The Cuban Rafter Crisis on Stage: Humanizing the Experience of Refugees in María Irene Fornés’ Manual for a Desperate Crossing

Abstract

The Cuban-born playwright María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) repeatedly dealt with migration in several plays throughout her long career in theater, sometimes presenting characters who were immigrants living in New York (Sarita) or resorting to correspondence between distant relatives separated in different countries (La Viuda, Letters from Cuba). Manual for a Desperate Crossing was her response to the Cuban Rafter Crisis of the mid-1990s. The article analyzes how the playwright makes use of a combination of objective and subjective strategies to counteract the dehumanizing effect of media coverage, shifting the focus to the individuals who risked their lives in the perilous crossing of the Caribbean Sea in rickety rafts from Cuba to the Florida shores. The emphasis on the transit as a theme and the mixture of instructional, technical discourses with highly stylized stage design and different audiovisual media forces us to look in a different, immersive way that generates empathy towards the refugees.

Keywords

• maría irene fornés
• manual for a desperate crossing
• cuban rafter crisis
• refugees
• migration
• balseros
• palimpsest