Chapter One
Introduction
Shannon Lee Dawdy, L. Antonio Curet, and Gabino La Rosa Corzo
This volume evolved out of a symposium titled "Prehistoric and Historic Archaeology of Cuba: A New Era of Research, Dialogue, and Collaboration" presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in 2002. The goal of the symposium was to provide a setting for Cuban and American archaeologists to engage in a dialogue that could help thaw the state of communication between scholars from both countries, which in many ways has remained frozen in the political climate of the early 1960s. The symposium also provided an opportunity to present a retrospective on the history of Cuban archaeology, as well as results of recent research. This volume shares the aims of the symposium, but it also has the goal of raising awareness among American archaeologists about the current social, political, and academic state of archaeology in Cuba. In particular, we want to present a more precise picture of Cuban archaeology since the beginning of the Revolution in order to redress some of the misunderstandings, mistrust, and myths created by the absurdities of the Cold War and its lingering ghosts.
SOCIETY AND ARCHAEOLOGY: INTERACTION BETWEEN CUBAN AND AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGISTS UNDER THE EMBARGO
For some time now, archaeologists and social scientists have recognized that the social, political, and economic context of their work can and does affect many aspects of research, including the questions being asked and the results obtained from their studies. In many cases, paradigms, research topics of interest, methodology, results, and conclusions are influenced by our personal and social conditions (e.g., Trigger 1989). However, these conditions can also affect the shape and trajectory of research in another way, by determining, at least indirectly, with whom we interact professionally. Social biases inevitably influence communication and interaction with other scholars, according to how our social perspective and background agree with those of colleagues. Ultimately, the terms, composition, or even lack of interaction between scholars can greatly influence the historical and intellectual development of an academic discipline. Within archaeology, few examples of how the lack of communication can affect the development of a field are more dramatic than the case of Cuban and North American archaeologists separated by the U.S. embargo.
The ongoing U.S. embargo of Cuba is an anachronism from the Cold War that affects everyone living in the island and a large number of people living in other countries. Before the 1960s, Cuba depended heavily upon products manufactured in the United States. In fact, the small island nation was one of the largest trading partners of the United States, particularly in the exchange of agricultural products (Forster and Handelman 1985). This economic interdependency was entangled with a long history of American interest in Cuba that included military interventions and significant control over the political and economic life of the island dating back at least to the 1870s. American influence was so strong that pre-Revolutionary Cuba is considered by many scholars to have been a modern colony of the United States (Pérez 1999). In 1959, Fidel Castro's Partido del Pueblo Cubano (Party of the Cuban People) came to power as a result of a revolutionary war against President Fulgencio Batista, now generally acknowledged to have been a brutal and inept dictator propped by the Eisenhower administration. Under Batista, the poverty of the Cuban people reached an all-time postcolonial low, with hunger and malnutrition widespread in 1950s Cuba (Forster and Handelman 1985:176; Wilkie and Moreno-Ibáñez 1985:79).
Within a few years of Batista's ouster, Castro began to establish a close relationship with the Socialist Party and the Soviet Union as U.S. political, military, and economic pressure mounted, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. A seizure of U.S. corporate assets and Cuba's growing alliance with the USSR soon led to the famous Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It was during this crisis that President Kennedy began the embargo of Cuba, banning the trade of all American products and businesses with Cuba, as well as travel to the island by most U.S. citizens, a move that has lasted in a modified version until the present day. For a relatively small nation whose whole industrial and agricultural infrastructure was based upon U.S. technology and designs, this sudden and severe break in economic and political relationships was devastating. For the average Cuban citizen in the 1960s, the embargo meant that basic products such as medicine, food, clothing, chemicals, fuel, and even clean water suddenly became unavailable. For the Cuban citizen of today, "El Bloqueo" means that many of these items are scarce, absurdly expensive, of poor quality, or available only sporadically. Although Cuba has survived by creating strong trade relations with other nations, the exclusion from the world's largest economy located just 90 miles away still means that the Cuban people suffer shortages in essential goods. The embargo is now perpetuated for quite different reasons than it was at the beginning, through the lobbying of Cuban exiles in the United States who are critical of the Revolutionary government, many of whom also hope to regain family property (and perhaps power) lost in the 1960s.
