painting more firmly in Nicaraguan soil. Similar confluences could be mentioned for poetry and literature. Certainly the prominence of such literary figures as Cardenal, Sergio Ramirez, Jose Coronel Urtecho, and Pablo Antonio Cuadra in documents of national identity has been well appreciated.24

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Yet whereas literary figures have been able to penetrate the state, theater, more so than any of the arts (including music and dance, which are more developed technically in Nicaragua), is an expression of the institutionalization of culture by the state. In this regard, the absence of any cultural institution prior to the Sandinista revolution is significant as is its current form, the Nicaraguan Institute of Culture. The Chamorro government inherited the Institute from the Sandinistas, who were already forced to withdraw from their program of public and popular arts. Although the Institute "corresponds to the state in the cultural ambit," it should be remembered that it is formally independent of the government and hence can solicit funds, above all from international sources.25 The Institute's principal charge, as described in the charter drafted by the Sandinistas, is to promote the rescue, development, and fortification of the national culture, sustained in the creative participation of the people. The state aids the national culture in all its expressions, be they of a collective or individual character.

The charter also mandates that artistic and cultural creation is free and unrestricted. "Cultural workers have full freedom to choose forms and modes of expression" and the state would "protect the author's rights." Subsequently the document declares that "culture is the most authentic manifestation of our national identity." Here identity is suspended somewhere between "the creative participation of the people" and the protection of individual "author's rights." A little further in the document are additional clauses that propose how the democratization of culture is to proceed: To make possible the acquisition of the best items of culture. To encourage cultural creation that springs up, in the end first rate, not from a bureaucracy—nor from recommendations or political criteria—but rather from criteria freely expressed by specialists and those in the know. To maintain the life—through its works (in editions, expositions, auditions)—as well as the memory and inheritance of the national "Classics" without ever exaggerating (or diminishing) their universal value.

The evaluation by those in the know, the promotion of classics against some putative national output that is nonclassical, and the


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emphasis on acquisition stand in striking contrast to the initial focus on participation. If democratization of culture is the end, it is not clear how it is to be served by these means, unless there is the assumption that this is the culture of classics and expertise that was hitherto excluded from the patrimony. Many critics have written on theater, but for reasons already made plain there are no theater critics, no volumes devoted to theater criticism, and no professional preparation for those assuming a position of expertise with respect to evaluation. The Institute is overseen by a Superior Council of Culture, whose seven members presumably comprise the experts in question: Pablo Antonio Cuadra, president; Gladys Ramirez de Espinosa, coordinator; Jorge Eduardo Arellano, Mimi Hammer, Ernesto Rizo, Hugo Palma, and Pedro Xavier Soli's. The tension in theater between the valorization of national classics and cultural participation was manifest when the Institute planned its first festival of Nicaraguan authors in such a way as to render the authorship of collective creations, and the remnants of the theatrical movement spawned by the revolution, ambiguous. After some discussion in the press, the conception of national author was extended to these groups.26 That this would emerge as an issue would not be difficult to predict from the wording in the document. Even more, however, is the Institute's articulation in its present incarnation of a language of excellence that conflates democracy with the market. This language has become all too familiar in discussions of culture. This chapter has attempted to suggest that this conflation of market with democracy as a form of national identity is doubly problematic. The ideology of the market certainly brings with it a particular conception of freedom. For many Nicaraguans, it is the freedom to be in the market but not of it. All Nicaraguans can bear witness to the spectacular commodities that freely invite the public gaze as much as they can learn to respect what constitutes an artistic classic. But the ability to select, identify, appropriate—these are freedoms reserved for those "in the know," an expertise required to choose what will represent the nation and a capacity to realize in practice what the market may bring. Yet if this is an ideology of national identity, it is one that presently delivers scarcity, of capital and cultural artifacts, even to those who would be its beneficiaries.

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In contrast to this troubled project to build a nation for a bourgeoisie ill treated by global capital, there is another sense to the conflation of democracy and market, though one not without its own set of problems. If the introduction of an ideology of the market narrows the scope for participation as a principle to be promoted in constructing a nation, the market as such, as public place or social site, may carry far more participation—beyond the narrow confines of economic rationality—than is generally granted. A labor market that embraces only half the work force (an especially unstable concept in a country in which more than half the population may be considered too young to be part of the work force yet compelled nonetheless to work) can hardly be considered a mechanism for assigning people to places, unless the market itself is seen as a place of subsistence whose only product is the public that it mobilizes. If people do not go out looking for work in the labor market, it is because they inhabit a different one. Like the popular festivals such as El Tope, the unruly mass, the crowd, participates in a mixing of voices not easily condoned by those in the know but necessary to tolerate if there is to be a national identity. Giieguence, the greatest Nicaraguan classic, has no author, no determinate origin, no definitive production, and only an indirect translation. Its popular forms are inauthentic, inaccurate, fragmentary, yet these validate the claims made for the work. Its history is irretrievable not simply because of the impossibility of determining its origins but because its practice takes a form that cannot be recognized by history, or at least by those designated to know what forms the historical can take. The demand for culture that is classic, that is to say, of a determinate class, comes surprisingly late for a class whose identity has always seemed to be eternally deferred. Not so for those who live by participation, but pointedly for those who have finally climbed to power on the back of participation only to await recognition from a source they may never hear from in their lifetime. Theirs is a poetic agony, an agony of misshapen form that promises to name them but will have to settle for others' use of their works. As regards the truly theatrical public, those who like Giiegiience or Roldan must live on exchange without capital, their mass will only continue to gather in all the sites that are productive of culture. The legacy of the Sandinista revolution is to make the articulation of national identity, and of a cultural terrain that might forge it, finally vi-


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able. Hence, paradoxically, even if Nicaraguan theater shows few traces of its recent socialist heritage, the classicism that now appears in the guise of its patron is both enabled and rendered incomplete. This class project of national identity is enabled by the vivid recognition from beyond Nicaraguan frontiers even in the very process of the violation of national boundaries. Given its dispositions, however, the post-Sandinista government is compromised by the diminished attentions its rivals had the dubious honor to receive. More than the aid that was never delivered, the promise of recognition may doom the current project of national identity. But it will do nothing to dampen the expressions of participation that mount as the ideology of exchange without capital meets its practical applications, namely, to mobilize incessantly a people with nothing more than the drive for identity, for subsistence, for an affirmation of their own creativity that is only apparent in use. The state of Nicaraguan theater may not be in advance of that movement, but the particular condition of theater more clearly expresses the larger political problem.

Chapter 4

Masquerades of Gender in a Nicaraguan Theater

Articulations of the Public The theatrical movement that developed in the aftermath of the revolution, based in the actual physical domain of the countryside, projected an imaginary countryside as well. It explored those spaces productive of revolutionary activity but scarcely made visible in the moment of revolutionary triumph. In doing so, it embodies the project of participation that transforms the theatrical public into an autorepresentation of the people. In a country as relatively compact as Nicaragua, with a population of some three million that is modest with respect to the community of nations, it is easy to underestimate the accomplishment of a rough parity of public access between theater and mass communication. The fact that this is possible in Nicaragua makes a case for privileging certain theatrical forms as joining the representation of a public with the representation of the spatial topos of that public's history. Spatial differentiation is nowhere precise. In Nicaragua, as in many other countries that retain an agricultural imprimatur in the midst of their capitals, categories can only be applied uneasily. If cows grazing in downtown Managua and chickens running through the living rooms in so many houses question the neat urbanity of the city, the meaning assigned to the opposition of town and country must be found elsewhere. Wherever it lies physically, the countryside of an agrarian economy is its productive center. Prior to its industrialization, agricultural production is closely linked with social reproduction. This linkage privileges the role of 78


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women and makes of it a virtual power that must be denied its actualization if the norms of private property are to hold sway. What is assigned to reproduction narrowly is easily displaced to production more broadly, leading to a certain feminization of the countryside. In these gendered terms the opposing meaning of urban center and rural marginalia will be articulated. The politics of this gendered space will find an expression through the theater that assigns for itself this identity of revolutionarily charged rurality. How this differentiation of space can be identified with grounds for historical movement in the socialism of the Sandinistas will be the concern of this chapter. The theater that developed when the Sandinistas came to power was no more homogeneous than the Frente itself. If anything was consistently thrust into theatrical development it was the demand that the public now extend its horizons to be that of the Nicaraguan population. Initially it seemed that this population announced the possibility of theater that could be popular in the sense of resting on the articulation of a people. The poetry workshops, the reverberations of painting from the island colony of Solentiname elsewhere, the theater groups formed through unions, military units, community groups, and other mass organizations appeared to be as much a directive to the arts in general as to whom art should be addressed as an actual form of expression. Given the difficulties of sustaining organized artistic activity in the formative years after the revolution, it was perhaps not surprising that this urge to representation of a people be condensed in a few theater groups that would take this as their project. The question of just what got condensed is more difficult to assess, for it raises the problem of the relation between theatrical presentation and representation of a public. This at least was the promise of the collective creation process that, as has been mentioned, was so extensively explored in Latin American theater of the seventies. The Sandinista revolution added the prospect of a theater forged through popular mobilization. A long-standing group like the Comedia Nacional gained access to publics it never previously had access to as a result of the touring opportunities that were the legacy of participation in the eighties, but determining how the group's theater aesthetic was affected by the revolution is not so clear to establish. In order to gain insight into the relation between popular mobilization and its crys-

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tallization in aesthetic form, it is more significant to focus on theatrical movements that emerged in the course of the revolution. If the metropolitan centers of Managua, Granada, and Leon had always been the arbiters of theatrical representation, then understandably a movement that intended to negate these conventions in order to join representation with population would turn to the countryside. Given the mass uprisings in the cities and towns, it is not accurate to say that the Sandinista revolution was rurally based, despite the activity of the guerrilla and the example of Sandino. Indeed, "Triumph" is marked by the occupation of the central square of Managua by the followers of the insurrection on July 19, 1979. Pictures of a space filled to the brim with AK-47s and fists in the air, banners on the empty cathedral and combatants on the monuments, became iconic images of the revolution not only on the currency but on T-shirts, the nightly news lead-in, and public art. Yet if these images are more significant symbolically than strategically, it is because they portray an urban center of power whose boundaries had fallen to a mobilization that penetrated its boundaries apparently from outside, though evidently also from within. This is not simply someplace other than the city but another kind of space altogether, namely, the countryside. This imagery of spilling into the city, so resonant in the topographic imaginary of revolutions, infers meaning to the space beyond the city's borders without providing the means for its articulation. All sorts of organizations from the army to the women's association were sites for poetry, painting, theater, and the like, but during the first years of the revolution the principal institution for channeling popular energies into cultural activities was the array of the Popular Culture Centers (Centres Populares de Cultura, or CPC) organized nationally and regionally, and established locally in many neighborhoods. The apex of activity of these centers, in the first half of 1984, saw the organization of fifty-four culture brigades, over four hundred seminars, and 1,545 recreational activities — events that drew 355,634 participants. The CPCs also oversaw the organization of amateur groups, which blossomed in number from 259 in 1983 to 970 just one year later. Amateur theater groups increased in number from 66 to 232 in that one year.1 As popular participation in making theater began to wane toward the end of 1984, amateur groups began to dissipate and the culture


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brigades to disband. Of the culture brigades, several groups remained with more focused theatrical intentions. Among these were two situated in productive centers that, in 1985, constituted themselves as the basis for what they hoped would be a "Community Theater Movement"—a rurally based national network of theater groups. One of these that was able to continue working until 1988, Teyocoyani, made a piece in 1985 that displayed the dynamics of the relations of town and country quite forcefully. The collectively produced work Juan y su mundo Quan and his world) was composed of two acts that divide the work into a pre- and postrevolutionary saga. Before the piece would begin, guitar-strumming members of Teyocoyani would mix folk songs of the Leon region with the national songs of the revolution. This musical frame continues as a form of narrative for the work. After the audience has assembled, two of the musicians climb atop a bamboo platform upstage and continue to sing; they announce the action, comment on it, and listen and judge what transpires in a testimonial dialogue with the players and public. The first act of Juan y su mundo plays so much as a kind of fairy tale of the revolution as to provide a parodic backdrop for the more confounding second act. "Juan," as introduced before the play by the actor who portrays him, is the archetypal campesino. He is costumed in black and white, indicating, the audience is told, that he contains the capacity for both good and evil. Local lore tells of spirits who fly at dusk searching for human subjects with whom they can form a pact, as on the eve of revolution so many were tempted to do. Without land or means to support his family, Juan in these "twilight times" is readily enticed to do the devil's work. He becomes the interlocutor of coercion, beating his fellow campesinos into submission and forcing his wife to submit to sexual favors for the devil's brigade. The devil is not Juan's only exteriority, however. An angel intervenes and challenges Juan's conduct and the devil's privilege. The two forces do battle in a choreography that finds the devil sitting atop a bamboo pole borne on the shoulders of his underlings and the angel left to his own more humble means of flight. With the predictive force of hindsight, the white-clothed angel prevails. Juan has been saved for the second act. Juan himself did not make the revolution, yet because it is made in his name, he is able to reap its fruits. When the action resumes, Juan, along with the campesinos he had formerly betrayed, is offered a co-

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operative by the angel, now an agent of the government. The cooperative is composed of all of the dreams the campesinos can name; the angelic agent crafts them out of thin air. When the angel departs, the dreams revert to their prior gaseous state and the cooperative is simply a plot of land upon which to materialize them. The first harvest is successful, but a tractor will be needed to assure continued productivity. Juan is sent into the city to secure a loan. The bus depots of Managua are located in each of the large markets that teemed with vendors and purchasers when prices were controlled by the government. When people get off the buses, they are immediately confronted with this economic nexus of country and city. Juan's arrival here presents all of the corruptions of the market in a mixed economy. Government inspectors come to buy under the table what they have just surveilled on top. Juan makes it past the marketplace to reach the bank, where an immense bureaucratic machinery provides confusion in response to his questions. From a corner, an official beckons, and in a flurry of soothing technical jargon, Juan is relieved of the deed to the cooperative he would have used to secure a loan. Returning with a worthless bank note, he goes back to the cooperative and finds his companeros sleeping. He regards them for a moment, reaches into a basket, and steals off with the cooperative's remaining funds. On his way out he is stopped by the angel from the first act who demands that he reflect on what he is doing. The devil then heralds him, only to be ignored. Juan walks offstage and the bards sitting atop the upstage platform join the cast in song. The decision is left with the audience in a third act improvised as discussion with the actors. This piece was viewed, in a sense, out of its context. Typically, these performances occurred before the people characterized in the play. In the countryside or on the war front, Juan y su mundo evoked the distance and marginality of agrarian production that was considered so central to the future of a Nicaragua attempting meaningful redistribution of land, increased agroexports, and more ample food supplies. The particular performance I saw was in 1986 at the Autonomous National University of Nicaragua (UNAN) in Leon. In this same auditorium important meetings of student supporters of the Sandinista Front took place and earlier works of political theater were performed. The audience of urban intellectuals persistently questioned the ambiguity of the play and its ending during the "third act" in-


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tended for spectator input. They suggested that the play did not provide strong enough guidance to its campesino public and was not clear enough as to the sources of shortages and scarcity that Juan's cooperative encountered. What this UNAN audience recapitulated in the third act was the very tension between center and margin that the play offered as its predicament. The intellectuals responded as an already-marginalized voice demanding a return to the center, to their properly directive role. This urban audience was subject to a recapitulation of the spatial imaginary of the revolution, here in the form of a play from the countryside coming to the city. Yet the discussion also allowed these intellectuals to speak back to that imaginary and offered them the possibility, through their immediate displacement from the center of history, to reflect on their place within it. That the play would seem to work on both sides of the divide that it inscribes only underscores the inseparably relational aspect of the center-margin, town and country, problematic in Nicaragua. Juan's departure is as much a problem for the campesinos he leaves as for the intellectuals' city that he may be heading for. As character and social actor, Juan anticipated the economic dilemma of those unable to maintain independent plots in the countryside who then migrate to a city that can scarcely provide for them. (Managua's population was said to have tripled during the war, but measuring a migration of this sort would be a daunting task.) Juan also articulated the political quandary of how to grant increased authority to regional administrations without their leaving the revolution. Finally, the play's blending of regional idioms indicated the cultural conundrum of rural roots as national culture compressed into the currency of mass media that can no longer be exchanged in the countryside. (Regional folk musics, for example, are the source of a burgeoning recording industry in Nicaragua whose products remain in the city while reproductions are scarcely consumed in the countryside.) At the same time, Juany su mundo was a rather modest instance of a public sphere parallel in function to the state yet formally outside it. That is, the play provided a platform to both represent and illicit a critical response with respect to the direction of national policy that required mobilizing the participation of an audience. This medium for the formation of a critical public was directed at the discourse of state even though the theater group was not itself an agency of state policy. Here social problems were articulated and rehearsed in performance.

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Yet as indicated by the urban intellectuals' reception, this public sphere turned out to betray certain fragilities. Teyocoyani's base was on a large state farm outside of El Sauce in the region of Leon. The need to focus on the imperatives of production limited the resources that could be made available to theater. The stability of the space that theater could render to a public in this instance was not within its grasp to control. Another of the Community Theater Movement projects in the intended national network of regionally based rural theaters, called Sofana and situated outside of Masaya, faltered precisely in its ability to secure and develop a space of its own from which to support itself and make theater. Clearly this is not the only condition for theatrical production, but in a country without a theatrical infrastructure of spaces that could be rented (even if money were available), responsibility for constructing a productive base for art lies with the artists. As there is not yet a place for art, the artists must also be something other than artists; they must engage in the very construction of art's possibility. This project was most closely approximated in the most stable of the community theater groups, and the problematics of theater as an index of cultural and economic production are legible as well in the group's work. In this sense the group was not typical, because nowhere was a specific experience repeated, but perhaps it was most emblematic of what could be considered a theatrical impulse produced by the Sandinista revolution as such, insofar as it had the greatest impact, reach, and sophistication in its work and went furthest in linking production and social reproduction in its practice. To illuminate these relations, one of its productions will be detailed in the following section. Figurations of Revolution The sun sketches shadows on the cement floor that is only partially covered by a ceiling of thatched bamboo. The sides of this theater cabana open to a dense tropical greenery that climbs steeply up the surrounding hills. A drum beats a saddened march as an unlikely procession spills into this arena. At its head, a gold-helmeted conquistador, resplendent in purple and green velvet and rendered faceless by a mask of white gauze, marshals those who follow. A wooden


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cart is borne by a finely muscled man, shirtless and masked in the same way as his superior. A woman, dressed in white, is splayed along the cart's planks. From between the man's legs, an immense bamboo pole extends over the woman. A rope trails from behind the cart to link two figures in bondage. One is a lean boy with brightly painted red lips, and the other a matronly fruit seller. The procession is closed by another conquistador who drags a long whip of coarse hemp, as limp at rest as the bamboo is stiff. As the faceless men depart, the two in bondage remain and the woman on the cart rises and welcomes those gathered to the marketplace where travelers meet, wares are sold, and stories exchanged. She entreats the public to listen to the three characters who appear so different yet whose stories belie a value that is essentially the same. The boy with the red lips offers his tale first, and the scene changes to the home of the boy's family. He is a student in high school who spends his free hours at home assisting his mother in domestic work. This includes serving his father and older brother, who mock him as he waits on them. The father becomes increasingly agitated and complains about the food. He kicks the few items of furniture around the house and then turns on his wife before moving toward the door. She asks him where he is going and he only grunts in reply. The younger son asks for some money to buy books for school and his father snorts, "I'm not going to give a son like this any of my money." The mother implores as the father leaves. The next scene opens with two libidinous young males casting about the backways of the marketplace. They spy some large empty baskets, and jump inside them to masturbate. While they rattle in the baskets, two other teens pass by. One gives the other a condom. The gift-getter assumes that he has been given a balloon until told that it has a different purpose, which has already been fulfilled. The condom goes limp and the boy gags. The two then notice the oddly animate baskets and remove the covers to interrupt the now-shamefaced inhabitants. Their own shame of discovery is interrupted by the entrance of the red-lipped boy, and the four are unified through this newfound object of harassment. After some cajoling, they force the red-lipped boy to lead an elephant walk—an awkward parade with baskets on their bent backs and arms connected beneath their crotches. The unwitting leader breaks away and begins to cry. He is

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pursued by a chorus who stamps and chants in unison "Men don't cry." When the abused youth returns home, he finds only his father. He is asked whether he had gotten his books, and he replies "No." The father regards him and lays some money on the table, beckoning his son to take it. The son approaches cautiously and bends over to pick up the few coins scattered there. His father seizes him from behind and rapes him. Just then the mother arrives home. Her husband withdraws abruptly from their son. Without looking at her, he shrugs and mumbles that her son had just gotten his money. She runs out, pursued by her husband. As the red-lipped boy strains to his feet, the conquistador enters with the woman who had been on the cart. She turns to the youth and says that she must tell her story. He bids her good luck and leaves. The woman begins to speak of her relationship with her husband, about how loving they had been together until she became pregnant and things started to change. We move through her reminiscence to a scene in her family's house, when the man she would marry was arriving for the first time to court her. He is a high Sandinista official of great wealth; she is poor but beautiful. He greets the woman's mother with a cascade of revolutionary rhetoric: "What a correct, upstanding household in a progressive neighborhood, the backbone of our historic struggle." The mother offers some coffee in return and retires to the kitchen. When she is out of sight, he lunges at the chaste young woman. She pushes him back. He gets on his knees and, with a flourish, proclaims what is said to be a formula for such proclamations: "I promise you the sky and the stars if you'll marry me." The mother enters and asks with some embarrassment whether they'll take their coffee there or in the kitchen. The daughter tells of the proposal, and the mother immediately calls for the father. He enters in a green striped suit, with the gait and appearance of a bullfrog. The two men slowly circumnavigate each other in a male territorial ritual. The father sizes up the suitor and seems skeptical until the mother begins a litany of what the gentleman caller possesses: five Toyota land cruisers, fifteen fincas (private farms) with a house on each, eleven hundred cows, and high government office. The father is convinced. In the wedding scene that follows, the two families face each other as a priest stands before them on a platform (the wooden cart with its protruding bamboo pole). The bride's mother announces what all


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agree is a paltry dowry (a broom and an apron), but it is compensated by a daughter of high character. The first part of the ceremony is something of an inquest directed by the priest into the daughter's moral history. Satisfied that she is chaste, the priest weds the two and the husband carries the newly declared bride to the pulpit, which now serves as a wedding bed. While the priest and the two families eagerly watch, the husband thrusts himself upon his wife. Within moments he withdraws and pulls from between her legs a red cloth which he waves with glee and gives to the applauding parents. Next we see the wife with her basket of clothes, taking her place where the women of the village do their wash. The other women are intent upon gossiping loud enough so that she can hear about her husband's affair with a fifteen-year-old female student. Emboldened, they chide her. One asks to borrow soap, and when she is given it replies, "You see? Just like the husband, ask and get it all." The washerwomen dance and sing before departing. The wife is left alone and says, "Yes, I shot her. I couldn't live with the shame." The conquistador brings in the next jongleur, who declares, "I hate all men. They are all the same. They ask for more than they give." This character, the third of the three initially brought to the marketplace in the conquistador's procession, is a permanent resident of the market, a fruit seller. She has begun her day, as her trade demands, at five in the morning in order to buy the fruit in the countryside and bring it to the city to market. Her husband, who is also her partner in business, was not around this morning, so she has had to load the fruit and drag her cart by its long bamboo yoke alone. Nor is he at their appointed selling place. Finally he shows up clad in nothing but his underwear and claims that he has been robbed. He is castigated for losing his clothes once again to a prostitute. The husband, in what we gather is a well-rehearsed exchange, expresses his shame and repentance, and asks his wife's forgiveness. She accepts and throws him some clothes, which she happened to have with her, and they begin to sell their fruit. The husband is soon distracted and begins to romance his wife. She flushes and suddenly remembers that this is the day they must pay their creditor. She hands her husband a wad of money and, with a gentle pat under his crotch, tells him to return early. He spruces himself and saunters away. An old woman comes by and says that she saw someone who looked just like the fruit seller's husband go into a local cabaret. The

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angry fruit seller closes her stall and runs off. Inside the cabaret a master of ceremonies dressed in a frilled shirt and red velvet jacket welcomes the crowd in English. He advises the people there that they can pay in dollars, traveler's checks, or credit cards. Playing cards are passed out to the audience (where the fruit seller's husband and a few other actors sit), which will determine the recipient of a very special prize, the winner of the "Miss Juventud" beauty contest. "Miss Juventud" is paraded before the cheering crowd, wearing a bathing suit that peeks through a regal cape that matches the jacket of the master of ceremonies. She ascends the platform (nothing other than the cart with its ever-present bamboo projection), faces upstage, and begins a gyrating dance that slowly lifts the cape. The MC asks if there is anyone who would not like to get to know the woman better and receives a resounding no from the audience. He then draws a number. The fruit seller's husband has the winning card. The husband gleefully jumps up and deposits the wad of money for the creditors of the fruit business into the MC's white glove, and escorts "Miss Juventud" behind a curtain. The whole process is being repeated with another woman when the fruit seller bursts into the cabaret. She eludes the bouncers, quickly scans the room and grasps its layout, and heads for the room "backstage." In an instant, her husband runs out, pulling up his pants; she is close behind him with a revolver drawn. She chases him through the cabaret and up onto the platform as the men scream and the bouncers flee. He throws himself at her feet, kisses them, and begs for her forgiveness. She softens for a moment and drops the revolver. He yanks it from her and begins to scold her for barging in on him. She grabs the gun back, and he drops to his knees again and begins to plead. Seeing that this has no effect, he covers his head and waits for the worst. She looks at him in horror, shrinks back crying, and drops the revolver. He slowly lifts his head and sees that his wife is paying no attention to him, focused instead on her own sentiments. The husband rises and throws his wife down and beats her. Still not receiving any attention from her, he leaves the cabaret. As she continues to sob, the MC emerges from his hiding place, straightens himself a bit, and surveys the cabaret's condition. He then jumps to the platform and begins to auction the fallen fruit seller to the now-silenced crowd. The people at the cabaret quickly regain their enthusiasm and line up at the base of the platform, playing card in


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hand. The woman stands up as the first in line lurches toward her. She arrests him with a strong voice, "Go on, take me. I'm a woman just like your mother, your sister, your wife, your daughter." The man shrinks back, and the line dissolves as the three who told their stories—the gay teenager, the imprisoned wife, and the fruit seller— rejoin in the marketplace and finish the piece in song. By some measures of theatrical presentation, the performance is elegant in its simplicity. Each role is a clearly drawn caricature, broadly acted with unmistakable conflicts that are physicalized and resolved. There are no set changes and only a handful of props (the wooden cart, baskets, a broom) that are rearranged to define each scene. Costume changes are frequent though seldom elaborate, and each actor plays multiple roles. The four musicians sit to the side of the acting space and play a motley assortment of drums, guitars, and wind instruments; they sit back and enjoy the show when they are not playing. Yet this simplicity can be deceptive, for unlike naturalistic drama that relies on the depth of the author's character and the actor's portrayal to create dramatic density, this play presents its action as a web of surfaces, which, like a labyrinth made of Japanese screens, reconfigures space without reflecting it. The voyeur's visit to the house of mirrors cannot capture this theater's effects. The depth in this theatricalization is not a function of the intricacies of the stage and the illusions it can evoke, but rather extends beyond the performers' activities into the public and its cultural history. To scratch the surface of the play's screens of signification, it is necessary to move from the performance text into the social. This is not simply an analytic maneuver: it is also the movement suggested by the play itself. This movement may in turn make legible the historical project suggested by the Sandinista revolution. The play, Amada Amor (Love, my love), first performed in 1988, is the result of an investigation into Nicaragua's past and present. A collective creation of the group Nixtayolero (meaning "morning star" in Nahuatl), the play blends three distinct archives: streams of indigenous culture emanating from pre-Columbian sources, current events of sexual politics, and the personal histories of the actors' sexuality. The second of the three stories, that of the woman's shooting of her husband's lover, is placed at the heart of the play and refers to an actual incident made into a scandal by the Nicaraguan press. The press, both pro- and anti-Sandinista, attached all blame to the woman

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and applauded her stiff sentence. The question of the husband's culpability was left unexamined by the press and by the courts. The ontological innocence of masculine desire, and the presumption of guilt for bespoiling that innocence, is a premise amplified and forcefully inverted by this central tale's relation to the other two. In the opening story, the father's rape of his son does not taint the patriarch with the guilt of "aberrant" sexuality because typically in normal (the term for straight male) Nicaraguan culture only the man who is penetrated in sexual intercourse is considered homosexual. The third story is also woven around a recent public controversy that raises the issue of the social figuration of women. Beauty pageants had been a regular feature of Somocista culture. In 1988, the Sandinista youth group (Juventud Sandinista) and the women's organization (Asociacion de Mujeres Nicaragiienses Luisa Amanda Espinosa, or AMNLAE) sponsored their own version of this type of spectacle, Miss Juventud. The contest was intended to alleviate the image of high seriousness for political organizations that had estranged some young people and to integrate cultural forms that had garnered popular interest. The extent to which such contests shifted control of the terms of beauty into women's hands (or more properly, the rest of their bodies) was up for contention. Recall that Miss Juventud is initially auctioned off in the cabaret. She is played by the actress who also plays the role of the woman who kills her husband's lover, thus in a sense doubling as the generalized object of male desire and the particular subject who loses that attention to another. Other characters are presented within this sexual calculus, but they are placed within the horizon of absolute gain and loss of desire that this actress represents. Unlike the other actors, she is a woman who plays female roles. The rest of the company is composed of men, all of whom shift between male and female roles in different scenes. The play of men for women has its antecedents in Western theater (Shakespearean drama being perhaps the most discussed of those that used this convention) and also in the pre-Columbian performances like El volador, which was observed in the sixteenth century by Spanish colonialists.2 Given the coincidence of males playing female roles in the traditions of both European and preconquest performance in the sixteenth century, it is not surprising to see the syncretistic expression of this cultural and gender ambiguity in puta-


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lively Christian feasts devoted to patron saints, like the San Sebastian festival of Diriamba that was discussed in chapter 3. Recall that Diriamba, a town in the agriculturally rich southern region of Nicaragua, still holds this festival, which includes El Tope, a meeting of saints (Santiago de Jinotepe and San Marcos Evangelista de San Marcos) invited by San Sebastian to gather for a joint mass in front of the church in the village of Dolores. The saints remain in residence here for the remainder of the festival, which concludes with a return procession to their three respective towns. The festival occurs between January 17 and 27, coinciding with the eighteenth month of the Aztec calendar, when the festival honoring Izcalli (resurrection) is celebrated as well as the return of the sun from the equinox and the inauguration of the hundred-day period before the rains begin (May 3). On this occasion too, men dress as women and offerings of food and drink—such as nacatamales (meat wrapped in banana leaves), picadillo (minced meat), and ginger chicha (home brew)— are made to all who come to the festivities. Although officially sanctioned during centuries of colonial rule, the festival becomes a way of expressing preferences—both cultural and sexual—that are otherwise suppressed. Exodus and return, basic to the agrarian cycle, resonant with the visit to the market, and implicit in the managed transgressions of the festival, are powerful thematics made reference to in the costumes, song, and dance of Nixtayolero's performance. This material is developed as a self-conscious aspect of Nixtayolero's theatrical research, as evidenced in group member Pablo Pupiro's analysis of the uses of imposed religion to conserve indigenous cultural forms against the colonizers.3 That the masquerade of the feminine, the terms of expression of possibilities otherwise denied, figures more generally as a form of resistance is far from assured. The permissible transgressions of carnival and cross-dressing can just as much affirm the normal through their exceptionality as undermine it or privilege the male relation to the public sphere as call it into question. In this sense the theater is unlike the festival in that it makes no claim to total catharsis or a necessary social function that offers a closure to the conflicts of everyday life. Particularly for Nixtayolero, which typically takes its theater to places of work and life, theater is an intervention into the quotidian and not a substitute for it. The decontextualization of resistant tradi-

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tions offers the possibility of both presenting and unmasking those forms. Apart of this possibility lies in the unevenness of what counts as a tradition. The figuration of the feminine is not constant throughout Nicaragua. No more consistent is the reception of cross-dressing in males associated outside the confines of the festival with homosexuality. Not surprisingly, it is in the southern towns that are sites of these festivities where male homosexuality receives its greatest degree of acceptance and gay men have respected positions as vendors in the marketplace. This attitude is not characteristic of the mountainous region of Matagalpa where the group Nixtayolero is based. In the 1870s the Nicaraguan government, in need of gold to finance railroads and other public works, sold land in Matagalpa province to Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, and English, inaugurating in effect a second colonial wave. The sexual concerns and mores of late-nineteenth-century Europe are much more apparent in the mountains, and views toward homosexuality are especially repressive. The bawdy and satirical anticolonial plays like El Gileguence, Loga del Nino Dios, and La Gigantona associated with the early Spanish southern towns of Masatepe, Nandiame, and Diriamba share more with their Renaissance counterparts than with the polkas popular in the mountains to the north. What the mountains and the lower-lying regions of Nicaragua do have in common is the cultural centrality of the marketplace, the centrifugal force that blends diverse elements of regional cultures together in Amada Amor. Hence it is appropriate that the marketplace—where the three characters meet to tell their stories—figures as the site for mixing diverse cultural traditions, historical figures (like the conquistadors), and attitudes toward sexuality. Other Nicaraguan groups, such as the Managua-based Justo Rufino Garay in its collective creation Agolpe de corazon (Heartbeat), have focused on the issue of sexism, and the theme has appeared in some of Nixtayolero's earlier work (including El carnicero, mentioned in chapter 2). The critical reflection on machismo and male desire per se is a distinctive turn, emerging in part from the circumstances of the group. When the men in the company were called for mandatory military service in 1987, the three women who had been in the group, rather than waiting for the men's return, left to form their own theater, Cihuatlampa, in the town of Matagalpa.


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Although the methodology of turning to indigenous forms was not new to Nixtayolero, the immediacy of the group's masculinized experience (despite the fact that one woman joined the group after the men returned to La Praga) foregrounded the traditions just discussed. These traditions, however, are transformed when they come into contact with the actors' efforts to represent their own lives. The recounting of this life experience is drawn from group improvisations. Amada Amor began with such improvisations based on the actors' first sexual experiences. (The actors at that time, all male, ranged from nineteen to thirty years of age and from one to ten years of experience with the company.) The masturbation scene, the courtship, the family encounter, and the wedding night together comprise a narrative of male becoming based on the actors' collective experience. Improvisation is commonly used in naturalistic Western theater to develop the background of a character's daily life that will lead to the scripted text. Improvisation has also been used to generate material or ideas for a given play. For Nixtayolero, improvisation leads both toward the performance text and away from it. Whether a text is written (usually the group's director performs this authorial function) or a collective creation, in performance the text provides a structure for improvisation from which the actors depart. In this sense, Nixtayolero's use of improvisation resembles Italian commedia dell'arte but even more to the point the many traditional festive spectacles and processionals like San Sebastian, whose originary text is mythic and exists only across the span of some uncountable number of performances. These popular performances are repeated annually at harvesttime and mimic the particular time sense that brings together the familiarity of repetition that comes from agricultural cyclical time, as well as the freshness of improvisation that is apparent in the surprise of rebirth that the harvest signifies. Hence, to understand Nixtayolero's appropriation of tradition as making familiar forms strange by decontextualizing them is to appreciate only one direction of the exchange of theater and culture. The invocation of tradition also alludes to their common referent, the link of land to its cultivation that is the foundation of agrarian life. It is here that whatever is strange about the festive tradition, either because it exists in an exceptional time or because the traditions are distinct from those practiced in a region or zone where a given performance takes place, is also made familiar. As

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cultural envoy, Nixtayolero seeks to refamiliarize and thereby link divergent cultural experiences in Nicaragua. Yet this effort is not a purely theatrical one for the members of Nixtayolero: the allusion to agri-culture that forms the foundation of their work is both allegorical and autoreferential. Situated Theater Nixtayolero's home in the mountains, six kilometers from Matagalpa, is finca La Praga, a small farm of less than fifty acres. The theater group is only one of five projects of MACRU (Movimiento de Animacion Cultural Rural) that Alan Bolt has organized. Another is a project funded by Swissaid, an international solidarity group the likes of which are frequently encountered even in the remotest areas of Nicaragua, thereby giving the larger project of national construction here a certain permeability to the global while simultaneously helping constitute a paranational progressive community that makes this revolutionary moment so distinctive. All twentieth-century revolutions have been characterized by varying degrees of internationalism, but the decentralized autonomy of these friendly foreign invaders poses the possibility of an alternative model of dependency that can be linked to development without debt. This local internationalism, understood most broadly as the awareness of the historic impact of external forces on internal development (and hence the awareness that self-sufficiency cannot mean isolation), which manifests itself both in an environmentalism and a decentralism unusual for a socialist context, could be considered MACRU's foreign policy. Much of the governmental foreign assistance focused on largescale capital intensive projects, such as Italy's geothermal project, Canadian grain storage, and Swedish mining that actually allowed Nicaragua to increase investment inputs during the recession of the early eighties while capital imports to other Central American economies were in decline. Yet, nongovernmental agencies and solidarity groups often established direct local bilateral ties. To the extent that foreign assistance in large-scale industrial production required high levels of expenditure for energy and machinery, however, it could actually increase the strain on the agricultural economy because of increases in relative costs. For example, between 1974 and 1984 the


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amount of sugar equivalent to the cost of a barrel of petroleum increased fiftyfold. The longer turnover time of these projects exacerbated inflationary pressures as capital was being invested without accompanying production of goods or employment of peasants or small producers. The Nicaraguan economy's loss of one billion dollars in the first three years of the contra war along with the internal problems generated by these development strategies led to a shift in orientation after 1985 to production of basic goods and employment. Self-sufficiency in supply of beans and corn was encouraged by the Sandinista government for large enterprises and the army. MACRU is reflective of this shift in orientation applied to a smaller productive base and suggests self-sufficiency as a rubric to be appreciated only in the larger context of a history of dependence.4 The Swissaid project at La Praga was staffed by two North American carpenters and two Nicaraguan craftsmakers from Masaya. Its purpose had been to explore the feasibility of substituting bamboo for increasingly scarce wood. Rapid growth makes bamboo a potential antidote to the deforestation—associated with large-scale lumbering and land clearance, and also with wood's being a source of fuel for immigrants to the cities—that has already threatened soil erosion and water supply. Bamboo could serve as an alternative material for housing, furniture, and the underemployed crafts economy. Until the contra forces were contained (ironically at the cost of plans for more centralized and industrialized agricultural development, in addition to resources for education, health care . . . and theater), the project's progress had been stunted because most of the bamboo stands were in the war zone. There were also efforts at relatively simple genetic engineering techniques to propagate and farm bamboo. Other MACRU projects undertaken at La Praga are based on appropriate technologies for self-sufficiency in energy, water, pest control (although some chemicals are used on the/me^), and agricultural diversification. This last concern endeavors to transform the coffee monoculture of the region into cash crops like lemongrass that have a higher yield and price yet do not deplete the soil the way that coffee does, and to introduce a more varied diet into local alimentary habits unaccustomed to anything besides rice, beans, tortillas, and salty farmer's cheese. Terraces have been created to prevent erosion, and shade trees have been planted to check the destructive effects of the sun. Mangoes, papaya, avocados, tamarind, cacaos, pears, several

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varieties of oranges and lemons, grapefruit, vanilla, cinnamon, and a range of flowers are cultivated in meticulously arranged rows and beds. At thefinca La Praga, some of these crops are mature enough to yield some cash return, but the money is consumed in wages and reinvestment so that thefinca has not provided sufficient revenue to subsidize Nixtayolero. In one year (1989), five neighboring cooperatives were assisted by MACRU to attempt to compensate for lost plants and improper shading. The area of Matagalpa suffers from alternating seasons of incessant rainfall that robs the soil and drought that sears tender crops. La Praga constructed a dam to control flooding and preserve water during the drought. In addition to intermixing banana trees to provide shade, banana fronds are used on dormant beds to retain moisture and provide nutrients to the soil.5 Foreign currency may be as central to La Praga's initial development as it has been to Nicaragua's; tours abroad are the source of the salaries of Nixtayolero's actors, who did without those salaries for a good portion of 1988 when other groups were invited to represent Nicaragua in theater festivals abroad, reflecting the antinomy of competition on the international market. The direction of the other projects of the finca, however, except for the bamboo project, remain under the actors' control. Gerardo Molineros, who grew up not far from La Praga and began picking coffee when he was three, as does his youngest brother (who was three when I met him in 1989), joined Nixtayolero at its inception in 1979, when he was thirteen. By 1989 he was doing the accounting for the entire firm and overseeing the crop diversification program. He also negotiates with the migrant workers (among whom are included his mother and siblings) who pick the coffee and receive the bulk of the currency that the harvest generates. The workers are reluctant to take on more responsibility for running thefinca, and Molineros must confront the dilemmas of participation that are thematic to so many of Nixtayolero's productions. Although he has had only a few years of formal schooling, he has written a testimonio, an autobiographical novel, in the sanctuary of his book-lined study— after crop tending, rehearsals, meetings, bookkeeping, and a nightly polka with his wife Sandra, a preschool teacher, and their two-yearold daughter Sandrita. His is not the only healthy library on thefinca. Beans and tortillas may be all that feeds his body on a given day, but there is a rich diet of cultural sustenance. Finca La Praga is consti-


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tuted as a lived dialogue between the production of material life and its representation in theater, which itself joins historical narratives with the contemporary context. It is the approximation of Marx's daydream of a society after the necessity of a division of labor within the limitations of current Nicaraguan scarcity that makes La Praga such a dynamic intervention. In the decade after its founding, Nixtayolero occupied many sites. The farm was the latest. The group was founded and is currently directed by Alan Bolt Gonzalez. Born in Las Canas in the mountains to the north of La Praga in 1951, Bolt's lineage includes immigrants from England and an indio grandmother. During the 1970s, Bolt had been a national cadre in the Sandinista Front, ultimately serving as political-military chief of Rivas, Granada, and Masaya in 1975; he also had engaged in forms of guerrilla theater. Starting in 1971 he worked with Omar Cabezas and Agustin Lara in Leon to create a pamphleterial theater.6 He continued this theatrical work until 1973, when he was forced underground. He considered this early theatrical involvement more as organizing work than theatrical activity: We created the first revolutionary theater group. I know now that we didn't have very clear ideas about what to do, what kind of theater to make. It was more of an emotional reaction and, at the same time, a beginning of a search about the use of the stage in Nicaragua. But we didn't really have clear ideas. We had some notions. We were convinced that politics and theater were not separate. But we didn't know how to do it. The theater we made was a very agitational and propagandist theater. I think it wasn't very good. But it was useful because it gave a real possibility that this union of theater and politics could be successful. But political action could not be made through theater only. We were making the revolution. . . . [Reflecting on current work:] We are not trying to be messengers. Of course we give messages. But the intention is not to persuade [the public] but to stimulate the public's possibilities of creation. At the same time we give impulse to a social action that begins with a common research.7

In 1979, Bolt directed the National Theater Department of the Ministry of Culture, which joined with the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), the predecessor of the Agriculture Ministry (Ministerio de Desarrollo Agropecuario y Reforma Agraria, or MIDINRA), to form collectives committed to "ideological labor in the rural ar-

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eas."8 The first incarnation of Nixtayolero was on a coffee farm called La Laguna, fifteen kilometers outside of Matagalpa. Its aim was to be a didactic theater that confronted issues related to the coffee harvest. By 1980, the group had performed in 170 state and private haciendas in Matagalpa and Jinotega and had presented its collective creation, Usted tiene la palabra, at a national theater festival in Managua. In 1981, Bolt left Managua to assume the directorship of Nixtayolero from the Cuban Carida Chao Carbonero from Teatro Escambray. During that year, the group created a number of pieces, including El carnicero, La sonambula, and La danza de los zopilotes, based on its ethnographic exploration of local culture and social problems; received workshops from Pedro Renteria of Cuba; and participated in a festival in Brazil. During the next two years (1982-83) the group's residencies and workshops in various rural communities, such as those of Miskito and Sumo Indians, and in the Segovias, became more extensive [for example, el Cua, Wiwili, Jinotega, Waslala, La Dalfa, Rancho Grande, Muy Muy, Matiguas (the Miskito word for "where the waters come from"), and in Pantasma after an attack by the contras]. Additionally, the army, Popular Culture Centers, and Frente began to organize national tours for Nixtayolero. Separation from the Ministry of Culture came in 1984, the year in which a U.S. tour brought sufficient hard currency to purchase finca La Praga. Bolt's return to the United States and the group's tours of Spain, Switzerland, Holland, and Germany followed in 1985 and 1986, when MACRU was formed and Teyocoyani and Sofana first joined Nixtayolero in the Community Theater Movement. For six months, between August 1987 and February 1988, the actors of Nixtayolero were inducted into the army and performed for over thirty thousand soldiers. They continued creating works such as Banana Republic (1987), a history of intervention in Nicaragua set as a circus, and Salsaopera (1990), a multimusical exploration of the appeal of the North. In all, some thirty works were generated by the theater group in the course of eleven years. Even from its inception Nixtayolero was not an exclusively regional phenomenon. It linked internationalism and tradition in ways that recognized broad influences for political theater. Two Cubans, Sergio Corrieri and Carida Chao Carbonero, provided technical assistance to Nixtayolero in 1980. They were from the Teatro Nuevo movement of Cuba, a group of actors who left Havana in 1968 to create a political theater in the Escambray Mountains, the site of Cuba's


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own counterrevolution. It was also at this time that Bolt left his position as head of the theater department of the Ministry of Culture. Between 1981 and 1984, the group moved several times in search of adequate facilities to build a theater and cooperative farm. In 1984, La Praga was purchased with funds earned in a tour of the United States, and Nixtayolero shifted its affiliation from the Ministry of Culture to the cultural workers' union (ASTC). After the Ministry of Culture was disbanded in 1988 because of shortages of funds and the ASTC committed its scarce resources to urban-based groups, Nixtayolero was forced to become wholly selfsufficient. In its history, the focus of the group's work has shifted from an explication of Sandinista policy to a critical examination of it as Bolt himself has moved from an official of the Frente to a friendly opponent within it. This development has been articulated in the group's own conditions of subsistence as well as in its conception of the juncture of politics and aesthetics in the theater. The initial difficulties in securing adequately stable and supplied facilities for work and living, as demonstrated by the assignment to the empty warehouse Albania in 1981, limited the series of mediations that could foster the critical work of its theater. As such, Nixtayolero's functioning as a state representative supported its didactic portrayals of social problems in diacritical terms. The acquisition of facilities separate from those of its intended audience (as, for example, when it took residence at the coffee finca La Laguna in 1979) or patron (when in 1982 it was named as a vanguard squad of the Sandinista Milicias) was realized with the purchase of finca La Praga, and thus promoted the dimensionalizing of character, the experimentation with thenmarginal forms of agricultural production, and the increasingly critical appraisal of the institutions and policies of the revolution. This appraisal was always conditioned by the belief that "the Sandinista Front, with all of its indefinitions, errors, alienation, and inappropriate formulas, is the best political alternative that exists in our country"9 The lines of difference are most visibly drawn between metropole and periphery, yet they cross within those spatial boundaries as well. In the myriad paths a revolution can take, debates over how and for whom production is organized are fundamental and intense, no less so for agriculture than for theater. Bolt responded critically to the effort made to industrialize agriculture during the early eighties:

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As part of the revolution we are against this model of development. There are two reasons for this. One, this model of development does not count on the people. People don't have the mechanism to discuss this model; it's too overwhelming. Too powerful . . . The other reason is that this model requires money, and money is the most expensive thing we have today10

Bolt figures in the debates over cultural and economic development. He links national and cultural liberation, neither of which consists of a singular movement of unified integration. As he grew up, the prevailing image of national character saw Nicaraguans as a nation of wanderers, yet nothing was said of the appropriation of lands by the latifundias (large farms) that forced migration. That same view of national character also speaks of the sobriety of Nicaraguans to explain why rural homes are unpainted, or points to the love of land to explain why people are shoeless, without mentioning the poverty that makes the purchase of paint or shoes impossible. Bolt seeks an alternative to this version of the culture of poverty that is made quaint and that speaks for a people in such a way as to maintain their underdevelopment. The liberation of culture in Nicaragua entails the realization of historical differences between, for example, the Sumo and Miskito groups with their theatrical dances, the Creoles of the Atlantic coast with their maypole dance, the Spanish colonial meseta of the southern Pacific with marimba music and dances, or the polkas and mazurkas of the mountainous north. These elements are not difficult to identify in Amada Amor and other works of Nixtayolero. The marimba mixed with the sounds of a northern Spanish guitar from Esteli and a Japanese synthesizer. Ribbons of color from the maypole on the fruit seller's costume danced with a polka under the conquistador's whip. Surely culture is defined by this mixing that comes from contact with difference. Yet the conditions of that contact, conditions of imagination, creation, and reproduction, associate culture with various forms of society. Bolt's articulation of the conditionality of difference is forceful: The defense of national identity, best understood as regional or zonal, consists of a struggle against the imposed negation of our culture. In negating that negation we affirm ourselves as creators, as critical beings, and we revalorize ourselves to improve that struggle. For this we have retaken in our theater the lived popular traditions of each region and tried to deepen its system of


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communication, at the same time that we investigate the region's actual contradictions and development. Above all, this "we" refers to workers, farmworkers, students, who at the time that they participate in this creation of the new society, make theater to support it.11

Bolt's conception of national identity constitutes a different sort of fiction from the one with which he grew up, a fiction that anticipates labor rather than rests on it. The conception Bolt had heard as a youth explained away both cultural difference and material demand; the current task of theater is to problematize these into a politics. The call to national unity that can only come from a voicing that claims to stand above (and therefore for) the nation, dissolves into voicings that displace each other from within their specific claims to regional authenticity. The impossibility of resolving this contradiction in the form of a single representative voice reaffirms the legitimacy of articulating local demands. The past is not the privileged domain of any single group, but, as in Amada Amor, can be appropriated only through a series of exchanges—in the case of this play, the exchange of representations in the marketplace. One might say that exchange is the protagonist here, that the occasion for making history is the possibility of representing one's own story publicly. The gain is not to be found in surplus value but in the problematization of representation. Here the fictionalization of gender shifts reflection to the public. Unlike Shakespearean drama, in which the characters' revelation of their own "true identity" can reinforce normative behavior,12 in Amada Amor the audience has the responsibility to unmask the characters. In some measure this is possible because the play is a fictionalization of a story the audience already knows (whether as "news," "folklore," or gendered "normative behavior"), and therefore the performance offers only a reinterpretation, not an originary myth of truth. Representation is problematized through the dual movement of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Gendered Appropriations of National Identity If the impersonation of gender raises the problem of interpretation per se, it is equally important to ask for whom the question of identity is problematized. The figuration of production in Nicaragua is no

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more homogeneous than that of culture. Just as Amada Amor presents a masquerade in the marketplace, so too La Praga appears as a deceptively familiar productive entity. At one level theffnca is a medium-sized coffee farm in the middle of Nicaragua's densest coffeegrowing region, yet its diversity of crops and agricultural methods call its identity into question. An appreciation of what makes coffee production so problematic points to what might be uncovered in this hidden identity. During the first half of this century, coffee was Nicaragua's primary cash crop, the insignia of the national bourgeoisie's rise from colonial bondage. (Nicaragua, as part of a short-lived Central American confederation, gained independence from Spain in 1821.) Repeated interventions from the North and internecine conflicts within this class made a trajectory of national development impossible to realize under the sign of coffee. The stagnation of global demand for coffee in the 1930s and 1940s13 was the backdrop for Somoza's ascendancy and the imposed condition of the integration of Nicaragua's agroeconomy into the heights of what Emmanuel Arghiri has called unequal exchange.14 In the case of Nicaragua, this meant a transfusion of sun, rain, and bugs for escalating quantities of agrochemicals, under the watchful eye of U.S. patronage for its model "modernizer." The treadmill of increased dependency on foreign inputs (and therefore debt) reached its apotheosis in the early seventies, when social damage (from the thousands of pesticide poisonings and related carcinogenic reactions,- to water contamination, to destruction of natural enemy populations, which in turn augurs increased expenditures for pesticides) exceeded earned foreign exchange by more than a third.15 In short, the shift to cotton first strengthened the national bourgeoisie in relation to the dictatorship (Somozas did not always occupy the presidential office after 1956, when the patriarch, Anastasio Somoza Garcia, was assassinated by poet Rigoberto Lopez Perez), then weakened that class (contributing to the bourgeoisie's support of the revolution in 1978). The rise and fall of the fortunes of cotton, however, did not eliminate the more heterogeneous coffee sector, in particular the large number of small and medium-sized producers. The revolution has increasingly committed itself to these groups, both in economic and political policy. Yet the Sandinistas themselves had been divided over how to use this political and productive base as a foundation for national devel-


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opment. One impulse had been the rapid industrialization and therefore proletarianization of agriculture; another conception, that of a slower transition, is represented by those who favor peasant cooperatives.16 A lack of capital, disruption of production by the war, and unsuccessful economic policies have made the first tendency increasingly difficult to implement. The road to a more decentralized and less industrialized agricultural development has been difficult to articulate for many of the same reasons, and the Sandinistas have been pressed to adopt those policies that require the least state inputs and therefore favor what remains of larger capital and market mechanisms. In a study of agrarian production in Nicaragua, based on Sandinista policy of the mideighties, Forrest Colburn remarks: Coffee production in the "new" Nicaragua also illustrates the limits of what "politics" can and cannot accomplish. Nationalization or redistributive policies cannot alone solve the principal problem plaguing the coffee sector in Nicaragua—low yields. State ownership of coffee farms introduces a whole set of managerial problems that—at least to date —make raising yields difficult. More important, the enormous number of coffee farms scattered throughout rural Nicaragua makes complete nationalization of the coffee sector unthinkable. Whether it likes it or not, the new regime depends on the private production of coffee, at least by the numerous small producers. Raising the low yields of small producers necessitates introducing them to improved cultivation practices, providing them with needed inputs, and, most important, making sure that it is in their perceived interest to adopt improved cultivation practices.17

The dilemma that the Sandinista state faced, however (and despite ideological shifts unchanged in the subsequent administration), was precisely the absence of material means or "inputs" to introduce change. In January 1989, half of the government employees in Managua were laid off from their jobs and were asked to seek employment in the productive sector (this in the middle of the coffee harvest). Through the force of circumstances, the heterogeneous coffee sector is viewed as critical to the stimulation of the Nicaraguan economy and political stabilization. It is far from clear that the reproduction of a single-crop monoculture, even if financially successful in the aggregate, can result in the kind of political and cultural processes that would yield a partici-

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patory society. The mask of the state as the sole directing force of change has been loosened by the strain of the first decade of Nicaragua's revolution. Nixtayolero andfinca La Praga brought together as MACRU play with the masks of national culture and identity in a different way to promote change. Just as the theatrical use of indigenous cultures makes the familiar strange so that it can be reexamined, so too the agricultural riches beneath the appearance of the dominance of coffee at La Praga motivate the search for alternatives that can be accomplished only through activities of interpretation and construction. Coffee and tradition are only apparent necessities whose critical use also points to possibilities of transformation. Culture and development are not truths hidden beneath the masks: they must be made. This leads us back to Bolt's formulation of the fusion of national and cultural development. Aside from his programmatic statements and manifestos, Bolt has articulated this view in a novel, really a historical fantasy, called El Libro de la Nation Qu. The book opens with Juan, an herbalist, fleeing Managua for the mountains—"for the center of the country." Aching for the touch of its natural beauty, he returns to his birthplace to reclaim his orientation to the world, lost through too many disheartening urban battles. From this rediscovered center, he encounters a parallel world, the Qu nation, effectively that of history recounted by a woman similarly in exile. The woman, Ma-Chinda, has been condemned to silence until death. Juan will serve as the recipient of her tale. This story, a national ontogenesis, displays aspects of a cosmology familiar in Latin America, the combined opposition of Christian and preconquest iconography. Quetzal is the principal deity from which the lineage of the first man, Adaneva, and the first woman, la Virgen de Mercedes, descends. These two give birth to identical twins whom no one can tell apart, Jesus and Demonic. Jesus is the friend of the Spaniards and aids in the pillage of conquest. Demonio is a humble but knowledgeable artisan allied with the Indians and the persecuted. Agriculture is sexuality. The plants grow through the monthly rhythm of sexual acts of the moon. Bolt's book tells of the creation and conquest of the nation, its administration by the foreigner Jesus-Cristo-Sac Uacnal, and about how the natives learned to deceive him to preserve what little they had. This torpid reign is replaced by a crueler local villian, Misesboy, who, allied with the Spanish, rules interminably through his progeny (all of the same name) until the Liga de Quetzal descends


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from the mountain to overthrow him in a valiant struggle. The Liga (league) is victorious, but it is immediately confronted with a contra force, the Mictlantexotes. More significantly for Bolt, it is confronted with its own decision as to how to allocate power. The Liga answers the question of who should lead by privileging those who best string words together. This reign of beautiful speech is known as the Unproductive Chaos. The "tongues of honey" helped concentrate power in the city, a place of utter abjection. A blindness settled in on whatever lay beyond the cordons of power, and in response to this honeyed speech there was nothing but silence. Party functionaries learned that "in silence we will have control." Hence the fate of MaChinda. Although women had helped make the revolution, they received the animus of their companeros as they attempted to make their voices heard, and they were ultimately repressed. A series of lessons closes El Libro de la Nation Qu, reflecting on the loss of the momentum of the "Transformacion": "In our stupidity we pushed the thought that everyone had to believe in only one idea, one creator, one truth."18 Bolt equates governance with art and insists on the appreciation of form: "Every governor must know how to use nothingness. Empty space."19 This can only be realized through an ecological cosmology, "the magic that has to do with the energy and harmony of everything, with the knowledge of plants, roots, leaves, flowers, and rocks, meridians of energy in the world and the body . . . "20 Obviously Bolt does not provide the only vision of development or the only project for a national culture. Among those that can still be located in Nicaragua is the still-stifled yearning of the national bourgeoisie. This view is more nuanced than the Somocista anticultural perspective, intended to promote the "colonized mind," that Bolt heard as a youth. In the early 1930s a group of Nicaraguan poets called La Vanguardia gave ideological support to Somoza as the architect of the nation-state. One member of that group, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, soon suffered the consequences of his initial support when the elder Somoza jailed him in 1937. As an editor of the daily La Prensa (a position he still holds), Cuadra turned his pen to inscribe the bourgeois opposition to the Somoza and the Sandinista government. He says of his cultural project, "We wanted to join the cosmopolitan with the national."21 Yet despite his privileging of the metropole (he comes from a family of long literary lineage based in

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Granada, Nicaragua's oldest colonial capital), Cuadra, like Bolt, turns to the countryside to construct a syncretistic national culture: From the time I wrote Libro de boras [Book of hours] in 1964, I've been preoccupied with something that has pursued me throughout my poetry: the incorporation of the indigenous tradition as well as the Greco-Roman tradition that comes to us through the Spanish language. (Of course, at first I knew a lot less about what I was doing. One learns how to create that fusion, that mestizo-like combination, little by little.) These two traditions seem extremely rich to me and I see no reason why we should cut them off. What we should do is absorb them, give them unity because we, as mestizos, are their synthesis. The Greco-Roman tradition is more accessible through our language: by speaking Spanish we keep speaking Greek and Latin. The indigenous is more difficult because it has scarcely been expressed in language and what there is becomes a challenge. But this challenge, I believe, inspires creativity and opens mysterious zones of human thought and feeling that the western world, with its excess of rationalism, has forgotten. All these myths, scarcely expressed in indigenous sculptures and ceramics, all those embryonic poems that one discovers in a glyph, in a primitive painting, or on a clay pot are like mysterious words that still haven't been formulated.22

Here too is a project for national culture that recognizes difference and the need to include what had hitherto been excluded. Is Cuadra so different from Bolt? If biography were class the two men could be considered closer to each other than to many other Nicaraguans. If, however, class is a practice that is made and not simply inherited, then the two propose rather different revolutions. For Cuadra, the mestizo—the proper Nicaraguan—is a synthesis achieved through the fusion of European rationality and indigenous mystery. Holding aside for a moment whether such a fusion could ever produce, let alone account for, the differences that actually comprise the Nicaraguan landscape, or from what position or perspective these sources get fused, it is perhaps more instructive to examine the differences, or more properly the divisions, presupposed by this act of synthesis. Cuadra's account brings together two dimensions of difference: it overlays the metropolitan and the agrarian with the rational and the mysterious. I would like to suggest that Cuadra constructs in his myth of national culture a conception of gendered difference. From his self-placement beyond the Hispanic,


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Indian, indeed even mestizo product, as national poet, national editor in what he proudly claims is the beyond of politics, he erects on the Nicaraguan landscape what Teresa de Lauretis terms a technology of gender. The opposition of rational and mysterious mapped onto a figure of the metropole whose domination rests upon the appropriation of the countryside, conjures up the attack on the magic and mystique of productive energies identified with the antifeminist impulse of the Middle Ages. This is so at least to the extent that, in an agrarian society, control of reproduction is the key to and precondition of productive capacity, which is measured by the number of able family members. This attack on the productive element in society surely could be considered a feature of each historical dominant culture from Plato's diatribe against "the many" to the more subtle palliative of consumption associated with Gramsci's analysis of Fordism (raising wages so that workers can purchase the products they produce, thereby becoming complicit in their own exploitation). Yet an aspect of patriarchal dominance that transects these diverse societal forms is the persistence of the figuration of women with their (re)productive capacity. Hence it is not that the register in which gender operates can be reduced to the register of productive activity, but rather that the scene of production is gendered in order for it to be productive. If the social trajectory of prerevolutionary Nicaragua resembled any European social formation it would be that of the European absolutism, of which Shakespearean theater is the crowning cultural moment.23 The strong mercantilist state ultimately cannot contain the fever of crisis in the countryside. Men act the parts of women so as to figure their absolute difference as desire—mysterious, irrational, pregnant with productive prowess that must be denied its moment in representation. It is this emergent reason, so full of its own national possibility, that dreams the link of land, labor, and gender. In another mode of national reflection, Cuadra, without naming it as such, feminizes the countryside and the natives who inhabit it by granting it (and them) a prelinguistic status whose telos is his own pen. Here the liberation of difference lays claim to its inscription. As de Lauretis says, "The construction of gender is both the product and the process of its representation."24 Against the bifurcation of difference that constructs gender, de

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Lauretis offers an other perspective, appropriating from film theory and its inference of space beyond the cinematic frame: Now the movement in and out of gender as ideological representation, which I propose characterizes the subject of feminism, is a movement back and forth between the representation of gender (in its male-centered frame of reference) and what that representation leaves out or, more pointedly, makes unrepresentable. It is a movement between the (represented) discursive space of the positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the space-off, the elsewhere, of those discourses: those other spaces both discursive and social that exist, since feminist practices have (re)constructed them, in the margins (or "between the lines," or "against the grain") of hegemonic discourses and in the interstices of institutions, in counterpractices and new forms of community. These two kinds of spaces are neither in opposition to one another nor strung along a chain of signification, but they coexist concurrently and in contradiction. The movement between them, therefore, is not that of a dialectic, of integration, of a combinatory or of differance, but is the tension of contradiction, multiplicity and heteronomy.25

Nixtayolero and La Praga could be said to exist in precisely this sort of "space-off," and Amada Amor is one product of this emergent technology of gender. The refiguring of the relations of production and reproduction, the shared materiality of national and cultural identity, is accomplished by acknowledging both the feminization of the countryside and the impossibility of mastering that feminization as a representation. The men of Amada Amor do not so much reveal their true identity (as in the Shakespearean gambit) as they deny themselves the identity that the play represents. The sexual freedom of the masculine to appropriate what men lack, the trope exchanged in the marketplace as one story displaces another, is simultaneously interrupted by the communicative order of the marketplace. While each story appears to reproduce masculine subjectivity, in the form of sex on demand, it slyly makes this subjectivity unavailable in the movement from the father's marking of his son, to the wife's marking of her husband's marital transgression (although at another woman's expense), to the fruit seller's dethroning of her husband's masculinity in the arena that constituted it, ultimately discarding the pistol for her own voice. "She," played by the actor who had been the father in


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the first story, captures the center of sexual production and appropriation by discarding gender for power in such a way as to render both ambiguous. That these three stories could be moments in a fable of revolution might appear as the crudest simplification of history and art that Cuadra so feared (to say nothing of those like Hilton Kramer, who would experience this as a degradation to the worldly he calls politics), made difficult by the ambiguity that power attains. Ultimately, it is the shift of power from that representation framed by the performance, to the "space-off," now literally a public domain, that is the other process of exchange in Amada Amor's marketplace. The Dependencies of Autonomy The trajectory of development enunciated by Nixtayolero during the 1980s presented a paradox that was legible in other domains where the revolution made its presence felt. The group, or more properly the project it embodied, reached for a materialization of its economic and aesthetic autonomy in the same way that many of the socalled popular organizations sought resources for their sectoral goals and an identifiable voice that would enable them to do so. Yet this very aspiration proved dependent on a context of integration present at another level. Nixtayolero's own movement away from the instrumentality of the state depended on a particular context for politics over which it had little control. Nor were the forms of mobilization of a public and the public it sought to mobilize of its own making. The critical capacities inferred in the theatrical strategies of defamiliarization and refamiliarization, so abundant in Amada Amor, take as their ultimate object the projection of socialism through its practical limitations as embodied in the state. It has been suggested here that the appropriation of the countryside's productive activity is naturalized through its figuration in gendered terms. The historical force of that naturalization becomes problematized only when the producers themselves are featured as historical agents. The Sandinistas did this to varying degrees in their own figuration of the agrarian producer, in what became a contest for the countryside with the contras to determine the revolution's fate, and in their policies of agrarian reform and land distribution, which were invariably the response to political mobilizations. Seen

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in this light, the demand for autonomy is not one of independence from, but of recognition by, the state. Such recognition is not simply a question of granting representation but of appreciating the force of that which is not seen from the perspective of the center. Autonomy, then, is not something that can be granted to groups, sectors, or movements. It can emerge only as a demand that a critical presence (as, for instance, displayed in theater) places upon the frustrated critical energies of governance. As such, what appear as demands for autonomy in practice turn out to be the result of a series of mediations produced by the very development of the state and civil society that the theater initially attempted to join and then develop in the fullest complexity of their relationship. The decade within which Nixtayolero develops its linkages of the aesthetic and agrarian productivities could be said to display a fuller elaboration of civil society with respect to the state. Here the particular theatrical project of socialist theater figures the societal development presented by the Sandinistas' socialist revolution. On closer inspection, the apparent autonomy that takes the form of a determinate political demand turns out to be an expression of an ensemble of relations that makes theater of the sort envisioned by Nixtayolero possible, displayed by the theater group in its work. This double materiality, of relations productive of society and of the concern with forms that those relations might take (hence an aesthetics), specifies the particular ensemble constructed by what is here considered the emblematic Sandinista theater, despite the mutual distancing by state and theater of the other's instrumentality. Insofar that the critique makes apparent what state policies cannot presently deliver, it may prove disruptive to the state's own legitimizing efforts in the face of external challenges. This could only contribute to the mutual estrangement between Nixtayolero and the Sandinista government. The funding constraints of the last years of the Sandinista administration did not contribute to Nixtayolero's lowered priority for financial support, which some of the urban theaters continued to enjoy. But the evaporation of funds from the metropolitan center did not deprive Nixtayolero of a context for its work. The more explicit its critique of the exercise of power with appreciation of its ambiguities became, the more a culture of producers was articulated.


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Within this complex of relations lay the basis for a socialist political culture. This culture, it must be recognized, always evinces a greater ambition than can be fulfilled. But when material scarcities fetter development, the enlarged critical capacity so central to making socialism a possibility does not wane. Only when this critique is denied its context does the form of socialist theater developed by groups like Nixtayolero lose its conditions of possibility.

Chapter 5

Sources of Socialist Culture in Cuba

To examine the spectrum of Cuban theater that has emerged since the revolution is to appreciate how historical dynamics, protosocialist in character, are embedded in a developing socialist culture. This chapter will attempt, first, to indicate a certain historicity to socialist culture. In this regard a revolution neither wipes the slate clean nor initiates the cultural critique appropriate to socialism. Undeniably, the social conditions for the production of theater were revolutionized in Cuba, but beyond socializing production and reception, the aesthetic dimension of socialist culture draws on a history related but not reducible to the revolutionary process. This leads to a second task of this chapter, namely, to indicate how contemporary theatrical forms incorporate historical sources and how the critical thrust of these sources is articulated within those forms. These diverse cultural sources will be examined through specific contemporary expressions of theater. The first group discussed, Cabildo Teatral Santiago, turns to Afrocuban sources, especially as displayed in the practices of camaval. The second theatermaker studied in this chapter, Albio Paz, has worked in the countryside, amalgamating popular forms rooted in agrarian traditions with current social problematics. The third source discussed is the theater of dramatic literature that responds to conditions of rule and efforts to articulate a national culture, and that finds its influence in Europe and then increasingly in the United States. Although all three sources bear a certain historical trajectory, and commingle in significant ways, the third, because of its close articulation with Cuban national112


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ism per se, will be used most directly to provide a sketch of the prehistory of the socialist revolution through the lens of theater. Privileging certain theatrical expressions, whether particular groups or plays, as exemplary of these forms is intended to give a specificity to the question of how critical historical sources are appropriated. Although the emphasis is a historically informed reading of the present, this chapter is also intended to impart a sense of the range of theatrical forms extant within a socialist culture. Discretely mapping certain elements of a much broader field may not account for how a given context for cultural activity is constructed, but it can begin to undermine the all too prevalent images of an official culture, taken to be singular in form. What gets conflated in this picture is a cultural policy that provides organizational resources with the much broader historical determination of aesthetic content. By establishing some of the complexity in the relation between organizational and aesthetic issues, some of the recent developments in Cuban culture can be better appreciated. Theatricality of Afrocuban Culture Incandescent yellows, orange, green, and red blink as the dancers pause, waiting for another float to complete its review far down the asphalt ribbon. The trek of the parade starts from the sixteenthcentury fort that guards the port of Havana and architecturally signals the old part of the city, HabanaVieja. In terms of the city's topography, the parade emanates from history. The float simulates a two-story house seemingly lifted from the procession's origins in Habana Vieja. Dancers gaze from the replicated iron balcony in a manner that echoes the evening activities of those who are now spectators jamming their own balconies in the houses along this wide, seafront avenue, the Malecon. These houses built for the Cuban bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century are metonymically placed on display for those who now occupy them, in the single structure at the rear end of the float. The housepaint on the actual structures has faded to a dull patina, but domed windows of colored glass, emblematic of nowvacated wealth, occasionally remain. The float is lined with such windows around its perimeter, seemingly providing imaginary replacements for now-unobtainable details. Stretching in front of the

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"house," on what would be its simulated street, a fourteen-piece band plays while more red-attired women dance. They mimic what the public is doing while offering a spectacle of that very activity. In their occupation of what had once been the local citadels of private property, they make this "house" public. As a public house, they play with the historic occupation their collection here would imply, with its current inference of decay, and their collective presence as women in a now-valued command of domesticity. The float is pulled by a tractor, but driven by a brigade of samba dancers before it. The rows of ruffles and bandannas, the plunging necklines bordered in satin are suddenly mobilized at the collective pelvis. A woman and a man are paired together and dance apart, her closed eyes shuttered blue, his sideburns pointed off into the night. Although the lines of paired dancers suggest military formation, with its proper directionality toward the front, here forward motion is subordinated to the angular thrusts of the body, backward and to the sides. Hips jut back, chest pulls to the side, hands gyrate clockwise, one toe turns in while body weight rocks to the heel of the other foot. But more than all this at once makes the dance move. While the formation moves forward as if it were one, each dancer rides the influence of many directions as if collectivity reigned in the body. Costumes hint at what this collectivity might be beyond the multitudinous celebration of the moment. While they present a field of sameness, the costumes make reference to a revolutionary prehistory and hence to what those in the present are not. Quotations of slavery are wrapped as scarves around the women's heads and appear as hats of straw on the men. References are made to histories far from Cuba's shores as well. Red and white satin sultans with turbans and scimitars of wood weave between rows of veiled sultanas. The women display their parity of selection as they cross in and out of their own formation. A well-known group, Los Payasos (the clowns), rings reminiscent of the European tradition of circus that has grown so popular in the Cuban countryside. Elsewhere, the prow of a ship, suggesting a vessel of Columbus's voyage, is ablaze with red light. On its main deck conga drummers play. Platformed tiers sprout twirlingfarolas (lanterns) often carried by dancers at the head and tail of the salsa brigades. Though their position would give them the responsibility of leadership, in practice they exaggerate the confounding effects on forward motion by weav-


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ing dramatically from one side of the wide avenue to the other. Applied as mastheads to the vessel of conquest, thefarolas highlight the misplaced directionality of the admiral's second voyage. As on the other floats, the dancers here are dressed thematically with preColumbian allusions of capes and headdresses, their other coverings vintage Tropicana. As if the indigenous forces of carnaval had commandeered the ship and now serve as the means of navigation, the women dance in the place where the sails would be. The reversal of occupation, now of the very vessel of colonization, bears no sign of strain in the toothy smiles that breeze down from the ship's masthead towers. At the same time, the ship is lit for the visual conquest by those natives who watch it pass out of sight, switching the place of siting and speculation that made colonization possible. Many, of course, seem oblivious to the passing of the floats, as if the conventions of spectacle were being thrown to the winds. An old woman sat on the wall of the Malecon, seemingly unfazed by the early morning revelry. Other more interested parties formed lines with their hands joined at the hips and wove through the crowds on the wide sidewalks, keeping abreast of the sanctioned performers but relying only peripherally on their existence to draw recruits from among the bystanders. Infants in strollers, toddlers in ecstasy with paper streamers, terrible two-sers trying to drown out the din with their own screams indicate the ease with which the domestic world of the family is extended into the public domain of the street. Carnaval is generalized child care and carries with it the appropriate authority for play and consolation. One mother invokes that authority with her suddenly unhappy two-year-old: "Don't cry, it's carnaval. Don't you want to carnaval?" The doubling in this utterance of noun and verb indicates something more widely applicable about the event. Carnaval is a collection of performances that heightens spectacle and hence the distance of the public. Simultaneously, carnaval, the activity, is a performative, not merely of the linguistic type but one in which presence cannot be separated from participation. If carnivals historically have been occasions for transgression from the sanctioned order of everyday life, the Cuban version specifies the tradition to its own situation. It is celebrated during the days leading to the twenty-sixth of July, the date of the abortive attack on Moncada barracks in Santiago led by Fidel Castro that announced the possibil-

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ity of a revolution against capital in Cuba. Notably, carnaval is associated with this annunciation of possibility and not with what might be a deceptively final military triumph of January 1, 1959, when Batista's forces succumbed. What is typically transgressive in carnaval is the assertion of abundance where there had been lack. The abundance of the crowd upon which carnaval depends is perhaps less strange in Cuba than in cultures more fully grounded in private life. Rather, abundance is apparent in the surplus of those things already present but less excessive in daily life—not just music, dance, and human association, but also food and drink. Tucked into the side streets and clustered along the Malecon, stands sell roasted pork, rice, sandwiches, and beer in seemingly endless supply. The process of procuring these libations can be complex, with nothing as certain as a line forming around the specially constructed wooden enclaves. Beer and malt drink are sold in liter-sized paper cups, but many families hold their beer in plastic buckets, which sway as they do through the samba night. In the sixties, I was told, the procession of floats was less a matter of spectacle. There were no metal barriers as there were in the late eighties and people mingled more fully among the marchers. The barriers only partially divide those on the floats from the rest of the public, however. People constantly squeeze through the barricades and the admonitions of police whistles sound too much like a part of the music to be heeded. The public throws paper and streamers at the dancers on the floats, who when not dancing return the missiles. The floats depart down the Malecon from the junction of its eastern end and another wide avenue, El Prado. Here, at the mouth of Havana harbor, the carnaval changes its character. El Prado is a promenade with streets on either side that cuts through Habana Vieja. Here the carnaval is a sea of people dancing and circulating among the bandstands that are set up at each cross street. These various constructions, from the ironwork of reviewing stands and float skeletons to outhouses brightly painted with pictures of the gender of their recommended users to the icons of carnaval that decorate the concession stands, project a vision of the possibility of building a social order. Each year the sight of workers erecting this infrastructure of carnaval signals the beginning of the season. The annual reconfiguring of existing public spaces serves as a figure more gener-


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ally for the construction of abundance when in practice urban space for living is scarce. This theme of the renewal of possibility extends to the daily cycle of the carnaval season as well. (In years past, the season encompassed several weekends preceding the week of July 26, but more recently has been compressed with the encroaching austerity of Cuba's special period.) Each night the same floats and brigades of dancers make their way westward down the Malecon. The bands play. People dance, drink, mix, eat, and shout. Before the sun rises, provisions and energies are spent, smells of beer and urine mingle in the gutters, paper cups and other tokens of the detritus of the night mark where revelry had been. Each morning after the streets are hosed and swept, and everything is put in place for another round. This capacity to mobilize does not come without effort. While the season of carnaval celebration appears as a time of unbounded excess, transgression of daily conventions, and improvisation on a massive scale, it also displays the full range of Cuba's administrative apparatuses. Initiated by the executive committee of the provincial Organs of Popular Power, the pyramidal assemblies that link neighborhood representatives to national governance, the activities of more than forty organizations must be coordinated to make the events happen. Even in small towns the neighborhoods are organized and articulated through carnaval. The Popular Power assemblies assure that each neighborhood is given the same economic resources for the planning of its festivities, which begins a year in advance. The parrandas of Remedies culminate in a battle of fireworks between neighborhoods that permits each to emerge as a victor through the dances that occupy the streets of the particular neighborhood and spill over into the common regions of the central plazas.1 As the floats promenade down the Malecon, the state is putting itself on display. The Ministry of Light Industry, the Provincial Direction of Culture, of Gastronomy, and of Sewers and Storm Drains join forces with a host of others in what amounts to an inventory of institutions, mass organizations, and the teams of musicians and dancers.2 This march through the institutions has come a long way since the forties when Bacardi Rum was the main sponsor of the carnaval—in return for which it was allotted the majority of votes to pick the festival's queen.3 Carnaval was never innocent of the formal relations

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of power, yet by rendering these implicit it affords a fuller expression of the public's critical disposition toward that social order—in this case, a critique made available by the order itself. Carnaval in Latin America can be traced to European forms dating from ancient Rome when Dionysus, the god of wine, is carried in a ship (carrus navalis) via Spain as the movable feast that precedes the celebration of Lent in winter or the Christian Shrove Tuesday that forbids meat (carne vale}4 In Cuba, the richest tradition of carnaval is in the eastern city of Santiago, where it can be documented as far back as the seventeenth century. The day for honoring the patron saint of the city, Santiago Apostol, is July 25, one day before the Moncada assault that intentionally enlisted the intoxicating effects of carnaval to seditious ends. Before these summer festivals were called carnaval, they were known as mamarracbos, a name subsequently reserved for "citizens who adopted ridiculous poses and costumes."5 Periodically the mamarracbos, drawn principally from the Afrocuban community, were banned for what the colonial administration saw as their licentious behavior. The ambivalence toward the expression/suppression of the Afrocuban culture was displayed in debates aired throughout the nineteenth century. The establishment of a system of floats with rewards for the best comparsa (costumed group of dancers) and the prohibition of slaves from participation in the parades also expressed a desire to apply hierarchical distinctions to control what at the time was a majority of the population. Scattered throughout the festivities were the relaciones, brief theatrical presentations by traveling bands of mamarracbos and other local citizens that burlesqued renowned dramatic works or improvised on quotidian themes of family or neighborhood life. These groups would often stop in a courtyard or affluent home to perform and receive a gratuity, perhaps as much to encourage the revelers to move on as from appreciation for the satirical commentary on the patron. In these instances too, the impact of African culture brought to the island has had its most transformative effect on the Christian cultural forms. The eastern side of the island where Santiago is located was the first area to be colonized. The Castilian government viewed urbanization as essential to civilization and therefore concentrated power in the towns, the first such settlement being Baracoa. Central to the administration of the towns was the cabildo or municipal council


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that fulfilled all government functions and soon became a basis for leveraging power from Spain, an initial autonomy that was later eroded. The first cabildos were elected by the colonials themselves and called vecinos, but this gave way to central appointments by the governor. The efforts of white colonials to secure more authority of administration were also bound up with the attempt to import more slaves for their plantations. Herbert S. Klein notes in his comparative study of slavery that Cuban slaves remained legal persons in bondage whereas Virginia codes rendered them a commodified object. Slaves in Cuba could possess property, marry a free person, and become Christian.6 When the cathedral was moved by Juan de Witte in 1532 from Baracoa to Santiago, signaling the emerging primacy of the latter over the former, a cabildo of the clergy was formed. As the cabildo declined as the central form of colonial power, it multiplied as a voluntary association grouped along national and occupational lines applied to free persons as well as slaves. The conditions of forced immigration did much to fragment the cultural integrity of the diverse African groups, however. Planters mixed slaves from different cultures to divide them politically and forced them to speak to each other in the master's language. This fragmentation did apparently concentrate meaning in a set of practices and symbols that made reference to a pan-African linguistic influence that could only be constituted outside of Africa. Henry Louis Gates has traced the migration through the Americas of these "signifying practices," which employ African-derived trickster figures to express indeterminacy.7 The spiritual beings of Yoruba culture in what is now called Nigeria are known as orisbas, and they number in the hundreds. Local shrines are erected often as royal courts in miniature. The Yoruba were not the first Africans forcibly brought to the New World, but they were the prize of Europe's apportionment of the internecine battles of the late eighteenth century that led to the subjugation of West Africans. The Yoruba provided the labor for the intensification of the plantation system in the early nineteenth century. The obligations to the orisha are expressed in rituals of sacrifice (ebo) and continue in the New World religions of Santeria and religious societies such as Abakua.8 These figures are joined with the Catholic church's efforts to provide an organizational base for Christianization within the slave com-

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munities that adopted the form of the cabildo. The processionals of the cabildos embodied the diverse cultural sources, placing in a manner of speaking on display the African elements as found in costumes and props of the marchers, the allusions to a political order prior to enslavement, and the uses of irony identified with the tricksters dressed as mamarrachos. These "protocarnaval" expressions also served as efforts to channel cultural sources into Christian institutions. The march enacted a transition from "pagan" to "civilization" as the wild dancing at the end of the comparsa would be stilled in the elegantly attired figures at its head. The procession therefore materialized an imaginary trajectory unfolded in a linear sequence of space that represented Christianization as a painlessly straightforward process of cultural assimilation. Yet read as a whole, the comparsa also displayed the impossibility of such an assimilationist project in the irreconcilability of its head and tail: an internal antagonism could be detected that also accounted for its forward movement.9 The church was inadvertently placed at the center of a colonial contradiction. Given that appropriation of African labor extended to sexuality and that marriage was an incompletely integrated institution of an alien culture, rates of "illegitimacy" could be as high as 50 percent among free persons. The church's legitimation of birth led to the compadrazgo or godparent system, which allows for a fictive or secondary kin network that compensates for the forced separation of slave families. Free colored people and mestizos sought godparents from higher status groups. As such, social networks transected the legal categories of colonial administrations. Conucos (private plots) fed the slaves and nurtured their cooperative production. The conuco also was a source of cash, through sale of surplus product, that could be used to finance Afrocuban social organization. African deities were often given a status of being based on family, rather than state. Hence, they highlighted this opposition between family and state, and became a basis for resistance—especially Ogun, god of war, Sbango, god of justice, andEshou, god of vengeance. Additionally, Catholicism's system of saints corresponded to certain folk deities and offered the kind of site-based spirit already familiar to many African cultures. The cabildo then became the embodiment of the tensions inherent in the slave system and constituted an amalgamation of labor control with the parcelization of political power.


