The Nostalgia of Empire: Time Travel In Cuba

Abstract

This article examines the representation of present day Cuba in North American popular culture. It interprets documentary sources including blogs, travel guides, television documentaries, newspapers and travel company websites and brochures to establish that Cuba has become primarily a site of nostalgia for North American travellers. It argues that the phenomenon of American wistfulness for Cuba is best understood as a condition associated with the original eighteenth-century explanation of nostalgia: as a pathology, an affective-cognitive experience in the form of an inconsolable yearning for a distant past and a vanished place. In fact, it is not Cuba that is ‘stuck in time’ but rather American knowledge of Cuba that is ‘frozen in a by-gone era’: a historically conditioned cultural memory borne of prevailing mid-twentieth-century tropes of empire. As a consequence, the article concludes with a warning that the appeal of this nostalgia-driven time travel will cease to ‘work’ as a marketing device, whereupon the need to fulfil the expectations created by nostalgia for a dark time in Cuban history may well have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences.