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Article Excerpt
In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway was profoundly affected by the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria and sympathetic to the idea that the sea was protected by saints and orishas. Secular faiths carry no remit in the novella and those who sail the Strait of Florida without ritual acknowledgement or acts of propitiation run the risk of being punished. Such is the fate of Santiago. His faith in baseball and his allegiance to the New York Yankees is an illustration of how mass culture was used by the United States to win Latin American hearts and minds in the post-war era and of the way such culture functioned as an instrument of social control in the fight against Communism.
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AT A CRITICAL MOMENT in his battle with the sharks in The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago reaches under the stern for an oar handle "sawed off to about two and a half feet in length" and "from as high up as he could raise the club" he hits a galano across "the base of the brain" (OMATS 105). The shark slides down the fish, but other sharks appear and Santiago is left to wonder how much damage he could have inflicted if he had "used a bat with two hands" (106). His desire for a baseball bat is of crucial importance. Instead of wanting to dramatize an indigenous style with sacred tools (the symbolic, wooden axe of the Afro-Cuban god Chango comes to mind) Santiago wishes to replicate the actions of an American hero whose baseball exploits were the stuff of adventure in the local tabloids--Joe DiMaggio. Santiago's actions in the boat bring DiMaggio's personal history to mind. A fisherman's son from San Francisco, DiMaggio as a boy sneaked away from home to practice his batting technique with "a broken oar as a bat on the sandlots nearby" (Talese 246). Santiago lacks DiMaggio's genius with the bat but his actions are those of a baseball scholar and a dutiful fan. During World War II, DiMaggio "was the most talked-about man in America" and in one of the popular hits of the day, Les Brown's band reminded the fans how important the baseball star was to the war effort. As the song cried out: "Joe ... Joe ... DiMaggio ... we want you on our side" (Talese 251).
Santiago's fixation with Joe DiMaggio is not a casual one. Carefully nurtured, it is a creation of the movies, radio programs, newsreels, and mass circulation newsprint which, during the post-war period, became an integral feature of the new diplomatic landscape of the United States. Nearly "all the techniques later employed for influencing cultures" outside the U.S., says Reinhold Wagnleitner, "were tested in Latin America" during the 1930s and 1940s. "The Latin American strategy," initially designed to counter fascist influence, became the "central basis" for "later American cultural policies" in the fight against Communism. "The obvious appeal of popular culture" he argues, was based on "a Madison Avenue approach" and under the Department of State popular culture became "one of America's potent weapons" in the battle to win the hearts and minds of Latin America (Wagnleitner 62, 63).
One result, agrees Julio Garcia, director of the Havana Film and Television School, was the "colonial decimation" of the Latin American film industry,
The American studios claimed it was due to market forces, but of course it wasn't.... In the 1930s and 1940s there were lots of great films being shown in our cinemas, then it dropped right off.... If we wanted some of their hits they would force us to take nine other films of lower quality. The glossy-produced films with big budgets were always put in the best cinemas, so Latin films screened in the less well-kept theatres. The public therefore assumed their own films were inherently inferior. (quoted in Payne 10)
Cultural imperialism buttressed economic imperialism during these years and cultural diplomacy, often conducted through the work of multinationals, lay at the heart of American foreign policy (Payne 10).
Jeremy Tunstall has shown that 75% of films watched by Cubans in 1948 were Hollywood productions (289). The newspaper industry also operated in a similar way. Between 1949 and 1963, America's export of books and printed material to Latin America multiplied ten-fold. Under the Media Guaranty Program (1948-1967), mass circulation newsprint became a daily feature of Latin American life (Wagnleitner 74). During these years, ordinary Cubans like Santiago were weaned away from their traditional faiths and, as Emily S. Rosenberg has written, "gravitated to the simplified messages of popular culture" (215): the language of American sport, music, film, and entertainment, all potent weapons in the fight against Communism. Latin American audiences were pandered to by a celebrity culture which did nothing to "combat injustice, poverty and ignorance," but "offered ethnocentric solutions disguised as internationalist ones.... dignified by the name of rationality" (Rosenberg 86). Mass culture may have been democratic "in the sense that it appealed to a cross section of the social classes," but, as Rosenberg notes, it was oligarchic and "carefully contrived and narrowly controlled" as an instrument of economic and cultural influence (36). Furthermore, even though Cuban society at this time included a substantial black population, the role models presented to Latin American audiences were uniformly white. Few if any discussed the morality of such intervention, let alone the moral, economic; and political stagnation of Cuba in the 1950s that America's support for Batista helped create.
These were the issues at the back of Hemingway's mind when he told the people of San Francisco de Paula who met him at Havana airport in 1959 that his sympathies were with the Revolution and that he did not want to be "considered a Yankee" (Fuentes 274). We must set his comment against Santiago's advising young Manolin to "have faith in the Yankees" (OMATS 14), a remark made at a time when the Yankees in question, the New York Yankees baseball club, had a reputation for racial profiling. Under its manager, Casey Stengel, the Yankees club in the 1950s was well-known for its opposition to players of color and notorious for its refusal to field a multi-ethnic squad. Stories in the media about the "racism" of the "Yankee organization" were commonplace, writes Jules Tygiel, citing Jackie Robinson's description of "the Yankees management" as "prejudiced" (294, 295). Despite the fact that The Old Man and the Sea was written at a "high point" in a cultural movement that stressed the importance of barroquismo (an expression that incorporated a diversity of styles) and a philosophy of resistance to North American culture and art, Santiago's advice disqualifies him as an agent of lo cubano or Afro-Cuban cultural perspectives resisting the hegemonic influence of the United States (Martinez 289, 281).
Transmitted on Cuban television in the weeks following Hemingway's receipt of the Nobel Prize, a rarely seen interview reveals his desire to preserve the integrity of Cuban life. (1) In carefully considered, colloquial Spanish Hemingway tells how he has always tried to engage with the local community and "understand the sea" and its "influence" on the daily life of those who use it. The presence of the sea, he stresses, is what he has "tried to put into [his] writing ... especially the sea on the north coast of Cuba" and its interactions, over the years, with settlement and culture. Hemingway also talks about the fishing village of Cojimar and the importance he attaches to its survival: "a very serious thing"...
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