Abstract A scandal struck Cuba in the summer of 1989: a decorated military general, who had recently been assigned to the second-highest rank in the Cuban military, was arrested and charged with corruption and drug running. Within two months of his arrest, Arnaldo Ochoa and others from the military and Ministry of the Interior had been executed by firing squad. Cuban coverage of these scandalous arrests and accusations was at once unprecedented and inscrutable. The trials were televized and transcripts of speeches and testimony were reprinted in the state newspaper Granma each subsequent day. But Fidel Castro himself acknowledged that some footage was not aired, and some things were not said, to protect the innocence of the Cuban people and their families. Employing strategies most often used by historians of the colonial Spanish Americas and Africa, this essay exposes the fears and desires embedded in the Ochoa military tribunal transcripts, which do their best to obscure both. The scholars referenced use secrecy, rumors, and gossip as categories of analysis in their exploration of colonial trials. While Cuba was far from a colony in the 1980s, the author argues that the government had similar motivations as colonial governments did when they put seditious, rebellious, or conspiratorial enslaved people on trial: the government wanted to suppress the realities that Ochoa's scandal reflected—namely, the disaffection of thousands of veterans of Cuba's African wars. Thus, the author employs a similar strategy here, reading the tribunal transcript using theories around secrecy and gossip. Such a methodology illuminates the Cuban government's anxieties about race and Blackness embedded in Ochoa's trial. Ochoa himself was White, but he had led troops in Angola and Ethiopia, most of whom were Black and among whom he was extremely popular. Excavating the rumors and secrecy embedded in Ochoa's trial reveals a through line of racial tension in revolutionary Cuba that might have reignited in Angola. This essay proposes a new way of writing about the history of race in late twentieth-century Cuba, one that draws on the methodologies of colonial scholars.
Abstract This essay takes up the questions that Ryan Cecil Jobson's The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (2024) provokes: Who performs sovereignty in the age of oil—and to what ends? Reading the dueling theatrics of corporate and state power alongside popular attachments to fossil fuels, the author asks how the masquerade of petro-sovereignty endures and what forms of collective freedom might yet emerge from within its contradictions.
Abstract This essay compares the ways two very different Caribbean historical novels explore different types of historical truth through their contrasting approaches to historical “facts.” The first is Valerie Belgrade's Ti Marie (1988), set mostly in Trinidad during the years 1777 to 1803. Widely considered a popular romance, Ti Marie does indeed contain elements of the fairy tale that appeal to the consumer of popular fiction. Nevertheless, several critics have noted its accurate historical detail, along with its complex themes and social framework. The other historical novel under investigation is David Dabydeen's The Counting House (1996), set mostly in Guyana during the early 1860s. This novel focuses on the experiences of a couple who migrate from India to Guyana as indentured laborers. Widely considered a literary novel, The Counting House, in contrast with Ti Marie, incorporates deliberate distortions of received history. Dabydeen eschews recorded history in favor of an imaginative recreation of “the madness” of the lives of plantation laborers, about which history has little to tell us beyond the well-known facts of their exploitation. Thus these two historical novels use very different approaches to explore different types of historical truth.
Abstract This essay pays tribute to Rhoda Reddock's groundbreaking work as a scholar-activist. As an ethnomusicologist and scholar of popular music studies, the author shares how her immersive rereading of many of Reddock's publications on the (neo)colonial constructions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, to name only a few, made her increasingly aware of how her work exemplifies the kinds of interventions—intellectual, institutional, political, and sociocultural—that make a difference in the world. This essay acknowledges Reddock's inspiring methodological approaches and sense of ethics (what she views as fair practice) exemplified by, among others, her inclusion of competing discourses in her publications. This, the author contends, says something about Reddock's listening to as opposed to listening for, her efforts not to be looking for confirmation of what she has already determined but rather to learn what other people think. The essay also underscores how Reddock's sense of ethics is further manifest in her refusal to shy away from confronting unspoken topics that, until recently, were widely known but kept as public secrets (homosexuality, HIV, sexual abuse) in academia and the Caribbean at large and beyond. Throughout this essay, the author notes how Reddock's lifelong work on gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity (and more) has not privileged one community, religion, tradition, private sector, or set of activities—a feat in and of itself. Collectively, the author reads Reddock's writings as fighting injustices, apathy, and desperation, as laying bare her own engagement but also as simultaneously encouraging others to engage—with and beyond her.
