Browsing by Author "Sams, Anni"

This Master s thesis analyses the politisation of collective memory in the Cuban Museum of Art and Culture founded in 1973 in Miami. The museum was established by Cubans who exiled after the revolution of 1959. The goal of the museum was to maintain Cuban culture and tradition until the return to homeland. The purpose of this thesis is to find out why an auction that took place at the museum in 1988 polarised the internal relations in the museum and why the functions of the museum slowly ceased after the auction. The research methods are anthropological participant observation, ethnographic fieldwork and archive research. The data is mainly gathered during the two months of field work in 2006 in Miami. The archive data comprises of 49 documents from the archives of the Cuban Museum, derived from the Cuban Heritage Collection of the University of Miami. The interview data includes five in-depth interviews with key figures from Miami, three of which were central actors in the case of the museum. Furthermore, field notes and 71 media texts concerning the Cuban Museum collected from the Cuban Heritage Collection are analysed. The thesis demonstrates that the tensions between processes of counter-memory and official history are negotiated in the operations of the museum as the collective memory of a community becomes public. The thesis depicts how the politics of memory are apparent in the efforts of the Cuban community to institutionalise memory and participate in the processes of constructing Cubanness. The tight institutional structure and political and cultural unity of the Cuban community of Miami, and especially of the first, golden generation of exiles, have made possible a parallel public sphere local to Miami. This definition of Cubanness is based on a specific projection of time, where the authentic Cuba is recognised as the Cuba before revolution, and the socialist Cuba is considered a context of the disfigurement of Cubanness. Victoria Boym s concept of restorative nostalgia explains the nostalgic nationalism of Cubans forced to settle outside the borders of the homeland, as the negotiations of past in the operations of the museum aim at a reproduction of the home and at overcoming the temporal distance from the idealised Cuba of the past. This thesis proposes that the Cuban Museum of Art and Culture can be considered an institution that reproduces counter-memory, understood after Johannes Fabian and John R. Eidson as social action that makes collective memory public. The museum participated in the production of collective memory and discussion of authentic Cubanness as opposed to the State of Cuba s official understanding of history. The conclusion is that through the exile ideology of the Cuban community in Miami, the public representations of memory are controlled in such a way that the historicity produced in the museum did not sufficiently represent the Cuban community, and as such, did not gain general support. This may be one reason for the termination of the operations of the museum, even as the Cuban community continues to wait for the possibility of return.