Despite frequent media coverage of the political tensions between the United States and Cuba and an outpouring of scholarly works on the history of Cuban-American relations, many Americans remain unaware of the economic, political, and personal impact of the embargo on everyday life in Cuba. Even less is said about how the "communication blockade" between scholars has affected the historical course of academic disciplines and scholarship in general. Communication between colleagues and the sharing of research results and ideas are critical to the advancement of all disciplines. The absence of regular avenues for scholarly exchange can slow the processes of discovery, theory-building, testing, and critique that are important to the mature development of a field. Unfortunately, the lack of communication between two generations of Cuban and U.S. scholars has led not only to a near silencing of scholarly exchange but also to a misunderstanding about the conditions underlying this silence. For example, in his review of archaeology in post-1959 Cuba, Davis (1996) argues, among other things, that this state of affairs is due to a voluntary isolation adopted by his Cuban counterparts. Archaeologists who have traveled to Cuba in the past few years have found this assumption to be false. Cuban archaeologists are eager, even hungry, for intellectual exchange and information on the state of the field in North America. The perception that Cuba's isolation is self-imposed rather than a condition structured by the U.S. embargo is a relic of Cold War rhetoric.
New archaeological findings and methods have been developed in many areas of study in both countries, but the gap in scholarly communication has limited the potential contribution that each side could make to the mutual benefit of theoretical and methodological discourses. For instance, greater scholarly interaction between Cuba and the United States during the 1960s and 1970s (difficult years for American archaeology and the social sciences in general) could have molded different historical trajectories of the discipline. On the one hand, Cuban archaeology could have benefited from many of the developments in American archaeology that resulted from the debate over New Archaeology and the development of Cultural Resource Management archaeology (Flannery 1973; Plog et al. 1978; Schiffer 1976). On the other hand, American archaeology could have profited from many of the early theoretical works developed in Cuban archaeology and anthropology that focused on themes such as transculturation, increasing social complexity, and the cultural impact of the African Diaspora (Ortíz 1943; Tabío and Rey 1966). This is not to say that during this time period no advancements were made or even that Cuban and American archaeologists were oblivious to developments elsewhere. Our argument here is rather that the nature of the developments and debates in the discipline could have been considerably different, and probably richer, if the channels of communication had been open at key moments in the history of archaeology.
CUBAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ARCHAEOLOGY
It is important to point out some of the contributions Cuban archaeology has made to the study of past societies and to the discipline at large. As can be seen from the papers in this volume by Dacal Moure and Watters (Chapter 2), Berman et al. (Chapter 3), Domínguez (Chapter 4), and Linville (Chapter 5), Cuban archaeology has a long scholarly and institutional tradition that dates back to the nineteenth century. In addition to trajectories in research and education, Cuba has a long tradition in conservation and cultural resource management, as Dacal Moure and Watters point out (see also Linville, Chapter 5, on the conservation of rock art). In fact, Cuban laws for the protection and regulation of archaeological heritage appear to be stricter than those of the United States.
In terms of the Caribbean, Cuban archaeology has led the field in some areas of important research. Innovative Cuban studies of lithic and shell assemblages in a region where ceramics monopolize discussion appear as an oasis in the desert. Another example is the government-sponsored program of the Censo de Sitios Arqueológicos, which has resulted in a sizeable computerized database; it should serve as a model for recording and inventorying archaeological sites throughout the Caribbean (see Dacal and Watters, Chapter 2).
In the realm of theory, Cuban archaeologists have applied the concept of transculturation, developed for the first time by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz (1943), to the interaction of ancient groups. Transculturation has been used successfully to explain many changes in late Archaic and Colonial times that resulted from the interaction between groups within Cuba and with those from neighboring islands (e.g., Rey 1970; Ulloa Hung and Valcárcel Rojas 2002). Cuban archaeologists have brought the issue of culture change to a higher level of discussion, especially in dealing with protoagricultural societies or with Archaic pottery-makers (see Ulloa Hung, Chapter 6; Ulloa Hung and Valcárcel Rojas 2002).
