Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.12.2.0355
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• Pages: 355-357
• Author: Eloise Linger

booK reVIeWS 355

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Fraunhar, Alison, Mulata Nation, Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba

(Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), pbk 262 pp. ISBN

9781496814456

Reviewed by Eloise Linger1

Alison Fraunhar is a cultural cartographer who has taken the job of mapping out

many of the intersections of race, gender, social class and identity in the con-

struction of Cubanness (Cubanidad). Further, she shows how the images and

portrayals of the mulata have changed alongside the growth of Cuban national-

ism and Cuban identity.

The research encompasses an impressive array of sources – from the visual

arts of nineteenth-century advertising, to literature, drama (both formal and

street performance), popular song lyrics from the 1600s celebrating the eroti-

cised mulata (who was sweet as sugar), artists’ presentations of African female

religious deities and Cuban Vanguardia art. She features several sophisticated

magazine covers, and female representations in Cuban film before and after the

profound changes of the 1959 revolution, including self-representation in the

arts. She brings us up to the present with images of the difficult survival issues of

Cuba’s “Special Period” and after, such as the rise of jineterismo and what she

calls “The Return of the Repressed: Tourists and their Baggage”. Finally, she

presents the major changes in approaches to sexualities and to self-representations

in twenty-first-century Cuba and the Cuban diaspora.

The book is a visual treat that educates. Some of the most fascinating sections

are the paintings reproduced in bulk for the marquillas cigarreras or cigarette

package wrappings. The author interprets the wrappers’ representations. Each

company had its own advertisement alongside a visual story, often painted in

several panels that covered the sides of the cigarette box.

Their advertising tried to entice sales by using exotic presentations of Cuba.

One wrapper emphasised the image of an indigenous woman, with feathers,

palms and other tropical plants, to attract Spanish investment and to sell tobacco

and sugar. Less exotic, but equally misleading painted ads showed idyllic planta-

tion scenes in harmony with nature, while the presumed owners sat conspicu-

ously consuming luxuries – instead of the horrors and brutality of slavery or

images of the malnourished men and women who actually produced the sugar.

Such scenes did not convey the turmoil of the sugar economy during the nine-

teenth century. The paintings hinted at the growing nationalist desires of many,

1 Eloise Linger is Associate Professor Emerita of Latin American and International

Studies, State University of New York, Old Westbury.