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This was expressed culturally in the structure of the cabildo. Each cabildo was based on the reconstruction of an African nation. Initially, the former chief or elder became the rey del cabildo and represented the slaves to whites. He had considerable power effectively as an ambassador that combined religious and political roles. These kings simulated and exaggerated dress of powerful whites, particularly military officers. They wore large hats and sashes and carried a silver-tipped walking stick. These ornaments were also fetishized and mixed with African elements, as in the diablitos that accompanied the reyes. African kings as well affected the dress of the colonizers. Subsequently, kings were elected for four years during the Dia de reyes festival and could not be reelected.10 Even this sketchy information on the history of the cabildo presents its paradox as a form of representation. First it was a representation of colonial authority that so sufficiently challenged the legitimacy of distant power as to be disbanded. Next, denied its place as an institution of government, it is converted into a voluntary association, a "society" of kindred affiliates drawn along occupational lines. Yet its aspirations to governance are retained with its organizational structure, and the cabildo is extended to the African communities on the island. The simulation of governance by the rey del cabildo amalgamates the colonial strategies of rule, repeated throughout the New World, that relied on culturally authentic representatives for internal discipline. At the same time this representation pointed to what it lacked, insofar as it made reference to a sovereignty now denied the African community Even if the cabildos were constituted to divide a population against itself, they pointed to the possibility of a unity. The cabildo asserted the prospects of self-governance and provided the basis for its own symbolic transgression of the limitations placed upon it. In this context the exceptional behavior licensed by carnaval, for all of the condemnation and intermittent censure of the mamarrachos, provided a trajectory for a critical and oppositional culture. The processionals that served as vehicles of conversion to colonial order were turned into occasions of critique in the carnaval performances of the relacioneros (the players in these roving performances). The satires of European drama in the courtyards of the local bourgeoisie deployed the conventions of dramatic representation to make the dominant culture an object of ridicule, displaying the conflict precip-

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itated in the unmediated contact of social groups. The enactment also pointed beyond representation to what lay unfulfilled in carnaval and as such was what would have to be attempted in the future. Self-conscious of this legacy and its projective promise, the Cabildo Teatral Santiago has reconstituted some of the problematics and methodologies of the cabildo. The theatrical cabildo of Santiago, Cuba's second most populous city, was founded in September 1961. Originally called Conjunto Dramatico de Oriente, it was renamed El Cabildo de Santiago. The group is housed only blocks from the central Plaza of the Cathedral, along a street closed off to traffic at night for evening strollers. The theater includes an indoor house that seats several hundred and an outdoor patio with bleachers on the sides— very much the actual conditions of the teatro de relaciones, a name that the Cabildo reserves for its own brand of theater. The Cabildo is active during carnaval in Santiago with brief interventions that spark commentary on local conditions. The performances also simulate some of the elements of carnaval, particularly the processional comparsa that serves as prologue to the scenic action, introducing the actors, allowing for the statement of musical and choreographic references, and suggesting conventions of spectatorship. When the signature work of the Cabildo, De como Santiago Apostolpuso lospies en la tierra (How the Apostle Santiago put his feet on the ground), premiered in the province in 1974, it drew 116,000 spectators.11 Written by Raul Pomares and directed by Ramiro Herrero, respectively founder and artistic director of the group, the play brings Santiago's patron saint to life, materializing the spirit to face the sublime effects of his city. The action of the drama is announced by the ne'erdo-well No Pompa and set in 1868, the first year of a decade-long war of the revolutionary mambi against Spain. The initial dialogue plays No Pompa off Santiago, who is disoriented at suddenly being turned from his pedestal of stone to life and argues for his authority to represent history based on his origins in the founding of the city. "I'm the essence of the Hispanic, the force for the faith," he declares. He complains that there is no longer respect as once there had been because of the relation (relajo) with the "low element," whereupon No Pompa replies, shifting the perspective of representation, "Among the low element? History is full of relation with the high element."12 No Pompa then offers to provide the evidence of origins through the


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enactment of his relacioneros of the city in 1540, at the time of its founding. By dint of mistaken identity, Santiago is given a bottle of cane brandy by the colonial governor, which he proceeds to imbibe with a slave who befriends him. In his drunkenness he reveals the governor's amorous secrets to another woman, setting up a burlesque by the chorus of slaves (the relacioneros who take up the colonial characters in masque) that shames the representatives of church and state. Confident they have shown Santiago Apostol the source of the satiric element in history, the relacioneros drop their roles of 1540 only to be interrupted by contemporary (1868) purveyors of the law who question their permission to perform and call for them to be hided. This leads to an insurrection of the slaves, whose song and dance now ring of Yoruba words and African elements, and an invocation by the colonials to Santiago to permit no more upheavals, revolutions, or independence. Seeing the abuse to which his name has been put, Santiago addresses his own image, admonishing that if it ever were to set its feet on the ground it would see how things really were. The didacticism of the play alternates with its jocularity. The question of who appropriates who in historical process and representation can be answered by Santiago himself as soon as he is grounded in the perspective of the popular. This comes by force of misrecognition of his actuality by those who would notice his presence only as a metaphysical force. What complicates an otherwise perhaps oversimplified allegory of dialectical materialism is that the historical insight is provided only when Santiago witnesses the transculturating voice of the slaves' own culture. This lateral displacement of one spirituality for another suggests that the relations established are both vertical (the lowering of colonials through satire) and horizontal (the attachment of Afrocuban culture to the play's powers of reason). The apparent historicism of the Cabildo Teatral Santiago, its celebration of lateral relations between African and insurrectionary cultures, was evident in other Cuban cultural organizations of the early seventies. Though the Cabildo's tales were replete with sexuality, their firm entrenchment in the idiom of carnaval did not raise the sort of questions generated by the early works of the Afrocuban Ballet Folklorico under the direction of Ramiro Guerra. The fact that such performance did emerge at this time signaled something of the confidence that could now be expressed toward tradition once this

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term could no longer be associated with opposition to the revolution per se (as in the Christian-inspired counterrevolutionaries of the sixties). The move to reclaim the past that is evident in De como Santiago Apostol spoke of a wider cultural sentiment, as demonstrated by its critical acclaim and popularity. More recently, the Cabildo has turned to a different historical moment to explore issues of and from the cultural margins. The production ofBaroko (1990) adapted from Cuban playwright Carlos Felipe's Requiempor Yarini (I960) moves the Afrocuban elements from carnivalesque farce to tragedy. The play's protagonist, Alejandro Yarini, is based on a political figure from the early years of the "pseudorepublic," the term now applied to the period between Cuba's formal independence from the United States in 1903 and Batista's fall in 1959. Yarini's life is a crossover from the heights of Havana monoculture to the multicultural pleasures of its older quarters. Yarini has a foot in both state and civil society, in the institutions of law and organized illegality, in the feigned innocence of bourgeois morality and the proprietary sexuality that it turns to under the cover of night. His allegiance across the divide of economy and culture is expressed in his prosaic speech and overdetermined physique. All of the action of the play takes place in his principal bordello, relegating the other forces that mold him to externalities something on the order of fate. The original play was initially deemed inappropriate to the assertion of a revolutionary ethos and was not produced in Cuba until the late sixties. In its present form, it appears to explore political dilemmas annunciated in moral terms. The outside courtyard of Cabildo's theater is suggestive of the bordello described in Carlos Felipe's play. Lining the square red-bricked patio are lengths of white cloth that tower above bleachers arranged around the space. The cloth flutters in the breeze and conceals the multiple entrances to the inner rooms of the theater and the passageways behind them where silhouette figures occasionally appear. At the opening of the performance, the actors too are dressed in white, their heads wrapped in bandannas or scarves. They intone an eerie dirge reminiscent of African call and response, Greek chorus, and Christian saints, and move in procession across the brick, behind the cloth, and into the theater's bowels, to reemerge with candles. Their formation also enables possession, as the song appears as a tremble that moves through their bodies, finding release through out-


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stretched arms or contortions of the spine. The forces are released as well by their taking the cloths from their heads and wiping, dusting, and swabbing their bodies with them, in gestures familiar to the secret societies of Afrocuban Abakua. This outdoor setting, itself the public space of an old great house, contains none of the ornateness called for in the original script for the play. On the contrary, its austerity focuses attention on the chorus of actors whose frieze formations provide a more fluid transformation of the scenic space than the use of props would make possible. After the procession has come and gone, a lone figure, Bebo, occupies the space and etches a Yoruba form, a circle transected by perpendicular lines with an x and an o alternating in each of the quadrants that is said to serve as a map containing various lifeways or caminos. These "signatures" are spatial imprints of deities that guide the "reader" to destiny by capturing a concrete historical conjuncture, signified as agando15 The scenic action will return time and again to this spatial referent, employing it as an orientation for the movement of the chorus (which backs onto the stage into the circle as if drawn by it) and for crucial encounters of the characters. Within this form, Bebo is pressed by the madam of the house, Jaba, to throw the shells and divine her fortune. Her resistance to its tragic forecast is felt throughout the play. Yarini is the proprietor of this space yet each appearance in it contributes to his undoing; Jaba constantly remolds the space according to her demands but remains uncredited for her labors. This relationship is mediated in the play by another one, that of Yarini's rival Lotot, a man of equal ambition but without finesse, and Santiaguerra, the woman over whom pacts (Baroko) between the two rivals are made and broken. Santiaguerra serves as the force of transgression throughout the play. Her defiance of the patriarchal codes that govern her as property renders Yarini's status as owner into the twinned possessions of spirit and flesh. We first observe Santiaguerra's disruption of the proprietary controls of sexual dominance when she leaves her own house in pursuit of Yarini. No longer merely an object of his desire, she demands to make their private reciprocity public. If Yarini's colonization of women had been based on his ability to maintain their private and therefore separate lives, her refusal to wait for his attentions placed her in a public realm as an invader of his privacy and therefore of

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male privilege. In the first act, he rebukes her: "I'm a business man. . . . My business is order." The character Yarini requires the entire play to complete the transformation of his relation to Santiaguerra as a pure object of exchange, as an instance of property, to use, signified by his possession. This transformation will cost him his life, but in his death he displays principles that others might live for. Through Santiaguerra's persistent interventions, it is possible for Yarini to arrive finally at a juncture where a commitment to use can be made over the obligations of exchange. Santiaguerra is introduced into the play as a commodity before she arrives uninvited at Jaba's house. Lotot offers Yarini 500 luises for her. Jaba remarks, "Is there any woman that is worth that much money?" Apparently not. When Lotot seeks Yarini out at La Jaba's, he triples that amount. Whereas Yarini's wealth was accumulated through his command of national resources, Lotot's means were multinational. He has just returned from a circuit of European cities where he collected his women. When he is most desperate to acquire Santiaguerra (he will win her after she is property, he claims), he offers half of this global reserve. Yarini instead insists that Santiaguerra cannot be purchased; the choice of association is hers, and he gives her the opportunity to reject Lotot. Despite this, however, Yarini's love of gambling leads him to suggest a trade. Lotot has acquired an exquisite piece of jewelry that will be entered into a wager against the prized Santiaguerra, winner take all. Yarini's chosen vehicle of chance is based on his own wit. He proposes a game of charades in which Lotot gives him a clue and Yarini must solve the riddle. Yarini's famed wit and luck fail him, breaking his proprietary bonds with a woman he could not admit he loved. The occasion for Lotot's meeting with Yarini was purportedly to consolidate their monopoly over the traffic in women, through pricefixing and collusion. Not surprisingly, the agent of multinational capital prevails. Yarini is weakened in this competition, one that Jaba nonetheless dreads because she will bear the brunt of its effects, as labor always does, by his own affiliations with the state. An "energetic campaign of public morality" is being unleashed by Yarini's political opponents. "The danger comes from higher up," suggests one of Yarini's lieutenants to Jaba when she expresses confidence that the local cops and hoodlums can be controlled. This is the grip that our


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ill-fated national bourgeois is thrust into and the one that ultimately crushes him. As the government sends its agents to apprehend Yarini in its campaign that purges the person to preserve the vice, Santiaguerra will again assert her powers of intervention. She refuses the transfer of ownership negotiated by the two men, thereby leaving their pact unconsummated. In her refusal to be exchange, she returns to Yarini. Jaba and Bebo attempt to reverse the fate they foresaw at the beginning of the play by invoking the Yoruba Orisha Elegud, "protector of the material ways." Yarini is cleansed of his sins with the cloths used in the opening procession. Bebo tries to provide him a path for escape by setting fire to his shadow as he stands inside the Yoruba chalk circle that has endured the three acts of the play. A chorus of women dances around him, holding a mask of his face over each one of theirs, then covering their heads with white gauze as his disembodied image floats in the darkened space. At this point, Yarini's own vision is to be replaced with the guidance provided by Elegud. His journey through this darkness to the freedom of the cars of his lieutenants waiting to take him to safety beyond the city's grasp is interrupted by Santiaguerra's return. She now claims him and forces him up against the two powers of regulation that pursue him, the market and the state. To be possessed by love he must break his pact with the market. With the state closing in and his time for escape dwindling, he summons Lotot to relinquish claims to the unfulfilled pact. Jaba had managed to foil the deadly embrace of the state with the protection of Elegud, but Santiaguerra can present herself only against the demands of the market. In the end, Yarini and Lotot fight a tangolike battle with knives. Glued chest to chest they glide aimlessly across the scenic space engaging each other for something that belongs now to neither. Yarini is felled, but neither survives the rapaciousness of circulation set loose from that object productive of their mutual desire. Lotot makes off with Santiaguerra but it is unclear that he will ever have her. Santiaguerra and Jaba survive between the coercive forces of a law they do not recognize and the hyperactive advances of a desire they cannot use. Here the change of name assumes greater proportions than a foregrounding of Afrocuban sources. Replacing Yarini with Baroko signals the shift in protagonists suggested in the more modern reading of the play text and performance. The abundant sexism of Carlos Fe-

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lipe's original text is rewritten in Cabildo's version as a context rather than a characterological flaw. The focus on exchange denoted in the making and breaking of pacts illuminates the contradiction between the demands of accumulation that defy human association and the reciprocity of that noncapitalist exchange identified by Mauss as prestation, where goods, embodied with spiritual effect, are given away by those most in possession of them with the presumed obligation of a return.14 If Lotot is driven by the purely instrumental means and ends of the international market, Yarini presents the possibility of introducing some other terms for exchange, although he does not survive their introduction. If he is susceptible to this possibility, it would seem to be because his participation in state and civil society makes him uneasy with both and therefore suspended, doubly marginalized between them. In this regard, Yarini's explorations of marginality, which again in the original play were the perverse motives of a frustrated bourgeois character, can now be reread as a tension between two aspects of the same social context. Principles of regulation, the laws invoked and violated in the various applications of Baroko during the play that point to the presence of the state, are mediated and disrupted by opposing principles of exchange displayed in civil society. Although prestation more closely approximates a socialist version of civil society, that version of exchange is never free (as is the case for Yarini, Jaba, and Santiaguerra) of the disruptive effects of accumulation as exchange. Rather, it can only approximate a socialist impulse when set against accumulation. This tension maintains the fateful triangles of Jaba, Yarini, and Santiaguerra (as the former instance of exchange) and Yarini, Santiaguerra, and Lotot (as the latter instance). In the final analysis, the value added when Lotot "gains" Santiaguerra bears little resemblance to the union formed when Yarini's death joins the two women. While more subtle about this opposition of exchange for its own sake and for the prospects of sociality than many other examples of revolutionary culture, the Cabildo's production of the play is less assured and assuring about its outcome. The women who labor for the likes of Yarini and Lotot are the unacknowledged but recognizable protagonists of the play. Their survival and the effects of their intervention on the action assert their primacy only upon reflection. After all, the action takes place in Jaba's house, and her appeal to divina-


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tions illuminates Yarini's fate and maps the possible courses of action in response. Santiaguerra continually disrupts the pacts made between men. It is true that neither of the women is given the depth of character ascribed to the men, although something of their complexity should now be apparent. According to the conventions of Greek tragedy, upon which both original text and revised production are explicitly based, an initial identification with the character, an empathy, is necessary in order for the public to experience the purgative effects of the protagonist's dramatic death. Augusto Boal has discussed the ways in which such histrionic manipulations can be used to reaffirm the powers of state.15 Yet we can empathize with Yarini only through what others say of him. Many lines pass before he enters the action, and he appears and speaks more as the pimp that he is than as the hero whose flaw (hamartia) could be our own. Santiaguerra's flaw, though not fatal for her, does insist on our capacity to resist the censuring effects of regulation in pursuit of association. As the play makes evident, such association can be created only when mediated by certain forces of regulation. If Santiaguerra and Jaba are not characters with a depth onto which we can displace our own identities (through the tragic poetic's transference of self to other as catharsis), a public may have to sketch itself more actively into the parts. Taken together, however, the two figures constitute an imaginary landscape; Jaba commands space (her house as the scene of the action) and Santiaguerra time (her interventions as what moves the plot) that a public could inhabit. This invites a higher degree of critical self-reflection than that to which the tragic form aspires. The Cabildo is gambling that such reflection is both necessary and possible for the public it now encounters in its performances. Theatrical Ethnography of the Popular The Cabildo Teatral Santiago's move to popular culture, even as mediated through its selection of dramatic literature, is only one version of the way in which Cuban theater has appropriated the popular. The Cabildo is supported by a center for cultural investigation, housed in its theater, that gathers anthropological material on Afrocuban cul-

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ture from around the island—not just from Santiago but also from Matanzas and Havana, where Afrocuban cultural practices have a strong presence. The theatrical production of Teatro Escambray, the group founded in 1968 to open an ideological front against counterrevolutionary movements, known as the struggle against bandits, was also supported by anthropologically oriented investigative techniques (living with campesinos, conducting interviews, collecting testimonials, and constructing theater based on their life problematics) gave impulse to the "new theater movement" (Teatro Nuevo) in the seventies. Members of the Teatro Escambray went on to form groups elsewhere; for example, Flora Lauten and her Teatro La YaYa, which was based in the Santa Clara Mountains with local people as actors, and Albio Paz. who took the concept back to the city to form Teatro Acero (Steel Theater) in a Havana steel factory. Paz was the author and director of a signature work of Teatro Escambray, La vitrina (The showcase) (1971), a kind of theatrical study of the socialization of agriculture as mediated by campesino culture. The drama places on display a coffin with a cadaver, ready to be buried, at the deceased's request and as according to campesino tradition, on the plot of land that had sustained the deceased in life. We are taken retrospectively through the life of this corpse, Pancho: his birth into poverty, his struggle to acquire his plot of land, his marriage, the coming of the revolution, the advantages he gains by it, and agrarian reform and Pancho's fall. In his dying gasp he protests that he will be left without land to be buried on. The remainder of the play becomes an opportunity to reflect on this predicament, on how campesinos might come to believe that losing self-sufficiency could turn out to be a gain. Against their doubt is posed the authority of the revolution and of Fidel Castro: "Yes, Fidel said that the campesinos were going to die on their own piece of land; but he also said that they were going to make greater plans; that there would be development."16 Both this authority and its trajectory are subjected to debate in the play, over the dead body of Pancho, whose own development was arrested over what the revolution had already delivered. The possibility of consolidating the land, paying the campesinos rent on it, producing for social exchange, was to be used by the bandidos to challenge the political legitimacy of the revolution. The debate rages across the generations of campesinos who are gathered on the stage and is punctuated by a chorus who rhymes the setting together in


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song. Toward the end of the play, the oldest campesino proclaims, "If we don't defend this government, what will we defend?"17 As Pancho is finally taken away from what the campesinos decide is to be used as high-yield farmland, to be buried in a cemetery, a site of socialized death, his wife Ana has an attack and dies. A number of the other campesinos quickly follow suit. Just as quickly, however, Ana and the others return to life, now without resistance to where Pancho will be buried. Shortly Pancho too returns to the living, now transformed, declaring, "Don't we have to change our thinking, because if not it is like being dead."18 Whereas in death Pancho had been an object for reflection, in life his newly born consciousness is put on display. Hence the title of the play seems to apply as much to its methodology of reflection as to the prominent box that serves as an occasion to speculate on something other than individual demise as a possible future. The immediate uncertainties demanded by social change are revealed in the play to find compensation in the confidence formed through solidarity. Indeed, that confidence is given a name, socialism, an institutional embodiment in the government and a generalized presence in Fidel Castro. It is not that this array of forces is presented as a displacement of the campesinos' own capacity. The last lines acknowledge that while they cannot do everything, they must do something to remove the deathly pall that had befallen them. What the play provides, then, is not a substitution for action but a presumed assurance of its possibility in a determinate context. In a report to a congress on theater for socialist countries in 1975, Teatro Escambray described itself as an "effective arm at the service of the necessities of development of the revolution."19 The context for so singularly instrumentalist a theater is not difficult to explain. The "struggle against bandits" occupied some sixty-five thousand troops between 1959 and 1965, when the last leader of the counterrevolution, Bias Tardio Hernandez, was killed.20 Yet the cessation of armed conflict did not terminate ideological disparities among campesinos with respect to the revolution. Despite land reform, the orientation toward small antagonistic groups that remained from the caudillo system, the possibilities of reaggregating wealth through manipulation of the reforms, and the juxtaposition of religion and revolution (especially among the Jehovah's Witnesses) presented challenges to any process of agrarian socialization.

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The second agrarian reform was implemented in October 1963 in response to what was deemed underutilization of capacity and was applied to all parcels over 165 acres. This too precipitated revolts from those expropriated who took to the hills in Escambray, Matanzas, and Las Villas.21 Castro had guaranteed the future of the remaining small producers (who still possessed over one-third of the cultivated land), saying it was better to allow people to be buried on their own land than be forced to join a cooperative. Then, in response to government plans to center economic development on intensive agriculture, twenty thousand private farms were sold to the state between 1967 and 1970.22 This was the immediate context for La vtirina. The formation of Teatro Escambray in 1968 by such well-known figures as Sergio Corrieri and Gilda Hernandez was the consequence of a stormy meeting at the end of 1967 that expressed larger concerns over the relevance of art to politics and the appropriate form for a revolutionary theater. Escambray then constituted one response to the autocritique of the Havana theater scene, the other being a commitment to revolution in theatrical form associated with the Group of 12 directed by Vicente Revuelta. Albio Paz at that time represented another path by which to arrive at the impulse to create a popular theater. Born in the provincial district of Zulueta in 1936, Paz participated in theater brigades that worked in the countryside in the early sixties. Unlike the other founding members of Escambray, Paz was not formed as a professional actor in Havana; he received his training at the Academia Provincial de Artes Dramaticas Nacional, where he enrolled in I960. The six years that he spent with Escambray contributed above all to the development of the sociological method for constructing theatrical productions. This method already privileged the audience in its investigative approach to social problems that incorporated local idioms of expression. The performances continued this relationship and evoked participation in their midst. The result was the creation of a means of dialogue rather than a dramatic text. As in the case of La vitrina and other works of collective creation, the text was composed after the performances, not before. This rendered the Teatro Nuevo movement as particularly conjunctural. At a Havana festival in 1980 there were six groups formed by the state; in 1982 there were only two; and by 1984 there was none.


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In 1985, Albio Paz became the director of Teatro Miron, a position he still holds. Miron is a theater in the port city of Matanzas that had been in existence since 1963. The group had been associated with classic works of Cuban dramaturgy (Estorino, Quintero, Milanes, Dorr) until Paz joined and infused it with his sociological techniques. Miron spends half the year performing for urban audiences in its own theater and during the summers tours the agricultural centers and towns of Matanzas province. After a party meeting in the town of Cardenas, Esteban Lazo, a member of the political bureau and first secretary of the party in Matanzas, suggested that Paz "investigate the problematic of the agroindustrial complexes" through theater. The result, Con elgato de Chincilla o la locura a caballo (With the Chinchilla cat or the wild horse), at once a burlesque encounter of theatrical styles and characters and a bawdy satire of politics high and low, premiered in 1987. The cast of twelve assumes some thirty roles, from the masked commedia-like Saltimbanqui, an "actor of all times," to the foamstuffed human pigs, Patras 1 and 2, to the earnest but uninformed worker, Atravesao, who is the only character costumed as he might be found in contemporary life. The play is less a narrative than a series of interlocking encounters, what in the theater of the early Soviet director Meyerhold were called attractions, units of scenic action that replace the temporality of the scene. The mixing of past and present, actuality and fantasy, cartoon and caricature among the characters deprives the play of any fixity of place. The set of collaged cloth curtains emblazoned with the insignia of the sugar centmles, or refineries, of the region (where the play was in fact performed) suggests a specific locale, but the play is intended to present the situation of Cuban labor more generally. As described in the program notes, "[The play] doesn't try to reflect the reality of a particular complex, but rather to conform to a national problematic . . . " The inventory of characters provides occasion to lampoon the pretentiousness of state power and the fetish of consumption through the means of folklore and popular humor. The cat and the horse of the title are both folkloric elements, the latter responsible for sowing chaos wherever it goes and the former an illusory hope based on past fortunes. The state is represented in tripartite splendor of the economic (the director and subdirector of the complex), political (union leadership), and culture (the secretary of the commu-

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nist youth organization—where youth remains something of a category of the "prepolitical"). In a twist from La vitrina, in which a corpse rose from a casket that remains center stage, the three figures of government, who represent the diverse locations of power in the revolution, spend a good bit of the play passing a casket between them in a slapstick of unassumed responsibilities for the corpse. The casket, usually borne unacknowledged on the back of one of the figures of state, materializes a common expression about passing the corpse (shirking responsibility for the burial). The piece opens with a prologue introducing characters and play. A band of synthesizer, bass, drum, and guitar plays and punctuates the action, though not continuously. The director of the sugar complex, dressed like a British colonial on safari, is enjoying himself in the hunt. The other three directors enter and discuss the impossibility of achieving the plan. There is a play with the need to analyze and self-criticize why they have a death on their hands. They beat their breasts and murmur self-criticism in unison..The audience is appreciative. Rosy-cheeked Florecita enters singing a song and holding watering cans full of flowers. She aspires to the most beautiful garden in the world and so keeps adding what she feels it lacks. The overstuffed workers think she has done enough. She replies that El Gato, who went away, can't live without her roses. This type of voluntary work is evident in virtually every public park, and "Florecitas" are not hard to find. A baseball player enters with some ill-fitting pants he has been given and asks Florecita to mend them. She assents, if he agrees to pay her. A cook enters, confusing author and character when he asks who is responsible for the chaos in the play and the economy. A shopper complains to the party chief about the difficulty of finding meat. Later, a thankless husband makes excuses for the overconsumption of pork: "I don't like it, but my wife puts it on the table." The director, shooting his prey, claims, "I don't see any problem with autoconsumption." He then implores others to work: "Do you think that if this were capitalism things would just fall from the sky?" The frustrated shopper remarks that "Matanzas is going to work in the Taxis," the Cuban apogee of entrepreneurial individualism. The director wants to stimulate the productivity of an artist, Brocha Gorda, who does not want to be regulated. Brocha is told that under capitalism


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he'd be selling mangoes. He shows his detractors his work, a sign for a nightclub with pork and the cost of a barbecue. He later intervenes into one of the directors' discussions of scarcity by showing them how to fit three pigs on a palm leaf, again revealing his art's pressing them on their lack of imagination. The second act opens with a revival meeting of the various authorities in their self-criticism session. Atravesao enters, demands to open the casket, and begins pounding on it with his hammer. The director explains that their problems are too complex to confront in so direct a fashion. Florecita returns in song, sweetly pleading for a truck to provide soil for her garden. She is refused on grounds that all trucks are in use for production, but she points out that they return empty. Atravesao is temporarily held at bay with a long technical account of the problems of the local economy, which first must be appreciated before any initiatives are attempted. The frustrated shopper returns with meat from the director's hunt in her sandwich, which the four officials politely decline. Reflecting the change of fortune, a cane worker runs in saying he has seen the goto de chincilla. At this Atravesao is emboldened to open the box and proclaims, "It's not a dead person but us." The stage is darkened as green cat eyes flash on the wall. If La vtirina was peppered with literal references to Fidel, El goto is more allusive. In the middle of 1985 when productivity was falling in Cuba's key economic sector and private labors were said to occupy much of the workers' time, Castro warned a meeting of directors that "this is the wild horse" disrupting effective output. The play was developed in the interval between Cuba's experimentation with certain market mechanisms, including farmers' markets, in the early eighties and the emergence of rectification, the policies of decentralized planning, voluntarism, and critique of bureaucratic inertia promulgated in the mideighties. The piece appeared to frustrate critics otherwise sympathetic to Paz's work as inadequately "synthetic" and overly repetitious.23 Surely the play is dealing with a less enclosed universe than the small producers of Escambray were concerned with in La vitrina. If anything it is a universe unbounded, as overstuffed and overflowing as the abundance of characters on the modest simulacrum of a sugar refinery that serves as its set. Yet this is also the "unproductive chaos" of locura a caballo, a "chaos" for which there is no clear authority

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presented on stage—only the sweep of hope that forms a horizon in the scanning green eyes of el goto de chincilla. While clearly consonant with the official ethos of rectification that implicates all levels of the division of labor in the project of social development, the play places institutional leadership on display in the way (and with the same mechanism) that La vitrina had. In so doing, it may limit the culpability of such leaders, or at least the assumption that the proper revolutionary course is embodied in their personae. This expanded embrace of what can now securely be considered an object of criticism and the increased confidence with which indeterminacy can be presented as part of a reflection on the historical moment clearly distance the context of El goto from that of La vitrina. It may also call into question the very functionality of the instrumentalism toward policy that both pieces share. As critical as the play was of government officials, it did not stand alone in this criticism. In 1988, when rectification was in full swing, the newspapers were full of reports of corrupt officials, inefficiencies, and scandals. This compared to a reading of the party paper Granma from 1968, with its twin foci on the threat of imperialism (the war in Vietnam) and the need for heightened production (in the exhortations to cut more cane) securely anchoring the Cuban socialist project without addressing the antinomies of its own organization. The abundance of critical energy on Teatro Miron's stage was in certain respects usurped by the public attention given to the critical issues it raised in the media and in popular institutions like the neighborhood defense committees. Despite the polemics El goto provoked when performed at various complexes in the region and throughout the country, its critical thrust lay not in its ability to compete with the news (theater will ever be subordinate to mass media) but in its rupturing of the boundaries of representation on which an instrumental theater, a theater of conjuncture, relies. Here realism is kept to a zero degree in order to open up the affinities in the public no longer able to take the theater's identification of protagonist for granted. This entails a shift in the very conception of the politicality of revolutionary theater. Two years later, in 1989, the work of Albio Paz took yet another turn. His collaboration with designer Rolando Estevez, who had created the backcloths emblazoned with industrial iconography in El gato, generated a very different aesthetic. In a play adapted by Paz


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from three stories by the Dominican intellectual and politician Juan Bosch, the familiar analytic acumen of his previous productions becomes introspective as if suddenly forced to confront the generative principles of its own critique in terms sympathetic to what might make continued criticism possible. The product of this reflection, Fragata, represented a turn from Paz's own instrumentality for theater in the service of a unity of critique to an address of the public for an enlarged appreciation of difference. In Fragata, the Miron stage is dense with objects in ocher and mustard tones. A cart, overladen with masks, icons of straw, costumes, and scenic objects—a veritable ark of theater—stands amid stage ladders covered with bark. Three of these ladders form a triangle from which hangs fishnet covered in rustling strips of cloth, suggesting autumn seaweed. Drums and other percussion instruments of rustic construction adorn stage left. One actor appears, beginning a round of a popular Cuban children's song, "Tin Tin." Two others enter at the next cadence. They begin to set the stage by pulling up the net lying where footlights might be, creating a forward scenic space and tentlike hill supported by the ladders. A woman comes out and puts down a large bundle of rags in tones that match the leaves. A truss of white rags shaped like an infant is attached at her breast. She pushes an ox skull connected to a stick through the parched netted landscape, her face buried behind a mass of white fibrous hair. In each of the three stories that compose the piece, the protagonist has a desire that is fulfilled in a kind of Faustian deal that leads ultimately to tragedy. In this first story the old woman Remigia, one of the few holdouts in the abandoned drought-stricken town of Paso Hondo, offers the packet at her breast to the three Animas ofPurgatorio (souls in purgatory) and asks for two drops of rain ("Dos pesos de agua," the title of the tale) in exchange. The three mischievous spirits rise from behind the hill of netting, their faces masked except for bearded jowls and their bodies swirled in floods of dark fabric except for clawing hands. They overflow Remigia's wishes and drown her. Still unsatisfied that they have received adequate compensation from her, the three recede, taking their waters with them. The townspeople return, three actors in burlap rags and matching masks that present faces of flaccid grotesquely; they hold wooden scaffoldings from which equally disconcerting figures of cloth hang.

