::::::
17
Haiti and Cuba: Trans-Caribbean Conversations
and Cross Border Movements
Monica Espaillat Lizardo
Monica Espaillat Lizardo received her Honours B.A. in History and Equity Studies
from the University of Toronto in June 2013. In September 2013 she began working
towards her PhD at the University of Toronto’s Department of History. She is
interested in the study of colonial and postcolonial history, particularly Caribbean,
Latin American and African histories. She hopes to focus her current studies on the
creation and policing of gender, race and citizenship within contentious Latin
American border zones (Haiti-Dominican Republic, Mexico-United States) from the
nineteenth century onwards.
This essay will explore the interconnected histories of Haiti
and Cuba: their migrations, ethnography, culture, politics, and
music. In the twentieth century, important historical actors from
both of these Caribbean nations collided with, interacted with, and
informed each other. While this essay will look at the parallel
histories of both countries, it will attempt to do so through a Haitian
perspective, though the fluidity of their histories often escapes such
confinement. The noirisme and negrismo movements centered and
praised African influences, and the communist movements
highlighted economic iniquities and promoted class struggle. The
glaring omission in these movements was the question of gender and
the position of women within the Haitian and Cuban patriarchal
states. Academic work examining these particular histories through a
consciously gendered perspective seems to be lacking. For this
reason, this historical examination will include the voice of Martha
Jean-Claude. Her story provides a useful and interesting frame from
which we can explore the interconnectedness of Haitian and Cuban
histories, as her own journey includes cultural, political, and musical
travel between the two countries.
The radical and transformative movements of twentieth
century Haiti were not singular. Ethnographic and political
movements occurred in parallel to similar movements in Cuba.
Historically, Haiti and Cuba have similar tales, although the specific
contexts vary. The twentieth century histories of the two nations
have been characterized by an exchange of exploitable labor from
Haiti to Cuba, but the connections do not end there. While Haiti had
Jean-Price Mars, Cuba had Fernando Ortiz. When Haiti expounded
noirisme, Cuba offered negrismo. While Haiti shook off U.S.
CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013
18
occupation in the 1930s, Cuba removed the shackles of the
Machadato.1 Both countries skirted around possible communism in
the mid-twentieth century, and by the end of the 1950s and early
60s, both countries had experienced tremendous political change.
When Jacques Roumain was creating Haitian peasant novels, Cuban
author Alejo Carpentier was preoccupied with lo real maravilloso.
While misogyny was deeply entrenched in Haitian culture, Cuban
machismo was privileged. While Haiti claimed Martha Jean-Claude
by birth, Cuba claimed her by love.
The creation of a deeply nuanced, context-dependent, and
coded oral culture served as a survival strategy for slaves within Haiti
and Cuba and throughout the Caribbean. The creation of this oral
culture was driven by multiple factors of great historical, social and
political significance. This oral culture served multiple purposes,
such as providing a conduit of communication and unity amongst
the different African ethnic groups being sold as chattel. It thus
allowed slaves to re-center the margins. Slave oral culture created an
insider-outsider dynamic, in which slaves positioned themselves on
the inside and colonialists were purposefully excluded. This defiant
orality was in and of itself an important socio-political institution,
and remains so today.
Slave oral culture remains as important today in ‘post-
colonial’ Caribbean spaces as it was historically. These oral cultures,
forged from experiences of struggle and agency that elude the static
narratives of victimization, serve as the foundation of numerous
contemporary musical and cultural movements. These movements
foreground and politicize the narratives of the marginalized and
disenfranchised masses. In Haiti, the codified oral culture draws
from and informs the religious practice of Vodou observed by most
Haitians. Vodou was transported across the Atlantic and recreated,
accounting for new social relations, in colonial Saint-Domingue. The
violently relentless suppression of Vodou, both in Saint-Domingue
and post-independence Haiti, has proved unsuccessful because of
the decentralized nature of the religion and its history as an oral
tradition.
Oral culture in Haiti has become politicized through
prevalent Vodou-informed musical traditions, which have been
1 Jules Benjamin, “The Machadato and Cuban Nationalism, 1928-1932,” The
Hispanic American Historical Review 55, no. 1 (1975): 66-91.
MONICA ESPAILLAT LIZARDO|
CUBA AND HAITI
19
transformed into popular cultural expressions that posit peasant
traditions as the “soul of the nation.”2 In this way, Vodou and
transgressive musical expression are linked. Although the tiny elite
sector of Haitian society has maintained governmental and economic
power, they hold what Michael D. Largey terms “dominance without
hegemony.”3 The insider-outsider dynamic has allowed the masses to
remain on the inside, controlling and defining their own culture
against elite-imposed ideologies.
