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HAVANA – “Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying,” is a phrase used by those suffering indignities in any culture, in any country. Pre-modern humorists in the United States often took racial slurs and words of humiliation and flipped the usage into something amusing and today’s comedians often use the profane to shock us. This tangled web of irony often exposes a truth in a way that scholars are unable to verbalize.
In Cuba, the expression, “chicken for fish,” has that effect.
When I visited Cuba in May with a group of journalists, there were three areas I wanted to explore: politics, environmental sustainability, and culture. The first is easy to explain – former leader Fidel Castro had not been seen in public in nine months. His brother and current leader, Raúl, is aging, too. What comes next after their demise? Environmentally, is Cuba’s infrastructure viable? Does it need assistance? Are the waters around this island nation still a fertile ground for fisheries and what is the extent of degradation, if any? Culturally, how do Cubans see the world, generally, and their government, particularly? Was there any freedom of speech, of dissent?
But the best insight that connected all three areas came through a discussion about the country’s music and its humor.
Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando has made it her point to look at the history of Afro-Cubans and their contributions to Cuban society and how government policy has impacted all aspects of Cuban life. Rolando, who has won the Cuban equivalent of the Academy Award for her documentaries has befriended poets, social commentators, and young rappers.
Her ties to the rap group Obsession, sort of the Cuban Public Enemy, have strained her relationship with Cuban officials. The filmmaker used the group’s song Kia Celle-J in her documentary 1912 Breaking the Silence about the 1912 massacre of thousands of Afro-Cubans who were members of the Independent Party of Color, which was then the only political party to promote racial equality in Cuba.
Cuban officials were dismayed, Rolando said, when she refused their request to remove Kia Celle-J from her film. But she noted that a popular comedian in Cuba has managed to use topical humor to tweak, if not outright criticize, the government, to great success.