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All flutter in amazement at their resuscitated home as Remigia expires. The scene is transformed for the next tale, "Un hombre virtuoso" (A virtuous man), by the actors who scoop Remigia off the stage wrapped in the netted terrain she had lived in. They create the stage anew, this time with roughly quilted burlap stretched across the cart and ladder to form a small courtyard. A carpenter, Quin, works for the upright Juan Ramon and his wife, and has a taste for drink, though in small quantities. Juan Ramon has strictly forbidden any drinking, so Quin's brew must be purchased furtively from the purveyor at the Pulperia, an urchinlike creature that resides upstage, apparently the source of the spirits of excess in Miron's scenic cosmology. Juan Ramon has a passion for surveillance, and his virtue derives from what he can see in others. His long nose, a hybrid of commedia character and toucan, can be seen peeking out of a window cut in the burlap "wall." It catches wind of Quin's transgression, and his minimal desire is turned to torment. Now enlarged and exaggerated, his failure to fulfill the demands of virtue afflicts his dreams, where heinous creatures of sticks and hemp dance as he is caught literally in his web (the net) of sleep. Quin dies clamoring for a drink denied, and the doctor pronounces laying off the bottle as his cause of death. Juan Ramon has maintained his virtue but lost his labor. Next the stage is decorated with brightly colored tapestries. "La fragata" (The frigate), a gigantic nymph, an enormous enfant prostitute who is the eye of every man's desire, is created on stage by actors who hang the full-body puppet frame on the largest man in the company. S/he appears content to play with the local children, here represented with large basket heads and oversized costumes that diminish the actors' scale. Fragata dances, teases, and is teased until she is seduced by a man who drops his drawers and beckons her to join him. She does so immediately and emerges from behind the bright tapestries a pregnant woman. She is now scorned by the town, hassled and harassed until she is driven mad and away. Before Fragata's departure, she is doubled by an actress scarcely half her size who holds a beach ball, a sign of the child's play that has shadowed her and the pregnancy that now shames her. Both are lost as the ball is dropped: the actress gets out of the costume while the actor has


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slipped away unseen. Thefmgata drops into a mere heap of a costume. The bundles of costumes, props, and objects without characters are collected together from the three stories and left in a pile under the tallest ladder upstage. The actors bow and depart singing another children's round. The ludic space and the magically transformed materials still resonant with their possibility are left, as if to be taken up by the public in its own tales. The austere, laconic stories trade narrative's capacity to carry imagination for the imaginary landscape created on stage. The richly textured costumes from which the set itself appears to extend present a visual semiosis of the material prima of the Cuban countryside. It is as if the characters carry on their backs the fibers from which a thousand stories could be told. Indeed, while the play draws on the work of Bosch (and it was to travel to the Dominican Republic until the preelection disturbances in 1989 canceled the trip), the Cuban variety of popular oral tale (cuento) is also abundant. The folklorist Samuel Feijoo has collected, classified, and written down hundreds of these cuentos drawn from all over the island. In one variant of the tales, borrachos (drunkards), the particular story "The Cautious Drinker" might remind one of Quin before his fall. Every afternoon this amiable gentleman goes to the bar, and, before he begins to drink, takes a small plastic toad out of his bag and sets it on the bar. After each drink he stares intently at the small figure. Finally he pays and leaves quietly. One day the bartender asks him to reveal the mystery. He complies: "I place the toad and watch him every time I take a slug. If I see only him, I go on drinking, but when I see two toads, I stop and go to bed."24 In the story hallucination is self-regulating. The doubled toads register the inner limit of excess, whose purpose is to extend a minor fetish. That the man returns to the bar each day with only one toad in his bag attests to his faithful pursuit of his fantasy. Quin's fantasy swirls around a dream denied, denied by the interlocutors in his unconscious. The toads guard against excess, but Quin has no protection against the excesses of moral surveillance. The popular Cuban folktales are full of self-irony toward the minor excesses of their characters. Without moralizing, they celebrate, while they insinuate a complicity in the transgressions they present. Invariably only a few

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paragraphs, the cuentos hit and run before any message can settle. They provoke and allow laughter to take the place of judgment. Elsewhere in Feijoo's collection, numerous stories of countryfolk (guajiros) tell of farmers who threaten thunderclaps with machetes, whose defecations are constantly interrupted, and who can't tell a piece of cheese from the moon when in Havana. Like the old countrywoman in "Dos pesos de agua," their dogged commitment to fulfill the task at hand renders them unprepared for what may follow. In a politics that had traded so much on the future, privileging the aesthetic of the guajiro suggests a refocus on the materials currently available for the construction of a present. Miron's three tales communicate this through their scenic materials but also in the fate of each of the three protagonists. Remigia falls when her cup overflows; Quin falls when his is empty; and Fragata disappears when the town fails to appreciate what lies at its own margins. One aspect of the rectification campaign was to replace the economic incentives of the early eighties with moral incentives, reminiscent of the late policies associated with Che Guevara. Images of Che were reemphasized, along with urges to voluntary work. If such efforts could clean parks and build housing and facilitate a critique of bureaucracy, as El goto documented, they could also limit tolerance for what might be considered beyond the moral pale. The portrayal of humility behind apparent excess suggests a deeper appreciation of difference than is possible when codes of behavior precede the assessment of public actions. At another level, the humility of these characters that are too common to be emulated asks that desires be constructed out of what is already at hand. In certain respects, Fragata anticipates the material scarcity that will befall Cuba in the years immediately following its premiere. By complicating the moral dimension of rectification, the play offers its public something beyond a stringent regulation of production with consumption as a means for assessing social development. Without a revaluation of what is marginal to contemporary Cuban culture, material gains alone cannot be adequate. Despite its subjecting some aspects of the rectification program to critical scrutiny, La fragata received prestigious awards from the writers' Union (UNEAC) and the Festival de Teatro Latinamericano Camaguey in 1990 as well as extensive critical acclaim in such Cuban publications as Revolution y cultura, Bohemia, Yumuri, Caiman


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Barbudo, andJuventudRebelde. Beyond these conventional appraisals of its critical reception, Miron's work is inserted into the cultural sources that it draws upon and the cultural institutions of the state. Albio Paz is the director of scenographic arts for the province of Matanzas, which means that in addition to directing his own group, he is responsible for the work of the other professional and amateur dramatic organizations, children's theater, and dance groups, and as a playwright he is active in the national administration of the writers' union. He also has artistic oversight with respect to emerging groups and single projects. Through Paz, Miron interfaces directly with the means for administering cultural policy. As critical as it might be of the state, this theater group also joins it organizationally, and, through Paz's theatrical practice, critiques the administrative activity in which he is engaged. Miron's other reach to critical sources is through its contact with its audience. During the summer months when the group travels to the various towns and sugar centrales of the region, the pulse of public reception and response to Miron's adaptation of popular forms can be taken. One Saturday night in the town of Alarcranes, Miron offered a parody of popular cinema, Trece locos en la pelicula, in one of the town's two movie theaters. Another summer evening, the group ventured to the sugar central Sergio Gonzalez, a huge refinery in the middle of endless fields. Performances took place next to a half-filled swimming pool that reportedly had been visited by a Hollywood movie star before the revolution, when the pool was part of the "big house." That night, El circo de los pasos combined the company's newly acquired clown skills and acrobatics with a critique of the mythical appeal of that great circus to the north. Children seem to be the main beneficiaries of these performances, although adults of various ages were not far from the circus carpet. Three, four, or five such shows might be done each week with two or three hours of travel time in each direction and regular rehearsals in the mornings. Though work on the sugar centrales has long been socialized, the actors remain a crucial form of migrant labor. For the public that occasions them and to whom they are an occasion, the amalgamation of pleasure and critique deepens the imaginable activity in the domain of consumption.

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The Struggle for Dramatic Literature As with indigenous culture more generally, the existence of preconquest performance can be identified only in the traces of its repression. Although Columbus made several landings on Cuba in his first voyage, colonization began in earnest in 1512. By the end of that year, a decree banning the native dance narrative areito was issued, only to be rescinded six years later when the conquest was complete and such forms were appreciated for their ability to stimulate slave labor. Within thirty years that labor was exhausted along with its cultural traces, left to be recorded by that ubiquitous conscience of colonialism, Bartolome de Las Casas. Apparently, early colonial theatrical presentations closely mimicked European forms yet despite this were censored in the late sixteenth century by the church, which also imposed a ban on comedy as sacrilegious in 1680.25 Censorship intensified with the development of Cuban drama. Jose Maria Heredia, the first Cuban playwright of note, was exiled in 1823, before he was twenty years old, for his nationalist prose. He initiated a century of Cuban anticolonial dramatic literature by invoking the tyrants of antiquity and the vanquished indigenous rulers as protagonists (Tiberio, 1827; Moctezuma o Los Mexicanos, 1819; and Xicotencatl o los Tlascaltecas, 1823). Although frustrated as theater because denied the opportunity for performance on native soil, this literature of national identity developed most fully under the sign of romanticism. In the decade from 1838 to 1848, close to eighty dramatic works were written in Havana alone. El Conde Alarcos, written by Jose Jacinto Milanes and premiered in 1838, is set in thirteenth-century Capetian France and uses the obligations of feudal absolutism to speak of the limits of slavery before the demands of bourgeois choice. The king has selected Count Alarcos as his successor and arranged a marriage with his daughter Blanca. Alarcos, a Spaniard, has married humbly and for love without the king's permission. Blanca, determined to have her man, reports this to her father, and when he is enraged she asks, "What king enslaves the heart?" The king gives his reply directly to Alarcos several scenes later when the latter asks forgiveness on the basis of his faith in the king: "What love, tell me, what faith is there between a slave and a gentleman [senor]?" The king's solution is to kill Alarcos's wife so that he is free to marry Blanca. When Alarcos


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protests, the king is unequivocal—"You are my slave!" Alarcos's verse remains eloquent, but he is unable to move the king, Blanca, or his wife Leonora's executioner, and she perishes in his arms.26 Considered by Rine Leal, the dean of Cuban theater critics, to be "the best dramatist in the Spanish language," Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda reached back to ancient Babylon to sketch a figure of despotic absolutism in Baltasar (1858). Writing to the Bourbon Prince of Asturias about this play, she says, "Baltasar, representative of the despotism of the pagan kings, together with the corruption and impotence of a fallen society, is doubtless in my work a figure of hated repugnance." She goes on to invoke the "new law of grace" that "breaks the chain of the people and dissipates the shadow of idolatry."27 Baltasar has imprisoned the aged king of Judea, Joaquin, and enslaved his people, who rise up with their axes, free their king, and slay Baltasar, who cries, "Your victory has unhinged an empire."28 As with the Capetian king, the injustice of colonial power is its failure to recognize love, or perhaps to know too well that love is a metaphor for self-determination. The romantics devolved the historical into the personal, constructing a project for a particular emancipation in universal terms. Yet the emergence of an identifiably Cuban form of performance antedates Heredia and the romantic dramatists. It articulates a version of class consciousness for the Cuban born of Spanish descent, the criollo. This first pass at national identity under colonial conditions consisted of a representation of what the landowners could appropriate of an identity, that of the slave. As such the first theatrical genre in Cuba can be considered the negrito, based on a black-faced white actor's ideological ridicule. The negrito elided the self-deprecation of the master rendered as slave without the "freedom" to exploit his own slaves fully, with the docilization of his own labor force as loose-limbed, clumsy, and only capable of harming itself. The negrito 's predicament is rescued by laughter. The genre is identifiable as early as 1812 and had its parallel in the character of Jim Crow in the slave culture of the United States. More directly, minstrel shows traveled to Cuba from the north during the first half of the 1860s, when the slave trade in Cuba was exploding with the concentration of sugar capital and when the black population superceded that of whites on the island for the first time. The appropriation of black character taken from the cultural context of

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the bozal (African-born slave) also comes at a time when the annexation of Cuba by the United States was seen by a segment of the landed bourgeoisie as a solution to the trade monopoly enjoined by Spain.29 The negrito also gives Cuba its first star, Francisco Covarrubias, who established a career through his articulation of this character over nearly fifty years of performance, as well as writing many sketches himself.30 Afrocuban life is portrayed by whites on stage, yet even free blacks (horros) were denied purchase of seats in the magisterial Tacon Theater when it opened in 1838. Not until the end of the century, with the collapse of the theatrical explosion detonated by the movements for independence, did this barrier fall. If the great halls like the Tacon (renamed the Garcia Lorca in 1961 to distance it from the autocratic Spanish captain general of the early 1800s) and the Circo (opened in 1847, renamed the Villanueva in 1853) were built in the image of romanticism, they were filled by an elaboration of the negrito known as teatro Bufo. Bufo, a kind of Cuban commedia with a triumvirate of characters—el negrito, la mulata, and el gallego—presented Cubanization as a form of corrupted Spanish. While explicitly racist, its denigration of the mother tongue presented a degraded Cuban character that would have to be cut loose if the body of Spanish culture were to remain healthy, hence relying on a shared ideology of race when direct calls for independence were impossible. As with so much nineteenth-century Cuban theater, the Bufo relied on the parodic representation of black experience as an allegory for colonization more generally. The industrialization and urbanization powered by the sugar economy are articulated in a black stage presence, los negros catedrdticos. Free blacks had occupied social positions on the island as long as slavery had existed there, and the catedrdtico or professor was an urbane linguistic master who attempted to control grammatically what might have been lost to blacks socially. In Francisco Fernandez Vilaros's play named after these characters, the linguistic constitutes a fragile and ultimately fallible strategy upon which to construct distinction out of difference. One of these professors closes the play with this reminder to the audience: "I am no more than a professor, who seeks with his grammar, elliptical and systematic, the strict technical key, political, pyrotechnic, surgical,


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and problematical."31 He and his companion Crispin begin the play with an homage to their shared "scientific knowledge," which distances them from those "disgraceful beings from those strange African climes." They profess only to one another and agree to "consider the equality of class and condition in future matrimonial candidates."32 The future is made immediate when they agree to arrange the marriage of their own children, Dorotea and Ricardo. Initially Dorotea is quite satisfied with the match until the bozal Jose passes by the house, sees her, and proposes an "alliance" to her father Aniceto, who rejects the project of "an alliance offensive or defensive with a heterogeneous black." This states the project of both the colonizers and the enslavers, of the metropolis and the field. Ricardo is quite offended by Jose's presence and scolds, "What did you come to this fashionable house for? Respond! Miserable! Did you come to sell peanuts?"33 Jose possesses something that is blind to difference, however. He has managed to save a small fortune of 12,500 pesos by working in the fields. Dorotea proclaims, "Money changes everything," and she shifts her allegiance. Her father is likewise convinced and abandons his colleague and his convictions. Once he has gained his prize, Jose assumes the posture of the catedrdtico and contrasts himself grammatically as gerund to his future father-in-law as "preterite past-perfect indicative."34 Namely, while Jose is in a state of being, Aniceto is fixed in the past. This appears to presage the conflict of Spaniard and Mambi, where the syntax of the field overwhelms that of the metropolis. Aniceto, despite the presence of Jose's capital, is disturbed about his genealogy. His colleague Crispin articulates this grammatically when he contemplates Aniceto as a future imperfect. Aniceto, finally merging words and money, assures his friend that his son has nothing to offer him. The professor will manage the capital and within a year transform it into a million pesos, and Jose will be turned into a dictionary. Accumulation will conquer difference as the strictures of genealogy have been ruptured. If only the Count of Alarcos could see them now. The Bufo exploded as a popular form in 1868 on the eve of the ten-year revolutionary war. Within a year the Bufo became literally incendiary. Jacinto Valdes, a popular singer, saluted the leader of the revolutionary government, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, during a rendition of "El negro bueno" during a performance at the Villanueva

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on January 21,1869. The next night's show was announced as a benefit for victims of "insolvency," alluding to the empty coffers of the revolutionary accounts. A group of pro-Spanish vigilantes known as the Volunteers, frustrated by the conciliatory policies of the newly arrived Captain General Domingo Dulce (who took no stricter action than to issue a fine of two hundred pesos to the theater after Valdes's performance, and accepted the explanation that the singer was drunk), heard of the transgression and the benefit performance, and burst into the theater during that event, after independista banners had been unfurled and women had costumed themselves in the colors of the insurrectionary flag. The Volunteers began shooting in the theater and pursued the audience into the street, killing many.35 After the Villanueva massacre, liberal efforts at assimilation of the opposition were banished, along with the Bufos themselves, which did not return to the Cuban stage until 1879, when the independence struggle temporarily abated. The ten-year war for independence spawned its own genre of historical representation in theater, named teatro mambi after the insurrectionists. The events following the declaration of independence by Carlos Manuel de Cespedes at La Demajagua, his plantation near the town of Yara, on October 10, 1868, called "El Grito de Yara," were dramatized by Luis Garcia Perez in a work of that name published in 1874. Cespedes was inscribed as well in an eponymous play written by F. J. Balmaseda in 1900. Cespedes and his son Oscar had participated in the theater as writers and actors, and the revolutionary leader was reported to have given performances to his troops.36 Perhaps the most dramatic figure of the revolution was Antonio Maceo, the masterful tactician of extraordinary courage who rose through the ranks of the insurrectionary forces to become a general despite racist attacks on his person and the claim that whites would not serve under a black commander. Recovering from one of his many wounds, Maceo, surrounded by Spanish forces, jumped up from the stretcher, mounted a horse, and rode away through a hail of bullets rather than surrender. This refusal was immortalized in what came to be known as the "Protest of Baragua"—Maceo's refusal to surrender after the provisional government's capitulation to Spain with the Pact of Zanjon had compromised the revolutionary goals of independence and emancipation. Maceo left his meeting with the Spaniards assuring them that hostilities would again break


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out; even though he was not in a position militarily to defeat their forces, he confronted the colonial power with an assertion of militance after apparent collapse.37 More than one hundred years later, when the shifts in Cuba's foreign relations left it suddenly isolated, "Un eterna Baragua" could be seen on T-shirts and billboards around Havana. Jose Marti, who provided so much intellectual coherence to the revolutionary movement, punctuated his work with theatrical attentions. He had written a dramatic poem, "Abdala," at age fifteen, published the day after the massacre at the Villanueva, that won him the ire of the colonial authorities. The protagonist of the poem is based on Mohammed Abu Abdallah, a religious reformer in Spain during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Marti renders his Abdala an African armed for change, introducing an affirmative presence and a historical voice for a black character who, in the era of the Bufos, proclaims, "How sweet it is to die when one dies in bold struggle for defense of fatherland."38 Marti appreciated that "theater lives in history," as he said in the statement "El teatro cubano," written while he was in exile in New York in 1892: "The office of a people is to create, and the force of the world is in those who produce. In theater, as in everything, we must create in Cuba."39 With the U.S. intervention in 1898, the annexation that at the beginning of the century appeared to the nascent bourgeoisie as a step toward the realization of its aspirations, now represented a violent truncation of such aspirations. When the Platt Amendment replaced direct occupation and governance by the United States in 1903, the period of the pseudorepublic began. The alternation of liberal and conservative administrations of Gomez and Menocal in the first two decades of the new republic was always shadowed by a U.S. military presence that intervened directly in Cuban affairs, as in 1912, to suppress an Afrocuban insurrection, or to break strikes to "prevent Bolshevism" in 1921. The Machado dictatorship of the twenties smashed the bipartisan system, alleviating this burden from the marines, and transformed the Cuban armed forces into a political institution and apparatus of civil service. Fulgencio Batista's overthrow of the army hierarchy in the "Sergeant's Revolt" in 1933 gave the military a populist face that propelled Batista into the presidency in 1940 and helped legitimate his coup d'etat in 1952 (despite the fact that he was a candidate in that election).40

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The formal initiation of the republic that so much of the nineteenth-century theatrical tradition had articulated and anticipated seemed to disperse the dynamism of the movement that had represented it. Rine Leal summarizes the fate of theater before the revolution: "When the republic showed its hymn and flag, Cuban theater was perhaps still robust. Surely there had been nationalist enthusiasm, but it soon faded, in the midst of a creation typically bourgeois and technically feeble. It is now that the crisis becomes perennial and in the end it eliminates dramatic expression . . . In 1958 Cuban theater is trapped in a dead-end street."41 The principal theater up until 1935, the Alhambra, compensated for whatever it lacked in critical insight with its productivity. Each week, the theater offered two premieres and twenty-three performances. The author of the bulk of these was Frederico Villoch, credited with some four hundred revues that cataloged neocolonial life in the tradition of the Bufos. The singular exception to this trend was Jose Antonio Ramos, whose plays such as La hidra (1908) and Tembladera (1918) developed trenchant social commentary through the optic of family crisis. In the case of the latter play, a family whose sugar wealth divides them displays the central problematics of development.42 If the furious productivity of the Alhambra signaled the beginnings of a mass culture whose articulation began with the introduction of cinema and national radio syndicates in the twenties, the writings of Ramos represented the stirrings of a distinctive lineage for a properly modernist high art in the theater. With the formal withdrawal of the Platt Amendment and the revolutionary activity of the early thirties, and the closing of the Alhambra in 1935, the tendency of theatrical modernism was initiated with the formation of the theater group La Cueva in 1936. With its inaugural production of Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise, La Cueva announced its intention to "bring to the stage only works of universal merit and those Cuban plays that accord with our criteria of art theater [teatro de arte]."45 The "universal" had also insinuated itself in the political economy of sugar; U.S. capital owned 56 percent of Cuban mills compared to 20 percent ownership by Cubans. At the same time, the cut in Cuban sugar from just under 50 percent to slightly more than 25 percent of the U.S. total between 1930 and 1933 contributed to the destabilization of Cuba internally44


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Fifteen groups composed the teatro de arte movement that developed through the late thirties and forties, and more than three-quarters of the works produced were of foreign or "universal" origin. In part, this was a rejection of what Cuban dramaturgy had become, its devolving into musical revues that faintly echoed the Bufos without any of their critical thrust. The reach beyond Cuban soil that characterized dramatic output until the time of the revolution—despite the activity of those who are considered by critics today among the finest Cuban dramatists of the twentieth century (Virgilio Pinera, Carlos Felipe, and Rolando Ferrer)—indicated the break that high modernism sought with a neocolonial national culture defined as kitsch. Most notable among the exceptions within the movement was Paco Alfonso and his Teatro Popular, a group that concentrated on national authors and had close ties to the left of the labor movement. Teatro de arte was above all a response to the commodification of culture that sought an autonomy for art without developing criteria for what the formal characteristics of that autonomy might be. It was the cauldron for writers and intellectuals on the left such as Alejo Carpentier, Juan Marinello, and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, and for the actors who would form the nucleus of the theater that emerged with the revolution: Sergio Corrieri, Roberto Blanco, Lillian Llerena, Herminia Sanchez, Helmo Hernandez (all of whom worked with the University Theater that was shut down by Batista in 1956); and Vicente and Raquel Revuelta, the former a prime mover of the Cuban stage and the latter the current director of the section of scenic arts of the Ministry of Culture, as well as a distinguished actress who worked with ADAD (a reformation of the Academy of Dramatic Arts that was formed in 1945 and also featured Cuban playwrights). Lacking in support, venues, and theatrical infrastructure, the teatro de arte groups rarely performed more than once a month and raised but did not resolve the demands of a professional theater. In the middle of the 1950s, a series of venues was established in Havana that initiated performances on a more consistent basis. The movement embraced some fourteen stable groups, another twenty that were struggling for stability, and several acting academies. Together, these groups nearly tripled the number of annual offerings over that of the teatro de arte groups, which never numbered more than seven at one time.45 Known as the salitas or small halls, usually of less than two hundred seats, these new groups established a the-

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ater that featured Broadway realism (Williams, Miller, Anderson, Inge) along with some accents of a less commercial nature, such as Genet's The Maids or the works of Sartre. If the predominant aesthetic echoed that of Broadway, so too did acting technique. Stanislavskian training came to Latin America in 1939 through a Japanese actor, Seki-Sano, who had studied in Moscow during the thirties.46 During the forties and fifties Cuban actors could be found in the courses of Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, and in "method" workshops in London, Paris, and Mexico City. In 1951 Jose Gelada brought such a course to Havana. One aspect of the cultural and economic context for this theatrical intensity was undoubtedly the successful landing of television on the island. The first image was broadcast in October 1950; within four months there were fourteen thousand sets in Cuba, and by the end of the decade there were roughly half a million, more televisions per capita than anywhere else in Latin America.47 As Vicente Revuelta reflected in 1955: "Theater for some years had been considered an illfated business and no one thought, until recently, about the economic possibilities of the theatrical presentation. Television could prove, on the one hand, the existence of good actors, directors, and technicians, and on the other, the restlessness of the Cuban public desirous of communication with these artists."48 Unlike the teatro de arte movement, the salitas were enabled by the diffusion of popular media, rather than constituting themselves against it. At the same time, Revuelta was concerned with the way that the "cosmopolitan" influence was limiting the development of a national Cuban stage. In 1956, he declared that "the absence of authors has created the greatest stumbling block in our theater."49 Much of this critique was articulated in the pages ofNuestro Tiempo, a periodical affiliated with the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), the Cuban communist party, which first published Brecht in Cuba and was itself a project of a cultural association that helped form some of the theater groups during the fifties. Batista was not unaware that the most effective mobilizations of artists and intellectuals were occurring on the left. He responded with the founding of the National Institute of Culture in 1954. The Institute attempted to assimilate artists by granting small subventions that were then possible to withdraw, as was the case of the Ballet de Cuba directed by Alicia Alonso.50 Closely imbricated in the structures


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of neocolonial culture, the salitas never forged an instrumental relation with the revolution, as the Villanueva had ninety years before and as Nicaraguan theater would twenty years later. The movement was above all the incubator for the professional theater that would develop for the first time with the revolution. Some groups, including Promoteo and Las Mascaras, survived into the revolution, but one, Teatro Estudio (formed in 1958) would align the theatrical trajectory of the first decade of the revolution and be its most enduring institution of theater. For the first decade after revolutionary forces came to power, Teatro Estudio remained the central theatrical institution, and theater was centered in Havana. In a recent survey of critics' choices for the best productions of Cuban theater, from a field of 857 productions between 1959-83, 57 percent of the votes went to Teatro Estudio for plays mounted between 1959-64; its performances were represented in the first six places on the list of the top ten.51 These figures indicate as much about the remarkable agreement within the critical community as about Teatro Estudio's stature. The founders of Teatro Estudio—among them, the Revueltas and Sergio Corrieri — identified their project as a "flexible theater," responsive to an analysis of social and cultural conditions as well as those of their medium, that would select work according to its "message of human interest." Despite their distancing from the formalist dictates of art for art's sake, they were committed to confronting the underdevelopment of theater as a feature of the revolution. They would respond "artistically speaking" by "perfecting our acting technique, until we have gained a definitive ensemble of consummate artistic quality according to modern scenic means that will enable us to assist in shaping a true national theater."52 While theater was to be responsive to its social conjuncture, it nonetheless needed to recognize its specificity as an aesthetic practice. The role of this theater that identified itself with the revolution (and became identified with it for over thirty years) was not to represent the revolution as a dramatic narrative but to provide a capacity for theatrical production worthy of national identity. Only in this frame could the emphasis on professionalization that would predominate in Cuban theater for the thirty years after the revolution be appreciated. Theater could contribute to development only if it could develop.

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O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night was the first production of Teatro Estudio, and the journey spanned the revolutionary triumph. The enormous public appeal and critical appreciation of the work became a foundation for a burgeoning romance of Havana theater and public in the early years of the revolution. If among the most critically minded of the commercial North American playwrights provided the texts for the consolidation of theatrical institutions before the revolution, the presence of those institutions permitted the transition to a predominantly national dramaturgy after the revolutionary triumph. Emblematic of that transition in theater and of the way Cuban playwrights articulated the situation and conflicts of social transition was the genre of family dramas that characterized the midfifties and sixties. Among these, Virgilio Pinera's Airefrio, written in 1958 and first performed in 1962, is considered exemplary. At the opening of the play, Luz Marina Romaguera complains to her youngest brother Oscar about the heat: "We won't be able to breathe until January."53 Pinera's words were prophetic. By January 1959 the heat that suffocated the Romaguera family had finally abated. The motif of eternal heat, the interminable wait for a change of season, suffuses the play. Yet the heat appears to hold the members of the family together, imprisoning them in the unchanging interior of their apartment while they dream of various ways of escape. Even their dreams are minor, persistent obsessions rather than visions with any transformative force. Luz Marina asks rhetorically, "Is there any perspective that would exchange misery for opulence, hot air for cold?"54 Oscar pursues the life of a poet without the means to support himself as a man of letters. He manages to reach "good airs" (Buenos Aires) in distant Argentina, only to return home without any change in his situation as poet or person. His aspirations and his failure spring from the family. Angel Romaguera spends his days scheming of a way to reclaim lost lands, as his vision literally lapses and his living conditions deteriorate. So too does he believe blindly that his decaying social class will reverse its fortunes. It is inconceivable to him that his chicken business, with his "totally scientific" avicultural techniques, failed.55 He maintains faith that the law will stand above the corrupting influences of politics and resurrect his past status. His drunkenness and bitterness have kept him from wage employment. His son Oscar distinguishes the causes of their mutual unemployment: Angel can't hold a job, Oscar doesn't


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want to work. Angel replies by stressing how similar they are in terms of their success in their respective vocations: "If literature is your goal, mine has been the family."56 As with everything else in his life, however, if Angel's end is the family, he has no means to accomplish it. For all of his demands for respect and propriety, he offers nothing but abuse. He snarls incessantly at his children, but Ana, his wife, of course suffers most from his utter incapacity to provide anything to his family except a demand that it exist. His last affair is most destructive to his wife's ability to justify her continued servitude in the face of his abuse. When she discovers that he is secretly meeting their fifteen-year-old niece, she confronts him, and is harshly rebuffed after his own denials have crumbled. During the next eighteen years of her life (and the duration of the scenic action), Ana continues to play her role but even the fragments of a dream are denied her. Luz Marina, who breaks her eternal wait for romance by walking out of the house at age forty-four and marrying a bus driver, comes closest of any of the Romagueras in trading on the possible and consolidating her downward mobility for some minimal pleasure. She is sanguine about how little she has changed her situation—"Same dog, different collar."57 She also spends her days caring for her aging (the years pass more quickly in the second and third acts) and increasingly infirm parents. As someone who shares the labors of pillaged domesticity she articulates in a way her mother cannot the fragile subterfuge that maintains them. "We pass our lives talking about the heat but we don't dare dot the i's. . . . The history of this house is not only of days of hunger . . . It's also the suffering, the desperation of your soul."58 If the heat provides insufficient distraction from the deadening pain of their situation as women, it is adequate to describe Angel's blind appropriation of what he claims to cherish: "Dad's conscience is like the heat I feel. If one day I get my fan, I'll forget the heat."59 The "opulence" of cool airs is too unfocused to be a fulfillable dream. The heat is constantly reintroduced only to provide the occasion for a momentary amnesia. The Romaguera family lives by consuming itself, the dead class living off its own carcass. The time of the petit bourgeois dream had already passed in Cuba by the 1950s, suffocated by the heavy capitalization of agriculture in the twentieth century. Over fifty thousand Cubans had university degrees, but employment and mobility were much scarcer.

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The play is peppered with illusions to the political situation that led to this carnivorous state. Batista's name and government are invoked again and again, but only to mark the time of daily life in its interminable and dulling routine. As Angel loses his sight and the Romagueras miss a bill payment and lose their lights, a reference is made to having "Batista for ten years."60 The references come and go quickly like a sharp pain that punctuates the season of interminable heat. There is nothing as analytic as a critique in the play, only an unmistakable association of the government with an insufferable condition. That condition is amorphous, however. It merges corrupt state power with decrepit patriarchy and a malformed bourgeoisie, and paints these forces into the stilted spaces of the Romaguera home and patriarch. While Angel is of a class in decline, he also incarnates the general situation of a nation that consumes the very social relations that make for its productivity. Pinera leaves us with this image of the neocolonial family as self-parasitical. The family that could never live together comes home to attend to Ana as she lies dying. Instead of being unified in her death, those who can hear (the middle son Luis is deaf and Angel is nearly so) squabble with each other about the quality of the furniture, where to hold the wake, and who will provide money. As the lights dim, they are talking to themselves, each turned away from the others. The claustrophobia of the petit bourgeois family was also the predicament of Pinera and the other authors of the "teatro de transicion" who were forced to write for themselves without the benefit of an audience. The yearning, implicit in scenic action trapped within the domestic sphere, is for a public sphere yet to be born. This was exactly what the revolution provided, both in terms of a means for theatrical production and a public, and this partnership was forged in the first years of the revolution. The successes of El robo del cochino by Abelardo Estorino (1961) and Santa Camila de la Habana Vie/a by Jose Brene (1962) (which was seen by twenty thousand people in less than one month)61 indicated how much the prospects for Cuban dramaturgy had changed in just a few years. By 1965, attendance at theatrical events surpassed one million annually, more than ten times what it was estimated to be in 1958. Quite clearly, the mediation between theater and public was the state. Batista's National Institute of Culture was replaced by new in-


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stitutions such as the National Theater, formed in June 1959. By the time the National Council of Culture was established (January 4, 1961), some twenty theater groups and nearly a dozen playwrights were receiving state funding. That year the Art Instructors School was created and in 1962 the National Art School at Cubanacan, the former country club, began its program of professionalization with four-year grants to students. By 1963, professional groups were established in the provinces in an effort at decentralization, and the amateur theater movement was launched.62 Yet despite this sudden surge of the revolutionary state's presence in theater, and in culture more generally, there was no reciprocal shift in the output of Cuban dramatists. While new playwrights were bursting on the scene and having their work produced by the parallel explosion of theater groups, the family thematic and the aesthetic expressed in the theater of transition continued. With the assertion of a revolutionary identity, however, family conflict assumed a different significance. Not only were families being divided as those who had sought escape from their declining social condition now abandoned the country, but the need to assert unity and incorporate those who had been socially marginal was keenly felt. These are the twin themes of Estorino's El robo and Brene's Santa Camila, the former, unlike Airefrio, offering participation in the revolution as an option in spite of its wrenching effects on the family, and the latter exploring the possibility of participation for Afrocuban culture as part of a national family. This initial expression of family drama reached its apotheosis in Jose Triana's La noche de los asesinos, much celebrated in and outside Cuba. Teatro Estudio's production won the Casa de las Americas award in 1966 and the play toured internationally. It generated tremendous controversy as a tormented tale of patricide that, with a less specific historical setting than the past, could be interpreted as an assault on the newly established authority. Triana left Cuba, and his work has not been performed there since. La noche de los asesinos presented most forcefully the question of how much the family thematic could now illuminate the historical conjuncture or adequately express the lines of social conflict drawn through the demands of national development. The metaphor of an incarcerating family could be appropriate for those disaffected by the revolution or its development, but this insular focus did not seem in keeping with the orien-

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tation of those who now constituted the theatrical (and political) public in Cuba. As critics such as Boudet, Leal, and Pogolotti have pointed out, the occasion for family drama as an allegory for the revolution was extinguished by the midsixties as the pressure to address problems outside the family asserted itself. The protagonist as witness or outsider had lost its resonance to much larger demands for participation even as these plays were the occasion for the initial explosion of a theatergoing public. Richness of language, precision of character, and depth of dramatic conflict would continue to be the criteria through which much professional theater was evaluated and to which it aspired. Such was the legacy of a century and a half of dramatic literature that now enjoyed adequate support and public appeal. This legacy is broadly discernible in contemporary dramatic output of Pinera and Estorino, as well as such established playwrights as Hector Quintero and Nicolas Dorr and younger writers such as Abilio Estevez.63 At the same time, this disjuncture between dramatic and social structures was felt within the theater community. During these formative times, art was not taken as a representation of life and politics but as a politics itself. The ambiguity in Castro's initial policy toward the intellectuals loaded the question of revolutionary commitment onto that of artistic form and led to a polarization. On the one hand was the critique of formal innovations separated from questions of content (or more properly, artistic practice in relation to its public) and on the other, the use of innovations in form to critique and expand the boundaries of what could be considered morally acceptable within a revolutionary culture. Teatro Estudio, central to what had been up until this point the drama of the revolution, embodied this tension. After a meeting in 1967, Teatro Estudio split between the impulse to reach within the theater and reinvent its form and to extend directly to the public beyond the stage to determine its content. Out of this split came two versions of a vanguardist impulse. The first, calling itself Los Doce and led by Vicente Revuelta, was aesthetic in orientation and incorporated what was occurring in 1968 on European stages into an experimental encounter with Havana audiences. The second, led by Sergio Corrieri, became the basis for Teatro Escambray and would now make social participation determine dramatic content. With this split, Cuban theater had established its own foundations within the revolution.


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The divergence of theatrical paths—between experiments with form on the one hand, and shifts in theater's social role on the other—diminished Teatro Estudio's solitary place in generating new theater. By 1976, the task of institutionalizing and professionalizing theater was taken on by the newly founded Ministry of Culture. That same year, the new constitution institutionalized power at different levels of society by separating the militant popular impulse (organized through the neighborhood-based Organs of Popular Power) and the tasks of administration, which would see leaders who had been selected because of their role in the revolution gradually replaced by those with technical and professional skills.64 The Cuban revolution consummated the enunciation of a theater public in a manner that was distributed across three cultural streams or sources—Afrocuban, popular, and theater of dramatic literature. But publics must continue to be generated if a revolutionary project is to maintain its resonance, and it is to the emerging artists who are most critically engaged with the last of these sources that I shall now turn.

Chapter 6

Cuban Theater under Rectification

As a performance idiom, theater is of necessity always in formation. Yet within that ongoing movement, the emergence of certain currents is detectable. In Cuba, a generation that was born after Batista's flight has come of age and is beginning to perform. The distinctiveness of this next generation lies in the continuities and changes of Cuban life more broadly. Cuba has experienced some remarkable shifts in its cultural climate, with the blessing and even the prodding of the country's top leaders. In the West, it could be said that something of a fable for understanding changes in the socialist world was created in response to the decline of Communist party rule in the East, as if whatever changes could occur under socialism, but especially those related to democracy, were subordinated to some universal trend toward marketization of the economy. Certainly the simple polarization of market and plan to differentiate capitalism and socialism was part of the problem. It is difficult to name a state society of any sort that does not employ market features, and Cuba, with its private farmers and self-employed service sector, is no exception. Nor is a capitalist economy feasible without national and international planning mechanisms, even though the budgetary process and global finance are not referred to in those terms. Rather, it is the market as an absolute horizon, namely, maximizing exchange value as the fundamental principle for organizing society, that animates the fable that was heartily reinvigorated through socialism's decline in the East. Simply put, the fable is that greater cultural diversity and public criticism by artists and intellectuals rest on the introduction of market mechanisms into the economy. Hence 158


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the West is invited to see in socialism what it supposedly knew about itself all along: that a market economy is the only fertile territory in which culture may flourish. The introduction of market mechanisms into planned economies therefore is supposed to indicate that socialist countries have finally seen the light and are becoming like us. It seems to matter very little to this perspective that innovative artistic output was not confined to the Gorbachev reforms; a distinctive and complex history is being denied by the West the many manifestations of socialism in the world. Behind this misrecognition is perhaps the tendency to find at the root of other social contexts a mirror of our own, and this prevents the Western observer from grasping the differences between socialist and capitalist perspectives. What makes Cuba so relevant to this discussion is that it breaks the mirror of market and cultural reform. This is not to say that economic conditions are irrelevant in the Cuban context; on the contrary, they are as critical there as elsewhere. Rather, developments in Cuban theater call into question the simple relation between economy and culture, for what appears to be an autonomy of culture and economy is in fact an integration of the two at a deeper level. It is not that socialist Cuba never experimented with distribution of food and craft products by small, independent producers instead of using centralized economic planning to bring goods to people. Such policies were tried for economic development in the early eighties, along with increased use of external markets (such as reselling subsidized Soviet oil at the full price to other countries). The drop in global oil and sugar prices and the tremendous loss of income that resulted made Cuba acutely aware of a small developing country's vulnerability to market fluctuations. Internally, the growing affluence of the independent farmers and craftspeople generated serious political problems in a country that promised equality for all. Critical reevaluations of the market initiatives also focused attention on the problems such initiatives were intended to correct, such as corruption and inefficiency in certain government offices and the limits of earlier overcentralized economic policies to elicit popular participation in national development. The inadequacy of the market reforms, and the sense that a return to the more centralized status quo of the past was equally untenable, prompted a call for a change of course at the meeting of the Cuban Communist party in 1986. Rec-

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tification became the rubric for the adjustment of problems generated by previous policies. Closing the farmers' markets in this particular incarnation had less effect on supply than was expected, as these markets could be used only to supplement daily diets—although Havana residents I spoke with certainly noticed the difference. Restrictions on the ability of small farmers to sell goods and make profits were not mirrored in official attitudes toward the arts, however. Visual artists and writers had already enjoyed strikingly similar privileges. Painters sold work freely to other Cubans, and dramatists received over one thousand dollars (close to a year's wages for a laborer) when one of their plays was performed. The occupational marginality so familiar to artists in the United States is largely absent in Cuba, providing that one is recognized by the state as a professional artist. Although economic conditions for artists have been favorable, the parameters of artistic expression are now being challenged. These parameters were established in 1961, when Fidel Castro, in his address to writers and artists, proclaimed, "Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing."1 The tolerance for differences in form and content among artists was tested during the 1960s and 1970s, and the lines of who was considered within the revolution were drawn uneasily. Beginning in the early eighties with a group of painters, and then articulated throughout the rest of the decade in the bursts of performance art and graffiti known as action pldstica, in collages that mix high and popular culture, in manifestos and writings, young artists offered a critique of what had perhaps become a tacit formal academicism, a perceived self-censorship of what themes could be broached in their work, and a reexamination of the relation between aesthetic form and political content.2 At the beginning of 1988, Castro again addressed the intellectuals, and, referring to these recent developments in the arts, he stated, "We will no longer be the executioners of this freedom—that would not be socialism. On the contrary: the reason for being of socialism is to maximize human capacity, human possibilities, to elevate as well to the highest grade this freedom to create, not only in form, but also in content."3 At the same meeting, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, the vice president of the Council of State, encouraged critics to fight "official immobility" and added, "although liberalism is dangerous and complacency unacceptable, more dangerous still in the terrain of culture


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and science are intolerance and dogmatism."4 Carlos Aldana, who had then just been appointed to head the party's ideological department (in charge of articulating official positions) said that the premise for this call to action was "a new and qualitatively more fluid relation between the party and the artists and writers, a democratization based in all of cultural life and a true unity of the Cuban intellectual movement."5 Were these encouraging words only that, we might suspect that Cuba's leaders were merely covering tensions between an old and new guard of intellectuals, the latter now institutionalized in the Asociacion de Hermanos Saiz.6 Yet, not only do these pronouncements respond to the seemingly spontaneous emergence of new developments in the arts, they also correspond to shifts in the cultural policy that would promote such developments. In theater, this entails a shift from automatically funding existing and established groups to accepting proposals from emerging artists and funding them as projects for a period of up to five years. The intersection of this cultural policy and emergent Cuban theater is what I will illuminate here. Cultural Developments Though the revolution had not consolidated any particular aesthetic form, cultural policy sought both to tap and to mobilize the substantial energies of artists and the population at large. This occurred within a broader context where an infrastructure for cultural production was erected. Best known because of their international impact are the developments of cinema and of the music industry, but visual and scenic arts made enormous strides as well. The number of large and small halls for theater varied during thirty years: theaters with seating capacity for more than five hundred ranged from ten in 1963 to twenty-one in 1981, then down to sixteen in 1985, and fluctuations in the numbers of halls that seated less than five hundred were of similar magnitude. The number of art galleries increased from under ten in the early sixties to well over one hundred by the end of the eighties. More extensive than either theaters or galleries was the network of community-based cultural institutes, Casas de la Cultura, the site of a very popular amateur movement with over two hundred

