HOPELESS YOUTH! Editors Francisco Martínez and Pille Runnel
Editors: Francisco Martínez, Pille Runnel English language editors: Daniel Edward Allen, Marcus Denton Layout, copy-editing: Ivi Tammaru Design: Margus Tamm Font: Aestii official new font family of the Estonian National Museum, designed by Mart Anderson Graffiti on cover: Edward von Lõngus Photo processing: Arp Karm Estonian National Museum (Editing) Francisco Martínez, Pille Runnel Authors Printing house: Greif Ltd This book was published with the support of the Estonian National Museum.
Feeling Stuck But Eager to Accelerate: Tourism and Cuban Time Valerio Simoni The touristic image of Cuba brings to the fore particular temporal horizons and notions of the passing of time. What tends to prevail when tourists imagine the island is the view of a place where time has stopped, or at least moves slowly. This vision might be starting to change these days, as the global media take up the reforms currently undertaken by President Raul Castro and the improvement in relations with the United States government. Cuba seems on the verge, and speculation as to the new direction the country will take generates much interest. As far as tourists go, the idea of seeing Cuba before it changes has been circulating for at least a decade, and has even become part of marketing strategies to lure visitors to go there now before it is too late. Since my first stay in Cuba in 2005 for my doctoral research on encounters between foreign tourists and members of the Cuban population, up to my latest stay there in 2014, I met countless visitors who expressed this sense of urgency. In a kind of salvage tourism, people cherished the idea of seeing, experiencing, and recording a country that had remained, allegedly, stuck in time since the 1959 Revolution led by Fidel Castro. The vintage American cars that still circulated on the island seemed to epitomise this temporal horizon, but so did the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon or the 104
Valerio Simoni Feeling Stuck But Eager to Accelerate: Tourism and Cuban Time picturesque old-cuban-smoking-a-cigar that keeps making the cover of several tourist guidebooks. No doubt, visiting a place that is deemed not only distant in space but also in time can exert much fascination. The fact that material remnants of the past were still in use the 1950s Chevys are still running! seemed to work as tangible proofs of such time-lag. To this, tourists could add the socialist legacy, materialised here again in iconic fashion by the slogans and portraits of revolutionary heroes painted on walls and billboards across the island. What is more, the old protagonists of the Cuban Revolution were still holding the reins of the country. In today s post-cold War scenario, it is not hard to imagine how all these marks of a bygone era could evoke a temporal disjuncture with the rest of the world. So what s the time in Cuba? Has the clock of history stopped on this island? Obviously not, as anyone who has set foot on Cuba, has had a closer look around and thought a bit more seriously about these matters can easily confirm. From an anthropological perspective, the very notion of a place stuck in time seems absurd and even dangerous once we consider the strenuous efforts put into historicising human life and shattering any evolutionist idea of a great divide between Us and Them. I do not wish to develop here a counter-narrative to show how Cuban society has always been changing and transforming: endless examples could be brought to support this claim and convince even the most sceptical tourist that life is moving on there too, as it always does in every part of the world. What I find more interesting and thought provoking, is to illustrate with a brief example how these particular notions of time and of the passage of time in touristic Cuba had also taken hold among some of the Cuban youth I encountered during my fieldwork, and informed some of their desires, aspirations, and ways of being and relating with tourists. The notion of a country stuck in time, where things never change, or where any change is in any case extremely slow, came up repeatedly in the course of my conversations with tourists and with young Cuban men and women who were used to spending much of their days in the visitors company. The reality of this state 105
Hopeless Youth! of affairs was often exemplified via purposive references to the obsolete technology Cubans were having to relying on, to their lagging behind in terms, for instance, of mobile phones, computers, and Internet use. While confronting me with this evidence, some of my Cuban friends suggested that perhaps, the next time I visited, I could bring along some such devices: a USB drive, a mobile phone, a laptop any of those, even second-hand, would certainly come in handy, and represent an improvement. The first time I did so, however, I ended up causing much disappointment among my friends. Obviously, I had missed their point. Throughout my life, I had never given too much importance to the latest hi-tech advances, feeling that what I needed was always already within my reach. Sceptical of any rush to get the latest gadget, I tended to despise such endeavours, and was somehow proud of sporting some technological relics, like my old fashioned mobile phone. No surprise then that the gift of one such phone to a Cuban friend caused no jubilation. Similarly, no one was really impressed with the USB drives I brought: their capacity was far too small, and they compared poorly with what people knew was available out there. Almost a decade has gone by since these first failed presents. In the meanwhile I have learned that if I want to know about the latest development in hi-tech I can ask some of my Cuban friends, who will surely know better than me. While all this may seem rather anecdotal, I think that such eagerness to be up to date, to know and be part of technological progress, illustrates a deeper desire and aspiration to belong to a fast paced world from which several of my Cuban friends felt excluded. The feeling of being stuck in a country that stood still, of being denied the same opportunities they assumed others had, abroad, of not moving forward as you could, seemed to act as a powerful driving force to reach out, to get connected, to show one s ability to live the contemporary, to assert, in other words, one s aspiration and capacity to be a fully-fledged global subject, someone who could measure up to the task of living in an accelerated world. 106