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A Cuban Zombie Nation?: Monsters in Havana

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National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema

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Abstract

This chapter analyses the animated film, Vampiros en La Habana (Juan Padrón 1985), and its sequel, Más vampiros en La Habana (2003), alongside Cuba’s first zombie comedy, Juan de los Muertos (Alejando Brugués 2011). Figures of the undead that trouble distinctions between presence and absence, zombies and vampires are also transnational cultural icons that are reanimated in a way that comments on Cuba’s particular relationship with consumption, production, capitalism, and survival. Paying attention to space, humour, and genre, this chapter argues that, although these monsters make visible the spectral threats of difference that haunt island identity, they also motivate the defensive reassertion of Cubanness. Far from being fantastic, then, monsters screen something very Real and ultimately inherent to Cuban national identity: a central void that structures and makes possible the very survival of identity itself.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Brugués was born in Argentina but states: ‘…I’m not Argentinian. My parents just happened to be there [when I was born]’ (in Tillman 2008). Although often listed as Argentinian, Brugués has repeatedly identified himself as Cuban.

  2. 2.

    All translations from Spanish are my own, except where a translated edition is available.

  3. 3.

    From the moment Cuba joined the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) in 1972, its economy became increasingly reliant on Soviet-subsidised and Soviet-designed trade, development, and finance agreements. Following the USSR’s ‘economic model of bureaucratic state capitalism’ (Reyes 2000), an ‘economic planning’ model was introduced, so that managers were actively encouraged to make state enterprises profitable. In addition, the 1970s saw the introduction of financial incentives to spur productivity, allowing some workers to buy consumer goods such as refrigerators or air conditioners. The greater financial resources of certain sectors of the population, from workers who put in extra time to distributors of agricultural produce earning considerable sums from private farmers’ markets, together with the increased availability of certain goods, had started to create a certain culture of consumption.

  4. 4.

    Literally derived from ‘jinete’ (jockey), this local term’s colourful associations imply agency and control on the part of a Cuban who ‘rides’ a foreigner/tourist for all they can whilst charming and seducing them. Most often used to refer to services of a sexual or at least romantic nature, jineterismo can also simply take the form of companionship or conversation. With no direct translation, it is sometimes rendered ‘hustling’ and can be used to describe the offering of goods, recommendations, or unofficial guide services to passing tourists, but always framed by affective discourses of family, friendship, or romance—genuine or otherwise.

  5. 5.

    In the context of a sharp economic downturn, and following the attempt by thousands of Cubans to seek asylum in Havana’s Peruvian embassy, Fidel Castro declared the port of Mariel open to any Cuban wishing to leave the country. Between April and October of 1980, over 100,000 Cubans left the island via Mariel.

  6. 6.

    Between 1975 and 1991, Cuba sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilian workers to support the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) in their struggle against rival movements backed by South Africa and the USA.

  7. 7.

    Although the metonymic link between family and nation is often broken down in Communist thought, particularly given Marx and Engels’ discussion of the issue in The Holy Family (1844), once again Cuba establishes itself as a somewhat different case. This is indicated by the national importance of the custody battle over Elián González in 2000 and the Código de la Familia, to name just two examples.

  8. 8.

    This act of nationalist loyalty recalls Žižek’s discussion of how nationalist over-identification functioned as the transgression of socialist law that also served to hold the community together in the former Yugoslavia (1992: 48).

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  1. School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Dunja Fehimović

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Correspondence to Dunja Fehimović .

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Fehimović, D. (2018). A Cuban Zombie Nation?: Monsters in Havana. In: National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93103-6_2

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