Bodily social memory “is enacted through musical
performance in ways that allow an individual to move beyond
imagining the nation through print-capitalism.”4 Musical culture
allows the masses to move beyond merely “read[ing] the nation; they
can see, hear and participate in it.”5 Through popular cultural
expression the masses can lay as much claim to historical and
political production as do the elite, the academics, and the
politicians. The daily, the mundane, the human, the governmental,
the international, and the political converge in popular cultural
expression. Thus, cultural expression becomes political, and a divide
between low and high politics loses relevance within Haiti.
1791 is an important year in the migratory connections
between Haiti and Cuba. As revolution, revolts, and violence
intensified in colonial Saint-Domingue, a wave of French settlers
accompanied by their slaves relocated to Cuba.6 These new settlers
primarily occupied the Guantanamo province on the eastern part of
the island.7The pull to Cuba would again intensify about a century
later. This time, Haitian braceros made up the migratory population
as Cuba’s sugar economy, driven by U.S. demand, required cheap
2 Gage Averill, "Haitian Dance Bands, 1915-1970: Class, Race, and Authenticity,"
Latin American Music Review 10, no. 2 (1989): 215.
3 Michael D. Largey, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 9.
4 Largey, 16.
5 Sue Tuohy, “The Sonic Dimensions of Nationalism in Modern China: Musical
Representation and Transformation,” Ethnomusicology 45 (2001). In Largey, 16.
6 Susan Hurlich, “Creole Language and Culture: Part of Cuba's Cultural
Patrimony, 1998” Bannzil Kreyòl Kiba Socio Cultural Project,
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs140.html.
7 Hurlich.
CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013
20
exploitable labor.8Haitians faced extreme racial discrimination that
manifested itself in pay rates, living conditions, and the broader
social context. The condition of the Haitian braceros was “not much
better than slavery.”9 As Cuba’s economy faltered in the 1920s and
further collapsed in the 1930s, the already deplorable conditions of
Haitians worsened.10
The discrimination against Haitians, fueled by racial
whitening policies being undertaken in Cuba, was defined by the
“three icons of fear: revolution, religion and sexuality.”11Arguably,
the greatest of these was the first, the fear of Cuba facing a Haitian
style revolution. As the Cuban economy further destabilized, both
Cuban and immigrant laborers began to protest, leading to large-
scale repatriations of Haitians. In the 1930s alone, approximately
38,000 laborers were forcefully repatriated to Haiti, being given no
time to sell or gather their assets.12 It is worth noting that the
Communist Party of Cuba, which would later ally itself with Haitian
communists, opposed these anti-immigration and specifically anti-
Haitian measures.13
Today, Haitian culture and language still has a deep
influence on the province of Guantanamo, which “has been
historically the most important region for Haitian residents”.14 A
study by Cuban sociologists in the 1980s estimated that
approximately 45,000 Haitian descendants and approximately
4,000 native Haitians lived in the province.15Haitian culture has
definitely left its mark upon Cuba in more general ways as well.
Cuba’s national language is Spanish, but the second most commonly
spoken language is Kreyòl.16 1991 saw the formation of the
Association of Haitian Residents and Descendants, and in 1998 a
8 Marc C. McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in the
Comparison of Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workers in Cuba,
1912-1939,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (1998): 600.
9 Hurlich.
10 McLeaod, 603.
11 McLeod, 600-601.
12 McLeod, 599.
13 McLeod, 605.
14 Hurlich.
15 Hurlich.
16 Hurlich.
MONICA ESPAILLAT LIZARDO|
CUBA AND HAITI
21
Kreyòl library was opened in Havana, attesting to the huge impact
Haiti and Haitians have made on Cuba.17
Cuba’s acceptance and elevation of Haitian culture within its
own borders seems at odds with its earlier policies of population
whitening. It seems incongruous that, in the late twentieth century,
Cubans were not only embracing but also actively creating space for
Haitian cultural expression when previously everything Haitian had
been so thoroughly devalued and demonized. Arguably, this radical
shift has much to do with the parallel ethnological movements
occurring in Haiti and Cuba in the 1930s and 1940s. These
movements sought to realign their respective nations with their
African influences and elevate the expression thereof.
