A Critical Review of Nilo Cruz’s important and Pulitzer Prize winning play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’

The interesting but in many ways still too limited and incomplete play, is set in in the changing Cuban-American community Ybor City near Tampa where many more Cuban exiles, were starting to move to in 1929 during the Prohibition-era (1920–1933). The play fundamentally deals with the varying acculturating experiences of the different Cuban exiles, migrants and/or immigrants living in the United States in various ways, and as an inherent part of that always quite complex and rather ambiguous, but nonetheless inevitable adaptative process, including also in some ways and to some extent, and this is also something, which is different for the different characters, the inevitable ongoing moving away from as well as the ongoing complex and sometimes even for some time contradictory and also ambiguous adaptation of the longstanding Cuban traditional behavioral practices and Cuban cultural values that are inherent in the various human relationships surrounding the skilled making of the still hand rolled cigars, in a small family-owned cigar factory by the Alcalar family.

With the important play, the Creole Cuban-American playwright, Nilo Cruz, became the very first Latino playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2003, over two decades ago now. Still, the quite interesting play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’ (Theatre Communications Group, 2003) dealing with the important but nonetheless quickly disappearing role of the lector (a reader), in cigar factories in the quickly changing, quickly modernizing and mechanizing United States of America in those days, and the play, is being regularly and rightfully revived, in different places across the very diverse and increasingly multi-ethnic and multicultural United States. The lector, whom the workers paid for, was important because in reading he was able to help the workers deal with the highly monotonous work of sorting cigar leaves as well as of creating and hand rolling hundreds of cigars each day. The lector also afforded the semi-literate and illiterate workers the ability to be able to hear and to engage with many different newspapers, the labor press as well as with the various great international novels and writers (e.g. Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Don Quixote, Ruben Dario), interestingly being read to the multi-ethnic and multicultural workers while they were doing their oftentimes quite boring, rather repetitive and exhausting work. We will see this very same thing happening in the play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’ when the new rector reads the classic Russian novel, Anna Karenina, to them, and it causes the various women to use the novel and to think about their respective lives and also about their longing and their dreams for their respective lives. An increasingly multi-ethnic and multicultural United States, is now standing more and more at a crucial and a critical political, social, economic, ideological, and cultural cross-road, and as a result facing ever more the ongoing dangerous ideological and the unhinged hard-rightwing populist political backlash in the United States.

The award-winning Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz, who was born in an ever more revolutionary Cuba under Fidel Castro, which in the 1960s, was constantly having to deal with, the ongoing severe and costly consequences of the total economic embargo the United States, had imposed under President John F. Kennedy, on the biggest Caribbean Island, and which was constantly strongly resisting against the 1823 Monroe Doctrine in 1962, but he was raised in Miami, Florida in the seventies, and, as a result, he could also touch on and use his very own immigrant and/or exilic experiences in the play in a changing US and also in a changing Cuban-American community in the US over time. At present, Cuba, is having increasingly great socio-economic problems dealing with the ongoing stifling U.S. economic boycott. The playwright explains that growing up in a socialist Cuba as well as constantly having to deal with the quite crippling U.S. economic boycott in the 1960s, which had led to a scarcity of food and to an increasing lack of material goods, the Cubans, were forced into recycling all kinds of stuff. His play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’, echoes this fundamentally formative difficult economic experience of his, in pointing to some of the economic challenges and problems the collectively Alcalar-owned small cigar factory in Ybor City, was facing in the summer of 1929, when the U.S. was undergoing an economic recession, which is a regular part of capitalism. Nilo Cruz, as a little Cuban boy, therefore, was given a cigar box in which he could put his coloring pencils, and it was a cigar box on which there was a landscape of palm trees and women draped in flowing tulles. This was the beginning of his enduring relationship with cigars and also with their particular history in Cuba and beyond.