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thousand participants and almost three thousand instructors who created events with attendance levels of close to thirty million— higher than for any other cultural activity except cinema (with an attendance level of thirty-two million, down from over fifty million, a level held until the 1980s). Thirty-three of these cultural institutes were initiated in 1975, and within a decade another two hundred were created. Additionally, the number of museums exploded (from seven in 1959 to 231 in 1987), as did the libraries (from thirty-two in 1964 to 328 in 1987). The publishing and distribution of books increased to nearly forty million copies of close to two thousand books in 1987, up from 145,000 copies printed in 1959 (although paper shortages in the early nineties undoubtedly decreased these numbers, leading to the suspended publication of many weeklies and small journals, some of which came to be published outside of Cuba).7 To ensure that professional training met the demands of a burgeoning cultural life and to coordinate the number of aspiring actors with spaces available for them in the groups that existed, a universitylevel arts school, the Institute Superior de Arte (ISA), was part of the program of the Ministry of Culture after its inception in 1975. Graduation from the ISA assured one a career as a professional. Once qualified as such, job security was guaranteed and promotion made possible.8 This professionalization and institutionalization had a marked effect on theater. By the mid-1980s, over fifty professional theater groups were fully funded by the Ministry. Audience draw had increased tenfold since 1958 (from 120,000 a year to 1,239,333 in a country of almost ten and a half million—compared to the 1-2 percent of the population that attends theater in the United States), and most of these people were between sixteen and thirty years of age.9 Even the number of performances given by all groups both at established theaters and at other sites (from factories to open plazas and fields) had increased from 7,121 to 9,617 in the decade between 1975 and 1985.10 By these measures, Cuban theater would seem to be quite healthy, and compared to theater in most other parts of the world, it undoubtedly is. Despite the fact that there was now a firm base in dramatic literature for Cuban theater (by the 1970s, 70 percent of the plays performed were written by Cubans, as opposed to 13 percent before the revolution),11 twin problems of developing


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theater outside of Havana and introducing new faces into the theatrical world remained. The Ministry had attempted to promulgate other groups like Teatro Escambray under the rubric of a Teatro Nuevo movement in the late 1970s, but by the early 1980s these groups, still formed with clusters of Havana-based actors, had disappeared.12 By the late eighties video had begun to eat into the audience for cinemas with the creation of public viewing rooms called solas de video, but many cultural institutions were beginning to see declines in attendance for other reasons. Withdrawal of foreign assistance from the East and continued economic blockade in the West, which both contributed to higher costs of imported goods, placed strains on the national transportation system and increased the time necessary to procure food and other basic needs. Less gasoline, fewer buses, and greater domestic demands made going out after work more challenging. Shortages of raw materials and replacement parts, combined with higher energy costs, diminished the number of cultural installations in service. Yet even with these pressures and global trends, there were more people in attendance at theatrical events in 1989 than in 1980, despite fewer total performances in the existing theaters (1,041,800 people at 2,630 performances in 1980 versus 1,104,200 for 2,339 events in 1989).13 Certainly the material strains were only exacerbated after 1990, but what is interesting about these figures is that they suggest that culture can maintain an appeal in spite of scarcity, and without doubt such possibilities are key to the survivability of socialist Cuba itself. When speaking to Cuban actors and directors or reading the work of critics in the theater journal Tablas, it was apparent that many were concerned about a perceived crisis of direction and momentum for Cuban theater well before the additional burdens of new material strains were felt.14 A recurrent theme in these discussions, published since the early eighties, is the creative prospects for younger theatermakers.15 What is striking is not so much that young people are asking for greater resources and recognition for their own theater but that the government has responded by reorganizing its cultural policy. The changes began to take effect in 1989 with the reorganization of the Ministry of Culture. The five institutes or artistic divisions (books, cinema, visual arts, scenographic arts, and music) were phys-

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ically relocated outside of the Ministry's headquarters and reconstituted as national councils, each with its own building and planning staff. Although the councils are still part of the Ministry's global budget and the monies apportioned to culture were anticipated to remain constant, the development of theatrical policy and allocation of funds became the responsibility of the council of scenographic arts. The council is considered an association of the most eminent members of the performance community, regardless of age. The president of the council, Raquel Revuelta, is the artistic director of Teatro Estudio. She saw the reorganization as supporting the emergence of "new values" so that "groups don't die of statism."16 Marianela Boan, "born in exile in Guatemala" in 1954, is also a member. She distinguished herself as a young choreographer for the national modern dance company Danza Contemporanea, and in 1988 formed a group of her own, Danza Abierta (one of the first groups—called proyectos or projects—to be formed and funded under the reorganization of the Ministry), in which she is seeking to "decodify" her own academic training in an aesthetic expression of the new policy.17 The council includes as well newer critical voices like Vivian Martinez Tabares, the editor of Tobias who views the council as a means to provide a "channel for scenographic creation without shackles of an extra-artistic character" in light of "the hypertrophy of established groups without mobility or possibilities of change, with the application of formulas of mediation and economic stimulation incompatible with the qualitative measures of artistic work, and with the undeniable loss of creativity of much of our best talent."18 This last quotation especially indicates the force of criticism of both official cultural policy and cultural currents being aired publicly in Cuba. The now-perceived overcentralization of artistic resources is being criticized directly by such established voices as Graziella Pogolotti: "The model of the grand production did not encounter adequate sustenance in the existing infrastructure. Converted into grand companies, the theater collectives did not know space of experimentation, they had a slow rhythm of premieres and did not succeed in systematizing the formation of their public."19 In the spring of 1989, the council began accepting proposals from directors to fund projects from one to five years in duration.20 When the initial period of submission was completed in June 1989, over seventy proposals had been submitted to the council in Havana


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alone, and nearly half of those were from figures who had never done professional theater before.21 Many of the practical aspects of the new policy were being developed in the course of its implementation. Clearly, financial resources impose limits on what can be funded, and resources were being cut back as the new policy was being implemented. Fewer groups could be supported than was originally planned. Some projects for emerging groups, however, simply entailed allocation of space for rehearsals and minimal outlays for an initial showing. In other cases the projects involved better use of existing facilities in order to provide access to more groups. Some of the proposals were deemed insufficiently coherent and needed to be reworked and resubmitted, but precise selection criteria would appear to be as elusive and thorny a problem in Cuba as elsewhere in the world. At this point it is easier to trace what the policy departs from than what it will ultimately become, although within two years of the attempted implementation it was apparent that a range of initiatives was possible that would widen the margin between state subsidy and artistic activity. One example is that of Guillermo Horta, a choreographer who had not worked with any of the major dance companies yet has worked independently with a number of groups; he was able to procure a rehearsal space in an abandoned house of Jehovah's Witnesses, and his work has been shown in various theaters. When citizenship carries with it certain substantive rights such as food and shelter, the creation of a margin for artistic expression may be less burdensome to the particular artists involved. In the early eighties, in the midst of Cuba's other experimentations with market mechanisms, a system for increasing the productivity of theater groups was devised that pegged salaries to the number of performances an actor gave per month.22 This system of "norms" was difficult to implement and standardize, and received criticism from many quarters for stressing quantity over quality in the theater. Yet the negative consequences of this and other market experiments during this period only served to foreground the deeper issues of how people could best be served by existing resources and how those resources could in turn be expanded by people. The projects were conceived in this critical environment that sought to shift the emphasis in theatrical production from quantity to quality and, at the same time, open up opportunities beyond the existing professional companies funded and institutionalized by the state.

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In particular, the projects were intended to address the criticism that innovation was being stifled when young energy was channeled exclusively into existing groups without the prospect of building on new ideas encountered at the ISA. The formation of projects by actors without university preparation would also become possible. The projects would not curtail funding for existing groups but attempt to make these more responsive to the use of their resources. Established groups had been internally responsible for allocating their budgets (once an agreement on needs was reached with the Ministry), but the reorganization permits a closer link between monies and other resources like theater space, audience draws, and numbers of performances. Most significantly perhaps, the new policies serve to break down the institutional rigidity of the established groups by creating a registry for all actors. Instead of being a permanent member of a group, actors are selected for a specific project, giving the groups a certain fluidity and a sense of being constantly in formation. This fluidity does not jettison security for actors; their salaries as actors are to be guaranteed for a fixed period of time, after which their status will be reevaluated. Theatrical Openings It is striking how much of the professional theater establishment in Cuba is centered in Havana and, of that, how much of it is connected, now or in the past, through some relation to Teatro Estudio. Even new developments like Teatro Escambray were breaks with it, rather than developments outside of it. The Ministry's attempt to create another theatrical center, in the Teatro Nuevo groups it formed in the late seventies, did not take root. Flora Lauten is an alumna of both efforts. She was a member of Teatro Estudio and Los Doce in the late sixties, a leading actress in Escambray's acclaimed La vtirina in 1971, and a director of a Teatro Nuevo group in La YaYa in the late seventies. She returned to Havana and in 1980 became an instructor at the ISA. By that time the first class of actors had already graduated and grumblings of discontent at serving time in regional groups were finding their way back to a younger cohort. The class of 1985 staged The Little Prince under Lauten's direction as its graduation project. The production met with sue-


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cess and, in an unprecedented move, the actors remained with the director the following year to form the company Teatro Buendia, named after the eternal family in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Lauten was able to parlay her professional esteem into a budget and building. A new generational satellite had been set into orbit. Lauten's use of collective discussion during rehearsal might be found in other groups, though I saw nothing like this in the rehearsals I witnessed of a half-dozen other companies. Projects like Galdpago (1984), written by one of her students, Salvador Lemis, and directed by Buendia actress Nelda Castillo, and the rapidity with which directors have left the group for independent projects (Orestes Perez's production of Carmen Duarte's play Carolina deAlto Songo in 1988 is one example) display the seriousness of Buendia's commitment to developing young talent. Buendia's concern with youth is not limited to the acting profession. The theater space of the group, a converted church in a neighborhood crowded by new housing projects and young people with little space within and few social outlets beyond the home, contains both a theater and a cafe. The theme of family crisis is not an unusual metaphor for civil war—recall its prominence in the plays of the fifties and sixties—but the multiplication of its meaning in a concern for the future of a now-established, but by no means certain, revolution can be found in many quarters of Cuban culture. Buendia's contribution is Lila, la mariposa (1986), a much transformed revival of a 1954 play by Rolando Ferrer.23 Ferrer's original version focuses on the plight of a fragile and lonely woman named Lila who is the owner of a dress shop called La Mariposa (The butterfly). The shop takes its name from a book of poems written for Lila twenty-five years before by her first love, who saw in her a creature that flitted around the light of its desire without ever being able to touch it. Yet he was no more able to maintain a relationship with Lila than his career as a poet, and he left her with only the fading lines of poetry that she preserves in a box. She marries another man, but their love too is unfulfilled. He takes to the streets and then to the sea. Marino, their son, is the remnant of this relationship. Lila's shop sits on the broad Havana avenue, El Malecon, that faces the sea, but she does all that she can to deny that proximity. The doors and windows are kept shut to exclude the sights and sounds of vice and delight from the neighboring port. She is jealous

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of the world outside that has stolen her lovers and she is an enemy of the passage of time, both past and present, that might remind her of her loss. These fears, her isolation, have made her nervous and subject to sporadic attacks. They have also rendered her entirely protective of her last worldly resource, her son Marino. Marino's proclivities are to join his friends by the sea, and Lila is forever calling him back, denying him an outlet. She depends on his youth to be reminded of her own. "He's thirteen, but for me he's only five," she says early in the play. It turns out that Lila has hidden his real age from him; Marino discovers through his aunt, Hortensia, who actually runs the shop, that he is really fifteen, and that his mother wanted to forestall the arrival of his independence by depriving him of an accurate picture of his history. When Lila realizes that this truth will mean her son's imminent departure, she goes into her room and drives a newly sharpened scissors, which Hortensia had been looking for in the previous scene, into her chest. A wake is held in the shop to mourn and speculate over the loss of this caged butterfly. Buendia's version of Lila, la manposa, reorders the play substantially. The original outcome of the play, Lila's funeral, now serves as a prologue to each of the two acts. A chorus of three employees of La Mariposa, ephemeral Yoruba goddesses that commented from upstage in the original production, is now brought downstage to announce and instigate the action. Dressed in black gowns, hats, and veils, they tell of Lila's death by her own hand. Lila's "corpse" lies upstage where the church altar once stood. A somber procession of Lila's neighbors enters from behind the audience, their sobs and whimpers building in intensity as they reach the bier and begin to circle around it. The neighbors pay their tributes and make their speculations on the causes of Lila's death. They depart and leave the enshrouded corpse. With this tragedy as a backdrop, the first act, set in the prerevolutionary 1950s, opens with the three seamstresses of the shop bantering with Hortensia over their work. Hortensia leaves them with an important project, but they instead orchestrate one of the many dreamlike sequences that finds Lila under the spell of her private world. The three move downstage and mime the actions of a phonograph. Lila enters alone and clutches the radio upstage, to which she is habituated. The seamstresses now become radio announcers, but they are no more content with or serious about this job than they


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were as seamstresses. Cuba of the fifties was permeated with radio and television, symbols of its apparent modernity and proximity to North American culture. The three enact current radio jingles and fragments of radio dramas familiar to the audience. Lila is drawn into the programs, listening, then mimicking and then dialoging with them as if they were her own unconscious. At a certain point, one seamstress-announcer becomes fed up with what another is singing and says, "If I hear that song again, I'm going to kill myself. It's so awful." Lila begins to repeat this line mindlessly. Lacking a will of her own, the radio designs her actions and plants in her the necessity of suicide without any intention. Each time she turns to end the melodrama, the world beyond her media-filled cave intervenes as a character spills in from the street. The suspense only inflates her romantic swooning. The poet who gave Lila her name in verse has returned for a surprise visit and, after refreshing her nostalgia for her days of true art, leaves just as suddenly. Lila is left swooning for her gentleman caller, but she really pines for her own son Marino, who is out cavorting with his young love, Adelfa, and her brother Capitan, his best friend. The three run, chasing each other to exhaustion, and fall in a heap together. When Marino finally returns to his mother's call, she embraces him voraciously. Marino leaves and returns, only to interrupt his mother once again from her inevitable demise with the scissors. One of the three seamstresses steals off with the scissors and plants it in the audience. When Hortensia searches for it to safeguard it from Lila, the audience is implicated as an accomplice in the crime. The weapon is demanded by the actors and taken by Lila, who exits with it and ends the suspense of when her death will come. With that ending, the first act comes to a close. Although the radio sequences have been inserted by director Flora Lauten, the first act is essentially true to the period in which it was written. A hint of irony is added to the melodrama by the youthful cast members, who literally could have been wearing their parents' clothes. The lilting flute and guitar music performed by the company's band throughout the first act is perhaps too serious to be taken seriously. One is probably willing to see this as a conventional fifties melodrama until the suspended disbelief is burst asunder by the second act. The band members take up saxophone, electric guitar, synthesizer, and drums, and begin a scintillating samba. The funeral proces-

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sion returns, this time as farce. The three seamstresses enter in revealing blue sequined costumes and high heels, and sing Lila's saga into microphones to the samba beat. Lila herself, up from the bier and dressed in full cabaret regalia, takes the first dance solo and the mourners follow. Drinks are served, the dancing continues as Lila moves from partner to partner, and the entire cast builds to a unison song celebrating Lila's eternity. The shift from melodrama to cabaret, which is sustained throughout the entire second act, brings with it a change in the protagonist. Lila is never left alone by her friends, and the play becomes Marino's story. Initially he is quite alone. In striped T-shirt and shorts, he is a little boy in a grown-up world that pays him no attention. He cannot pierce the din of the cabaret to communicate with his mother, nor can he clarify for himself whether to leave home and, if so, where to go. He searches for Adelfa, using the romantic guitar music as a siren call. Instead of his finding an other, however, the actress who had played Adelfa comes onstage dressed as Marino, and he is doubled. Together, they attempt to interrupt the cabaret music with their own earnest and romantic songs. Gradually, more and more of the cast changes into Marino and asks his questions: "Who am I? Am I alone?" The cabaret continues carelessly until the original Marino stops the action and declares: "No one has answered my question." The remainder of the cast joins the Marines as they enter the audience with the myriad queries from their own daily life: "Why should I stay at home? What must I do to become a man? Why do I need to work? Why don't I like the sea as much as I used to?" These questions are pursued with the audience as the performance breaks up into less formal conversation. The crossing of narratives in the second act shifts the play's historical locus from the prerevolutionary 1950s to the Cuban present. The mix of theatrical styles, bawdy cabaret, and earnest romance speaks as well to the breakup of a singular voice that could represent the direction and intent of the revolution. It is an interesting twist that the earnest romance of the youthful Marines attacks the kitsch surface of the parental cabaret in the second act, for this romantic mode represented Lila's prerevolutionary generation in the first act of the play. The Marines too take up this search for meaning, but with an active outward focus in contrast to Lila's passive reception and waiting. Cuban cabaret, of Tropicana fame, was also a child of the fifties, but per-


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sists today as both a touristic and a popular entertainment that contains elements of the music and dance ofcarnaval. The availability of cabaret to the entire Cuban community (everyone in Lila's neighborhood) signals public access to what in the past had been a privileged domain. Yet, at the same time, the intense entertainment of Cabaret does not provide an arena where new social problems can be considered and thus excludes Marino in his quest for a music that can express his particular identity. The complexity of the present in the second act consists of the juxtaposition of elements that have persisted from the past with lost forms that must be redefined and reinfused with meaning. Generational differences are convenient symbols for divergent historical moments that may introduce a new voicing that carries a distinct perspective. Lila's tragic romance indicates her loss of historical agency; her dependence on the dominant culture of the radio replaces her own capacity to consciously direct her life just as the 1950s petit bourgeoisie would no longer be able to project aspirations for Cuba's future. The thrust of the Marines' collective romantic voice is to introduce the problem of agency or conscious change after the revolution has been won. That the Marines feel excluded from the victory celebration of the death of the old Lila, of her past, demonstrates above all else that the victory cannot be taken for granted, nor can its meaning be assumed. The second act does not resolve the tension of voices, but rather represents that uncertainty of future as an indelible part of the present and, at the end of the play, makes its public, who will inherit that future, part of the dialogue. This production both acknowledges the history of Cuban national dramaturgy in its struggle for independence in the fifties as the firmament from which a future theater will arise, and recognizes the persistence of an almost paternalistic concern with the social dislocation of youth. The problem of where to go is but a symptom of the question of where a developing nation should be going. The demand for physical and cultural space to meditate on this problem is profound. Buendia is not the only group to recognize the need. Across town in the old section of Havana, where narrow streets yield to the play of children and the winsome dreams of youth, the question of finding a room of one's own is no less acute. A converted cinema housed Teatro Verdun, where the Teatro Arte Popular was in residence under the artistic direction of Eugenio Hernandez Espi-

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nosa, author of a number of plays, such as Maria Antonia (1967), Odebi el Cazador (1982), and Obdy Shango (1983), that employ features of Afrocuban culture.24 The same year that Buendia established its project (1987), Espinosa embarked on his, which (like the former's theater cafe) was active for about a year and then closed for refurbishing. Unlike other spaces that are the venue for a particular company, Verdun was also the conduit for unknown performers. Weekdays allowed young experimental performers (actors, musicians, and poets) to present work without the sanction or surveillance of the Ministry, and Saturday nights afforded a mixing ground for young people and culture. Hernandez, in direct reference to rectification, said that such flexibility would not have been possible even one year earlier. Though a resource encounters a demand, there was little evidence of a market mechanism here. In the latenight sessions, no money changed hands, nor were cultural prices set on what was seen. Performers and spectators came and went, sharing equipment, praise, conversation, and a sense that something was theirs. The need to experience oneself as continuing to define the process of social change, when the language of revolution places such emphasis on renovation, is important to appreciate. Indeed, an available space where activities are not preprogrammed or planned has special significance in a culture where planning is accepted as a rational means for allocating scarcities of all sorts. Although the past three decades have seen periods where material scarcities intensify and relax, the presumption of stable means of allocation has been continuous. Surprisingly, the response to these conditions by many young actors is not that of the experience of scarcity per se, but of the limits of certainty to artistic production. With the certainties of planning come a feeling of security, an expectation that no one will starve, or go without shelter or health care. The fact that a generation accepts these battles as won only shifts the demand to what people want to attain with their lives. The luxury of uncertainty, of time unplanned, of resources expended without maximizing rationality are all values that express the situation under which many people came of age. This helps explain the glow of young faces in Teatro Verdun at two in the morning when others still out on the town would likely be quite intoxicated. It also situates the work of a young director, Victor Varela, who claimed that in Cuba "people are dying of security."25


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Varela is not a product of existing theatrical institutions; rather, he is a response to them. When he formed his group, which came to be known as Teatro Obstaculo (Obstacle theater), in 1987, it was distinctive in that it had professional intentions without state support. The group survived on its own resources until mid-1989, when it became one of the first beneficiaries of the new policy of the projects, or proyectos. His group was allocated an abandoned Masonic Lodge, one of the few active voluntary associations of the Cuban business sector before the revolution and one of the sites of insurrectionary planning during the nineteenth century. Varela, sensitive to the risks of security, nonetheless believed that state support would not compromise his creative and critical expression. The observations reported here were made in the summer of 1988, before he was given such a status. At that time, he had been training and preparing a work with five actors, who, like him, were born in the decade after the revolution: Alcibiades Zaldivar Alvarez, Tania Goto Hernandez, Barbara Barrientos Nunez, Alexis Gonzalez Diaz de Villegas, and Julio Mazorra Perez. One was working in a bank, another taught theater in a school, and the others were supported by family and friends. In a theatrical and quotidian culture where words come easily, this work, called La cuana pared (The fourth wall) (1988), eschews a literary foundation for a physical one. This type of break is familiar in world theater and had an appearance in that fissional moment in Cuba twenty years ago. But when Vicente Revuelta led Los Doce to boycott an overly circumscribed medium found in dramatic form and literature, it was a hiatus within the center of Cuban theater. Revuelta had the material and cultural resources to make such explorations without jeopardizing his artistic stature. Where public space overlaps with the state and materials for the theater are found by a special government enterprise, alternatives begin with the negation of these provisions. Varela made and mounted the piece in one of the two rooms in his apartment. His materials for costumes and scenography are the discarded gauze and styrofoam packaging from the quintessence of public security in Cuba, health care. These acts of foraging and burrowing create a private domain, a dark cocoon, where privacy can be jointly introduced by actors and those in attendance. The public does not peer through or even pierce the fourth wall—but in fact constructs it, and by so doing completes a cube that contains the per-

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formed event. La cuana pared was performed many times in the director's house before its two-month run in the National Theater. The house visits were by invitation and assume a network that knows neither supply and demand nor plan. My visit came on June 26, 1988. Seven of us wait outside Varela's house for the sun to go down and the sky to darken. The audience is not arbitrary or distant from the theater: Vicente Revuelta is here, and Helmo Hernandez, son of the current director of Teatro Cubano de Acero. The lighting designer, Alejandro Ferrera, leads us into the courtyard of what was reputed to be one of the first and finest houses in the culturally rich Vedado section of Havana. The house has been reconditioned with plaster squared to cover its stately columns and ornate facade. We proceed to the interior corner of the courtyard, where a line of drying laundry greets us. Varela's apartment is entirely dark and we are literally handed to him one at a time and placed into our seats. I am seated in the corner of a wicker couch, completely disoriented in the space of a few steps. I sit perpendicular to the performance space until I get my bearings by adjusting to the image of Varela standing quite still in the archway opening to the living-room-as-theater. He passes behind us, shuts the door, and the darkness deepens. Denser still is the impression of a figure that shuffles across the opening that divides audience and performers. We are cut into the wall, imbricated in it, material witness to what the performers will try to reach through. The first change in the lighting was my own eyes' adjustment. Slowly, the aperture of the senses adjusts to the weight of the dark forms, groans and whimpers that comprise the barely perceptible beginning of the piece. The ears open wider than the eyes, and by the time sight enters fully, smell accompanies the already-wet bodies. This first fully visible image reveals five actors who lie in a line, head in groin, heaving and contracting with great tension and difficulty. Their bodies are clothed in dull white cotton loosely hung to reveal shimmering flesh. Their faces are also caked in white, and their feet appear horribly distended in socks stuffed with styrofoam that crinkles when they move. They stop and sit up with doll stares, and a single flashlight passes slowly over their faces. They slap themselves against the hard tile floor and collide into each others' bodies as they gradually get up off the floor. One actor becomes a target for another; with eyes closed, she suffers in silence as he continually


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crashes into her. The piece, which spans over two hours, is made up of many short physical events or activities that the actors perform on one another's bodies. Many are repeated diligently until transformed into something else. For example, two men approach each other throwing a soccer ball against the other's chest until they are too close to throw it any longer. They press their chests into the ball, roll it into their mouths, and begin to revolve around each other and through the room. Except for the smooth patterned tile floor, the walls of the tiny performance space are all covered with the same hospital gauze that drapes the actors' bodies. Styrofoam orbs of various sizes press through the otherwise flat surfaces of the walls. The ceiling is more complex. It is composed of clusters of styrofoam packing material that are periodically punctured by the actors and blizzard down on them, sticking to their bodies and accumulating on the polished floor of red ceramic tiles. The various apparatuses that have kept this plastic snow in place (wooden frames and plastic bags, along with other styrofoam objects) dangle from the ceiling like a self-creating mobile. The first bag that is punctured covers a trio upstage and brings them to rest, while a duo struggles over an empty suitcase downstage until one folds himself inside of it. His partner joins him there and they begin one of the various encounters in the piece that loosely weaves sexuality and violence. Her initially soothing caresses to his leg that break his isolation within the suitcase turn to rather staccato attacks with her hand that leave his flesh reddened. The three that had lain in stasis upstage then begin to heave, and the mound of styrofoam that enshrouds them undulates. They wrap into one another with an elastic band, like an umbilical cord around their waist, and begin to rebound off each other through the space. An antique doll, naked and with a glassy cherubic face that bears a remarkable resemblance to the state of the actors, is used by an actress to mimic her own movements. The aural environment is punctuated by sounds from the street or by the flushing of a toilet in the neighboring apartment. These interruptions are noticed only intermittently and invariably seem well timed. In addition, a pastiche of recorded music periodically silences the nonverbal sounds that usher forth from the actors. Some vintage electronic music comes on as the actress loses interest in the doll and attempts to pull the person sitting next to me into the performance

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space. She withdraws without the audience member, and the white light suddenly changes to red as the five actors stare across the "fourth wall." They make masks of their costume material and probe at the public. A blue light comes on to Mozart's Requiem, and the actors remove their masks and the rest of their garments. They stand naked and close together, yet just as isolated from one another as they had been when in physical contact, and move slowly toward the public. Now standing, now squatting, they give great depth to the enclosed space. They stand right at the threshold of the imaginary "fourth wall," peering through it as if looking for someone that probably wasn't there. Their looks yield to reaches. Touches to the face, the hands, the shoulders of those in attendance. A light from behind the actors seems to demand their return, and they withdraw. It fades and the room resumes its original darkness. When the accumulation of the actors' unfulfilled intimacies has finally passed and they remove their meager coverings to press their bodies into the human fourth wall, for one watching the piece there is a quiet exhaustion, a laying to rest of verbal accounts, a privacy shared collectively. There is no singular protagonist to carry this experience on, nor is there a faceless body to cover it. The rawness of healing wounds, still susceptible to infection and therefore influence, is the sensation that ebbs more slowly than the body cools after leaving Victor Varela's house. The ghosts of realism weigh heavily on much Cuban performance, yet these spirits are often grotesquely misplaced on the culture of a much warmer psychology. What for other Cuban performers might be unintended parody—that is, the crying and suffering effected by the dancers and actors of other stages—is here turned most cruelly against itself and into a form of honesty. The slaps and bodily collisions that permeate La cuana pared are not abstracted into pure motion: they remain activities. The conviction that propels this repetition of gestures frees their empty meaning from the fullness of the body, and this latter force applies a direct and discomforting pressure to the public's senses. The performers are patient yet deliberate in their self-effacement. It is perhaps when terror is farthest from people's minds that these insidious revelations are so disquieting. The interesting problem is the cultural conjuncture that gives this type of performance its impact—not the proliferation of theater groups that would situate it within a broader movement.


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It might be easy to see in La cuarta pared a yearning for the intimacy of some universal possessive individualism in a culture where all experience is claimed for the public sphere. Yet the opposition of public and private is neither as clear nor as distinct in Cuba as it might be in the United States. True, there is a housing shortage in Havana, and many young people get married in order to secure their own apartment. These spaces, however, become the very centers for social activity as the familial ties are reconstructed among close groups of friends. Without the income or the goods, it is very difficult to construct an identity around consumption (this is one reason why the prices for cultural activities are subsidized to remain so low). In Varela's terms, the security of food, housing, employment, medical care, and social welfare is so certain in Cuba as to be suffocating, and he is searching for something less predictable than the staples of life. Yet paradoxically, this security and certainty exist within conditions of material scarcity. Cuba is not a wealthy nation, and for three decades it received significant amounts of foreign assistance. La cuarta pared introduces uncertainty within the limits of scarcity, but this should not be misinterpreted as an embrace of a market logic. Such a logic would dictate that if demand exhausts supply, many would go without goods or services; hence scarcity introduces the uncertainty of survival. The limits and scarcities here are of the material of the body, not some external materiality of objects; it is a problem of the production of activities, not the consumption of leisure time. In turn, the uncertainty comes not in how much time will pass before the acquisition of a preestablished goal is possible (like saving for a car that may not be affordable until this week or the next), but in not knowing what the outcome will be of one's attempts at expression. The problem of the private sphere in Cuba therefore appears to be one of production, not consumption, one not neatly reduced to an individual's needs met through encounters with the market. This is not to say that Cubans are any less interested than their relatives in Miami are in improving the quality of their television set or upgrading their refrigerator, that they would not like to eat meat more frequently or buy a car (even when gasoline was available). But if these things define freedom and aspirations to it in the West, the socialist version may be both more subtle and more ambitious.

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With that ambition comes a sensitivity to the tensions between unbridled desire to occupy a historical place and an awareness of how that might displace others. As with Buendia's Lila this tension suggests a revision of the genre of Cuban family drama. Carmen Duarte, born in 1959, had already written a half-dozen plays after graduating from the ISA in 1982 when her (Cudnto me das, marinero? (How much will you give me, sailor?) was performed in 1989 by the group Luminar that she directs at the University of Havana. The play is an encounter between a young suicidal poet, Ana, and an old woman of bourgeois extraction, Celina, who fishes daily in a small boat to feed her family, which now consists only of her faithful dog. Although intending death, Ana is terrified by sharks and is rescued from the sea by Celina. Once in the boat she demands of the old woman some insight into where they are headed: 'Are you taking me to hell or paradise?" But Celina has a hard time getting Ana to do any rowing, and chides her for her presumption that somebody else will deliver her to her destiny: "Youth figure they deserve everything." Celina equates Ana's status as artist with her own—not a class, but a "new noble caste" whose privileges are inherited. Ana at first resists any intimation of identity with the toothless sage, but then comes to see her artfulness once she grasps their shared context, a sea without depth that denies profound exploration and refuses to provide nourishment. "This was my sea of fish \pargos] that now is infected by sharks that still have in their mouths the warm blood of the most beautiful beings in the sea. It's a horrible crime." The "boat" in the production in a large and steamy lecture hall was a wheelchair, and the performers were doubtless having an initial encounter with acting, which further condensed the textual references in the play. Nonetheless, Duarte's work was received with much critical interest and was published within a year after the performance.26 Theater on the Verge of Popular Culture In 1990, the National Theater, the large modern complex that faces one edge of the immense Plaza de la Revolucion, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. The Cuban government is big on anniversaries, self-conscious as it is of the accomplishment of its continued survival in a hostile world, of the new measure of temporality initiated with


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the revolution that is not adequately reflected by noting the date, and keen as it is to host an occasion of celebration. Such an occasion might suggest a play of epic inflection mounted by those who had seen the theater through its past three decades, but this was not the case. Rather, the selection was something more lyrical, but not predictably so, and the group of artists who came together for the project did so for the first time under a director who had never seen his work performed before. The selection of the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (actually part of a trilogy produced for the event that also included A Streetcar Named Desire and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy} does have historical significance. On the eve of the revolution when the development of national culture was frustrated, plays by North American authors, Williams and O'Neill in particular, were favored by Cuban audiences. By the summer of 1990, the withdrawal of Soviet and East European support was already strongly felt in Cuba. The rubric of rectification had to accommodate itself to that of what the government called the "special period" of adjustment to diminished goods and services that were dependent on foreign inputs. Despite these material deficiencies, theproyectos continued apace. Exclusive of salaries, their entire budget was 14,000 pesos. This could go a long way if the technical requirements of production were kept to a minimum. For example, Jose Milian, a director with long experience in musical theater, had done a send-up of the opera Carmen called Para matar a Carmen during the same period for 170 pesos in a small theater-cafe. The budget for the trilogy of plays that included Glass Menagerie was 6,000 pesos and came from the resources of the National Theater, whose funds are allocated separately from those of the proyectos. This figure is certainly modest by Western standards but represents a significant investment for support of emerging artists engaged in their first project. An administrator of the National Theater told me that this was exactly what they intended to do with the money. Despite such prodigious support, the preparations did not proceed without complications. The actors, who were all under contract to other groups, had to be temporarily released from these obligations. This kind of fluidity between groups was a departure from the emphasis on stable repertory collectives that had been the goal of Cuban "art theater" since the thirties. Because the group was not es-

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tablished, it had no rehearsal space of its own and was accommodated in a basement area of the National Theater that had once been a cafe and now was the theater employees' lunchroom. The nudity that was to be part of the performance was considered controversial enough to generate rumors of intervention, but ultimately the controversy did not alter the director's plans for the production. The props and scenic objects were numerous and had to be procured through various means: negotiation with the Institute of Cinema for vintage objects from the fifties, candle stands borrowed from a church, balloons available only at the diplomatic store. No theatrical production is without its share of uncertainties and complexities in Cuba or elsewhere, but the challenges of a noninstitutional theater group in the heart of a national theater institution poses these challenges most strongly. The play opened to a full house and critical acclaim in the smaller of the National Theater's two halls, Sala Covarrubias (named after the creator of the nineteenth-century negrito), and there were lines for subsequent performances. In the darkened theater, the bracing strains of the theme music of Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark goes on beyond the length needed for aural recognition, long enough perhaps to display invisible credits or give the audience the impression of having just finished seeing a movie. Proximities to cinema, to popular culture more broadly, and to North American influences in particular are more than thematic elements in this production; they appear to animate the performance itself. An enormous image of a man is slowly illuminated in the place where a movie screen might be. Those familiar with the original play by Williams will recognize the image as the fifth, absent "character" Tom describes in his opening monologue, the picture of his long-departed father over the mantel. The backcloth is in actuality a painting of a projected photograph by Consuelo Casteneda and possesses the grainy texture associated with an older mode of mechanical reproduction. The bulk of the canvas is a military uniform emblazoned with medals, some, it turns out, decorations from the Cuban Communist party. Crowning the metallic breast is a head with strong jaw and lips that appear to have been recently satisfied by speech. The image stops at the eyes, as if this father had powers of supervision not reducible to or representable by any set of organs. The figure then would seem to stand above the stage looking down with eyes unseen on a public that gazes upon him. Yet this sim-


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ulacrum of surveillance is punctured by a relatively diminutive original that stands beneath the copied image. In this production he is called el viajero (the traveler) and makes his periodic and brief entrances and exits on roller skates. The original of the simulation of unseen power happens to be the photographer for the trilogy, whose own promotional images of the play that displayed what was considered ambiguous sexuality were at times torn off walls and posts of Havana where they had been placed in an unusual display of selfpromotion. The actor, photographer, and referent for the image, Gonzalo Hernandez, is silent throughout the play. His principal gesture is to mime a wave as if captured in a pixilated or single-frame series within a cinematic projection introducing a physical grammar shared by other characters in the play of a now-past film technology or a movement of time too fast to be captured on film. The viajero's mimetic waving accompanies the absent father's (of Williams' text) only correspondence to the family he has abandoned, the words "Hello-Goodbye" on a postcard from Mexico (where no small number of contemporary Cuban artists, including the painter of the backdrop, can not infrequently be found). The anxiety of abandonment (and abandono is the word that is used to describe those Cubans who have left the country) here doubles with the presence of an absent authority posed to watch but without eyes to see, and a minor or more properly supplemental character in the play whose comings and goings accompany the plot without having any apparent impact upon it. The scene prepared in the distance between the image of authority upstage and the rolling referent onstage is of rather ambiguous relations of power where authority is less ominous, fixed, and immutable than it appears, and hence more license can be taken in this space than might have been realized. This production of Glass Menagerie introduces an economy of visual excess, of hyperactivity beyond what the script demands, and of a cinematization of theater that effaces the boundaries between cultural representation and enactment. Like the budget for the production, this largesse may be modest because it does not do violence to other cultural possibilities. This visual excess invites historical reflection on scenic terms that are more whimsical than those allowed by epic theater. Perhaps the reminder that there is no singular voice in the narration of history attains its greatest significance when partici-

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pation most needs to be mobilized. In this regard, many of Tom's monologues, which cast the play as his story, have been pared down or removed. De-emphasizing Tom's protagonistic and narrative role frees the action from being a retrospective of his own psychology; rather, the responsibility for narration and activity has been dispersed among the characters and externalized into the scenic space itself. After the musical prologue and the first light on the image and referent begins to illuminate the rest of the stage, the audience sees Tom and his sister Laura standing on their two beds with lace hoods placed stage left and right. Two lines of silver shoes, Tom's work world from the warehouse brought home, run down the length of the stage. Brother and sister are dressed in infant clothes, bonnets, and porcelainesque masks of pink and blue. They repeat a series of angular, mechanical gestures that suggest their cinematic importation from some distant screening. At this point, the two siblings remain mute while a voice-over that mixes characters gives a version of Tom's opening monologue. Amanda Wingfield appears upstage standing in a bathtub wearing a kimono over a satin bodice. Her children carry on their frenzied kinetic activities, blithely ignoring her until she addresses them directly (they sing responses of "Si, mama") or until they have some need of her. The first instance of need is their nursing at her breast as she spins her tales of past admirers, but the mother seems to ignore her children's presence as much as they had hers. The children then proceed to fight for a microphone through which to claim their mother's attention, but this too seems to have no effect. The actors are like strips of celluloid layered across the stage. Emotions alternate as mechanically as their gestures are danced without apparent reference to what they say. Even when Tom and Laura momentarily flash the audience it seems more a quotation of nudity than an instance of self-revelation. The most effusive pastiche is musical. Bits and pieces of movie music pack the air. The swoon of a Cuban bolero singer from the 1940s is followed by a snippet of the march from Bridge over the River Kwai. Fifties rock segues into "I Wish I Were in Dixie." If the play opens with the promise of adventure that only travel to exotic places can provide, with the theme music associated with Indiana Jones, the first act concludes with the Wingfield family huddled nobly together while the cloying chorus of Gone with the Wind seems to


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mock the inveterate Southerner—namely, Williams himself—who, even from his relocated cosmopolitan base in New York, could never leave "home" or, at least, wrest it from his imagination. The irony of being stuck in an imaginary home composed of imported images while anxious over those who have abandoned this dreamscape is but one of the critical inversions enacted in this production. Like the doubling of the image of the absent father with the presence of the supplemental traveler, the abundance of cinematic references seems to disarm the exceptional appeal of escape to fantasy that going to the movies seemed to imply in the original context of the play. Going to the movies might have been a plausible escape for the original character Tom Wingfield in a play set in the thirties, written, as Williams tells us in Tom's voice, "when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind,"27 but cinema could not provide such an escape for a Cuban who had grown up with the revolution. Movies were abundant, cheap, and multinational. Armando Correa, who adapted The Glass Menagerie for this production, told me that when he visited New York for the first time and walked its streets incessantly, everything looked familiar to him; he had already gained visual recognition of the grand icons and the infamous marginalities through thirty years of movies. Although Williams in the original scripted version had planned to project images on screens to "strengthen the effect of what is merely allusion in the writing and allow the primary point to be made more simply and lightly than if the entire responsibility were on the spoken lines,"28 the device was not employed. Carlos Diaz, director of the trilogy, had also hoped to project bits of old Hollywood films on the stage, but access to the film clips proved difficult. Williams thought visual images would simplify the meaning of his words for an audience he feared had a "lack of attention"29 for his work, but the allusion to cinematic visuality, indeed to the entire cinematic field that this production represented on stage, could only add complexity for an audience as multiliterate in forms of global popular culture as contemporary Cubans are. The implosion of fantasy thus denies it any instrumental relation to activity, as, for example, the myth of greener pastures might imply. This is not to say that the world's largest concentration of capital lying slightly to the north has not divided the Cuban population with an altogether real alternative to their lives (though clearly nothing like free choice governs

