Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.6.2.0232
• Pages: 232360-233
• Published date: 01 December 2014
• Date: 01 December 2014
• Author: Dunja Fehimović

232 BOOK REVIEWS

I J  C S 6.2 W 2014

Laurie A. Frederik, Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of

National Culture in Cuba (Durham, NC: Routledge, 2012) pb 360pp.

ISBN: 9780822352655

Reviewed by Dunja Fehimovic´

Frederik’s ethnography of rural community theatre in Special Period Cuba is

based on impressively thorough, detailed f‌ieldwork carried out mainly between

1998 and 2001. The resulting narration provides valuable insight into two aspects

of the Cuban nation in a moment of transition: rural life and its representations,

and the hierarchies and intricate functioning of the national culture circuit. I use

the term ‘narration’ to highlight one of the text’s merits: it is well-written and

highly engaging, despite the complex combination of discourses that necessarily

arises from its position between the disciplines of anthropology, theatre and

performance studies.

Highlighting one of the advantages of the present work, Frederik’s introduction

points out the paradoxical marginalisation of the rural (particularly the ‘zonas

de silencio’ in which she carried out her f‌ieldwork) in Cuban national culture

despite the symbolic importance of the campesino at various points in the

country’s history. During a time of commercialisation, dollarisation and growing

tourism, she suggests that the ‘campo’ and the ‘campesino’ take on renewed

signif‌icance as repositories of pure Cubanness. Somewhat incompletely and less

convincingly, the author claims that this can be linked to the emergence of a new

model of Cuban citizenship; abandoning Che Guevara’s Hombre nuevo, Cubans

were now to model themselves after the Hombre novísimo: ‘an urban man with

campesino morals and a campesino soul; still communist in his humility and

loyalty to the nation, but less aligned with a political party’ and more generally

patriotic and anti-imperialist (p. 14).

Setting the stage for Special Period theatre, the f‌irst chapter provides a useful

account of the medium’s development in Cuba. Beginning with Teatro Bufo in

pre-independence Cuba, Frederik shows how its depictions of the sly ‘negrito’

paradoxically popularised the f‌igure and expanded the potential def‌inition of

the future nation beyond white criollos. The Revolution outlawed such racism,

instead inaugurating a Teatro Nuevo, which was to be ‘an active model of utopia

for the socialist system itself’ (p. 49), characterised by dialectic interaction with

the public, a cooperative, collective structure and a didactic, ‘consciousness-

raising’ goal. Through the histories of Teatro Estudio to Teatro Escambray and

its splinter ensembles, Frederik reveals how early Revolutionary theatre served

to document and ease transition and empower campesinos, incorporating them

into national dialogue. She goes on to describe the prevalence of censorship and

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