Elizabeth A. McAlister posits that there are three
contributing factors resulting in the “emergence of contemporary
constellations of black popular expressions.”18 These are (1) the
displacement of European models of culture and of Europeans as
universal subjects (2) the present dominance of the USA as the
center of global cultural production and circulation (3) and the
decolonization of the third world and the construction of decolonized
sensibilities and subjectivities.19
All three factors can be found in what Gage Averill has
termed the “Haitian Renaissance [where] indigenous movements
looked deeper into the culture of the countryside for inspiration.”20 It
is important to note that while McAlister’s three factors of black
popular expression hold up within the Haitian context, they privilege
the elite’s reactionary shift towards peasant culture coinciding with
the U.S. occupation of Haiti. That is to say, African-influenced
popular expression amongst the non-elite masses predated its
recognition and legitimization by the elites in state institutions and
rhetoric. Before Haitian elites denounced the very European models
of culture and civilization to which they had so fervently clung as
markers of superior status, Haitian peasants were already honoring
and reveling in African-derived traditions. Once U.S. racism
17 Hurlich.
18 Elizabeth A. McAlister, Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its
Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 195-196.
19 McAlister, 195-196.
20 Averill, 215-218.
CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013
22
destabilized Haitian hierarchies of color, class, and status, the elites
needed to embrace, under the alibi of decolonization, an Afro-
Haitian culture that Haitian peasants and the non-elite masses had
already embraced.
It was during this “Haitian Renaissance” that Jean Price-Mars
espoused the view he held in his 1928 work Ainsi parle l'oncle, which
urged for Vodou musical traditions to be integrated into elite
institutions.21 This ideological shift stressed Haiti’s deep connection
and immense debt to Africa.22 Price-Mars is often cited as the father
of Haitian noirisme. Noirisme, an intellectual movement that
expanded on cultural indigenisme, took a racialist view of culture
and politics while asserting the primacy of African thought and
traditions over those of a “stagnant old” Europe.23Political
subscribers of Noirisme, driven by an adherence to color politics,
“advocated the total control of the state apparatus by black
representatives of the popular classes.”24From the noirisme tradition
emerged a group of thinkers originating from outside the elite upper
classes, the Griots.25 The Griots held a romanticized belief in the
inherent virtue of the masses. Their belief was placed in the “beggar,
the unwashed, the peasant with calloused feet who descends from
the mountains with his garden produce.”26 The black peasant was the
purest citizen, and to these citizens they wrote: “You are the pillars of
the edifice;/Disappear,/And everything will collapse like a house of
cards.”27
While Haitian elites, intellectuals and political thinkers were
realigning their focus towards Africa, exponents of Afro-Cuban
culture were busily constructing a parallel movement of their own.
Price-Mars provided littérature indigene for Haiti while Fernando
Ortiz provided his own investigations into indigenous Afro-Cuban
21 Averill, 215-218.
22 David Nicholls, "Ideology and Political Protest in Haiti, 1930-46." Journal of
Contemporary History 9, no. 4(1974): 3-5.
23 Nicholls, 4, 5, 10.
24 Matthew Smith, "VIVE 1804!: The Haitian Revolution and the Revolutionary
Generation of 1946." Caribbean Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2004): 26-27.
25 Nicholls, 6.
26 Nicholls, 6.
27 Quoting La Revue Indigene, 1927, 71-72. In Nicholls, 7.
MONICA ESPAILLAT LIZARDO|
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23
culture.28 Arguably, Ortiz’s investigations of Afro-Cuban culture did
not celebrate or elevate the importance of Africa in the same way the
works of Price-Mars did. The work of Cubans Nicolás Guillén and
Alejo Carpentier do carry clear admiration for the African connection
in Cuba and throughout the Caribbean.29The parallel movement of
“Afro-Cubanism in the Hispanic Caribbean also contributed to the
Haitian revival”, and the work of Alejo Carpentier served to merge
the parallel Haitian and Cuban movements.30 His work praised Afro-
Cuban traditions and further extolled the virtues of Haiti’s African
past and the similarities between Afro-Cuban and Afro-Haitian
traditions.31
Carpentier, a novelist, musicologist, and musician in his
own right, produced in 1946 what remains to this day the most
extensive and influential study of Cuban musical history, La Música
en Cuba (Music in Cuba). Carpentier explores Cuban musical
traditions from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, covering
European elite traditions as well as Afro-Cuban folk music. Before
publishing La Música en Cuba, Carpentier took a trip to Haiti that
influenced all of his subsequent publications along with his entire
approach and style. It was “only after his visit to Haiti [in 1943 that
he began] to publish the works” for which he is now famous.32 His
short sojourn in Haiti shifted his focus from Cuba alone to the wider
Caribbean, including Haiti specifically. Viaje a la Semilla (1944) and
El Reino de Este Mundo (1949) were inspired by his admiration for
Haiti and his belief that “Haiti [was] the musical cornerstone of the
Antilles.”33The musical and political potential of Haiti captivated
Carpentier.
