Authentic Assertions, Commercial Concessions: Race, Nation, and Popular Culture in Cuban New York City and Miami, 1940-1960.

Abstract

“Authentic Assertions, Commercial Concessions” examines the relationship between popular black and white Cuban entertainers and the Cuban communities and broader Latino/a publics of New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s. It uses the stories told by some of the key Cuban participants in the Latin music scene of this period as well as the public discourse produced in the Spanish-language newspapers in both cities as a window into a broader experience of Cuban ethnic identity. In New York City, Cuban migrants and musicians settled nearby and among much larger Puerto Rican and African-American communities. It was within these contexts that black and white musicians engaged with ideas about their music, race, and national identity. In Miami, Cuban migrants and musicians lived in the context of a tourism industry and political climate that facilitated a massive back-and-forth movement between the United States and Cuba. Here, Cuban communities and Cuban ethnic identity developed in relation to the racial and political demands of Jim Crow and Panamericanism.

In both cities and, indeed, in the broader realm of popular culture, black and white Cuban musicians – from Mario Bauzá and Machito to Xavier Cugat and Desi Arnaz – played key roles in shaping Cuban ethnic identity for others. Through their participation in music festivals, nightclubs, social clubs, and television and film productions and with the Spanish-language press acting as an important intermediary, Cuban performers also played a central role in constructing Hispano and Latino/a identity and culture. With Cuban music and musicians at the center, a relationship developed between national origin communities, nationalist cultural representations, and an emerging public defined by shared language, hemispheric solidarity, and transnational culture.

Among the 90,000 Cubans settled in New York and Florida before the Cuban Revolution of 1959 were numerous musicians, who at times shifted seamlessly between critical and oppositional stories of race to discourses of musical nationalism and racial harmony. This dissertation examines what it meant to be “Cuban,” “Afro-Cuban,” “Hispanic,” and “Latin” on the stages, dance floors, television screens, and crowded streets of New York City and Miami in the 1940 and 1950s.