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this alternative) but rather that alternative is actual, not fantastical or Utopian. The cinematization of Glass Menagerie's scenic space in this production attempts to shift the Utopian energies of that elsewhere back into the actual quotidian culture of its audience, one that is certainly overdetermined by influences beyond Cuba. The first act of the original text of Glass Menagerie establishes not only the characters in the Wingfield family but also an air of tragic expectation. It should already be apparent that the manifold cinematic surfaces of this Cuban production interfere with the displaced identification with a protagonist constitutive of conventional tragedy. These cinematic surfaces approximate more the conventions of melodrama in which the deep psychology of the protagonist is substituted for a field of prearticulated emotions that actors fulfill. This is at least consistent with Michael Chanan's reading of melodrama in Latin American film: "In the imitation of the star system that developed in Latin America, however, the personality of the actor was sacrificed to the abstractions of the genre. The result—to return to the Cubans' analysis—was that relationships between the characters on the screen reduced reality to a series of artificial cause-and-effect mechanisms."30 It is against this imposed artifice, now part of the fabric of Cuban popular culture, that characters in this production of Glass Menagerie act, and in such a way as to enable a resistance both to the passive fatalism of Williams's tragic narrative and to the predetermined responses of melodramatic stylistics without re-creating the heroic figure of the revolutionary epic. The character in which this resistance is most apparent is Laura, who, as a woman who dares not desire, is transformed into a desiring machine. If Williams's Laura must hide her shameful defect, her contemporary Cuban counterpart, played by Maria Elena Diardes, wears hers quite visibly. A cumbersome orthopedic brace is strapped to her calf for much of the performance. It is equipped with bells that jingle during her many frenzied dances; we recall that dancing is something she is loathe to do with her gentleman caller in the original version. When he arrives at the beginning of act 2, Jim too wears an orthopedic brace, though his "flaw" appears to be his ungoverned sexuality, specifically his desire for Tom expressed through a series of courtship dances, rather than an interest in the conquest of Laura's shame. Jim enters the Wingfield house dressed as a pirate with painted lips and a patch over one eye. The prize cup he won in high


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school for debate is chained to his wrist and now used for drinking. In Cuba today, "pirate" is a term applied to the freelance taxi drivers or boteros who ply city streets and interurban routes in enormous Cadillacs and Buicks —many of the same vintage as the play. Riding in the backseat, pressed against four other bodies, of these "private" cars through the streets of former shopping districts with moderne buildings and neon signs visually frozen in the fifties can itself be a cinematic experience. Jim may have called to fulfill Tom's desires— and he does give away his magnificent pirate's hat when Tom comes on stage in huge silver shoes shaped as boats to confess that he is leaving his family for the "merchant marine" (a line that gets a hearty laugh from the audience) but Laura is the one who makes use of the pirate. As the familiar lines of the play, which remain intact, have Jim basking in Laura's admiration, she avails herself of Jim's services in an extended and very physical seduction. At first the two converse in nontouching mechanical gestures, but Laura breaks with the polite exchange and strips off her long evening gown to continue their conversation in an alluring black sequined cabaret costume. Twin trapezes have been lowered for this moment; her brace does not impede her acrobatics, and Jim struggles to keep up with her on his own trapeze. When Laura is finished with her romp on the trapeze, she takes him to her bed and has him remove the mark of her presumed vulnerability. She tries out several positions on him, including standing on his shoulders while she delights in her fetish of glass objects. She leads him back downstage and undresses the pirate and herself. Naked, she presses into him while he pretends to teach her to dance, reminding her not to be rigid. She takes pleasure from his rigidity only to have him fall on her prized unicorn and break it. She assures him she has no favorites, and he responds to her equanimity by saying he is glad to be able to help in "constructing democracy" (this line was inserted into Williams's text). Laura takes Jim back to the other bed upstage for a further romp. He humps the air while she appears suddenly to lose interest in him, making his subsequent confession of being engaged to another woman something of an absurdity. As he stumbles through these lines, Laura, with hardly a glance toward him, bathes him, dresses him as Caesar, and sends him on his way. She then prepares herself in a wedding gown while her brother

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makes his escape in the toy airplane that takes him farther away than the moon. Tom rises and falls, and recites the lines of his father's postcard, "Hola-Adios," while he drops his own cards on the stage. As he completes his last lines, Laura stands downstage resplendent in her white gown. She lifts her veil to expose her breasts and an enormous smile. The play ends with her brother's fantasy flight and her unveiled desire. The pirate who served the Wingfield family so well stands upstage at attention and the matron Amanda is occupied with her gowns. The disruptive possibility of the market has been turned back into the domestic libidinal economy, one that, as it maintains the integrity of the family, has no reverence for its prescribed roles. More difference is possible in the Wingfield family than perhaps had previously been imaged, and those who would have been left for tragically abandoned announce the many pleasures that can be found at home. If the terms of sexual exchange were not being questioned through the characterizations of Laura and Tom in this production, it would be tempting to see it as merely a Marcusean desublimation, whether benign or repressive. But the politics of gender and homosexuality are made too public in the performance not to appreciate who is being addressed in the national theater. Glass Menagerie in this incarnation invites its public to imagine an enlarged capacity for agency within private domains and addresses its patron with a challenge to specify the articulation of freedom within existing material constraints. This freedom derives from the complexities of Cuban culture now given free reign in the public domain, extending the notion of a society where formally all can speak to the nonreducibility of its disparate voices. The disruptive presence of the marginalities of youth, sex, gender, and globally mediated culture is here displayed as more than tolerable differences but as constitutive of a desire for further play and production. The New Economy of Theater The next wave of Cuban cultural policy seems to withdraw both from the market mechanisms for determining if a theater is valuable and from the centralized planning techniques that had made it viable.


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The decentralization does not result in the elimination of planning altogether, but rather shifts the emphasis from building theatrical institutions to making available the resources for theater. Initiatives can be generated by those in the community, outside the state, without introducing the logic of financial gain (the expectation that theaters turn a profit) to determine whether those initiatives were worthwhile. Recall that the National Council of Scenographic Arts of the Ministry of Culture is composed of artists and critics, so that an incentive is built into the everyday practice of performing bureaucratic functions to keep such administration humanized. Theater is not simply a mirror for society, and to move in a straight line from cultural to economic and political policy is unreasonable. The destabilizing impact of market experiments earlier in the decade and the critique of overcentralized state apparatuses in the early seventies have led to an attempt to steer between these two courses in the present. Openings in the political climate are evidenced by the public criticism of these earlier policies. Theater, and culture more broadly, becomes a key element of social developments when turned to as the expression and embodiment of initiative and exploration in other fields. Theater is a barometer sensitive to the problems of everyday life and the search for solutions to social problems. That this type of theater is very much on the agenda seems apparent in the youthful burst of theatrical activity found in Cuba today. Many efforts can only be mentioned here: the mixing of dance and theater in the new groups Ballet Teatro de la Habana (recently formed by three popular bailarinas who left the Ballet Nacional de Cuba: Caridad Martinez, Rosario Suarez, and Mirta Garcia); Retazos, under the direction of Isabel Bustos, and Danza Espiral of Matanzas; Teatro 2 de Santa Clara, directed by Fernando Saez; practitioners of performance art like Leandro Soto and Consuelo Casteneda; playwrights Abelio Estevez, Alberto Pedro, and Yulky Gary The list is necessarily incomplete, but what is important is that in a country that had supported just over fifty professional companies, these new interventions can have a decided impact. In examining the spectrum of this activity evident in the few examples given here, the lesson implied is that theater has to be deprofessionalized before it can be deinstitutionalized. If professionalization has ensured that certain skills are imparted so that actors can fit interchangeably into a national network of theaters (thereby ratio-

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nalizing the use of a scarce resource), it has also meant officiating over the techniques and aesthetics that compose an actor's formation. Rethinking who can be considered a professional, and therefore what might count as technique, makes it possible for performance skills to respond to particular dramatic problems being developed by emerging theaters. What is interesting is that such problems do not even get posed in Cuba until the apparatus for professionalism exists. It then becomes possible for artists to renegotiate their social contract with the state by increasing the degree of self-determination of who can be considered an artist (and therefore who is eligible for state funding and support). Whether this means a shift from the commitment to distribute theatrical resources to the widest possible audience, to the specialized public characteristic of the small subscription theaters or salitas of the fifties remains a crucial question. The difference suggested here is that young people are seeking out the theater in large numbers, providing a new popular audience base. In this and other respects, the polarities of elite and popular culture have already been crossed in Cuba. More people participate in the amateur or aficionado arts movement than attend professional performances in Cuba, yet the repertory of these amateur groups is not so different from that of the professionals. If the professional groups are invested with the problem of theatrical innovation as such, then what we may be seeing is the problem of scarcity addressed by multiplying the sites of production, not simply shifting distribution so that the greatest number of people can enjoy what is available. The new cultural policies intend to decentralize cultural production without turning to the dependence on market mechanisms that has stifled innovation in the arts in other places in the world (for example, in the raising of ticket prices so that theater groups pay for themselves or price themselves out of reach of their audience). Although artistic production appears to be exploring a planned decentralization that could offer a model for other economic sectors (the state supplies the finances and the people furnish the organization), the alignment of theater and society remains an indirect one. Rather than some imputed economic freedom causing cultural possibility, the success in building an infrastructure to deliver basic necessities has made it possible to turn to more ambitious tasks. Young people are the emblem of a new set of expectations that must be ar-


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ticulated and provided for. These social dynamics are abstracted into the theater. If socialist Cuba's first decade had featured a narrative form, the testimonio, that directly depicted historical events, the entrance into the fourth decade reveals an art concerned to display the shapes and forms of social conflict. The theater that emerged under rectification addressed the problem of how to enable people to feel that they continue to make a revolution, even if they were born after the initial battles had been won.

Conclusion: Theater and the Recognition of Socialism

Socialism Without Models? Comparison has its perils. Behind, or perhaps more precisely, beyond every effort to relate two or more phenomena stands an ideal, a generalized category of which the phenomena in question are supposed to be merely instances. The tension between the expectations of the ideal and the actuality of observed practices is bound to cast the latter in the light of a presumed deficiency, as Erving Goffman observed in another context. In Goffman's account, the unrecognized idealization of a social setting means that instances of activity enter into relationship with one another already lacking—in debt, so to speak, to the fully credible ideal.1 Formal comparison insists on introducing a scaling device, implicitly or explicitly, that marks every disclosure of information or data gleaned from the observed phenomenon as tending to approximate the ideal but irrevocably falling short of it. Yet measurement is here conceived of as an arithmetic difference, where units of analysis are already identical prior to being measured (true perhaps of numbers, but not of persons or countries) and data are positive only insofar as they reveal such quantifiable distance or qualitative lack from the ideal. Michael E. Brown, in his perceptive historicization of Goffman, has appreciated this process of incessant comparison without reference to value as a fundamental trope of capitalist exchange. He renders explicit what amounts to Goffman's implicit political economy of information, one in which a given setting demands disclosure of information that in its very circulation is judged inadequate to the realization of an ideal 190

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value, as descriptive of the contemporary extensions of the commodity form.2 Scientific communities, social and otherwise, are highly regulated versions of this economy of controlled information.3 The ability to extract fact from context while denying the traces that context may leave on particular expressions of knowledge, is surely one of the accomplishments of contemporary discourses of inquiry founded on comparative technique.4 If comparisons proceed at the risk of denigrating what they seek to identify, of sacrificing the knowledge they pursue for a judgment known in advance, then how is any project for the representation of difference possible? It would be an irony indeed if, in order to resist the idealization of comparison, comparison were avoided altogether in favor of a silencing of inquiry so that no risk were ventured. Just because scientific communities bear forces of regulation, they still depend on a capacity to produce information that they never fully contain. Regulation assumes that what it seeks to control exists as undisciplined, as different in form and kind from its laws, no matter how effectively these laws are articulated. Information leaks out, it is reappropriated, it is generated as a deviation from laws meant to anticipate its every move. Comparative analytic practice, if it is to be adequate to the risks it presents of effacing what it seeks to identify, must be capable of explicitly rendering a dual tension. This tension is apparent on the one hand between the expectations and applications of concepts generated through comparison and, on the other, between the formal requisites of knowledge and its conditions of production. Rendering this set of tensions acknowledges the politics of analysis by displaying what is contested and contingent in the production and regulation of knowledge. Concepts cannot be ungoverned by the politics of generating them, so critical activity does not stand above or outside the historical context that forms it and that it must bear the responsibility for representing. Hence, rather than rejecting comparison for the risks it presents, this examination of theater in Cuba and Nicaragua is an attempt to engage in a dual exercise: to critique the idealization implicit in comparative method that claims the ability to ground those ideals as features of every human practice, while exploring just what analytic principles would be adequate to think about a specific ideal, in this case socialism.

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So many discussions of socialism have relied upon these unacknowledged premises of comparison, whether between a putatively autonomous socialist nation-state, country, or society and some absolute condition of history called socialism, or in referring to different instances of socialist practice as if these were variations of an ideal, even if the reference is intended to be sympathetic, as in the use of the term "model." Without doubt, much use has been made of such terms, precisely in efforts to provide history, context, reference, and possibility to situated political struggles. It can be argued that without a sense of what is possible, without a history to appeal to, without an idea in need of realization, little political activity is imaginable. Yet if imagining political activity is what modeling promises, it may also distract from those images situated in the struggles that are in practice responsible for these effects. If models are not mistaken for anything like developmental maps for historical processes, where the map exists prior to the excursion (rather than being an effect, a trace of that activity), they certainly can be appreciated for their political if not analytic utility, namely, as symbolic artifacts of the culture, the myths, generated by politics. Myths, as Levi-Strauss understood them, are efforts to resolve in the symbolic realm contradictions articulated in practice.5 They too have their real effects, but not as accounts for the totality of a situation. Revolutions produce myths for those who participate in them and for those who observe them; the two sets of myths correspond to different contradictory situations. Internally, revolutionary myths provide a basis of temporal and spatial boundaries that enables political processes to proceed as if they were on a new footing, with a sense of determinate origins and an accountability to an inside (of the revolution) that must now be protected against a hostile exteriority, whether that be social antagonists nationally or internationally based. Externally, revolutionary myths introduce the possibility of socialism to places either thought free of it or not yet engaged in its development. The model serves to stabilize a mobile situation momentarily so that socialism can be attacked or defended as, alternately, impossible because it is considered an intrinsically alien mode of thought or immanently realizable because of its coherence as an idea. Both external uses of revolutionary myth generate problems for their practitioners. The version hostile to revolution treats all popu-

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lar expressions as protorevolutionary, their suspicions grounded in the strength of their denial. The sympathetic myth values the model beyond what it may account for in practice, presuming certainty about what as yet needs to be determined, namely, the politics of its own situation. The point here is not that such myths are without utility but that in their application they obscure what they seek to account for. Although claiming to be theory, they cannot provide theoretical understanding. If the conventions of comparison from which terms like "model" flow undervalue practice as an incomplete version of an overvalued ideal, analysis that recognizes the risks of comparison must provide an alternative. If analysis is to be committed to keeping alive the possibility of imagining socialism, what could be called the socialist project, while it examines instances of socialist practice, then the relation between virtual and actual needs to be conceptually reconfigured. The paradox presented is to preserve a prospect for a socialist project beyond any instance of socialism by being able to recognize the socialism of those concrete and specifiable examples. The concrete is not an incomplete version of the ideal whole, but a partial realization of it—partial in the sense of being both committed to certain principles of organization and displaying those principles when subject to appropriate analysis. Yet the concept (socialism) only partly realizes what is analytically necessary to grasp the concrete, as not all of any given situation can be considered socialist. Locating the socialism of concrete situations cannot be conflated with realizing the concepts applied through analysis. This modified and more modest comparative approach will be ventured here. With respect to the question of revolutionary models, the ideological formations associated with Cuba and Nicaragua provide useful refinements of their limits and possible applications. There are, no doubt, affinities in the historical situations of the two revolutionary movements—each with its heroic figures, national independence deferred by U.S. intervention, interlocking intellectual sources, the myriad transecting relations of politics, culture, and economy that locate them both in that geosocial field known as Latin America. Sandino's refusal to surrender to forces of foreign occupation in 1927 is reminiscent of Maceo's declaration to the Spaniards at Baragua over a half-century before. The shared marginality of the two countries with respect to Creole elites figured in their respective personas the

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project of national construction. Sandino was an "illegitimate" son of a small-town landowner who embraced such diverse ideologies as the anarcho-communism of Mexican Ricardo Flores Magon and the Spanish-born Argentine Joaquin Trincado and his Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune, an amalgamation of Christian and Islamic iconography that generated the "austere rationalism" so influential to the Nicaraguans' military cooperatives in the Segovias.6 Antonio Maceo, like Sandino a member of a Masonic Lodge that in Cuba served as a base for the independence movement, was born a free black in a slave economy. His excellence in guerrilla tactics, including his ability to regroup in the remote shelters or palenques constructed over the years by fugitive slaves, eventually won his promotion from sergeant to the rank of general and prefigured tactics that would be identified with the Cuban revolution nearly a century later.7 In Mexico, Che Guevara was a student of Alberto Bayo, whose synthesis of Sandino's guerrilla tactics and theory of the mobile foco Guevara assimilated before developing his own version. Out of debt to Sandino, the two volumes of Gregorio Selser's biography of him were the first books off Cuba's revolutionary presses in I960.8 More significantly, Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Sandinista Front founder Carlos Fonseca were contemporaries who shared an international formation in the Latin American left, and Fonseca spent time in Havana as well as Moscow. It is equally important to respect the divergence of revolutionary strategy developed by each movement as well as the limits to such strategy. In Cuba, the/oco strategy permitted revolutionary activity to persist when a frontal assault on institutions of state power, such as the attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, proved impossible. Yet, by itself, the/oco never proved militarily decisive. Politically, its furtive presence allowed for a representation of the strength of opposition beyond what was in practice the case. Guevara himself appreciated that the radio was as decisive to M-26-M's viability as any skirmish, and international television interviews were considered a major victory. When the revolution had accomplished the full representation of its possibility, then Guevara's march through the major urban centers between Santiago and Havana had a more directly cumulative military effect. The battles in the Sierras, while arduous, were quite contracted (less than three years)

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compared to other guerrilla movements, including those of Cuba's earlier independence struggles. Sandino notwithstanding, revolutionary efforts predated the FSLN's initial activities in 1961. Yet even the Sandinistas' modifications of the/oco concept, designed so that they could embed themselves more firmly in family structures for social support and blur both urban/rural and political/military distinctions in their participants' activities, were not adequate to sustain foquismo as the sole revolutionary idea over a eighteen-year period. The difficulty of extending localized effects into a national presence shifted emphasis to more urban-based politics of mobilization in addition to more politically grounded organization of rural populations. These activities predominated through the midseventies. By the late seventies, the revolutionists had outlived the cotton boom and the worsening economy after the 1972 earthquake, Somoza's alienation of the bourgeoisie with the assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro in 1978, and Somoza's political isolation from the international community. In the breach of ruptured national identity, however weakened it already was, a series of popular uprisings that rendered ambiguous the relation of leaders and led prepared for the final military assault on Managua in July 1979. This apparent ontology of revolution, from/oco to accumulation of forces to insurrection, has been reinscribed in the mythos of the Sandinista triumph as an account of a ligation of political factions and strategies constitutive of the Front. As the inheritors of the mantle for the last phase of struggle, the Ortega brothers —Daniel, the president, and Humberto, the head of the army (whose own arms were pierced with bullets)—became the leaders of a nine-member directorate. It has not always been clear how this revolutionary strategy has translated into administrative policy, but the figure of factions united without loss of difference continued as a primary trope of Sandinista reign. Onto this trope other trinities could be grafted: nationalism, Christianity, Marxism; private property, state cooperatives, land reform for small producers; "nonaligned" international relations with all "three worlds." In practice differences were not so neatly divided, as attested by the proliferation of activities that identified within the revolution or that were intermittently tolerated by it. It has often been said that revolutionary governments have been stunted in their organizational development by their inability to shed

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their militaristic foundations. Yet a closer examination of those foundations reveals them to be more politically grounded than had perhaps been suspected, as defeat or triumph is represented through military metaphors (battles won) that are being deployed politically. Unfortunately for the new government, there is never anything as decisive as a military victory claims to be. In Cuba, Castro's explicit framing of what was consistent with political requisites tacitly claimed a stable determination of what was not consistent. While any study of Cuban policy since the revolution reveals dramatic changes, the singularity of revolutionary interest and identity has remained a consistent trope, although this may simply shape how that trope is challenged, not whether it can be sustained, as a number of the theater examples illustrate. From within the respective revolutionary contexts, therefore, the unifying tropes of singularity or plurality may regulate but not determine difference within either the state or civil society. With respect to the reception of these tropes externally in the international arena, their distinctness may be more significant. Though such figures of speech as "the Cuban model of socialism" or "Castroism" may continue to act on the imagination of revolution outside of Cuba as if they had a stable referent, the invocation of a model associated with the Sandinista experience may not present so clear an image. This is no doubt in part due to the relative differences in the stability and development of both countries. In Cuba, a population aggregate of as little as two hundred can officially be considered urban if certain infrastructural features are present (paved streets, piped water, sewage, streetlights, and medical and educational services). With over 70 percent of the population so defined, effects of the revolution can have a determinate appearance throughout the country. Similar efforts to expand infrastructure in Nicaragua, admittedly less developed in this respect than Cuba before its revolution, were stymied by war and economic crisis.9 Nicaragua certainly became a generalized figure of hope in the international desire for alternatives to capitalist hegemony, but only in Reagan's crudest reductions as a threat to national security could it serve as an idealized model that could be reproduced elsewhere. As discussed in chapter 1, many revolutionary tourists made their sojourns in response to that desire. Short of discovering an other so exotic as to defy reflection, what those journeys may have disturbed

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was the imaginary surface upon which such reflections are made. Between Cuba and Nicaragua lies the very problem of appropriating historical situations to fulfill ideals that render the real places mere reflections in a mirror located outside them. It is a process reminiscent of colonial mimesis. Resisting this temptation may also enable the revolutionary imagination to relinquish its hold on models altogether, a move that may well turn out to be all to the benefit and vibrancy of such imagination. The Revolutionary Break—How Far to Go? If relinquishing intellectual dependency on models of historical events permits critical analysis to recognize the specificity and commitment of those events without negating them with the absolute judgment of idealized criteria, it should be appreciated that this freedom also bears certain burdens of its own. The analytic condition that seeks to be free of models cannot mean that thinking about politics proceeds without any ideas; it only asks that ideas be situated as incomplete with respect to what they imagine. If the absence of models now makes what is unique to events accessible to analysis, it also threatens to confuse what is different, new, and original about the initiatives introduced by a revolution as if these were available as conditions of its historical development. Here, the representation of revolutions as ventures won or lost is inconsistent with subsequent demands of development that fit poorly with such diacritical terms. While revolutions may introduce a rupture with the past, they are certainly not free of it. Yet just what is ruptured and what remains as given conditions need to be sorted out if the familiar notion of a revolutionary break is to have analytic content. Historical time can only be understood, as in the famous dialectical statement of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, as radically contingent, indeterminate, and nonrepeatable. To conceive of history as the inscription of active human social processes in received structuring instances that gives temporal movement its material substance, is to view every encounter of people and circumstances as one outcome of previous contests. But what is being rendered contingent and which outcomes are being subject to variation are themselves uneven. A revolution must be properly conceived of as introducing a

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break (in the sense of a fissure) into certain prevailing relations of dominance, nationally and internationally. Revolution does not constitute a break with those relations precisely because it remains inserted in a context that includes them. Especially with respect to the conditions of social development in countries such as Nicaragua and Cuba where the nation-state emerges as a feature of the transition from one regime of external domination to another, the domestic economy exists only as an extension of what lies outside it. The United States was absolutely instrumental in the national formation of both countries. The United States literally appropriated Cuban independence from Spain with its intervention of 1898, and William Walker's intercession into the Nicaraguan civil war of 1855 has been interpreted as the condition of transition to a national government insofar as it left the patrilocal patterns of governance insufficient for maintaining even those nascent forms of private property.10 The extent of U.S. intervention needs to be factored into the persistence of revolutionary activity in Cuba and Nicaragua, but it also needs to be figured into the conditions of dependency inherited by the revolutionary administrations of those countries. In the nineteenth century, when the precedents of U.S. imperial intervention were established, Cuba and Nicaragua represented the outer limits of Spain's colonial relations. The profitability of the slave-driven sugar economy in Cuba presented Spain with a colony it would nearly bankrupt itself to avoid losing; Central America, however, had effectively ceased to offer Spain surplus value in any magnitude by the seventeenth century. Associated with these disparate colonial economic situations was the socializing impact on the domestic population. Spain was content to leave Nicaragua depleted and exhausted in human terms while it was willing to repopulate the island of white gold in pursuit of accumulation. Paradoxically this meant that Nicaraguan peasants retained a viable self-sufficiency well into the nineteenth century, and landowners owned little more than land. Significant socialization of agricultural labor was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon and incomplete enough to provide ample grounds for effective contra organization in the countryside. As a principal medium for the concentration of capital and subsequently of social development, freeing the labor of the plantations and then state farms was a political target of the Cuban mambis and an economic target of Castro's mechanization of the harvest and year-round

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employment for agricultural labor. The social base that resisted the land reforms of the early sixties in Cuba was not as significant a social or economic segment as the still-large numbers of subsistence producers in Nicaragua. Just how these factors interacted with the ability to contain counterrevolution and its conditions of penetration and, with the lessons of Vietnam in between, how far the United States had come in organizing such forces, would need to be subtly combined in any study of the efforts to subvert revolution in the sixties and the eighties. Yet these factors are not enough to appreciate the limits to sovereignty of the Castro and Sandinista governments, and as such they do not in themselves provide an adequate understanding of the two revolutionary breaks. Two other sets of forces constitute the historical conjuncture in which the respective revolutionary breaks occurred. One has to do with the history of socialism and the way it is inserted in the capitalist world, and the other concerns the internal social conditions generated by the revolution itself. The question of Cuba's relation to the Soviet Union is surely misplaced if posed in the too-familiar terms of Castro's own ideological relation to communism. This is the case not only because it mistakes the development of leadership for the leadership of development but because it assumes the foreign relations of communist governments to be that of an unwavering intent unaffected by historical circumstances. The fit of economic needs (of petroleum and sugar) for exportcommodity exchange as effective relations of barter was a significant feature of international socialist circuits that evaded and were deprived money capital. Such trade in kind was certainly consistent with Cuba's continuity as a single export economy in the decade after the revolution. By the late 1980s, on the eve of Soviet withdrawal (from itself and Cuba), international economic relations had already shifted considerably toward joint ventures in tourism and more diversified trade with Latin America. This shift was not contingent on crystal forecasting of Gorbachev's demise (although Cuba, it should be recalled, had already withdrawn from the market strategy he represented around the time he came to power) but of pressures internal to the Cuban and, as it has become plain, the Soviet economies. The shifting environment for what could count as adequate external support for export economies marked the moment of Sandinista triumph. The eighties saw a dramatic decline in the price of raw mate-

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rials in the international market. Although the Soviet Union supplied aid, it did not replace the international market as it had done with purchases of Cuban sugar at subsidized prices. It is difficult to know what discussions anticipated Soviet withdrawal from its support of Third World revolutions by the end of the eighties. At the beginning of that decade, certain limits to development were already being felt in the USSR that would mitigate against the fullest levels of support of the Sandinistas, for both economic and ideological reasons. The Sandinistas as well had emerged in an ideological environment that had seen the nonaligned movement and the splintering of the bipolar world. Their own commitment to nonalignment had its economic reflection in active relations with Japan and Western Europe, especially the social democratic governments in Sweden, France, and Spain. The Sandinista revolution not only crested the wave of postcolonial struggles that began with Algeria and Cuba and extended to Vietnam, Angola, and Mozambique, but it also benefited from the response to those struggles in the West. Remember that Nicaragua in the eighties became incredibly permeable to international solidarity activists—from short stints on coffee and construction brigades to alternative development projects funded and staffed by foreign solidarity groups. Yet this permeability was an expression of the more diffuse international climate of influence in which the Sandinistas sought to govern. One consequence of a situation in which a country that had been forced to develop through a client state (the United States) suddenly cut off from that relationship—a situation shared by Cuba and Nicaragua—has been to seek another client. That Nicaragua did not do this to the extent that Cuba was able to (at least for thirty years) is a function of both external and internal circumstances. The loss of access to markets through progressively punitive responses that culminated in the trade embargo initiated in May 1985, and the absence of another client, forced Nicaragua to be dependent on its national bourgeoisie for development. Politically, concessions made to the bourgeoisie in terms of economic policy, from exchange and interest-rate subsidies to protection against strikes, and in terms of a level of democratic participation never enjoyed by the bourgeoisie under Somoza, weakened the Sandinistas' fundamental basis of support in the popular sectors that bore the burdens of these policies. No doubt, dependence on the good faith of the national bourgeoisie introduced tremendous risks,

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particularly given the fact that this group had no record of reliability. The risks of other dependencies may well have been greater, however, even if they had been available. The Sandinistas out of power have nonetheless removed the military curtain that protected and limited the activity of the national bourgeoisie under Somoza and made possible a politics of contestation between social sectors where there had been only repression. In this regard, the Sandinistas' project of national development included the political development of the bourgeoisie, an observation inconsistent with the claim that the Sandinistas militarized society. Similarly inconsistent with the image of a totally controlled society, Cuba's skilled and educated workforce, its social and political stability, have given it a certain appeal as a site of foreign investment that may render its economy more internationally mixed than that of Nicaragua is currently able to be. As in Nicaragua, this strategy has its political risks, not the least of which are creating a dual economy as in the dollar-driven tourism industry that is typical for such industries but inconsistent with the language of the social economy, and introducing greater possibilities for strata of privilege. The whole question of how to manage development problems that point to situations of continued dependency on external economic forces indicates that the degree to which a given revolution accomplishes a break with its past is not simply an internal matter. Shocking effects can result when the external economy breaks with the revolutionary environment, as U.S. embargo and Soviet withdrawal indicate so sharply. The revolutionary break is multiply contingent and may provoke efforts that actually strengthen certain historical continuities, whether they be dependence on external inputs, strengthening what had been underdeveloped national elites, strengthening the monopoly of force to maintain national boundaries, or assuming stultifying debts in the interest of social development. Instead of assuming that a given revolutionary situation is in the position to redefine the grounds on which its development efforts take place, the question should be how the new situation troubles those grounds in the sense of introducing principles and values of activity that depart from prerevolutionary premises. Identifying the principles alone will not be adequate to assess the efficacy of revolutionary efforts. Rather, an

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analysis sensitive to how those principles interact with their context will yield the fullest appreciation of what politics could and can be. Centralization and Decentralization Cuba is a geopolitical island. It has been much more able to maintain its boundaries than Nicaragua has, which has brought Cuba greater stability and greater possibility for control over the development process. Cuba and Nicaragua have been compared as relatively centralized and decentralized with respect to polity, culture, and economy. These are not merely ideological dispositions but represent differences in the social and historical circumstances in which the two revolutions found themselves. As such, the question of the degree of centralization implemented by a socialist state follows from our discussion of revolutionary break. Centralization is not something simply chosen by a government but is also an expression of societal development more broadly. More important, common measures of centralization may be misleading to the extent that they obscure what are often the decentralizing effects of concentrated and institutionalized apparatuses of social order. In this regard, decentralization is not merely the opposite of centralization but represents the movement away from the center that assumes both the existence of a center and the means to maintain coherent organization with respect to it. The various programs associated with Cuba's rectification are a case in point. From one perspective, the legitimacy of a revolutionary government is dependent on maintaining a public imagination of continual renewal. The ability to announce a program of reforms as a radical departure from previous policies certainly contributes to that legitimacy, and Cuba has made persistent use of such announcements. Rectification is as much a language of a correctable past as it is the umbrella for a set of policy initiatives. Invoking the spirit of Che on the twentieth anniversary of his death, Castro answered his rhetorical question: What are we rectifying? We're rectifying all those things—and there are many—that strayed from the revolutionary spirit, from revolutionary work, revolutionary virtue, revolutionary effort, revolutionary responsibility; all those things that strayed from the

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spirit of solidarity among people. We're rectifying all the shoddiness and mediocrity that is precisely the negation of Che's ideas, his revolutionary thought, his style, his spirit, and his example.11

On the one hand, this corrective signaled a critique of the market principles and practices that had characterized the preceding policy initiatives (1979-85) and suggested a unifying moral authority identified with the voice of the state. On the other hand, rectification attacked many of the centralizing aspects of those market principles that had apparently encouraged quantifying profitability at the enterprise level without respect to social use value. The focus this suggests for quality of goods shifts the emphasis back to the point of production as the site of regulation rather than the generalized accumulation associated with quantifiable norms. So too with rewards and incentives. If the gap between the appeal of goods produced nationally versus those imported raises the issue of how to respond to the incessant comparison imposed by the global economy, reorienting the fulfillment of needs to the producers themselves can ameliorate some of the reduction of development to growth. An example of this in Cuba was the reinstitution of the housing microbrigades, which allowed workers to shift from production centers to small-scale housing projects. A fixed percentage of the units constructed reverted to those who built them. With the withdrawal of support from the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), rectification yielded to the "special period" as the rhetoric of transformation. But certain principles of decentralized initiative like vegetable gardens (on vacant lots where housing might have been built if the materials were available) supplemented the more strict rationing of basic goods and the increasing role of full-price parallel and black markets as vehicles of distributing scarce goods. Another example of centralized decision-making yielding decentralized applications is found in transportation, where the absence of parts and petroleum that reduced bus runs to a tenth of what they had been saw an infusion of Chinese bicycles into Cuba that unpacked the dense experience of the daily commute. In Nicaragua, the relation of centralization and decentralization was quite different, partly because the Sandinistas' economic decisions were always compromised by internal politics and partly because the formation of a state capable of implementing directives on

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a national scale was compromised by a lack of material resources. If Cuba's sovereignty to make decisions was won at the cost of its isolation, Nicaragua, like so many other Third World nations, suffered a center of decision that was located beyond its borders. In this regard, some of the decentralization of Sandinista policy was regulated by the response to a hostile and external center. Without doubt, the Sandinistas were ideologically committed to a relative decentralization of initiative as reflected in the 1987 constitution that ceded authority to mayoralities with the understanding that this would in turn promote party pluralism.12 Yet it is also difficult to discern where these commitments left off and where the exigencies of a weak national state began. As has been mentioned, the underdevelopment of the Nicaraguan state can be traced to colonial times with Spain's abandonment of Central America as a site of accumulation; this continued to be thematic of the nineteenth century as Managua emerged as the weak center between the warring patriarchies of Granada and Leon, and reemerged in the twentieth century after U.S. Marines stifled the aspiration of Zelaya's dictatorship for national development. Somoza's appropriation of international aid for the 1972 quake that left downtown Managua in ruins to the present day only underscored how that dynasty maintained itself at the expense of a national formation. With this legacy, the Sandinistas faced a population that had not fully experienced the demands of a nation-state and, in the case of those most marginalized (such as the groups of the Atlantic coast and the subsistence producers of the interior), they faced the resistance to this project. Even the agrarian reforms that parceled large holdings and gave generous credits still forced on these populations the recognition of a state where there had been none. Perhaps these distributions could not yet be considered decentralizations because they had not yet joined the population into an integrated social economy, and they came before a center could adequately be established within Nicaragua. The massive layoffs of government employees in 1988 and again in 1989, called compactaciones, did reduce the payroll in response to deficits as the International Monetary Fund would have it, but to a certain extent the services of those public employees were already compromised by the suffocating costs of war, debt, lost production, and global recession. Economically, by the end of their term, the Sandinistas' decentralization probably had more impact on the ability of the na-

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tional bourgeoisie to pursue its development needs than on any other sector. Politically, however, the Sandinistas' governance has had a greater efficacy. By breaking the instrumental relation between the means of force and property, so common as the face of government throughout Latin America, the Sandinistas did oversee the proliferation of political associations, which, if not fully formed nationally, nonetheless compose a national politics. Paradoxically, the limits on the Sandinistas' ability to use socialist policies to develop nationally also were the conditions under which an entire field of political difference was mobilized. These mobilizations, even when their demands are directed at a center that lacks resources and political inclination to respond to them, may be continuing a decentralized development in anticipation of the moment when a principle of centralization would emerge that could sustain them. The proliferation of what has been called the grass roots in Nicaragua, even as the Sandinistas experience the division of being part of this group and part of what it would constitute itself against, is an expression of both the strength and the weakness of political development there.13 A relationship of centralization and decentralization may be in evidence both in Nicaragua and Cuba, forged by different historical and ideological circumstances. It would be a gross oversimplification, although one that is tempting to make for certain features of each situation, to craft an analysis that treated these terms as independent of one another. The strongest caricature of such an analytic separation would be in contrasting the social organization of Cuba and Nicaragua as vertical and horizontal, respectively. Logically this makes little sense because, in true Cartesian fashion, the terms imply one another—each suggesting movement on a plane composed of two, in this case conceptual, dimensions. More specifically, in terms of the logic of critical social analysis, verticalism and horizontalism as organizational principles may confuse ideal values with social constraints. The problem for analysis is how to recognize the difference between levels and scale, as a conceptual distinction between vertical and horizontal where the former suggests that movement is possible among varying orders of abstraction for locuses of activity, from, for example, the decision taken in a conversation to something as gross as social reproduction. Scale, equivalent to the horizontal dimension of analysis, would pertain to the extent of the social domain reached at a given level. A conversation could be personal or national, as could

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an instance of social reproduction. The problem for politics introduced by these terms is quite different, for it risks reducing an appreciation of resources and context to a mere assertion of principles. Autonomy versus Ensembles If decentralization is held to be a value independent of its context or conditions of possibility, another term that it refers to has had many incarnations in discussions of socialism and politics. The vision of an emancipated self may find expression in every society, even, as Pierre Clastres shows, for those without any state formation.14 Marx's perhaps overquoted paean to communist life as an excursion through the division of labor from poetry to fishing has been noted for its premodernist tones. Yet the fantasy of the individual freed from the entangling alliance of society is precisely the birthmark of the ideology of modernity, as Raymond Williams has discussed in his social etymology.15 The fantasy of the premodern autonomous self is a projection that could be made only from within modernity, just as every nostalgic impulse is a creature of the present. The desire for autonomy has also been projected forward into discussions of socialism and has attained something of an ontology of freedom. It has also been projected analytically as a critique of essentialism and a counter to reductionism, as evident in the term relative autonomy. Once again, this conjuncture of value and analysis—where slippage between the two often goes unacknowledged—deserves further attention. No doubt there are sensible applications of the term autonomy with respect to socialist development, especially as an effort to limit the disruptive effects of externalities (such as imperialism) on an emerging social economy. But autonomy has also been applied as a defining value of socialism as, for example, in the expression "worker's self-management."16 The notion of self-management is curious from a variety of perspectives. First, by emphasizing labor's ability to render decisions over production at the point where it is most particularized, the workplace, the principal transformation of an economy organized for the market into one organized for social value is lost. To abstract decision-making from the purpose of such decisions confuses participation as a formal requisite with what might be

