Paper Cut-Outs: Notes on Cuba, Taste and Mobility

Abstract

This fragment from Pedro Manuel González Reinoso’s representation of his performance of the Russian woman, Roxy Roja, highlights what Cubans would regularly tell me over the years, albeit in a much more bombastic fashion, exceeding the kind of mimicry that we have come to expect of good postcolonial subjects. There was something missing from the Soviet brand of modernity that was exported to Cubans, something that they may have associated with a «glow», a lightness, or a grace, or another quality. While the Soviets’ largesse with Cubans is less debatable when it comes to the superpower’s economic subventions on the island over three decades, moments of gratitude for them tend to be entwined with ridicule for the position of Cubans vis-à-vis the Soviet’s «distorted modernity». Despite –or perhaps– on account of the overarching narrative of Soviet progress and modernity that was cultivated by the Soviet and Cuba governments, among everyday Cubans, products and people from de Soviet Union had the reputation of being Clumsy and unrefined.