ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Caribbean diaspora and their repercussion at the level of the nation-State in Cuba and Puerto Rico. It counterpoints the cases of Cuba and Puerto Rico in three historical moments: (1) the organization of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, 1892, in New York City, integrating Puerto Rican and Cuban anticolonial nationalists advocating for the rise of the two nations against Spanish imperial rule with an ideology of pan-Antillean unity against all kinds of empire; (2) the early Cold War when the two Antilles that were labeled in the nineteenth-century discourse as “two wings of the same bird” became emblematic of opposing paradigms of development: Puerto Rico of capitalist development under the aegis of US transnational capital, and Cuba of socialist development with the aid of the Soviet Union, and; (3) the current moment that we characterize as one of world crisis of capitalist civilization wherein both places/countries are differentially facing crises. In the presentation, the counterpoint will focus on the following questions: their historical formations and transformations as diasporic trans/nations and the implications for the analysis of the nation-form itself, the multiple meanings and political-epistemic values of the very notions of border and diaspora in light of the comparative histories of Cuba and Puerto Rico; and what are the implications of the current crisis to rethinking the Caribbean not only as an imperial frontier (Bosch) and as a laboratory of modernity, but also as a key space for constructing alternative futures.
