It's been almost a month

*Please note, I’ve been having internet troubles, so this post was meant to go up on Monday 2/20.

I’d been doing fairly well at hitting the ground running until this past week, when I kinda got off my game in terms of fieldwork. I was feeling pretty tired and sidetracked, the International Book Fair was going on, and I had two really wonderful and really distracting visitors in town this week that kept me away from doing my usual walks around Habana Vieja. Regardless, I think conceptually my project is going well, which is where Magda wants me to be anyway. My homework has been to write down both the main objective for this play and thoughts on how I am going to structure it, which came after a few discussions about whether or not my play should be based around the Cuban family that went a little like this:

Magda: You should base your play around the Cuban family. It’s so unique and multigenerational and each family is its own cast of characters. You can have an intellectual and a manicera and a guy who sells tobacco all under the same roof! It’s the building block of our society.

Me: But everyone bases their plays around the Cuban family! You’ve given me five plays to read this past week that all center themselves around a Cuban family!

Magda: Exactly. It’s a crucial theme in our national body of literature.

Me: (quietly to herself) And it’s worked to death and I am not Cuban. (louder, to Magda) I think it’s really good for me to become familiar with such a foundational social structure as it appears in Cuban theater, but my fieldwork doesn’t take me into people’s houses.

Magda: So then how are you going to structure your play?!

Nico: Around a neighborhood!

Magda: Oh, well I mean that’s pretty much the same thing. Neighbors are more or less extensions of the Cuban family.

Nico: …

So glad that discussion seems to be tabled for now. For the record, though, I do want to stress that Magda is totally right about family being a big important part of Cuban culture and therefore of Cuban theater, and that learning about how it’s depicted really is an important thing for me to be doing. I’m just a lot more interested in the interactions that take place on the street outside the home. If anything, I am kind of looking at chosen families/ close networks that get created in informal tourist economies, which is sort of a way of thinking about how family roles get transposed into other social realms.

Anyway, this seems to be my big objective for the play:

I want this play to serve as a vehicle for self-reflection among North American audiences about how as potential travelers their privileged bodies can shape the fabric of a culture. I want this to be a humanizing depiction of the typically nameless, faceless locals that tourists are warned about when visiting Third World “playgrounds.” I want to foster empathy for jineter@s, manicer@s, etc. by letting them speak their own truths and show that a fringe economy is oftentimes the only alternative these folks have to make a living in a country that’s moving away from socialism and towards the free market.

So far I’m thinking that the play is going to be set in an imaginary neighborhood in Centro Habana/ Habana Vieja. I’m thinking about it as a series of monologues that bounce off of each other and imply that individual characters are aware of the others, but they don’t necessarily interact. This is tricky ground. I’m still very much trying to keep this a piece of documentary theater, and I will most likely be interviewing all of my participants individually. I’m not sure how I feel about recreating dialogue/interactions from field notes in order to create dialogue between characters, since that necessitates fictionalization, which I’m trying not to do. Not that documentary theater doesn’t alter reality, but using verbatim interview transcripts as the basis for the script is one of the things I like most about this medium. The words you hear onstage were spoken by real people, and there is so much power and beauty in that.

In theory I have a few exciting interviews lined up for next week: a manicera (toasted peanut seller) who also sells moneda nacional and tobacco to tourists (both totally illegal), a tobacco seller/ informal tour guide and also card-carrying member of the CP, and a man who worked for the ministry of tourism for 30 years. I’m waiting for Javier to pass me the interviews he’s conducting with his neighbors who won’t talk to me but have known him since he was a child. For this next week, I’m proposing to myself to stake out Habana Vieja at night, the Malecón also at night, and the spot next to the crafts market where the tour buses unload. One of the people in town this week was my cousin, and I managed to sneak into her tour group and get guided around and bused around the city. It was fascinating to see what it is that Canadian tourists get shown and what they don’t. For instance, the U.S. interests section but not the Anti-Imperialist Stage where Raul gives his speeches, which is directly next to it. It was also really interesting to see how much more aggressively folks on the street approach tour groups than they approach me as an individual. They stake out the stops on the tour group routes and then rush people getting off the bus asking them for money. It’s a much more desperate crowd than people just trying to sell things to you as you walk by. I would be really interested in talking to a few of them about their lives.