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meaningful to participate in. As so many employee bail-out schemes have made clear, decisions over who to lay off or how much to compromise wages or pensions hardly challenge the profit-taking environment.17 This leads to another sense of worker self-management that is questionable as an ideology of socialism, namely, that the discipline of self be elevated to a principle of emancipation. Here socialism is apparently to be understood from the perspective of a regime of regulation internalized so successfully at the institutional level as to render visible and directly coercive authority unnecessary. Such was at least Foucault's image for the institutionalization of capitalist modernity. What is trenchant in Foucault's analysis is that this apparent autonomy is the consequence of a more profound and extensive socialization of the apparatuses of power.18 Poulantzas states this even more clearly: The specialization and centralization of the capitalist State, its hierarchical-bureaucratic functioning and its elective institutions all involve the atomization of the body-politic into what are called "individuals"—that is, juridical-political persons who are the subjects of certain freedoms. The State here presupposes a specific organization of the political space upon which the exercise of power comes to bear. The centralized, bureaucratized State installs this atomization and, as a representative State laying claim to national sovereignty and the popular will, it represents the unity of a body (people-nation) that is split into formally equivalent monads, (emphasis in original)19

There is no reason to suspect that socialist organization would be free of the self-consciousness associated with generalized surveillance, but it is curious that this would be held to be its distinguishing feature. If autonomy turns out to be the effect of a certain social organization that institutes a formal separation of otherwise socialized persons, namely, Poulantzas's individuals, rather than being the condition of development for social organization, the status of autonomy as an object of socialist aspiration is dubious. Specifically, autonomy appears to suppose that any formal separation, such as that between individuals, among disparate social groups, between economy and polity, civil society and state, can be taken as a measure of freedom. But the formal separation, the social distance between entities, can only be used as a measure against some common "unit" that all are

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presumed to share. Such units imply a common field within which all of those entities appear—simply put, a context that permits difference to emerge as a relation between entities. This field of relations that produces difference needs to be understood as an ensemble rather than as an autonomous set of positions. Such ensembles name the conditions under which individuals are separated from one another, rather than beginning with their separation. They account for the relation of state to civil society rather than assuming a stable opposition. And, of course, ensembles can identify the immediate context for a given activity, like a stage. If autonomy constitutes the pinnacle of freedom in a regulation of self based on property, the ensemble suggests that activity be viewed through its enabling organization. Socialism in this regard is the society of ensembles, the privileging of the relation of groups over that of apparently independent things. The formalism of autonomy is to make a virtue of boundaries that separate one entity from another without reference to how those boundaries are produced or what they contain—not in the sense of some essential content but as a means of dividing resource and site. From the perspective of ensembles, boundaries are not principles of freedom, although they may free a given social entity from certain constraints, as Nicaragua freed the countryside from the intervention of the state at the expense of its violation internationally. Yet not all of the presence of ensembles can be ascribed to socialistic impulses. Culturally speaking, both Cuba and Nicaragua are less individuated than the Western nations. Prior to their respective revolutions, however, their populations were inserted in quite different ways into networks of ensembles. What the revolutionary governments of the two countries each attempted was a certain national closure that would introduce the state as a mediation among groupings that may not have had any common means of exchange. Literacy, health care, credit, and housing are only a few instances of such mediating links that help join without collapsing the articulation of difference. The stabilization of housing can revalue domesticity in a way that articulates gender differences while assigning significant social resources to women. No one would claim that an economy that renders the household as a nexus for social distribution eliminates sexual politics in Cuba, but such an economy has added domestic space to the resources available to women in that

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struggle. Similarly, the availability of health care in the urban centers of Nicaragua did not eliminate the differentiation of town and country, but it did facilitate the circulation of the population through those spaces in a manner that nationalized the cities. In each of these examples, grasping the transformed conditions of difference makes apparent effects of socialist policy that would become less profound if viewed as instances of autonomy fostered through allocations of resources (although such social goods as housing and health care may also be instances of that autonomy). At least part of the freedom that socialist practices may introduce needs to be assessed from the perspective of what new conditions of difference, of struggle, and of the creation of identity are made possible. Otherwise the differences that socialism itself introduces may be obscured. Perhaps the area where the language of autonomy has been least useful in understanding the social processes initiated by socialism has been the arts. Here too the identity of autonomy with individuals is most keenly felt as an expression of the cultural prejudices of Western modernism with its associated terms of genius and authenticity, as if artistic freedom could be measured as an absolute autonomy from the social. If individualism and autonomy are useful figures for the emergence of certain ideological practices, they are less applicable to Latin America, where aesthetic activity acquired its specificity precisely as the mediation of European avant-gardes with popular cultural forms. Further, the political inflection of much artistic output speaks generally to the compromised national formations that situated intellectual activity as national narrative, rather than being positioned outside of the cultural dominant and its disseminations, as claimed, for example, by Marcuse.20 Where the cultural specificities of Latin America leave off and the principles of socialist culture begin is in practice difficult to discern with precision in Cuba and Nicaragua; it would further confuse this relation to apply the language of autonomy to the artistic activity of these settings, because the very opposition to the state generated by cultural development would be misapprehended as a feature of the artist's own subjective experience rather than as the context for that experience. Under conditions of full state support for both production and reception of artistic output, the work privileged as public readily appears in the guise of the artist's voice. Artistic work is not simply inserted into civil society, it addresses it as the surplus of voice now

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turned in the direction of the state. Part of artistic work's critical thrust comes from this double displacement: that is, the excess of state support applied to a given artistic expression, and the surplus expression that, as aesthetic output renders it fully public, can only confront the state as what it makes possible but also what it is not. Although enabled by state expenditure, socialist arts by their conditions of production and the social space they occupy point to the limits of the state. Even art that purports to reflect the ideological content of the state, such as agitprop, can only do more and less than that while effectively holding up a mirror to reflect the state as incomplete and the public as outside that mirror. When art aspires to be more complex, as is frequently the case, not only what but how it mediates state and civil society embodies these tensions more fully. Focusing for a moment on artistic production as such, clearly these socialist relations of reception burden creativity with the inevitability of the obligations of public display. Any system of reception incorporates certain principles of exclusion, as many studies of art markets have shown, but the self-consciousness of where work will wind up can only weigh on the problem of what it will be. Hence, while the uncertainties of creativity may always feed back on creative processes in the form of a certain censorship, the organization of creative activity under socialistic principles introduces particular versions of the problem, even after addressing the issue of who is included in those processes. Here, censorship of self needs to be distinguished from censorship as self primarily because the former assumes a stable self that is negated rather than produced through its activity. If, however, the limits of context always apply to self-constitution, in art or anything else, the most profound limit for artistic work under socialism is the privileging of voice prior to its articulation. It is easy to ascribe this presence of audience prior to the inscription of creative activity in a medium as the intrusion of the state in the consciousness of the autonomous artist. But such anticipations of audience are more properly appreciated as the burdens of the obligation to address the public, a responsibility generally assumed by the state and now taken up by those who find themselves situationally against the state (in the sense of being outside it and also addressing it). Freud described the predicament of self in an environment overflowing with the social as demanding a repression of experience so that the social could be symbolically condensed, and artists under so-

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cialism find themselves in a special variant of this predicament. What in everyday life finds its outlet in dreams is now taken as a public activity where the fruits of that repression are to be materialized in art, with all the benefits of a secure place but none of the benefits of a reassuring reply. Public versus Private The obligations of the public are a familiar association to make with socialism. Recognizing a socialist public sphere that is different from the state has often been difficult, but what has been harder still to appreciate is what would constitute a private domain. It would be tempting to follow the differentiation made for bourgeois civil society, where the private is constituted negatively as what can be protected from the demands of the public sphere. As the domain where people subject themselves to the vices and vicissitudes of the market, the public sphere in its nineteenth-century conception was associated with pollution. Indeed, one foundation for the separation of public and private was that the polluted self, alienated to and in the workplace, be cleansed through the purity of the domestic sphere. Clearly this was a separation articulated through and constitutive of gender relations, for purity was assigned to some putative woman's nature, prior to and therefore outside of the reach of the social.21 Although acquisition through the market doubled as a construction of self, identified by Macpherson as possessive individualism,22 for the majority deprived of any socially meaningful accumulation the term had a different meaning. The private sphere was where individuals (men) could repossess themselves, where what was lost through appropriation could be reappropriated through other means. Women's unpaid labor constituted men's necessity of self, and women's self, as untainted by the social, was to be made available for possession. What is intended in this sketch of the private, one heavily inflected with Anglocentric imagery, is simply to indicate how the production of the private in the social could be accomplished. Another form of idealization would be to assume that socialism wholly reinscribes the relations of public and private. On the one hand, the separation of workplace and home place associated with industrialization and urbanization has also characterized socialist versions of these historical

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processes. On the other hand, private and public spheres are also culturally specific, and the specificities of gender, familial, and spatial relations in Latin America shape the terms if not the grounds of this separation. It is important to ask more modestly what additional figures socialist development may introduce to this relation. At least one aspect of the rectification campaign in Cuba was to respond to the material incentives, the link of wages to productivity associated with the market reforms of the late seventies and early eighties. Che's image, which had always served as a trope of revolutionary morality, was reemphasized during the late eighties. Carlos Tablada's study of Che is perhaps the key text in this reemphasis, and Tablada quotes the relevant passage from "Socialism and Man in Cuba": It is not a matter of how many kilograms of meat one has to eat, nor of how many times a year someone can go to the beach, nor how many pretty things from abroad you might be able to buy with present-day wages. It is a matter of making the individual feel more complete, with much more internal richness and much more responsibility.23

In this account, public and private appear to correspond to the material and the symbolic—the former grafted on a person's exteriority and the latter on inferiority. In certain respects, this opposition is not so different from that of the conception of the polluted material world described for the nineteenth century, but it also suggests the possibility of a movement between "internal richness" and "responsibility" as a measure of what would specify the relation of public and private under socialism. Whereas the capitalist public-private relation is an antagonistic one in which the self is constructed through the acquisition of objects that promise to return what was lost in alienated form, the socialist version of this relation would make productive participation in the public sphere constitutive of the development of the private. This last conception subsumes quantity to quality and object to a complex subject, and only minimally addresses the question of how the object world fits in socialist culture. Here the opposition between the material and the moral may beg the question of the materiality of morality. If morality is merely the authority of an idea, an ability to respond (responsibility) to a conception of what is right, it remains an

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idea, like the fully realized bourgeois self beyond the horizon of practice. To refute the needs for possessions to complete a dispossessed self may rupture the isolated dyad of subject and object that constitutes possessive individualism, but it does not follow that some socialist conception of personhood can be created without an economy of desire mediated through things. Here rectification would seem to point to something beyond the invocation of Che as legitimating the move from market mechanisms, namely, a certain proliferation in the cultural realm, from young artists to imported mass media, that enriches the field through which identity is constructed. Media, like language, traverses public and private and permits identification without the necessity of possession. Because culture has been a dramatic growth industry in Cuba since the revolution, it is intriguing that occasions for reception (as measured, for example, by attendance statistics at cultural events) have not reached a point of saturation despite a much more limited dissemination of media electronics than is present in the West. On the contrary, the increased density of programming with proportional growth in the acquisition of these commodities displaces into more social settings what have become in the West private activities. If privacy does not sustain the same spatial segregation or object boundary (as a person surrounded by possessions) in a setting as fully mediated, industrialized, and urbanized as Cuba, it is invited to develop more as a space of the imaginary and an imaginary space. Such imaginings are necessarily conducted more in public, but they are also more firmly projective of how or what people are to do to construct themselves. A similar line of speculation is much more tenuous to create for the Nicaraguan situation, given the relative absence of the social conditions for disarticulating public and private. The 1980s did see tremendous urbanization as the population of Managua more than tripled. Yet, unlike Cuba, this urbanization was not a feature of a strategy of social development. Rather, it was a response to war, to the collapse of agricultural credit and prices, and a feature of uneven development. It is not that the Sandinistas were without plans for urbanization; rents were stabilized nationally, housing was constructed, and infrastructure was developed and regulated. Yet certainly these plans could not provide the resources for the extensive urban migration, occupation, and construction that occurred. Havana quarters

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are often cramped, but those in Managua (depending much more so on where) are denser still, rendering spatial articulation of the private the exception for Nicaraguan living arrangements.24 In terms of the imaginary space of self, the degree of self-construction (based on expectations of educational access, vocational mobility, travel, and so on) has far fewer resources available to the average Nicaraguan youth. This is not to say that the revolution did not begin to introduce these possibilities but that those gains have by now been greatly compromised and that they were not able to proceed as far. But the imaginary of the private is stimulated by the promise of personal development aligned with the social that revolutionary discourse makes public. This too generates a surplus of desire that generates a sense of and demand for movement in the individual, though far less defined by a private space that he or she would possess than what is assumed to be the case for Western capitalism. The socialist conception of self occurs in a space that is in certain respects always public and identified through an affiliation with nation and as such with the state. The Anteriority of this self comes about in the very limits of that difference between the demands for public participation and what the state can actually provide in terms of resources for development. It would be tempting to view this gap as that of a particular scarcity—of food, housing, education, occupations, or whatever. Here is where Che's formulation perhaps has its relevance. Scarcity is not abated by the saturation of a particular object in relation to a given population. There is no reason to assume that development is a project that can be completed; it can only be assessed in terms of the principles and conditions that it establishes and the way it makes available certain critical problems. Socialism can no more catch up with the West than the West can fulfill the claims made for its internal population. Western capitalism depends on its lack, whereas socialism makes a claim for the survival of difference. The austerity measures that the Sandinistas introduced in the late eighties might have been survivable by them and the population if these measures had been only that and not also political concessions to internal and external opponents. It is conceivable that the Cuban austerity of the "special period" may be survivable if different principles for the articulation of public and private are not introduced. Given the experiences of Cuba and Nicaragua it would also seem that

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the demands for survivability are never static, and external circumstances force such demands to escalate. Beyond the opportunity for desire to find its expression in difference, expression must also result in participation. The relation of difference and participation raises the issue of democracy. Democracy The history of socialism seems never to have been free of the constraints of its very survival. To some extent this is the case with all nation-states. It is a condition that justifies defense, national security interests, sedition acts, and the like, all of which may be invoked to compromise internal expressions of political difference. As such, every nation-state claims limits to its tolerance, to say nothing of its willingness to promote a range of difference. Yet in practice, the degree of external threat to national sovereignty varies considerably. The sense in which Nicaragua and the United States are equivalent geopolitical entities may be overshadowed by the ways in which they are dissimilar. In part this is because the threat to an individual state is overdetermined by the global environment and in this regard Cuba and Nicaragua can only be considered threats to the global hegemony of the United States and not to its national sovereignty, whereas these socialist countries have been reduced to a defense of national sovereignty lacking a counterhegemonic presence organized globally. The inability of the Soviet Union to establish the reciprocity of missiles in Cuba that the United States had, say, in Turkey speaks to the inconsistencies in practice in the ideology of deterrence based on globally projected military alliances. The issue here is not that the Soviet Union did not eventually develop the means to engage in global strikes with its nuclear capacity but that this did not translate into the same geopolitical construct of mutual encirclement. Despite the rhetoric of the communist threat from Cuba and Nicaragua, Soviet military assistance never acquired the offensive capacity characteristic of the First or Third World dependence on the U.S. containment strategy as a condition of their own defense. Like other dependencies, this one is a product of political domination, in this case the U.S. victory in the Second World War. Given the continued dominance of capital as a resource for social development and a political principle,

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it is difficult to imagine what a socialist strategy of the containment of capital would look like as opposed to a strategy of protecting regions from the political disruptions of capital while attempting to procure it as societal resource. Considering what has just been said, it is possible to appreciate at least two orders of limitation of the tolerance of internal political difference that Cuba and Nicaragua have been subjected to from external forces. The first entails their peripherality to an already-weak defense of national sovereignty, and the second derives from their relative weakness as nation-states per se. Though such external constraints may limit what toleration of difference is possible and heighten the significance of what might otherwise appear as minimal oppositions, the substantive questions of what constitutes in Castro's terms critical orientations "within the revolution" remain. While in practice such questions admit a certain undecidability, as evidenced by the variations of what may be taken as consistent with the revolution at any particular time, there are still internal determinations at both the ideological and the institutional levels. It seems quite difficult, for example, to account for the degree of political repression of opposition in the history of the United States on functional grounds. Perhaps one could argue that the smashing of insurrections like Shay's Rebellion was necessary to secure an emerging capital's dominance over the terms of political participation. It would seem much more difficult to make that claim for the infiltration and repression of the CPUSA during the 1950s or the student movement of the sixties. In these instances the degree of repression is incommensurate with the ability of these political movements to undermine the identification of capitalist hegemony with national sovereignty. The U.S. government has tolerated the existence of individual texts or articulations that suggest a certain ideological diversity, but there is no evidence that the government has tolerated and certainly not facilitated the emergence of any institutionalized opposition. Presumably this contradiction has been mediated through the market. To the extent that an instance of difference can be treated as simply a cultural commodity, such as a book or an article, its depoliticized form ameliorates the demands its content might place on political formation. The same might be said of demonstrations (although the enthusiasm for police intervention would belie this): the single gathering is tolerated while the organization is attacked.

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That social movements in the West are appeals to the state indicates the degree to which they stand outside of the state as instances of ideology (speech) without any institutional commitment to what that speech might entail if its demands were to be realized. Here the formal separation between a political public sphere and the state operates as a means for the containment of difference while the expression of difference gets touted as evidence for the vibrancy of democracy in the United States. Given the political stability of the U.S. governmental apparatus compared to that of virtually any other country, what is remarkable is not how tolerant of difference that government is but the institutional and ideological circumscription of difference. It could be argued in this context that Nicaragua's tolerance of difference was unprecedented. Despite intermittent press censorship, despite surveillance of opposition, despite detentions (which in the frame of a nation at war, especially civil war, had perhaps never been more modest), the ten years of Sandinista rule actually resulted in the development of a legal and significant political opposition where there had been none. The Sandinistas' strategy might be described as using the development of government for the construction of a state, to the extent that the inclusion of diverse political parties in government constituted an incorporation of disparate social groups within the purview of the state. What remained incomplete in this strategy was that formal participation of opposition groups did not secure allegiance to the Sandinistas' project of state formation and that such formal participation in government did not have parallel structures of participation such as the neighborhood-based Sandinista Defense Committees for those not active in a governmental party apparatus. As the revolutionary process was undermined, the governmental mechanisms for the formal participation of parties remained. The withering state could not continue to support the foundations of popular participation. Weakened from its base, government was poised to turn against the state. This was expressed in the substitution of the limited participation required for determining government, i.e., voting, for the more profound and ambitious participation of producers and owners needed to maintain the state. The Sandinistas left office through the formal democratic process that they had implemented, without the resources that might maintain their aspirations of state formation. Despite the ravages of war

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and blockade, part of the Chamorro victory was due to the Sandinistas' success. Chamorro andLaPrensa had been openly aligned with the contras, and the Sandinista censors tolerated their saying so. Given what the Sandinistas faced in terms of dependence on global and national capitals, this tolerance is perhaps understandable; but their own ideological projection and institutional strategy of developing political opposition go beyond any simple instrumental or functionalist account of the dictates of survival. Whether the Sandinistas as an opposition party can continue their project of state formation that might enable them to return to governance remains to be seen. They have moved into the civil society they helped create not only through the insistence on the necessity of opposition, but in its realization through the demands of participation (the so-called grass roots) on the one hand and, on the other, through the introduction of a certain distance of the state means of violence from the political that has been such a familiar characteristic of governance in Latin America. With a certain irony it can be said that whereas the United States tolerates far less difference than its current structures of dominance can handle, the Sandinistas tolerated a good deal more than they were able to survive. What compromises this speculation is of course the weakness of Nicaragua's forces of internal determination of difference. The incessant destabilization of its internal political processes meant that the pressures of legitimation associated with governance never attained a reconciliation with the formation of state that could have institutionalized both formal and popular participation. If only because it has more securely instituted its political structures of dominance, Cuba offers a firmer basis of comparison. In Cuba the project of state formation was underdeveloped for many of the same reasons that Nicaragua's had been.25 Yet with its development of infrastructure and the successive incorporation of political opposition, Cuba in 1959 was better situated for the elaboration of state apparatus than Nicaragua had been twenty years later. Batista's overthrow of Machado and the subsequent constitution had pretensions for participation that Somoza's assassination of Sandino, the real object of his coup in 1934, never had. Certainly Batista's return to power in the 1950s made a farce of the populist overtures of the earlier Sergeant's Revolt, and his use of government as a mechanism for primitive accumulation did not differentiate him from the

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Somoza dynasty. The Cuban state did mediate the relation between a highly concentrated foreign capital (from ownership of sugar production to telephones, oil, and utilities) in a manner that the Somoza family's ownership of Nicaragua's productive capacity could only mock without the demands for mediation. In the cases of both Nicaragua and Cuba, U.S. skepticism turned to hostility within a year after the revolution, and hostility took the familiar forms of counterrevolution and embargo (though in Nicaragua, without the nationalizations and with numerous trade concessions, there appeared to be even less grounds for these acts). The Cubans' successful process of resistance to counterrevolution and consolidation of political opposition was roughly equivalent to the span of time the Sandinistas were in power. Part of this success no doubt lay in the ability to keep separate in Cuba what had become joined in Nicaragua. The invasion of Playa Giron was so immediately defeated and discredited that it had none of the efficacy for remaining elites or resistance to agrarian reform by small holders that the contras came to embody. Although Castro was quick to point out how many doctors had abandoned the country and how many technical personnel left with the nationalizations, Cuba's underemployed educated sector, its proletarianized agriculture, the relatively small number of dispossessed peasants, and small holders who never had their land appropriated presented a very different socioeconomic mosaic than that found in Nicaragua. That foreign capital owned as much of Cuba as it did meant that nationalization would not have the impact it would on the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie that the Sandinistas never ceased cultivating. The much greater socialization of manual and mental labor in Cuba meant that there was a closer affinity between the bulk of the population and the appeal of socially oriented state formation. Castro's initial governments did seek to incorporate the disparate bourgeois parties but their withdrawal from formal participation could not have the social impact that the politically impotent but economically significant Nicaraguan business constituencies would have had. Because formal participation of disparate parties could have so little impact on the population at large, much less of the project of state formation in Cuba hinged on the initial terms for the development of government as it had in Nicaragua. Rather, the critical incorporation was with the Communist party, an entity that was never permitted under Batista to have much impact in the formal

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realm of participation but with its links to trade unions and the critical intelligentsia was emblematic of the direction institutionalization of government would have to take if it were to secure formal participation. That the consequence of this integration resulted in the formation of a single political organization with a persistent leader has perhaps been given more explanatory power than it deserves in discussions of Cuban politics, if, as is often the case, the leader and party are taken both as the totality of politics and of social development. This overcrediting of the apparatuses of government with politics springs from a failure to disarticulate government and state, and what follows from this in a socialist context, formal and popular participation. In the Cuban context such separation may be rendered more complex because the continuity between the consolidation of government and the elaboration of the state has proceeded with Fidel Castro as both governmental leader and figure of state discourse. It would be useful to ask whether more change consistent with socialist development would have transpired in Cuba were another leader to have replaced him at some point. To pose the question this way, however, is to limit severely the terms of analysis of what difference a leader could make to a given context. The question begs an understanding of what forces context might bring not only in constraining activity of government but also in the formation of its leadership per se. Participation is not reducible to social change, however, although (depending on the parameters of inclusion and the demands of control over the environment for development) change and participation can certainly come into conflict with one another. Such would presumably be the case with any revolutionary process where the depth of social change invariably precludes the participation of certain sectors of the population through generalized means of the limitation of formal participation. What socialist revolutions have claimed is that these formal limits are compensated through popular means that replace the range of different political forms or parties with the strength of the relationship between representatives and those they represent. This is not to suggest that the formal apparatuses of government, such as the party, are any more eternal for socialist constructions than for bourgeois representative democracies, but the problem of transition of leadership or succession of parties is made all the more formidable by the absence of historical circum-

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stances where political parameters were firmly enough on socialist terms as to have presented multiple parties as a socialist alternative. Conversely, alternative directions of political and economic development have emerged within a given socialist leadership or government. The introduction of institutions for popular participation, the Organs of Popular Power, seventeen years after the revolutionary triumph in Cuba suggests that there remained participation to be institutionalized and that the state was still in formation. These community assemblies that form the base of the representative system of government display the greatest measure of authority and administration over everyday life and correspondingly entail the closest approximation of direct democracy. They also raise the problem of the limited scale of such mechanisms. More broadly, the question could be posed as follows: can mechanisms of direct democracy be unmediated by an organizational network at a national scale that equilibrates local administrative units or inputs? Such mediations would more properly be an issue of state structure rather than governmental policy insofar as decision-making capabilities cannot be such as to undermine the distribution of social goods that are associated with citizenship. Which resources or decisions "belong" to a given political unit such as a community, region, nation, or world may be less important than the culture of those decisions. This culture entails the inscription in daily life of a commitment to decide that coordinates the generalized contingency of the social environment with a confidence in historical possibility. It is curious that the point at which the relations of representation are most diffuse, the national level, is often taken as the critical measure of democracy, particularly if these relations wind up minimizing opportunities for participation exclusive of electoral rites. As the citizens of the former German Democratic Republic or of Fujimori's Peru found out in different ways, electoral choices unattached to political organizations promote strong decisions and weak participation. This discussion also presents a methodological problem for the study of democracy broadly, if indeed it can ever be treated as a fully independent variable (as if allocations of power could themselves be separated from the materiality of what gets allocated)—namely, what measures of participation and/or representation need to be adequate to. It is not clear what values are getting compared when such facts as number of parties on the ballot, number of years a candidate has

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served in office, percentage of the population in political parties, or frequency of elections are taken as depicting a standardizable content in equalizable contexts; measuring representation adequate to scales of participation would seem more meaningful, and not some abstract index of representability without appeal to how those represented shape the terms of exchange. Measures of participation need to be adequate to more than representation, more than the degree of selectability of government. Such measures need to be adequate to the relevance of participation for the practical functioning and operative critique of the state. When General Arnaldo Ochoa was tried, convicted, and executed for corruption and drug smuggling, it was interpreted by affiliates of the U.S. State Department like former Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliot Abrams (one of the architects of the war against the Sandinistas) as a preemptive strike against a possible successor to the government leadership. This begged the questions of who Ochoa might have represented within Cuba, what beyond his "popularity" he would bring to office, and how his governance would effect the socialist state.26 Certainly this is consistent with the reduction of socialism to the psychology and person of a head of state that characterizes virtually all public discussion of Cuba in standard U.S. media, and is as such unremarkable. Instead, the U.S. coverage should be contrasted to the popular response in Cuba, one no doubt theatricalized by the media there through talk shows and person-on-the-street interviews as an occasion to hurl spleen at privilege and question the legitimacy of the state (although not that of the government prosecuting Ochoa). The misrepresentation of the significance of the case for Cubans was yet another lost opportunity to grasp the dynamics of participation in the public sphere. Such discussions are not reserved for major scandals, as is familiar in the West. The voracity with which Habaneros consume the daily news with commentary—and they appreciate that the press is only the voice of the state once removed—suggests a political culture not confined to pubs and bars. This penchant for discussion, both an effect of the structures of participation and an expression of them, can be heard in myriad popular interpretations of the numerous and seemingly unending run of new rules and regulations that must be chewed on and interpreted. The revolution cannot take credit for all of the form of these discussions, although it may have fortified a type

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of public sphere that has waned in other industrial settings. It may perhaps take more credit for the content of these discussions and the reflexivity they impose on the terms of participation. To say this is to insist that any adequate measure of participation constitutive of a serious appreciation of democracy would have to address the relation of politics inside and outside political institutions, which entails recognizing how politics is embedded in daily life but also how the discursive practices of daily life and of the state find cultural expression. Culture generally then may turn out to have more significance for appreciating the contours of participation than a narrowly institutional view of politics would allow—one, for example, that looks only at the party. The intent of this study has been to privilege a particular cultural practice, theater, to understand the dynamics of this mediation. To make this maneuver effective requires a double strategy: first, to situate theater in the midst of the mediation of state and daily life in Cuba and Nicaragua, and second, with more profound implications for the study of socialism, to use theater to situate this mediation. I shall therefore conclude with a reflection on the different conditions of and for the development of theater in the two revolutionary settings, followed by a discussion of the differing developmental and critical principles legible in Cuba and Nicaragua's theatrical practices. Situating Theater There is no place as complex as a country must be where theatrical activity is contained within a single expressive form. Even in Nicaragua, where theater before the revolution had been difficult to sustain, popular enactments like Guegiience and La Novia de Tola provided marked contrasts from the Teatro Experimental de Managua or the Comedia Nacional. The conventions of theatrical performance provide a narrative of apparent unity given physical boundary on the stage that approximates an idealized projection of the nation. Yet little of the narration of nation found its way onto formal stages until the revolution. Theater, no less than the fictitious unity that constitutes national identity, rests on an appropriation of some locally generated identity, often located at the margins of those with the power to articulate the national project. Especially in nations emerging

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through a history of colonialism, that power to articulate is complicated by its desire for recognition from beyond the borders that would contain it. As was common throughout Latin America, intellectuals found themselves looking elsewhere for their cultural confirmation, sometimes through the force of exile like Jose Marti or, for want of a national culture of intellectuals they would be credited with embodying, like Ruben Dario. Every project to represent the unity of the nation not only necessitates appropriation (in the form of representation of forms initially presented elsewhere) of sources marginal to it, but also generates a specific exclusion of form or content from representation that is not appropriated and, by so doing, generates the very relations of marginality upon which it draws. Literature has been privileged as this representational form. Theater can present a stronger case than the novel, but under more precarious conditions given the ephemerality of its traces of representation when the fiction—because it is a fiction—needs to be more sustainable. This is what made Alan Bolt's theater project so intriguing from the perspective of a socialist vision of national identity: it reversed the relations of margin and center (unable by itself to transcend the delineation), and thereby offered the possibility that a nation could be constituted from the perspective of the appropriated—namely, those hitherto discontinuous marginalities, the sum of locality that exists for the metropolis as el campo, but for itself was only so many sites of subsistence. Bolt's theater, despite its extensive reach, could not as a theater be national construction, but it could represent a version of it. The limits of theater for political mobilization should not be assumed as the limits of its figurative power to articulate a national project. Ultimately, those limits offer the only hope for social as opposed to national development, because the latter, even in its most progressive incarnation, is only a temporary measure in support of the former, and even then only under special circumstances, as when a territory and population was constituted through particular histories of violation that national liberation might attempt to ameliorate. In this regard, Bolt's work seeks to critique the adequacy of the center to address conditions of identity and development. Recognizing difference is not adequate to promoting its conditions of possibility, however. While Bolt may be offering a scheme to relate marginalities in representation, the concern to revalue the resources of produc-

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tion in terms of land, labor, gender, and culture is more ambitious than a national project aimed at minimizing the disruptive effects of intervention. This suggests the point at which socialism and any merely national articulation part company. While Bolt's theater is a representation of a certain project of identity and development, it certainly cannot be considered representative of such projects. Whatever aspirations theater may hold, speaking of a typical theater is problematic—not simply because this begs the question of what that theater might be typical of, but, more important, it tends to confuse typicalities of form with shared contexts and relations. This is why situation as an analytic term may improve on representation to address the issue of how to move between theater and society, form and context. Representation operates through certain relations of appropriation that introduce boundaries between what is included and what is excluded. These boundaries are not adequate to discern different levels of activity such as text and context, however. It is not the case that what gets excluded from representation constitutes context for the included, as both elements are selected from the same field of possibilities. The task of situation as an analytic procedure is to account for the movement between that field, the conditions for constituting a given occasion for activity (performance), and the content of that activity, what is usually referred to as the text. What makes such a situation more challenging in Nicaragua than in Cuba are the difficulties of identifying the diverse sources for various theatrical activities that derive from an already-constituted cultural field; in Cuba, the strength and relative centralization of theatrical traditions make this maneuver more feasible. Theater as a public activity is accomplished only with the revolution in both settings, but in Nicaragua the revolution also begins the constitution of the field for theatrical activity as well. Hence theater is far more developed by the Cuban revolution, but its development is more indebted to the Nicaraguan revolution per se. The professionalization of theater culminates with the Cuban revolution, and it is deferred (as it had been previously) for the participation that the Sandinistas' victory enabled. In this regard, the situation for theatrical development was multiply determined by the history of theater and of the prospects for nation that each revolutionary experience displayed.

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One of the paradoxical features of the situation of theater in Cuba and Nicaragua is evident in the relation between theater and the rev* olution. On the eve of the Cuban revolution theater had divested itself adequately of the harsh instrumentalities of the market to focus on its own conditions of development, yet people like the Revueltas who were and remain committed to the revolution did not narrate this relation in their theatrical work. Although Bolt's formation in semiclandestine agit prop theater had been determined by precisely this instrumentality of the revolution, the demand for narration was much greater in Nicaragua, where other narrative forms, such as the mass media, were scarcer and less generally distributed (except for radio) than in Cuba. Despite these inverse relations of instrumentality and revolution, Cuban theater emerged as the aesthetically more centralized form, whereas Nicaraguan popular theater only gradually yielded to more aesthetically mediated modes of representation. In Cuba, the establishment—seventeen years after the initial revolutionary triumph—of the Ministry of Culture, an organ of the state, actually became a medium of decentralization and a mediation of the instrumentalism of judgment of aesthetics with respect to politics. In Nicaragua, the culture ministry was set up within months of the triumph, only to collapse in 1988 with the retrenchment of state institutions. While the Ministry was perhaps more than anything a point of reference for blossoming popular activity, the artists' union, the ASTC, in practice made the aesthetic decisions of who would get funded— given the scarcities, a necessarily self-limiting process. Yet the institutionalization of professionalism in the ASTC did not totalize the resources for theatrical activity as completely as the Cuban Ministry did. Though ideological reasons might have been cited by groups such as Teatro Experimental de Managua that received only sporadic support, other groups that found themselves without an allocation of the scarce resources—like Bolt's after 1988, and Nestor Mendez—considered themselves to be partisans of the revolution. That institutionalization demands centralization would hence be an oversimplification, for even the atomizing effects of universal commodification assume the extension of an institution, the market, into sites that may have been free of it. With the emergence of a mixed economy in theater, however, ideological orientation did not determine whether a given group could be considered public or pri-

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vate in the economic sense. Further—with respect, for example, to Cuban Victor Varela's living room performance, La cuarta pared— private was an articulation of a particular form of social space, rather than a theater oriented as commodity. In Cuba, institutional reorganizations that effectively embrace more artistic activity wind up supporting a further decentralization of the arts. This is the case in terms of aesthetic criteria like formal abstraction that had made state guardians of the arts nervous in the sixties. It also applies to political criteria, like forthright critique of the state, which thirty years earlier might not have been considered "within the revolution." The Sandinistas' resources were always too minimal to judge their cultural policy with respect to a national organizational field. But the strong identification of culture generally with the assertion of the revolution gave a symbolic priority to culture beyond what could then be supported. This figured prominently in communicating a self-image of the revolution. The national positioning of the cultural was apparent in a range of phenomena, which included the appointments of Ernesto Cardenal as Minister of Culture and novelist Sergio Ramirez as vice president; the Popular Culture Centers and workshops as parallels of the literacy campaigns in the field of cultural activity; and the establishment of the artists' union headed by the poet Rosario Murillo, whose spouse was president of Nicaragua. Cultural forms certainly emerged with the Cuban revolution, notably in the areas of cinema and music, especially nueva trova. It is less clear how central these were to a more politically inflected discourse of self-concept. Rather than the cultural institutions per se bearing the bulk of responsibility for the place of culture in the revolutions, it is important to locate the production of culture itself as a factor. Managua and Havana are both the irrefutable metropolitan centers of their respective countries (for historical reasons that have already been discussed), but Managua is a much weaker cultural center. The Universidad Autonoma de Leon gave Alan Bolt his first theatrical experience and was a base for the movement of student intellectuals known as Ventana, who published a review of culture and politics by the same name.27 Even for Managua-based intellectuals like Cuadra and Urtecho, the countryside was likely to be the cultural referent for national identity. Despite a growing recording industry that incorporated musicians from the Atlantic coast and the Segovias, a fledgling film industry, and

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occasional forays into television production beyond news and talk shows, Managua never developed Havana's infrastructure for mass media that could effectively privilege town over countryside as a site of cultural production. Outside the Nicaraguan capital, television tended to come after the revolution (as I witnessed in the growing presence of blue lights and antennae in the rural shacks in the mountains of Matagalpa over six years of visits) rather than preceding it as in the prototypic market of Cuba in the 1950s that was a backdrop for international films and a source of other people's popular music. The revolutionary government did make efforts to distribute cultural resources nationally, and no doubt in provincial centers the network of theater and dance companies, cultural centers, cinemas, and so on, had no prerevolutionary parallel. Yet Havana remained the center of this national network (Santiago had significant autonomy but not the centrality as a national center) with its university of the arts (ISA), ministerial offices, and access to international media (including pirated Miami radio and late-night television). The cultural autonomy of Managua was much more difficult to define given its international marginalization as an outlet for the cheapest media commodities (translating into low-budget films and an eighteen-month lag on pop tunes) and its peripherality with respect to the material and symbolic centers of cultural production in the countryside, from Solentiname to the poetry movement. These powerful spatial relations had their impact on the development of theater as well. They enabled Bolt's project to assume a national significance within just a few years. In Cuba, only a movement of Havana actors like Sergio Corrieri (in the same year he had starred in the internationally acclaimed film Memories of Underdevelopmenf) into the Escambray Mountains indicated a recognition from the center of a need for a redistribution of cultural resources to the countryside. Given the high degree of centralization and industrialization (even of agriculture) in Cuba, it is sensible that the tensions of margin and center—what might be described as generic terms for any relations of historical movement—would not be expressed in terms of city and countryside as in Nicaragua. Conversely, it would be difficult to imagine a marginalization in Nicaragua along the lines of youth, given their predominance in the demographics of age in the population and in the revolution at all levels. (Tomas Borge is the only surviving founder of the FSLN, and is an exception to the prev-

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alent age of those in power during the 1980s.) Yet in Cuba, with social development (especially education and training) outstripping the material resources to realize the aspirations such development would embody, youth is created as a margin outside and awaiting those apparently already filled positions of economic and historical prominence. It is not that these tensions of margin and center are universally thematized in the theater but rather that they are legible in theater's most emergent forms in both Cuba and Nicaragua. This conjuncture of aesthetic innovation and social dynamics situates developments in the theater. Even when those developments do not figure the conjuncture directly, as seems the case in the reurbanization of theater in Chamorro-led Nicaragua, couched as a turn to professional and "universal" theater, the very possibility of such theater is greatly indebted to the revolution's nationalization of audience. Further, in its projection of aspirations for a national identity through the theater, the urban theater is immediately dependent on the prior rurally based theatrical experience in the form of an appropriation. Similarly in Cuba, the diversity of theatrical form generated by the national field of socialist cultural policy generates the premise of differentiation that the younger theatermakers have laid claim to as their basis of legitimacy for otherwise scarce resources. Hence it could be said for both Cuba and Nicaragua that the history of socialist theatrical development is a resource for theatrical trajectories even when new works diverge from that history. This discussion was meant to account, albeit in a cursory fashion, for the privileging of certain theatrical forms in each country. It now remains to invert the terms of the analysis to use the way certain problems of national and social development are figured in the theater to discern the formation of socialism in each context. Just as theater derives its situation from its broader social context, so too can that context only be grasped through an adequate theoretical abstraction from a given concrete instance. Socialist Ensembles Socialism may be relatively straightforward to define in theory (controversy about these definitions notwithstanding) but is difficult to

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recognize in practice. Socialism assumes the development and allocation of productive resources for societal use rather than profit-taking exchange, yet its presence in any concrete site cannot be reduced to a measure of the ratio between these two circuits of productive relations. More of Nicaragua's productive capacity was privately controlled than was the case in France. Cuba's joint ventures with Western capital, including U.S. subsidiaries, are said to have already reached the level of investment it had received from the Soviet Union. Surely such comparisons are of little value for specifying a conception of socialism, for they beg the question of how specific forms of ownership are inserted into an economy. That the most loyal capitalist state would assume responsibility for nonprofitable enterprises like transportation may derive more from the service it performs for capital than from its commitment to fulfill social obligations. Socialism, especially as it emerges from the circumstances of neocolonialism, cannot be assessed as an aggregate of the microeconomics of production; it must be inferred as a tendency of the direction of development of an economy. Even that direction must be assessed not in terms of some absolute value but relative to the history of development from which it seeks to depart. In many respects, the economic program of the Sandinistas was quite modest if its state support of agriculture is compared to similar inputs in the United States or France. Instead, such policies, along with those foundations of consent (like education and health) associated with even the most conservative administrations of the welfare state in the West, were inconceivable under the political economy of dependent capitalism and intolerable to its systemic beneficiaries, foreign and domestic. Such relativizations of economic initiatives shift the burden of proof of a socialist presence from the economic to the political—specifically, to measures of the social foundations of the state, the conditions of opposition to a prior hegemonic situation, or the emergent practices of participation beyond the formal mechanisms that had previously existed, like voting. They still may not solve the problem of how to move from definition to recognition, however. Even measures of participation tend to hinge on the identification of formal organizations and their effects on policy rather than on the social content, as it were, of those organizations. Relating such content to an adequate appreciation of context might enable one to notice what socialism actually looked like in practice.

