“¡Azúcar!”: Fragments from a Land of Sugar

Abstract

The sugarcane-processing factory, or central, has long played a pivotal role in Cuba’s history. For the Cuban people, the production of sugar is more than just an export commodity. Sugar, and by proxy the central—its spatial manifestation—are multifaceted cultural artifacts. Through a series of anecdotes, I tell a story from a land of sugar. I piece together this narrative from visual, textual, and oral archives. These seemingly disjointed, scattered, asynchronous, and erroneously nostalgic voices construct a manifold view of Cuba from its colonization to the present. As such, this project is an interpolation, or an oscillation of fragments of a story that remains incomplete and littered with gaps. This is a story about territory, race and ultimately catastrophe—reflecting a world that continues to be plunged into crisis. A crisis that is, as Eva Horn describes in Future as Catastrophe, “no longer an event, but a prolonged present.” But this project is also a tale of resilience, illustrating how in more ways than one, our personal geographies are inherently linked to the legacies of colonial-economic processes.