A self affirmed communist and supporter of the 1959 Cuban
revolution, Carpentier helps represent a particular brand of
communism deeply influenced by the romanticism of the noirisme
and negrismo movements. Haiti’s history arguably features
28 Alejo Carpentier and Timothy Brennan, Music in Cuba (1946. Reprint,
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 34.
29 David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race Colour, and National
Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 157-158.
30 Carpentier, 159.
31 Carpentier, 33-34.
32 Carpentier, 34.
33 Carpentier, 33.
CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013
24
proponents of a type of communism that borders on the spiritual, in
stark contrast to the anti-religious and suppressive communist
regime of post-revolutionary Cuba. Because Haiti and Cuba
experienced the romanticism of noirisme and negrismo respectively,
it is interesting to view the ‘spiritual’ sector of Haitian communism
juxtaposed against the anti-religious communism of Castro’s Cuba.
While in both Haiti and Cuba religious belief was largely seen as
incompatible with communist practice, this was not the case for
Haiti’s Jacques Roumain, who founded the Haitian Communist
Party in 1934.34Roumain was a fervent supporter of the peasant
classes and their cultural institutions; he claimed to respect religion
and religious practice, Vodou included.35 Roumain’s interest in
Vodou was so great that it would eventually lead him to publish Le
Sacrifice Du Tambour-Assôtôr (1943), which recorded the Vodou
songs and practices of the particular celebration that served as the
baptism of the Assôtôr drum.36 Roumain conceptualized the
importance of Vodou as a “vehicle for conserving the folk tradition of
the masses.”37 Roumain’s close political and personal ties to the
Cuban negrismo poet Nicolás Guillén further speak to his political
alignment with the peasant and Afro-Haitian masses.38
While communism is now considered largely incompatible
with religion, this was not always the case. The work of José Carlos
Mariátegui, one of the main founders of Latin American
communism, relates his view of communism as an “ethical, political
and spiritual concept.”39 His understanding of communism was
imbued with a deep romanticism, and he unapologetically equated
communist revolutionary emotion with religious emotion. As
Mariátegui succinctly states, “the revolutionaries’ power is not in
their science but in their faith, their passion, their will. It is a
34 Nicholls, “Ideology,” 14.
35 Nicholls, “Ideology,” 12, 15.
36 Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Joanne Bartley, Vodou songs in Haitian Creole
and English, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 53.
37 Nicholls, 12.
38 Matthew J. Smith, Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political
Change, 1934-1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 51.
39 Michael Lowy and Mariana Ortega Breña, “Communism and Religion: José
Carlos Mariátegui's Revolutionary Mysticism,” Latin American Perspectives 35,
no. 2 (2008): 71, 74.
MONICA ESPAILLAT LIZARDO|
CUBA AND HAITI
25
religious, mystical, spiritual power. It is the power of myth.
Revolutionary emotion is a religious emotion.”40
However, there was no room in Socialist Cuba to conceive of
communism as taking part in any spiritual or religious fervor. As
Cuba transitioned into Soviet style Marxism, “a single system of free
secular public education” was created, and all religious schools were
forcibly closed.41 The declaration of an atheist Cuban state resulted
in extreme discrimination against all religious adherents. This
discrimination was formalized in 1975 and would remain
institutionalized until 1992 when Cuba transitioned from state
atheism to secularism.42
Where do Martha Jean-Claude’s narrative and voice fit in
the historically multi-layered connection that Haiti and Cuba share?
The story of Jean-Claude can be understood as a microcosm of the
historical, cultural and political connections between the two nations
described above. Jean-Claude, born in 1919 on Haitian soil, has been
cited as one of the most influential artists from the time her career
began in the 1940s to the time of her death in 2001.43
Jean-Claude’s career began in earnest in 1942.From the
outset her Vodou informed music elucidated her communist leanings
and her commitment to rallying for the disenfranchised masses. Ten
years later, her association with communism and her subversive
work would land a pregnant Jean-Claude in Haitian prison.