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Not that socialism for all its practical effects and historical manifestations could have a single look, stable content, or constant essence. But for socialism to maintain an appeal it must project a possibility beyond the immediate conditions of existence for any concrete expression or measurable effect. For this reason analysis should privilege cultural practices in the recognition of socialism. These practices join an immediately situated practice with a projection that is inscribed in the symbolic material generated by that practice. As situation and inscription, theater can be taken as a measure and a projection of possibility. As measure, it displays the critical principles that encounter an actual public. As project it presents what it can only hint at the completion of. Karen Hermassi has described what such ambitions for theater in society might entail: Drama is a unique expression of the polity's highest purpose, and that purpose, like the purpose of man, is not order in and for itself but vision and play. When we are sufficiently at ease in the world, we will act out our destinies in the form of play rather than pursue the "unlimited" growth of counterfeit material powers. When a political culture has now and then attained a peculiar balance between the requisites of order and the needs of the human psyche, that culture has produced drama in which its inherent violence and tensions are translated into the artist's will to become and the audience's will to remember and act. As the dramatic action becomes a living part of the audience's minds, fulfilling the conscious desire to be entertained, the unconscious desire is to extrapolate something from the performance that will enable us to tolerate the conditions of this world. . . . The theatre, then, enables the audience to experience a kind of political participation that far exceeds that of institutional representation, where the general public retires from the strain of collective responsibility, leaving that burden to a few public servants. The intimidations of memory, as provoked in dramatic art, are, I believe, the main reason for the decline of theatre, for the obligations of recollection and participation become too burdensome. The theatre's powers of education cut through too many defenses; they threaten the onedimensionality of any polity or community by dramatizing its contemporary reality as merely one alternative in the future of its political life. This renders theatre intolerable for many societies, (emphasis in original)28 Theater rests on the possibility of surviving memory and tolerat-

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ing participation beyond what may be sustainable or sustained through other realms of politics. As it dramatizes the contingency of the present, theater could be said to imagine collectively the continuation of history through other means. Hermassi's insight is important to appreciate the robustness of theater in Cuba and Nicaragua, where as nations under siege they could scarcely feel confident about the balance of order and need—unless, of course, theater as mediation of state and civil society is taken as a measure of the stability of that balance. It would be easy to take the Sandinistas' electoral loss in 1990 as a symptom of a loss of balance, but this cannot account for their survival (both electoral in 1984 and political through the austerity measures of 1988 and 1989) way beyond what the dictates of material scarcity narrowly defined might allow. Likewise in Cuba, measuring the insecurities of order and need, and interpolating these as a measure of system stability is easy. It would be impossible to understand the longevity of the Cuban or the Nicaraguan situation without resorting to the most reductionistic notions of totalitarianism that simply do away with the question of balancing order and need because the will to express need is somehow absent from the populations that had asserted needs in revolution only years before. But if the claims of the totalitarian model were valid, it would also be impossible to account for the presence, let alone the support for, a critical theater of memory and participation, as there would be neither artistic basis nor public grounds for it. To explain the vibrancy of theater, attested to by its decline after the putative stabilization of the Chamorro government and its persistence after the destabilizing withdrawal of Soviet aid in Cuba, it is necessary to see what social forces are marshaled within it. What will be suggested is that theater's success depends on the expression of relations that culminate only in performance. Theater is possible as the desire for memory and participation that also displays that desire. In this regard theatrical relations entail the connections of forces internal and external to performance. These can only be grasped as constituting an ensemble made possible by the surplus of the social in socialism and abetting the desire for the continuation of that surplus. Theater is a moment of apparent spatial unity produced by a contemporaneity of forces that imply one another in terms of their specific production but only realize their effects as elements through

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interaction. Hence a theatrical ensemble cannot be limited to the realization of a text through performance. Performance is always performance for a public that is mobilized through performance but also occasions that performance. Similarly, the performance itself is made available through a range of enabling contributions from, for example, director, author, and technicians that can only become invisible through its realization. Once these immediate boundary conditions are recognized, it becomes apparent that any given performance is merely a node in a much wider array of relations that both presupposes and displays a given context. Here one could begin with the construction of the theater space as an instance of an entire construction of spaces. Those spaces embrace the audience-to-be in terms of the places of work, housing, and transportation systems that bring the members of the audience to the theater. The contours of this kind of spatial situation of theater were sketched in chapter 2, where it was also noted that the apparent aesthetic and political autonomy of Nixtayolero was in actuality a product of this ensemble of relations. No doubt the rupture of this ensemble rendered this particular form of theater untenable. The rupture occurred as much in the material network of relations, especially those that allowed the theater to be accessible to a public and provided the support that would make actors' lives available to theater, as in the symbolic fabric that assured that the accumulation of memory and participation would be relevant to processes beyond the theater. This is not to say that the prospects for a critical theater have been eliminated in Nicaragua, but only that a given conjuncture has been circumscribed. Participation and memory can take many forms as in the risk figured through security in Victor Varela's work that combines a memory of unrepresentable fantasy with the public's spatial insinuation in the performer's privacy. The socialism of that particular ensemble lies precisely in the determination of public and private that collide in performance but are not determined by it. Alternately, Albio Paz's commentaries on the problems of participation through his popular enactments assume in their sites of performance and specificity of their publics a certain reflexivity. They also display a larger discourse of participation in the self-construction of society for which memory has no practical history. Paz's cautionary tales on the demands of par-

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ticipation of communities when the conditions for growth or materialization of need are limited, situate his work quite centrally in the imagination of what Cuba's development might increasingly demand. These examples raise the figurative power of theater to represent a given socialist project, but they also locate the socialism of these theaters in their powers to enable a collective imagination beyond what the demands of order and need would imply. While socialism has suffered under the burden of the constructed scarcities of capitalism, it also introduces into its own cultural production an inversion of those relations of scarcity. Here, an experience of material scarcity actually serves as a resource for a surplus that is the product of an ensemble whose symbolic work is to imagine just such a possibility. In this regard, a conception of socialism that is restricted to an economy oriented toward the freedom from want may impoverish that conception, especially if the conception of socialism cannot also imagine how a symbolic surplus, an excess of desire realized through the immediacy of a gathered ensemble, is constitutive of that project. Here theater contributes, methodologically and politically, to the problem of how to notice the socialism of a given social formation. A single evening of theater is not equivalent to socialist development taken as a whole, nor is it the case that attendance at publicly financed performances (though relatively high compared to percentages of the population that attends theater in the United States) is higher than public exposure to mass media, education, or other institutions. The problem is that no single measure, site, or situation is adequate to recognize socialism in its entirety. As such, even institutional contacts that are patterned and routine, like work, home, or school, do not relate metonymically to the socialist formation as a part to a whole. The functional specificity of each of these sites tends to limit its representational reach to the point at which location joins context. Hence, for example, the culture of the workplace may evoke a more generalized imagery of socialism in terms of its figuration of the centrality of labor. As metaphor, however, it is likely to miss what beyond production per se is constitutive of socialism. Theater serves as a rather reflexive index of socialism in that its figuration is less about the specificities of its own productive situation than the representation of production as a problem. It is less re-

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flexive about what it takes to produce theater; indeed, these relations are often concealed in performance to yield a self-consciousness about how elements are drawn from beyond the boundaries of the performance space to construct the illusion of a continuation of the world beyond through other means. That these are conditions shared by all theatrical presentations should be apparent: they do not specify a given aesthetic form of theater. Socialist theater, however, operates as the conjuncture of this claim to act as a continuation of an external totalization that is implicated in performance with a demand for participation adequate to that totalization evoked by the performance. This conjuncture of organizational context with aesthetic form does not complete a vision of a socialist project but in its insinuation before a public renders it as necessity if the performance is to find its internal completion. It is sensible that in order to render the work of memory and participation consistent with the principles of collectivity rather than compensation for an absent community that commercial theater projects, this theater must be socialized in its relations of production and reception. But theater must also be socialized with respect to its aesthetic content, namely, its performance values or forms. Socialist theater is a production where use value is exchange value, and form assumes the demands of content. With respect to Cuba and Nicaragua we have seen that these parameters do not yield a uniform theatrical idiom —only a problem that is legible across and that is borne in a multiplicity of responses. This insight should instruct us about socialism as well, for socialism is a means of conditioning a situation, not a given appearance that displays in unmediated fashion the proof of an ideal. The diversity of theatrical forms observed in these two countries indicates that the socialist situation is not a readily exhaustible problem, and the very display of difference in theater is a presentation of the possibility of continuing that more ambitious historical project. Clearly that project has space for a diversity of socialist theaters in those countries dominated by capital as well. The collective memory presented in theater is the weight of contingency on the drama of the present, whether expressed as risk or responsibility. Theater under socialism displays the obligations of the state to deliver the conditions of an assembling public while momentarily suspending the name of the state, leaving that public with the burden of

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a self-assertion. At the end of performance the public is left not with the problem of managing itself as an already-constituted body (audience) but in the situation of dispersing itself with the memory of an identified but incomplete project throughout the institutional spaces of society. Theater battles the temptation to present a grand narrative of socialism as telos by offering an actual ending that can only necessitate a continuation. It also grounds a particular socialist project through its figurative powers to locate what is historically emergent about that project but not yet generalizable in either polity or economy For Cuba this figurative power was seen with respect to the otherwise disparate policies of rectification. These policies were displayed in the reorganized production of theater that assumed greater integration of administration with execution. These organizational flexibilities were accomplished as a reversal of a prior marketization, and they featured a nonnarrative aesthetics that forced audiences to be complicit in the generation of new forms out of limited materials. For Sandinista Nicaragua, such figuration was evident in the theatrical mediation of town and country, consumption and production, indigenous culture and gender, that were brought together in the interpenetration of production and culture promoted by the community theater movement. These figurative powers make themselves available in different ways to different audiences. They are being asserted in this writing as methodological principles for detecting the internal dialectic of state and civil society under socialism, what might be termed its historicity. It is more difficult to explicate the appropriation of these figurative powers of theater for a given audience because the efficacy of performance does not translate to other measurable effects. Performance is a technology of social assemblage. What gets assembled is the materiality of audience and performers but also the imaginary relations of socialism, its moving dreams, lived Utopias, symbolization of ensemble. As socialism cannot free itself from its capitalist context, so theater is not free of the partial formation of socialism in any existing situation. Theater is a site where the fantasy of history, which makes minimal demands of participation on the audience beyond its immediate assembly, inverts those demands in the collective imagination of the excessive participation of performance.

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In theater, the socialist context can depict the incompleteness of its project as a problem for history and not as a statement on the limits of self—which even the most radical theaters framed by capital must contend with as a founding myth of their audience. The transformation of the way theater is inserted in society, the loss of the autonomy of the aesthetic that is so often portrayed as a loss of freedom, in practice represents the more profound displacement of the aesthetic as a compensation for the social to a new economy of the aesthetic. This economy, while invoking the authority of production, also indicates the limits of that authority to deliver a form adequate to its demand. Socialist culture is not merely an allegory of production as emancipation, but an effort to reconfigure the economy of desire as the consumption of the social. Ensemble becomes the principle of the aesthetic realized now as a displacement from the privileged sphere of artistic production into the quotidian domain. For the theater of capital there is no demand to remember that history must continue after the traces of performance have vanished. This memory of continued history is the only condition of socialist theater, whether under any given set of circumstances it is capable of realizing it or not. The desire for history is articulated through the desire for further performance that, under the autonomous aesthetic domain associated with capital's conditions of cultural exchange, renders history no more than serialized representation. Obviously the theater cannot carry this burden alone: it is also the burden of context expressed on stage. A revolutionary process does not end until it has exhausted the social forces that it had initially opposed. Hence one could say that the American and French revolutions have run their course with respect to an aristocracy already bent on transforming itself, while the whole history of socialist revolutions remains incomplete and uncompleted. This condition would appear to be a continuous resource for socialist theater insofar as it remains a guardian of a memory that has not yet come to pass. The possibility of such memory has never perhaps seemed so pressing in the face of an avalanche of endings to what by all historical reckonings must be considered still the dawn of the narrative of socialism. While staging such endings as final, theater in practice downplays their significance in the assurance of a survival beyond the play. The drama of historical socialism may indeed turn out to have many endings too—certainly the many proclamations of

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socialism's newly-arrived-at impossibility have always accompanied its appearances, from the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune to the last presidential bows of Gorbachev and the Sandinistas. Such transitive performances may be much closer to history than the great narratives of continuity, convergence, and reason by which capital's tale is told. In the theater of history, socialism's bright punctuations refer more directly to the practical experience of those already exempted from and by the grandness of narrative. In this larger problem of representation, theater may also have its privileged role. The fragility of that exquisite ensemble that breaks apart as it is formed as the memory of a scene gets appropriated for use, speaks both to the limit but also to the possibility of theater and of socialism. It throws the responsibility for ensemble that has generated it back in the direction of audience, which must now proceed as if this were all that could be animating public activity. The surprised recognition of revolutionary promise is presented back as what is organizing audience to begin with. The exhausting exceptionalism of transformation is reinscribed from theater into an index of daily practice. Paradoxically the proof that the audience has approached this trajectory of historicity can be located only in the theater itself as a materialization of what this audience is anticipated to be. The performance is configured as if the audience-to-be were always already in and of it. From its perspective, the audience receives these materialized representations as the forms it could be. If socialism is to remain possible it must produce legible moments of its own sociality as a feature of its own free associations. Here the staging of socialism can be found.

Notes

Translations from the Spanish are by the author except where noted otherwise. 1. THEATER AND THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF SOCIALISM 1. Visitors of this ilk produced a small genre of critically minded travel accounts, among them: Salman Rushdie's, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (London: Penguin, 1987); Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre (San Francisco: City Lights, 1984); Joel Kovel, In Nicaragua (London: Free Associations, 1988). These works bear a resemblance to the genre of testimonio that has important expressions in Nicaragua, e.g., Omar Cabezas, Fire from, the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista (New York: New American Library, 1985); Tomas Borge, Carlos, the Dawn Is No Longer Beyond Our Reach, trans. Margaret Randall (Seattle: Left Bank, 1984); Sergio Ramirez, To Bury Our Fathers: A Novel of Nicaragua (New York: Readers International, 1984). Ramirez also compiled the recently translated Sandino: The Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot, 1921-34, trans. Robert E. Conrad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 2. Jean-Paul Dumont, The Headman and /.- Ambiguity and Ambivalence in the Fieldworking Experience (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978). 3. Such spaces "foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination." For the socialist ethnographer of socialism, dependency on improvisational means is made all the more explicit. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. 4. See Randy Martin, "Sowing the Threads of Resistance: Worker Resistance and Managerial Control in a Paint and Garment Factory," Humanity and Society 11,3 (1986): 259-75, and Randy Martin, Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1990). 5. Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Rabinow reminds us that "fieldwork is a dialectic between reflection and immediacv" that is "committed to self-consciousness" (39).

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6. Michael Burawoy, Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modem Metropolis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 7. See Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (New York: Prentice Hall, 1967). 8. Clough locates that form of narrative in a form of realism that appears dead because it has disavowed its own desire for narration, hence linking sociology's crisis of identity to feminist and psychoanalytic accounts of the relation of representation to the real. See Patricia Clough, The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (Newbury Park, Calif: Sage, 1992), 2. For a collection that addresses the feminist critique to anthropology, see Micaela Di Leonardo, ed., Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 9. These methodological limitations are apparent in recent surveys of ethnographic writing by sociologists that do, however, treat its representational aspect. See John Van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); David Jacobsen, Reading Ethnography (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991); and Paul Atkinson, The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality (New York: Routledge, 1990). These studies appear to present a gain over those that would collapse representation and object into a matter of becoming the observed, without any critical recuperation of what this entails. See Peter Adler and Patricia Adler, Membership Roles in Field Research (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1987) and David M. Hayano, "Auto-Ethnography: Paradigms, Problems and Prospects," Human Organization 38,1 (1979): 99-104. 10. This "self-concept" is revealed most famously in Bronislaw Malinowski's diaries but is also hinted at in Evans-Pritchard's complaint of "nuerosis" in his study of the people of the Sudan. See Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967) and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). 11. For discussion, see Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991). 12. This language of boundary and containment was reformulated in the idiom of anticommunism to the same effect of systematically confusing internal capacities for history with external anxieties of influence and rule. A simplifying Cartesian displacement of East against West contending for a dominance of North over South, robbed the socialism of anticolonial struggles of their situated context. The elision of South with East enabled the assertion of a proprietary interest in those struggles. The fate of those (colonial) others was treated as if it belonged to us without recognizing how, in the massive appropriation upon which global dominance rests, we, in actuality, belonged to them. Hence, the forces that gave rise to ethnography and to socialism may be more profoundly linked than is usually acknowledged. It was these bounded geographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the ethnographer penetrated with the intention of disclosure. The narrative of difference upon which the inaugural ethnographies and capitalist modernization rest too easily effaces the socializing effects of cultural contact, among whose recursive features socialism can be located. See Ralph Milliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, eds., Socialist Register: The Uses of AntiCommunism (London: Merlin, 1984). 13. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, 7. 14. Ibid., 9.

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15. Ibid, 11. 16. Ibid, 14. 17. Ibid, 15. 18. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 17. 19. Ibid, 60. 20. See Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) and James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 21. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 22. Fredric Jameson has sought to condition this generalized recognition of difference in the history of anticolonial struggles that gained the countries of the Third World, and concomitantly the counterhegemonic identities within the First World, what he cites after Sartre's introduction to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth as the means to speak, rather than merely the use of the word. Jameson's formulation enables a connection to be made between ethnography and socialism, and between cultural difference and geopolitics. See Fredric Jameson, "Periodizing the Sixties," in Sohnya Sayres et al., eds., The Sixties without Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 178-215. 23. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 53-54. 24. Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 203. 25. See Soraya Altorki and Camillia El-Solh, eds., Studying Your Own Society: Arab Women in the Field (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988) and Lila Abu-Lughod, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" Women and Performance 5, 1 (1990): 7-27. 26. For a discussion of these issues, see Madhava Prasad, "On the Question of a Theory of (Third World) Literature" and George Yudice, "We Are Not the World," both in Social Text 31/32 (1992): 57-83, 202-16. From a different perspective that makes the same point, William Roseberry interrogates the limits of interpretation in the face of political economy in Anthropologies and Histories (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989). 27. For a discussion of these issues with respect to professional anthropology, see Genit Huizer and Bruce Mannheim, eds., The Politics of Anthropology: From Colonialism and Sexism toward a View from Below (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979). 28. See Stephen Tyler, The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University Of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. 29. George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), ix. 30. June Nash, "Ethnology in a Revolutionary Setting," in Huizer and Mannheim, eds., The Politics of Anthropology, 368. 31. See the works of Erving Goffman and Michael Brown in sociology, especially Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963) and Brown, The Production of Society (Totowa, N.J.: Allen and Little-

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field, 1986); Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak in literary studies, notably Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) and Spivak, In Other Worlds (New York: Routledge, 1987); and James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 32. The conception of an opposition between state and civil society has been called into question by, among others, Michel Foucault, who "is led to raise the question of power by grasping it where it is exercised and manifested, without trying to find fundamental or general formulations; without considering, for example, the presence of a state which would be the holder of power, which would exercise its sovereignty upon a civil society which itself would not be the depository of analogous processes of power"; see Foucault, "The Discourse on Power" in Remarks on Marx-. Conversations with Duccio Trombadori (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 164. While Foucault's formulation raises issues of its own, such as what, besides power, might differentiate the state, applied to the discourse of socialism it approximates the view that all power is nondifferentiated and vested in the state. 33. Janos Kornai, The Socialist System-. The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 46. 34. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 10-11. Goffman cites Bateson's "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," reprinted in Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 177-93. 35. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 10. 36. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) and the essays in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) for discussion of the related concept of heteroglossia. 37. I have discussed these issues with respect to dance and its audiences in Randy Martin, "Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation," Social Text 34 (Winter 1992): 103-23, and Randy Martin, "Agency and History: The Demands of Dance Ethnography," in Susan Foster, ed., Choreographing History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). 38. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 39. Talal Asad, "The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology," in Clifford and Marcus, eds., Writing Culture, 159. 40. Consonant with this reading, Johannes Fabian suggests that such performance invites the ethnographer to be "a provider of occasions, a catalyst in the weakest sense"; see Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba Zaire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 7. 41. This model of cultural translation also underlies the notion of interculturalism in performance. See Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 209, for definition; see Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and the special issue of Performing Arts Journal 33/34 (1989) for discussion. 42. While Levi-Strauss pursues a representation of structure without limit, he nonetheless appreciates that even the "key myth is interesting not because it is typical,


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but rather because of its irregular position within the group"; see Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1964]), 1:2. 43. This issue has already been recognized by Margaret Mead, Letters from the Field, 1925-1975 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 267. It is also the basis of Stanley Diamond's critique of Levi-Strauss in In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974). 44. Such methodological claims are also made with respect to the historiography of theater. Joseph Roach asserts that theater is a device "closely analogous to contemporary optical instruments especially suited to the magnification of behavior"; see Joseph Roach, "The Artificial Eye: Augustan Theater and the Empire of the Visible," in Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt, eds., The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 143. For Anthony Kubiak, "theatre enunciates the very instant of perception that exists before culture and its laws"; see Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 15. 45. In certain cases, theater is viewed as a significant agency of social organization. Clifford Geertz, in Negara, allows that the state draws its force from its "semiotic capacity" (123) and as such "statecraft is a thespian art" (120); he does not, however, entertain the possibility of a semiosis against the state. Similarly, James Peacock, in Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Proletarian Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), views theater as symbolic activity that encourages modernization in Southeast Asia. The work of Victor Turner and Richard Schechner has gone furthest, perhaps, in applying the performative to the practice of ethnography. Schechner, a theater director, turns to anthropology because he senses a "convergence of paradigms"; see Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 33. At the end of his distinguished career, Turner proposes that ethnography be performed by his students' enacting rituals to understand how people of other cultures experience one another; see Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ, 1986), 140. While certainly effective in focusing on what performance may reveal about cultural processes, Schechner and Turner risk isolating such processes as "strips of behavior" from their broader context.

2. WHERE'S THE THEATER? 1. The literature on the economics of performance sees in it a certain exceptionalism to the laws of the profit-taking market. Even during the boom of the sixties, this literature appreciated that general affluence could not support an industry whose production costs increased with the length of a run. Hence conventional economies of scale did not apply, and this justified government intervention. See William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, The Performing Arts- The Economic Dilemma (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968 [1966]); Ray Bensen, "The Broadway Theater: A Problem of Stasis," dissertation, University of California-Los Angeles, 1970; Jack Poggi, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1967 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968); Thomas Gale Moore, The Economics of the American Theater (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1968); Gideon Chagy ed., Business in the Arts (New York: Paul Eriksson, 1970).

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2. For documentation of these recent attacks, see Steven Dubin, Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions (New York: Routledge, 1992). 3. At least one study attacks the notion that Broadway's decline is attributable to a dearth of new plays, or at least resources for their development. It sees the collapse of Off Broadway in the seventies as rendering New York inhospitable to the incubation of work that could then be transferred to a more commercial stage. This article does not, however, address these economic factors to the broader aesthetic and cultural issues of contemporary drama. See Douglas Anderson, "The Dream Machine: Thirty Years of New Play Development in America," The Drama Review 119 (Fall 1988): 55-84. 4. Jiirgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere," in Steven Seidman, ed.,Jiirgen Habermas on Society and Politics: A Reader (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 231. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), Habermas discusses theater in the context of the articulation of the bourgeois public sphere (38). 5. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 144. 6. Recent debates on the relation of capital to the state, generated by the notion of relative autonomy associated with the work of Nicos Poulantzas, are tracked from a Marxist perspective in Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in Their Place (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1990). 7. A theoretically sensitive articulation of the formation of public and private spheres as a means of differentiating relations of gender, race, and class in the formation of U.S. capitalism can be found in Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life (London: Verso, 1989). The application of the distinction cross-culturally to explore the social materialization of gender can be found in the influential collection of essays entitled Women, Culture and Society, Michele Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974). Micaela di Leonardo traces how the conception has been developed and challenged in feminist anthropology since the seventies in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 8. Habermas, "The Public Sphere," 233. 9. Jack Cohen et al., eds., Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 5:89, 5:50. 10. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 11. Aristotelian tragedy and Machiavellian virtue are the tropes that Augusto Boal assigns to these theatrical forms in Theater of the Oppressed (New York: Urizen Books, 1979). 12. For this reason the significance of a particular theater is always conjunctural. For studies that adopt this framework to examine theatrical articulations of a given political project, see Marie-Helene Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) and Loren Kruger, The National Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Kruger's book has a lucid discussion of the theoretical grounds for locating theater as a mediation of state and civil society. 13. This articulation of public and private is well appreciated in recent feminist analysis; see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Notes to pages 31 - 39

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Press, 1989) and "Rethinking the Public Sphere," in Craig Calhoun, ed.,Habermasand the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 14. For an exemplary version of the argument, see Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 15. Articulations of cultural studies can be found in Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990) and Larry Grossberg et al., eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992). Daniel Miller explores how the objectification associated with the commodity is constitutive of culture in Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 16. Jeffrey Goldfarb developed these themes in his dissertation on Polish student theater, The Persistence of Freedom (Boulder: Westview Press, 1980), and in On Cultural Freedom: An Exploration of Public Life in Poland and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). He appreciates that theater is both a national articulation and a site of opposition but views the latter as part of a range of "completely independent political, social and cultural institutions" (Cultural Freedom, 19-20). Miklos Haraszti, however, dismisses any critical possibility on the assumption that "the state is able to domesticate the artist because the artist has already made the state his home." Therefore art "opens no new dimension in our closed world." See Miklos Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 5, 146. Other studies indicate that aesthetic and economic decentralization were part of socialist state policies. See Marina L. Kniazeva, "Theater on the Market," Journal of Communication 41, 2 (Spring 1991): 31-38; Anne White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland, and Hungary, 1953-1989 (London: Routledge, 1989); Alexi Altayev, "The Economic Experiment: Soviet Theater of the Last Decade," in Theater. Special Issue: Soviet Theater under Glasnost (Fall 1989): 18-20. 17. For recent attempts, see Leszek Nowak, Power and Civil Society: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Real Socialism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); Zbigniew Rau, ed., The Reemergence of Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); Vladimir Tismaneaunu, ed., In Search of Civil Society: Independent Peace Movements in the Soviet Bloc (New York: Routledge, 1990); C. M. Hann, ed., Market Economy and Civil Society in Hungary (London: F. Cass, 1990). 18. In their magisterial discussion of civil society, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato characterize the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe as "statist dictatorships" that "penetrate and control both the economy and the various domains of independent social life" (viii). But this makes it difficult to grasp what such domains would be independent of, or how "new autonomous forms of discourse" could emerge if the state there is the totalizing institution they represent it to be. When they speak of a mediating role of the political between state and civil society, clearly they do not have such contexts in mind. Yet their through line of autonomy from the state as fundamental to political rights establishes this image of socialism as the backdrop for all of their theorizing. See Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 19. George Konrad, and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 130. 20. See Michael E. Brown, The Production of Society (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986).

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21. Formulations of these relations can be found in the work of Nicos Poulantzas and also in James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973); Goran Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? (London: NLB, 1978); Erik Olin Wright, Class Crisis and the State (London: Verso, 1978); Peter Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Fred Block, Revisiting State Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Bob Jessop, State Theory-. Putting Capitalist States in Their Place (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1990). 22. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 1978), 37. 23. Ibid., 24. 24. Glaus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 242. 25. Ibid., 274. 26. See Oriana Baddeley and Valerie Fraser, Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America (London: Verso, 1989); Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 (Melbourne: Art and Text, 1986); Guy Brett, Transcontinental: Nine Latin American Artists (London: Verso, 1990); William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verso, 1991). Rowe and Schelling draw on the specificities of the Latin American context to reflect on the uses of popular culture as ideologies of national formation. 27. See Carlos Jose Reyes, "Fulgor y limites de la creacion colectiva," in Moises Perez Coterillo, ed., Escenarios de Dos Mundos: Inventario teatral de Iberoamerica (Madrid: Centro de Documentation Teatral, 1988), 1:42-54, and Beatriz J. Rizk, El Nuevo Teatro Latinoamericano: Una lectura historica (Minneapolis: The Prisma Institute, 1987). 28. The history of Latin American theater is presented on a country-by-country basis in the four-volume set, Escenarios de Dos Mundos: Inventario teatral de Iberoamerica, Moises Perez Coterillo, ed. 29. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 381. 3. NICARAGUAN THEATER GOES TO MARKET 1. Interview with economist Arturo Grigsby of the Central American University, "The UNO Economic Plan: Is There a Popular Alternative?" Envio 9,112 (1990): 28-29. 2. This account of Torovenado is taken from "La Ley del Pueblo," Enlace 2,6 (January 1991): 4-7. Discussions of the relation of conquest and preconquest culture as maintaining critical capacities can be found in June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) and Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 3. For accounts of the insurrectionary tendency and the popular uprisings, see Gary Ruchwarger, People in Power: Forging a Grassroots Democracy in Nicaragua (South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey, 1987), especially 18-29, and the interview with Humberto Ortega in Tomas Borge et al., Sandinistas Speak (New York: Pathfinder, 1982), especially 64-73. 4. Hector Perez-Brignoli provides a synopsis of the conquest in A Brief History of Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 36. Jorge Eduardo


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Arellano collected figures from colonial sources that show population decline from six hundred thousand to eight thousand between 1524 and 1578 in Nueva Historic* de Nicaragua (Managua: Fondo Editorial CIRA, 1990), 1:109. 5. Daniel Brinton, The Gueguence-. A Comedy Ballet in the Nahuatl-Spanish Dialect of Nicaragua (Philadelphia: Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature, 1883), 3:xlii. This appeared in English in Brinton's original. 6. See Jorge Eduardo Arellano, Inventario Teatral de Nicaragua (Managua: Biblioteca Banco Central de Nicaragua, 1988), 218, 221 for quotes from critics. The production premiered April 7,1978, and was invited to a theater festival in Caracas, a rare honor for Nicaraguan groups. 7. For discussion, see J. H. Elliot, "Spain and America in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1:326. 8. Brinton, The Gueguence, 9. 9. Ibid., 75. 10. Ibid., 9. 11. Ibid., 21. 12. Ibid., 25. 13. Ibid., 31. 14. Ibid., 72-73. 15. Jorge Eduardo Arellano, "El Giiegiience or the Mestizo Essence of Nicaragua," Boletin Nicaraguense de Bibliografia y Documentacion: Cuatro estudios en busca de nuestra identidad 63 (April-June 1990): 36. 16. Ibid., 44. 17. Socorro Bonilla Castellon, "Resena historica de la Comedia Nacional de Nicaragua," Boletin Nicaraguense de Bibliografia y Documentacion, 49 (SeptemberOctober 1982): 132. 18. Interview with Rolando Steiner by Emma Fonseca, "Nicaragua: A Country without Theatrical Tradition," Mujer 3 (April 1974): 22-23. Quoted from Arellano, Inventario Teatral de Nicaragua, 148-49. 19. This material is taken from Arellano's discussion of what he terms the "Golden Age" of Nicaraguan theater (1951-78), distinguishing it from theatrical activity under the Sandinistas, which he calls Euphoria and Decay. See Inventario Teatral de Nicaragua, 83-160. 20. Interview with Salvador Espinosa in Managua, January 14, 1991. 21. Interview with Gloria Rizo, director of the National Theater school, January 21, 1991. 22. Jorge Eduardo Arellano, Historia de la pintura nicaragiiense, 4th ed. (Managua: CIRA, 1990), 53. 23. Quoted in ibid., 68. 24. For a survey of the role of the Latin American writer in culture and society, see Jean Franco, Modem Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist (New York: Praeger, 1967). 25. Quotations in this passage are taken from "Instituto Nicarguense de Cultura: Polfticas, funciones y organization," undated mimeograph supplied by Pierre Pearson, Vice Minister of Culture. According to Pearson, the Institute proper employs thirty people, with approximately three hundred employees throughout the organization and an annual budget of $2,400,000. Additional funds come from Swedish, Dutch,

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Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. embassies and associations as well as contributions from Pepsi Cola, Hotel Mercedes, and Flor de Cana, a Nicaraguan rum manufacturer. 26. For example, see "Muestra de Teatro Clasico desperto polemica: artistas lo consideran una censura" (Showcase of Classic Theater awakens polemic: artists consider it censorship), Barricada (January 23, 1991): 7. Gladys Ramirez de Espinosa responded: "We don't have anything against the collectively created works and we will realize a showcase of this kind later to respond to the inquietude of the groups." 4. MASQUERADES OF GENDER IN A NICARAGUAN THEATER 1. Statistical information on cultural activities was scarce in Nicaragua as the necessary infrastructure was only just emerging. These figures are contained in two tables, "Cultura: Capacitacion, actividades, y brigadas culturales de los Centres Populares de Cultura (CPC)" and "Grupos aficionados que reciben asistencia tecnica de los Centres Populares de Cultura," in the first such report provided by the Ministry of Culture in Boletin Numero 1, Primer Semestre 1984; Institute National de Estadisticas y Census. 2. Jorge Eduardo Arellano has compiled a bibliographic history of Nicaraguan theater in Boletm Nicaragiiense de Bibliografia y Documentation 58-59 (August 1988-January 1989). The reference to El volador is on p. 7. 3. Pablo Pupiro, "Investigation del Giiegiiense," mimeograph, no date. 4. For a discussion of international assistance to Nicaragua during the first half of the 1980s, see Solon Barraclough et al., Aid that Counts: The Western Contribution to Development and Survival in Nicaragua (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 1988). Figures for this passage taken from pp. 26-43. 5. Information in this passage was acquired from miscellaneous documents from the MACRU project of finca La Praga dated December 2, 1989, and walking tour/ interview with Gerardo Molineros, January, 1989. 6. Interview with Alan Bolt, "La conciencia no se trasmite de manera magica," Pensamiento Propio 33 (May/June 1986): 11-16. 7. Interview with Alan Bolt at finca La Praga, June 1986. 8. Alan Bolt, "Curriculum del colectivo de teatro Nixtayolero," unpublished manuscript, 1988. 9. Alan Bolt, introductory notes to the first acting workshop of the Community Theater Movement, 1986 n.p. 10. Interview with Alan Bolt, June 1986. 11. Alan Bolt, "Sobre la problema de identidad nacional" (On the problem of national identity), unpublished manuscript, 7, my translation. 12. See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt's analysis of cross-dressing in Twelfth Night, where the realization of identity leads to a reinforcing of normative behavior through marriage, in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 88. 13. See Maria Veronica Frenkel, "The Evolution of Food and Agricultural Policies during Crisis and War," in Michael E. Conroy, ed., Nicaragua: Profiles of the Revolutionary Public Sector (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987), 203. 14. Emmanuel Arghiri, Unequal Exchange (New York and London: Verso, 1972) examines the exchange of raw for manufactured goods between nations of the periphery and the center of the global economy, and how this process produces debt and higher rates of exploitation for the nations of the periphery.


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15. Sean Swezey and Daniel Faber, "Disarticulated Accumulation, Agroexport, and Ecological Crisis in Nicaragua: The Case of Cotton," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism-. A Journal of Socialist Ecology 1, 1 (1988): 56. 16. Dennis Gilbert traces the shifts in Sandinista policy on this issue in Sandinistas-. The Party and Revolution (New York: Blackwell, 1988), 90. For articulations of the two positions, see Agriculture Minister Jaime Wheelock Roman, Entre la crisis y la agresion: La reforma agraria Sandinista (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1985) and Rosa Maria Torres and Jose Luis Coraggio, Transicion y crisis en Nicaragua (San Jose: Editorial Dei, 1987). 17. Forrest Colburn, Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua: State, Class and the Dilemmas of Agrarian Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 84. 18. Alan Bolt, El Libro de la Nacion Qu (Managua: Vientos del Sur, 1990), 195. 19. Ibid., 197-98. 20. Ibid., 206. 21. Interview with Pablo Antonio Cuadra in Managua, 1982, Culture and Politics in Nicaragua: Testimonies of Poets and Writers, by Steven White (New York: Lumen, 1986), 19. 22. Ibid., 33. 23. For an analysis of the relation between theater and absolutism, see Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 24. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5. 25. Ibid., 26. 5. SOURCES OF SOCIALIST CULTURE IN CUBA 1. See Ramiro Guerra, Teatralizacion del Folklore y otros ensayos (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1989). 2. See, for example, Poder Popular/Provincia Ciudad de la Habana, Camaval 1981: Plan del Camaval (Habana: Biblioteca Nacional). 3. See Alejandro Pichel Verdasco, "La Gran Semana Santiaguera, 1948-1956," 1981 Sancti Spiritus, 11. Manuscript in Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba, Havana. 4. For discussion, see Monica Rector, "Code and Message in Camaval" in Umberto Eco et al., Carnival! (Berlin: Mouton, 1984). 5. For documentation, see Nancy Perez Rodriguez, El Camaval Santiaguero, 2 vols. (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 1988), 1:31. 6. Herbert S. Klein, Slaver)' in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 13-62. 7. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), especially chapters 1 and 2. 8. See Joseph M. Murphy, Santeria: An African Religion in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). 9. Joel James Figarola, "Cabildo Teatral Santiago: Aproximacion al Carnaval," in his En las raices del drbol (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 1988), 13-42. 10. See Fernando Ortiz, "Los cabildos afrocubanos," in Orbita de Fernando Ortiz (Habana: UNEAC, 1973 [1921]), 121-34. 11. Manuel Galich, "Prologue," to Teatro de relaciones (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1983), 8. 12. Ibid., 41.

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13. Argeliers Leon, "Para leer las firmas abakua," Union 10 (April-June 1990): 2-13. 14. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1967). 15- Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed (New York: Urizen, 1979), especially 1-50. 16. Albio Paz, La vitrina, in Graziella Pogolotti, Rine Leal, and Rosa Ileana Boudet, eds., Teatro y revolucion (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1980), 367. 17. Ibid., 381. 18. Ibid., 389. 19. "Informe del Grupo Teatro Escambray en el Congreso de Teatro de los paises socialistas," Moscow, December 1975, quoted in Rine Leal's prologue to Roberto Orihuela, ed., Lucha contra bandidos (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1983), xxiii. For other sources on Teatro Escambray, see Recopilacion de textos sobre el teatro latino americano de creacion colectiva, edited and with a prologue by Francisco Garzon Cespedes (Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1978); Sergio Corrieri, "El Grupo Escambray: una experiencia de la revolucion," in Gerardo Luzuriaga, ed., Popular Theater for Social Change in Latin America: Essays in English and Spanish (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1978), 363-69; and Rine Leal, ed., Teatro Escambray (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1978). 20. For an account, see Leal's prologue to Lucha contra bandidos, vii. 21. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: In Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 1439. 22. For a discussion, see Medea Benjamin, Joseph Collins, and Michael Scott, "Economic Transformation in the 1960s and 1970s: The Agrarian Revolution," in Phillip Brenner et al., eds., The Cuba Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 89-101. 23. See the following Cuban theater reviews: Esther Suarez Duran, "

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