It was on the edge of evening when I heard the drums and the horns, coming from the far end of Plaza José Martí, in Cienfuegos, Cuba. It was the sort of dusk that I associate with the Caribbean. Soft, fading light, a gentle breeze, a walk around the old port and customs house along the waterfront. I had stopped for a rest in the plaza, sitting on a bench watching the world go by, when the music started, so I strolled over to have look. By the row of benches lining the path through the square were musicians: a group of men, young and old, with a variety of drums, a battered trombone, an instrument that looked like two frying pans turned upside down, and even a cowbell. I started to focus the lens of my camera to grab a photo while the light was good, but at that moment they started playing in earnest, and I put down the camera before taking even one shot. They were making an almighty racket with those drums and horns and rusty pans, but it all fell together, it worked. The wild, diverging sounds were harnessed by a rhythm that somehow managed to corral the notes together. The teenagers, boys and girls, milling around the musicians began a coordinated dance routine. As it turned out it was a practice session for an upcoming performance. It was quite a sight, and judging by the crowd of locals and tourists who began to gather, I was not the only one impressed. Not having a musicologist or ethnologist by my side,I had to trust my instinct that the drumming and the dancing was coming out of the Afro-Cuban tradition. The teachers clapped the counts for the dancers, who strutted up and down the plaza, shaking, turning, chanting. While they were a spectacle in themselves, there was another reason to observe – the range of colour among the teens ran from a very light olive to a deep brown. The musicians, too, were a multi-hued lot. The dancing and the music seemed to say that the island’s Afro-Cuban heritage was part of everyone’s life. The crowd was smiling, people were clapping and cheering. Then again, it is easy to idealize such serendipitous moments. Was I seeing the real Cuba,such as it is, or how I would like it to be?
In the past twenty years or so, new theories in cultural studies and history have developed to articulate ways of thinking about and characterizing the Caribbean. According to historian B. W. Higman, two of the most important are the idea of the slave society and that of the creole society. The difference between them is significant. Many societies,such as that of the Romans, could be considered slave societies, from ancient times onwards. Yet the idea of a creole society is unique to the Caribbean, and Higman argues that this model ‘places emphasis on complex and subtle cultural interactions between peoples and the creativity that existed within and in spite of the brutality and exploitation of plantation slavery’.1 It is an optimistic characterization, and not one that everyone would necessarily buy into. But sitting in that plaza in Cuba, more than a hundred years after the end of slavery, and more than fifty years after the beginning of the Cuban revolution, I felt as if I was watching this theory in motion, a creolized world of people from many backgrounds making what they could out of the bad and good they had been dealt, in the context of a world that had given them more than their fair share of hardships.
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In his 1962 Caribbean travelogue The Middle Passage V. S. Naipaul made the infamous claim that ‘history is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies’.2 However he meant it – with irony, or with serious intent – this line was received with seriousness and, for some, offence. Yet, in the context of the tourism industry, maybe he was right. Virgin beaches, ‘unspoilt’ paradise. It is much easier to imagine a West Indies without history. Then you don’t have to understand why there is poverty or inequality, but rather it is easy to think the palm trees have always swayed in the breeze, and that there has always been someone to refresh your glass of rum punch. But in our post-colonial, postmodern world, such a notion seems completely anachronistic. The idea of what history is has been dissected and picked over for the past fifty years, while the study of West Indian history has come into its own, with research now ranging from archaeology of the earliest inhabitants to musicology of twenty-first-century dancehall. Indeed, when thinking about it, this seems the wrong away round: everything was created in the West Indies. The Europe of today, its financial foundations built with sugar money and the factories and mills built as a result of the work of slaves thousands of miles away; the idea of true equality as espoused in 1794 Saint-Domingue; and even globalization and migration, with the ships passing to and fro taking people and goods in all possible directions, hundreds of years before the term ‘globalization’ was coined. The Caribbean contains all this. ‘That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments,these echoes,these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong,’ Derek Walcott wrote. ‘They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Razack, the ship that carried the first indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane fields of Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle.’3
There is no easy time ahead in paradise. The islands all face a number of challenges that will shape the future: ecological concerns, immigration issues, poverty, political instability, to name but a few. These, of course, are not for the Caribbean to shoulder alone. At the time of writing, many of Europe’s economies were in meltdown, the United States was in a recession, and China was facing unprecedented environmental problems. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the powerful nations, as well as in the weaker ones. Opinion varies over which is the world’s true ‘superpower’ – the United States or China? And what about the countries on the rise, like India or Brazil? Little is known for certain about who, if anyone, will next call the shots,or control the resources, or start the wars, but whichever way the axis of power tilts for the foreseeable future, the Caribbean remains in the middle of it all, a crossroads connecting the world as it has done for more than five hundred years.