Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840-1920

Cuban Studies 39 includes essays on: the recent transformation of the Cuban film animation industry; the influence of the liberal agenda of Justo Rufino Barrios on Jose Mart; a profile of the music of the Special Period and its social commentary; an in-depth examination of the contents, important themes, and enormous research potential of the Miscelnea de Expedientes collection at the Cuban National Archive; and a realistic assessment on the political future of Cuba.

Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.

ALTHOUGH it was springtide by the calendar, and already some little way advanced, the snow time was by no means over in that wild Border country. The exact date was April 19. I fix it by the fact that my birthday falls on the 18th, and that I spent that one, the twenty-third, in an old-fashioned hotel at Wooler, and celebrated it by treating myself at dinner to the best bottle of wine the house afforded. It may have been the bottle of wine—but more likely it was sheer ignorance and presumption—that prompted me next morning to attempt what proved to be an impossible feat of pedestrianism. I set out immediately after breakfast intending before nightfall to make a complete circuit of the country which lies between Wooler and the Scottish border, going round by Kirknewton, Coldburn, and the Cheviot, and getting back to my starting-point by Hedgehope Hill and Kelpie Strand. That would have been a big walk on a long and fair summer day; in the uncertainty of a northern April it was a rash venture, which landed me in a highly unpleasant situation before the close of the afternoon. The morning was bright and promising, and for many enjoyable hours all went well. But about three o’clock came a disappearance of the sun and a suspicious darkening of the sky and lowering of temperature; before long snow began to fall, and in a fashion with which I, a Southerner, was not at all familiar. It was thick, it was blinding, it was persistent; it speedily obscured tracks, and heaped itself up in hollows; I began to have visions of being lost in it. And between five and six o’clock I found myself in this position—as far as I could make out from my pocket-map, I was at some point of the Angle between the Cheviot, Cairn Hill, and Hedgehope Hill and at the western extremity of Harthope Burn, but for all practical purposes I might as well have been in the heart of the Andes. I could just make out the presence of the three great hills, but I could see nothing of any farmstead or dwelling; what was worse, no house, wayside inn, or village was marked on my map—that is, within any reasonable distance. As for a path, I had already lost the one I was on, and the snow by that time had become a smooth thick white carpet in front of me; I might be safe in stepping farther on that carpet, and I might sink into a hole or bog and be unable to get out. And the nearest indicated place—Middleton—was miles and miles away, and darkness was coming, and coming quickly. The exact spot in which I made these rough reckonings was at the lee side of a coppice of young fir, whereat I had paused to rest a while and to consider what was best to be done. Clearly, there was only one thing to do!—to struggle on and trust to luck. I prepared for that by taking a pull at my flask, in which, fortunately, there was still half its original contents of whisky and water left, and finishing the remains of my lunch. But the prospect that faced me when I presently left my shelter and rounded the corner of the coppice was by no means pleasant. The snow wasfalling faster and thicker, and darkness was surely coming. It looked as if I was either to struggle through the snow for more miles than I knew of, or be condemned to creep under any shelter I could find and pass a miserable night. But even then my bad luck was on the turn. Going onward and downward, from off the moorland towards the valley, I suddenly realised that I had struck some sort of road or made track; it was hard and wide, as I ascertained by striking my stick through the snow at various places. And just as suddenly, a little way farther to the east, I saw, bright and beckoning, the lights of a house.

Huerta, a leading exponent of contemporary Chicano theater, has assembled six short, representative plays that not only share the common theme of survival but also have received successful staging. The playsÍ stylistic variety, from the Brechtian Guadalupe and La victima through the realistically domestic Soldierboy to the modern morality play Money, combined with useful introductions both to the collection as a whole and to each of the scripts, enhances the anthologyÍs value. Readers should be informed that some scenes are bilingual and some written entirely in Spanish. Recommended especially for libraries serving Hispanic communities.

On September 29, 1927, Cuban soprano Rita Montaner walked onto the stage of Havana's Teatro Regina, her features obscured under a mask of blackened glycerin and her body clad in the tight pants, boots, and riding jacket of a coachman. Standing alongside a gilded carriage and a live horse, the blackfaced, cross-dressed actress sang the premiere of Eliseo Grenet's tango-congo, "Ay Mama Ines." The crowd went wild. Montaner's performance cemented "Ay Mama Ines" as one of the classics in the Cuban repertoire, but more importantly, the premiere heralded the birth of the Cuban zarzuela, a new genre of music theater that over the next fifteen years transformed popular entertainment on the island. Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage marks the first comprehensive study of the Cuban zarzuela, a Spanish-language light opera with spoken dialogue that originated in Spain but flourished in Havana during the early twentieth century. Created by musicians and managers to fill a growing demand for family entertainment, the zarzuela evidenced the emerging economic and cultural power of Cuba's white female bourgeoisie to influence the entertainment industry. Susan Thomas explores zarzuela's function as a pedagogical tool, through which composers, librettists, and business managers hoped to control their troupes and audiences by presenting desirable and problematic images of both feminine and masculine identities. Zarzuela was, Thomas explains, "anti-feminist but pro-feminine, its plots focusing on female protagonists and its musical scores showcasing the female voice." Focusing on character types such as the mulata, the negrito, and the ingenue, Thomas uncovers the zarzuela's richly textured relationship to social constructs of race, class, and especially gender.