Following the publication of her anti-government play, Anriette, and
her husband’s involvement in a housing redistribution project aimed
at providing homes for economically marginalized Haitians,
President Paul Eugene Magloire ordered her immediate arrest.44
Released from prison only two days before going into labor, Jean-
40 Lowy, 73.
41 Aurelio Alonso, “Religion in Cuba’s Socialist Transition,” Socialism and
Democracy 24, no. 1 (2010): 152.
42 Alonso, 153-156.
43 "Singer Martha Jean-Claude Dead at 82." The Haiti Support Group .
www.haitisupportgroup.org (accessed November 19, 2012).
44 “Singer Martha Jean-Claude Dead at 82."; Gage Averill, A Day for the Hunter, A
Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997), 69.
CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013
26
Claude realized the grave danger she faced and she self-exiled to
Cuba to join her husband in 1952.45She migrated under duress to a
political climate where her own politics could be voiced.
Haitians and Cubans alike affectionately knew Jean-Claude
as Mamita, because of her unwavering loyalty to the peasant
masses.46 She described her goal as such, stating that she wished to
“sing the song of the peasants that is what’s in my heart. I learn
toward these people. My songs are what one calls protest ballads.”47
Jean-Claude was never hesitant to define her work – in acting,
screen writing and musical performance – as overtly political, and as
she saw it, “[i]t’s natural that I struggle for social justice.”48
In 1959, Jean-Claude was quick to side with the
revolutionary cause and effectively became an ambassador of the
Cuban revolution throughout the Caribbean and the world. Although
Jean-Claude was in communist-controlled Cuba and free from the
immediate violence of the Duvalier regime, her songs and artistic
expositions attest to her commitment to her people struggling under
the violent father-son dictatorship. Mamita sang songs honoring
those who suffered under the regime, and in 1974 she worked to
produce the documentary Simparele, a staunchly anti-Duvalier
piece.49
Jean-Claude is both narrator and participant in the
documentary, which tells the story of Haiti through a multitude of
art forms.50The film gives an extremely emotional portrayal of the
1791-1804 Haitian revolution, and largely revolves around Afro-
Haitian culture, primarily the practice of Vodou as an important
socio-political catalyst for change. Louise Diamond and Lyn Parker
45 Averill, A Day for the Hunter, 69.
46Martha Jean-Claude en Haiti . Film. Directed by Juan Carlos Tabio. Havana :
Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficas (ICAIC), 1987.
47 “Singer Martha Jean-Claude Dead at 82.”
48 “Singer Martha Jean-Claude Dead at 82.”
49Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale), “Martha Jean-Claude, 82, Legendary Haitian
Singer,” November 17, 2001. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2001-11-
17/news/0111160886_1_haiti-and-cuba-haitian-communist-ruled-island.
50 Louise Diamond and Lyn Parker, “Simparele The heartbeat of a people,” Jump
Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 19 (1978): 20-21.
MONICA ESPAILLAT LIZARDO|
CUBA AND HAITI
27
suggest that Simparele “bridges a gap that has existed in Marxist
ideology between political praxis and spiritual consciousness.”51 This
intimation is a powerful one in light of discussions of the spiritual
communism that existed within Haiti. Jean-Claude, like Roumain
and Mariátegui, served as part of a radical tradition that challenged
the assumptions of a secular, non-religious, and non-spiritual
communism in Latin America and the Caribbean.
As a “powerful exponent of indigenous music,” Martha’s
great success is important because of the positive gender
repercussions it has affected within Haitian popular institutions.52As
political singer Manno Charlemagne states, “Martha Jean Claude
was the raisin [roots] movement. She had to endure a lot. To be a
woman singing in those days [1940s-1950s] in Haiti, she was called a
puta, a whore. But she is a monument.”53 The success of Jean-Claude
as a powerful and politically assertive female entertainer promoted
the advancement of Haitian women in the musical world, and she
provided the “model of many Haitian female folkloric singers to
follow.”54 Because of her connections to both Haiti and Cuba, her
success challenged the institutionalized patriarchy and machismo of
both states.
A self proclaimed “famn de zil (woman of two islands)”,
Jean-Claude successfully deepened the already existing conversation
between Haiti and Cuba. When the Duvalier dictatorship fell in 1986,
Jean-Claude returned to her native Haiti. The film Martha Jean-
Claude en Haiti, under the direction of Cuban Carlos Tabio, captures
Jean-Claude’s return to her homeland after almost 40 years of exile.
