This chapter examines the literary representation of Afro-Cuban orality by three major Cuban literary figures of the twentieth century: Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Nicolás Guillén. Their writing is considered in the context of wider debates about the representational value of Latin American literary portrayals of the Other and the question of the subaltern speaking, thus linking them with the late 1980s body of criticism known as postmodern ethnography. In this sense, critics tend to favor Cabrera’s self-reflective innovative representation over Ortiz’s supposedly objective detachment as traditional anthropologist. However, this chapter draws attention to the fact that both Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s studies were forms of salvage ethnography, an approach based on the erroneous belief that oral traditions need to be preserved or rescued through writing. The chapter then addresses the son poetry of Nicolás Guillén as a contrasting representation of Afro-Cuban orality in the realm of written poetry that circumvents Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s reifying approaches by drawing on the lyrics of Afro-Cuban music son. Thus, the poem "Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio" achieves an openly subjective literary reworking of an Afro-Cuban son text while recognizing its parallel existence as a legitimate Afro-Cuban literary form and foregrounding its own status as copy.

This chapter examines the literary representation of Afro-Cuban orality by three major Cuban literary figures of the twentieth century: Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Nicolás Guillén. Their writing is considered in the context of wider debates about the representational value of Latin American literary portrayals of the Other and the question of the subaltern speaking, thus linking them with the late 1980s body of criticism known as postmodern ethnography. In this sense, critics tend to favor Cabrera’s self-reflective innovative representation over Ortiz’s supposedly objective detachment as traditional anthropologist. However, this chapter draws attention to the fact that both Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s studies were forms of salvage ethnography, an approach based on the erroneous belief that oral traditions need to be preserved or rescued through writing. The chapter then addresses the son poetry of Nicolás Guillén as a contrasting representation of Afro-Cuban orality in the realm of written poetry that circumvents Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s reifying approaches by drawing on the lyrics of Afro-Cuban music son. Thus, the poem "Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio" achieves an openly subjective literary reworking of an Afro-Cuban son text while recognizing its parallel existence as a legitimate Afro-Cuban literary form and foregrounding its own status as copy.

Chapter 6 explores memories of domestic service and intimacy between the 1960s and 1980s. Using oral history interviews, the chapter argues that the memories of former domestic workers and former employers of domestic workers informed their racial politics in the present. These memories were almost entirely devoid of political activism, even though this book has demonstrated that domestics were politically active for all of twentieth-century Cuban history. Instead of politics, the emblematic memory that Cubans retained was “the emotional logic of domestic service,” which allowed and even celebrated harmony between black and white Cubans while maintaining a strict and often unspoken racialized hierarchy. After the official end to domestic service in the 1960s, nostalgia for domestic service became a way for anti-Communist Cubans in exile and on the island to argue that pre-1959 had not been racist, as the revolutionary government has always insisted. This chapter historicizes the emotions around domestic service and demonstrates that an institution that had always distilled racial hierarchy in Cuba into its purest form was used to argue for a horizontal equality that never existed.