Elizabeth Schwall's new publication provides a detailed account of institutionalized dance initiatives undertaken in the decades immediately prior to and following the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It makes the important point that politics in Cuba have always been performed as well as spoken, and it demonstrates the centrality of culture as an area of negotiation between individual performers or ensembles and state institutions. Among the book's strengths are its exploration of the struggles of queer and Black performers within revolutionary power structures. Schwall argues convincingly that dance performance, and especially ballet, received strong institutional support as a means of undertaking cultural diplomacy abroad and generating support for the revolution, and that dance served as a means of securing power and prestige for the artists themselves, who used it to challenge persistent biases or inequalities in society. The volume focuses primarily on ballet and modern dance, and to a lesser extent on folkloric ensembles. It is oriented towards specialists in Cuban history, academics, and graduate students. The book is clearly written and well organized, and relies on impressive amounts of archival work in addition to personal interviews.
The book is organized into seven chapters. The first two focus on the emergence of ballet as a local art form and how choreographers depicted nationalistic themes in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, even as classical dance remained “an expression of whiteness and elite sensibilities” (12). Chapter 3 examines the impact of racial and class prejudice on dancers in the 1960s, as well as how Black artists responded to such prejudice. Chapter 4 explores how performers experienced and responded to the revolutionary leadership's homophobia in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 5 considers the use of dance in mass educational campaigns of the early revolution, and Chapter 6 details the use of dance as international diplomacy. A final chapter explores dance initiatives of the late 1970s and 1980s and their more frequent ideological challenges to revolutionary norms. A brief epilogue describes the fall of the Soviet Union and its effect on institutional performance.
One of the primary strengths of Schwall's study is its close attention to the experiences of individuals: the author documents the lives and professional struggles of many performers to an extent never achieved previously. Her exploration of the close ties between ballet and various government administrations before and after the revolution is useful. Accounts of the struggles of Black performers both to be accepted as professional dancers and to present Black cultural heritage on stage are impressive. Descriptions of particular dance productions of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, with accompanying photographs, will undoubtedly be of great use to many, as will accounts of the consistent underfunding of Black institutions such as the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional.
I have only minor critiques of the text. Schwall does not provide much discussion of major moments of revolutionary history, for instance, which might have been helpful to some readers in interpreting the significance of particular artistic trends. Much of the book focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, with less attention given even to the 1980s and virtually nothing to later decades. While I understand that the author chose to frame her study within this time period, I found myself wanting information about dance performance in more recent periods.
Finally, the book includes virtually no information on popular dance, for which Cuba is very famous internationally, probably more so than for ballet. Discussion of the guarapachanga, pilón, mozambique, songo, rueda, and countless other styles would have been welcome from my perspective, as those forms of expression touched the lives of virtually all Cubans and have their own important stories to tell. Those issues aside, the author should be commended for contributing to our understanding of Cuban history in substantive ways, for underscoring the importance of culture as a form of politics, and for sharing the details of professional dancers’ careers and struggles that have largely been silenced or forgotten.
