ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a series of projects as small gestures of reconciliation between Cubans: the publication of Teatro cubano contemporáneo (1992); Cancelled Encuentro (Meeting) in Havana (1993); theater exchanges in the late 1990s between Cuba and New York; the First International Monologue/Performance Festival in Miami (2001); and the first Havana-Miami theatrical coproduction by Miami’s La Má’ Teodora (2002). Although they intervened in and disrupted the Miami/Havana divide, the performances themselves did not enter the cultural history of their various communities nor have they entered the history of Transnational Latine Studies. The chapter begins with an analysis of cultural policy theories focusing on the contrast between the formation of national modern subjects in revolutionary Cuba and in exile and the articulation of cultural citizenship in Greater Cuba proposed by these gestures. It then analyzes the gestures as instances of a cultural project that enacts rather than imagines a nonexclusive cultural terrain of Greater Cuba outside of the traditional island/exile dichotomy. The transgressive nature of the performances discussed in this chapter slowly intervened in the cultural policies in Cuba and in Miami. Thus, they may serve as examples for future initiatives to explore much-needed productive and creative models for US-Cuba collaboration.