Another major contribution is in the area of historical archaeology (Domínguez, Chapter 4). In general, historical archaeology has been poorly appreciated in the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas, but the works of Cuban archaeologists dealing with topics such as the hacienda system (see Singleton, Chapter 10), slavery and escaped slaves (La Rosa Corzo, Chapter 9), and urban processes (Domínguez, Chapter 4) have in many ways anticipated developments in the North American branch of this field by a decade or more. Of special interest are recent renovation projects in Old Havana that have integrated in an exemplary manner the work of historians, architects, and archaeologists (Domínguez, Chapter 4). Although it is true that other pioneering works tied to historic renovations exist (e.g., Ricardo Alegría's work in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico), most of these have focused on architectural restoration rather than on a scholarly, multidisciplinary study of colonial urban settlements. In terms of its multidisciplinary nature, the joint project between the Cuban government and UNESCO is serving as a model for restoration of other colonial zones in the Americas.
ON INTERNATIONALISM, POLITICS, AND THE PRACTICE OF ARCHAEOLOGY
To qualify our critique of American perceptions of Cuban scholarship, we should acknowledge that in recent years archaeologists have become increasingly sensitive to the political context of their work, both intellectually and in terms of practice. Critical assessments of "nationalist archaeology" in different parts of the globe, such as those made by contributors to the volume Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Kohl and Fawcett 1995; see also Fowler 1987; Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990; Kohl 1998; Meskell 1998), have shown how archaeology plays a part in forming "imagined communities" (Anderson 1983) of nations and ethnic communities. A growing sensitivity to nationalist politics has put archaeologists on their guard, ready to cast doubt on research that smacks of undue boosterism or patriotism. But two problems remain unresolved by this criticism. First, the closely related problem of international politics remains relatively neglected-especially in the field of Americanist archaeology. Nations, nationalism, and nationalist archaeology do not arise in a vacuum; rather they are creations defined in part by their opposition to other nations and, we must allow, other "archaeologies." A second problem arises out of the epistemological assumptions made in critiquing "nationalist" scholarship. Critics have attacked participating scholars as "distorting the past" (Kohl and Fawcett 1995:13). They exhort that archaeological interpretation should "adhere to scholarly standards of logic and evidence" (Silberman 1995:250). But this remonstrance then begs the question: whose scholarly standards of logic and evidence? Who ought to decide what the priorities and standards of archaeology should be? Is it possible to reach a consensus on archaeological practice without regard to national contexts?
The dominance of North American and European funding, publication, and organizational power in archaeology would certainly favor the "standards" of archaeologists living in the West. However, there is no guarantee that just because a disciplinary culture is dominant that it is any less political. A long history of claims-making in Western academia shows that many interpretations or policies asserted to be derived from "objective" standards, or observations of the "natural" order of things, were later revealed to be anything but disinterested in their design. In working toward global standards of archaeological practice, we must be wary of unilateralism, and we must base consensus on actual conversations with colleagues from around the world.
An understanding of these two problems frames the intent of this volume, both in the spirit in which it is offered and in the model of "dialogue" that it follows. Few nations in the last 50 years have had such a constant oppositional relationship in the realm of politics than have Cuba and the United States, yet archaeologists have hesitated to acknowledge how much this tension has affected the field.
With the recent focus on nationalist archaeology, one might overlook that an earlier phase of criticism focused on the more complex question of international relations, particularly archaeology's relationship to colonialism. The rise of Marxist-influenced Social Archaeology in Cuba, Mexico, and other Latin American countries in the 1960s engaged in this critique and eventually contributed to the development of Post-Processual Archaeology in North America and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s (Oyuela-Caycedo et al. 1997; Patterson 1994). The gist of these critiques was that in the Americas much of archaeological practice (its structures of funding, labor relations, and curatorial arrangements, for example) either directly supported, or were supported by, relationships of political-economic inequality broadly defined as colonialism. Some critics went further to say that interpretations themselves were biased by colonialist perspectives. Archaeology was seen as replicating hegemonic relations in other realms, particularly between the United States and Central American countries. Although a parallel critique of anthropology's role in colonialism, galvanized by Fabian (1983), has nearly run its course and become part of the worldview of cultural anthropology, few North American archaeologists would yet agree with, or have paid any attention to, statements such as Daniel Miller's, that "Archaeology rises solely out of the colonial structure" (1980:710). A small scatter of publications by historical archaeologists does voice this view, but their critique has by and large failed to penetrate the mainstream of archaeological practice in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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DIALOGUES IN CUBAN ARCHAEOLOGY
Copyright © 2005 The University of Alabama Press
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ISBN: 978-0-8173-5187-8
