5 - Mothers, Maids and Mistresses: Las criadas de La Habana

Summary

Pedro Pérez Sarduy's Las criadas de La Habana (2001) follows the changing fortunes of a poor Black Cuban woman for approximately five decades (from the 1940s to the 1990s). Marta moves from rural Santa Clara to Havana in the decade preceding the Castro Revolution to work as a maid in the homes of (mainly) wealthy White Cubans and expatriates. The text revisits her career in a series of different homes and details both the public and private dilemmas that following that vocation entailed for Marta. At the same time as Marta recalls the ups and downs of her vocational life, the narrative provides a retrospective analysis of the different political regimes (Machado, Batista, Castro) that span the protagonist's lifetime in both rural and urban Cuba. Concerns of race and class are at the core of the novel's remembering of both Marta's and Cuba's past. Similarly, the nation's present and future, especially in their capacity to stand for racial and class justice, are brought into sharp focus. The vexed question of US-Cuban relations also occupies much of the narrative. All these concerns are communicated through the voice of the Black woman speaker as she grapples with the consequences of traversing the realities of a doubly marginalized position within society. Mothers, maids and mistresses are the main protagonists in a novel which is invested in charting the lives of Black Cuban women and mapping their relationships with each other as well as with White women. In their capacities as mothers, maid and mistresses the women are also depicted as engaging with a series of issues related to male, particularly Black male, identities.

Both Carlos Uxó and David Akbar Gilliam, two of the few critics who have so far written about Las criadas de La Habana, have commented on the way the novel departs from a set of representational traditions which have tended to constrict or victimize the image of Black Cuban women. Gilliam is particularly concerned with the fact that Sarduy's novel goes against the grain of a Eurocentric, colonially inspired, stereotypical mode of representing Black Cuban women which has tended to overdetermine their sexuality and place their moral codes and spiritual values in doubt (2011: 58). Uxó points to the thematic originality that the first-person narration by a Black maid brings to Cuban literature.