In a touching show of affection for her land and her people, Jean-
Claude requests that the crowds gathered at her arrival let her fulfill
the promise she had made of kissing the ground when she returned
to Haiti. With the crowd’s dispersal, Mamita kneels on the ground
and puts her lips to the Haitian soil for which, as her music clearly
showed, she had been longing. The last scene of the documentary
captures well the life and public career of Jean-Claude. As she dances
amongst crowds of Haitians in an outdoor venue her lyrics boldly
protest:
51 Diamond, 21.
52 Averill, A Day for the Hunter, 57-58.
53Averill, A Day for the Hunter, 69-70.
54 Averill, A Day for the Hunter, 65.
CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013
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Bolívar y Pétion en el mundo de la verdad van a cita a
América por una nueva convención, tengo mucha fuerza
me siento muy fuerte, Bolívar le dijo a Petión a esa no le
pasara igual igual que en panamá América esta de
pie,…cuando repica el tambor me montan los negros
grandes, Dessalines me monta, Toussaint también me
monta, vamos cabalgando por toda las Américas, me da
fuerza todo eso…intervención, marinos hambre y
dictadores, nos hacen pagar un jamón no sabemos el
gusto del jamón, Boukman toco el tambor comunicando
al continente de la gran asamblea que nos convertía en un
sola patria, tengo mucha fuerza, me siento muy fuerte,
dijeron que mi pueblo estaba muerto, yo les dije que no
era cierto lo convirtieron en zombi, el 7 de febrero comió
mal.55
When the popular Haitian musical group Boukman
Eksperyans spoke in 1995 about the political and social commitment
of “mizik rasin,” they said: "Rasin is the next reggae. There is
spirituality and there is politics. We're talking about a
revolution."56This succinct observation captures many of the threads
that weave through this essay. By referring to another Caribbean
musical-political movement, Jamaican reggae, Boukman Eksperyans
illustrated the migratory potential of these movements and the
trans-Caribbean and transnational political conversations that
emerge from musical traditions. Their quote highlights the socio-
political importance of cultural expression, and the politically
transgressive and revolutionary potential of a defiant oral culture
expressed through popular music. It also alludes to previous
conversations about spiritual communism, where the revolution to
uplift the marginalized masses is dependent on and driven by a
spiritual connection to the people and the cause. Caribbean oral
traditions and popular musical expressions are mini-revolutions,
serving as constant reminders of the transformative potential of
these historically rooted weapons that allow the masses to re-center
the margins.
55Martha Jean-Claude en Haiti.
56Schreiner, Claus. "Bouyon Rasin: First Haitian Roots Music Festival Live”
Tropical Music. http://www.tropical-music.com (accessed December 3, 2012).
MONICA ESPAILLAT LIZARDO|
CUBA AND HAITI
29
Works Cited
Alonso, Aurelio. “Religion in Cuba’s Socialist Transition.” Socialism and
Democracy 24, no. 1 (2010): 147-159.
Averill, Gage. “Haitian Dance Bands, 1915-1970: Class, Race, and
Authenticity.” Latin American Music Review 10, no. 2 (1989): 203-235.
http://www.jstor.org (accessed November 12, 2012).
Averill, Gage. A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey: Popular Music
and Power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Benjamin, Jules. “The Machadato and Cuban Nationalism, 1928-1932.”
The Hispanic American Historical Review 55, no. 1 (1975): 66-91.
http://www.jstor.org (accessed November 19, 2012).
Carpentier, Alejo, and Timothy Brennan. Music in Cuba. 1946. Reprint,
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Diamond, Louise, and Lyn Parker. “Simparele The heartbeat of a
people.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 19 (1978): 20-21.
Hebblethwaite, Benjamin, and Joanne Bartley. Vodou songs in Haitian
Creole and English. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.
Hurlich, Susan. “Creole Language and Culture: Part of Cuba's Cultural
Patrimony.” Bannzil Kreyòl Kiba Socio-Cultural Project.
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs140.html (accessed November
19, 2012).
Largey, Michael D. Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural
Nationalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Lowy, Michael, and Mariana Ortega Breña. “Communism and Religion:
José Carlos Mariátegui's Revolutionary Mysticism." Latin American
Perspectives 35, no. 2 (2008): 71-79. http://www.jstor.org (accessed
November 11, 2012).
Martha Jean-Claude en Haiti. Film. Directed by Juan Carlos Tabio.
Havana: Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográfica (ICAIC),
CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013
30
1987.
McAlister, Elizabeth A. Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti
and its Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
McLeod, Marc C. “Undesirable Aliens: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
in the Comparison of Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workers
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