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ABSTRACT
In Cristina García’s novel Dreaming in Cuban (1992), the Cuban matriarch Celia del Pino supports the Revolution; her daughter Lourdes flees communism for capitalist New York; Lourdes’s daughter Pilar, an artist coming of age in Brooklyn in the 1970s, blends these two positions through her double attachment to her Cuban legacy and her American lifestyle. Pervading this dialectic is music, from mambo and danzón to first-generation punk rock. The text’s overriding motif is revolution, reflected in Pilar’s endeavors in paint and punk. Pilar muses, “Art is the ultimate revolution.” This paper explores the implications of punk values set against authoritarianism.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. All subsequent parenthetical documentation is to the first (1992) edition of Dreaming in Cuban.
2. “Curiously, classical music was not seen in the same light; in this Cuba was different from Mao’s Cultural Revolution—which, aside from unleashing massive violence that Cuba avoided, was busily condemning Beethoven as a bourgeois agent of imperialism even as the Chinese leadership was welcoming Richard Nixon to China” (West-Durán 80).
3. For example, Vivien Goldman’s phrase “ongoing musical revolution” (10) in 2019 is preceded by Simon Reynolds in 2005 who gets right to it: his prologue is titled “The Unfinished Revolution” (xvii). In 2018, Raymond Patton has “revolution” in his book’s title as do, in 2001, Colegrave and Sullivan in theirs and Boot and Salewicz in theirs (1996). Quick out of the gate was Carolyn Coon in whose photo-dense book the large-font cry “ROCK REVOLUTION” emblazons chapter two. Of the songs and lyrics that prop up this cliché, well-known examples include the Clash’s “Revolution Rock” (1979) and Tanya Stephens’s “Welcome to the Rebelution” (2006).
4. I recommend Michael de Miranda’s YouTube demonstration of timbale, clave, cowbell, conga, bongo, and guiro parts in a guaracha for a visual and aural counterpart of the textual cross-rhythms in Dreaming in Cuban.
5. Not all readers admire Lourdes’s success. In a blistering critique of sugar’s role in Dreaming in Cuban, Gil’Adí Maia declares, “sugar functions … as a physical agent of sweetness and destruction: a unifying literary trope that metaphorically uncovers the violent histories of exchange between the Caribbean and the United States, highlighting how the commodity enabled the construction of an American empire, capitalist system, and the monstrous bodies depicted in both” (99). Maia savages Lourdes’s triumphs in New York City thus: “The sugary treats of her bakery are thus encoded as symbols of American nationalism; through her capitalist endeavors, they disseminate addiction and infection, blanketing the landscape in the sugary frosting of the commodity’s violent history” (105).
6. Few would say Reed was a punk as normally defined or caricatured. He was a rocker. When the Ramones came out in 1976, he had just released Coney Island Baby, not close to punk. Still, there he is, a cartoon version, on the cover of the first issue of Punk magazine, January 1976. His “Godfather of Punk” status (traceable to his punk temperament rather than his music) is honored too in McNeil and McCain’s oral history of punk, Please Kill Me. Their first speaker is Reed; then the rest of the Velvet Underground join the discussion.
7. Punk is not just about deriding others. Chapters one and two of David Ensminger’s The Politics of Punk teen with the names of bands and the social justice causes to which major and minor groups have contributed funding and time. More examples of political action are found in Kelley Tatro’s survey of the Mexico City punk scene. Such examples pervade punk performance in general.
8. “Beny” is used in this essay rather than “Benny,” preferred by Radanovich and others, because that is how it appears in Dreaming in Cuban even though “[t]he historical record of how Bartolo [Moré’s Christian name] became Benny is anything but clear” (Radonovich 43).
9. “Punkette” is not disparaging. Poly Styrene used it in an interview (qtd. in O’Brien 196), and for Goldman, 18 and passim, this label is a badge of honor.
10. Lourdes proves so obnoxious in Cuba that “[t]he Committee for the Defense of the Revolution has started hassling Abuela about Mom” (234). Pilar wants to extend their week-long stay; Lourdes, in a more or less “apoplectic” state-of-mind because everything about Cuba enrages her, says no.
11. Against an avocado/lime-tinted background, a sultry, dark-haired seemingly nude model (the straps of her hidden bikini are pulled down) named Dolores Erickson sits cross-legged covered in a massive mound of whipped cream—actually, shaving cream, except for the big blotch of real whipped cream perched on her forehead (McNerthney)—most of her chest smeared with it, leaving her left arm, shoulders, neck, and part of her left breast bare. Holding a long-stemmed rose in her left hand, the woman stares enticingly at the viewer, her right index finger touching her lower lip in a come-hither gesture. To the viewer’s right are the band’s name, the program, and the album title in a curving art-deco serif font that underscores this bold, beautiful, pure sixties concept—instantly canonical, eternally provocative.