Nonetheless, to boldly situate the Pulitzer prize-winning play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’, in 1929, is really very interesting and quite provocative in that in many ways, 1929, was the end of specific period of time in the United States, in which at least for many more white U.S. citizens, they had become somewhat more prosperous during the 1920s, as a result of the United States coming out of the difficult WWI (1914–1918) years and especially the 1917–1918 years, when the United States, had joined the fighting in Europe against the powerful Wilhelmine Germany. In the nineteen twenties, the U.S. economy, was to recover with a rapid growth in the production of all kinds of new and of diverse consumer goods such as automobiles, telephones, radios, vacuums, various beauty products, and the much more widespread use of electricity, which ultimately had made all of this consumption much more possible together with credit (“Buy now, pay later”) that also became much more available for many more mostly white people in those times. At the very same time, many more especially white U.S. citizens, were also starting to prosper somewhat more economically as well, in a deeply racist and profoundly segregated Jim Crow U.S., and many of these very same white citizens, were now equally starting to focus much more on making money and also on having a good time in their lives, and that is why these times, are also sometimes called the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and the ‘Jazz Age’. In the 1920s, many more especially, but certainly not only but still nonetheless mostly, white U.S. consumers, were now becoming as well much more eager U.S. consumers, and they were especially focusing on the increasing consumption of the more and more varied consumer goods being offered in the market place and also on popular entertainment such as films and music.
In this context, it is also important to emphasize the fact that all of this was happening under the accumulating effects of the growing and of the quickly deepening influence of the advertisement industry, which was under the leadership of people like Edward Bernays, and it was using and experimenting with all of the different types of recently developed psychological theories, techniques and insights in order to try and strongly influence and encourage people to consume ever more goods and things in those days. In the play, Anna in The Tropics, we see this happening with the new lector, who one of the co-owners wants to fire, the new Cuban lector, does so by pointing to the need for the much more traditional Cuban-American factory-owners, to seriously start thinking about advertising their cigars instead of them firing him, and beginning to use machines to help make their various cigars. Obviously, the idea here is that that advertising the Alcalar cigars, would ultimately help them to be able to sell many more of their cigars in the increasingly competitive and diverse cigar and smoking-market place moving forward (p. 52–53).

Another important phenomenon occurring in the ‘Roaring Twenties’, was that the Caribbean-American play, in which women play quite an important and a foundational role, given the huge importance of women in Caribbean culture, and also despite all of the various obstacles and challenges, they constantly have to face and to confront, is also that ‘Anna in The Tropics’, is taking place in the aftermath of the First Wave of Feminism, which is often seen as ending in 1920. The First Wave of Feminism, was particularly about the gaining of property and the voting rights for women (the 1919 Nineteenth Amendment). In the Caribbean-American play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’, we see this with the wife, Orfelia, being a part-owner of the family-owned cigar factory in Ybor City as well as in the fact of her largely running the factory when her husband, Santiago, is absent as a consequence of the profound shame he carries with him as well a sense of him losing his personal respect and reputation in the process, and all of this as a direct result of the money that he owes to his half-brother, Cheché because of his drinking and his gambling addictions. Anyone growing up in the Caribbean some forty years or more ago, knows that personal and family standing as well as a person’s reputation, was a very important thing, in much more closely interconnected Caribbean societies in those times. We also see this ongoing feminist strengthening of the position of women in society in the very fact that Orfelia, uses some of the factory’s money and also some of her own money, in order to pay for the new Cuban lector’s trip, to come to read in their cigar factory Ybor City in Florida, in 1929 (p.11).

In this context, the play also unfolds against the significant backdrop of the interesting phenomenon of the flappers in the United States in the 1920s, which was part of a deepening and of a spreading entertainment press in those days. Flappers were young and mostly white women in the 1920s, although not only white as the African-American singer and dancer, who lived in France in order to escape from rampant Jim Crow U.S. racism, Josephine Baker, was and certainly could also be seen also a flapper. Still, these mostly young white women, were in those days in the 1920s, busily embracing a new and a different modern lifestyle, which was viewed by many in the U.S. society at that time, as being immoral, outrageous and utterly unacceptable. Nonetheless, these adventurous young women, who wanted more out of life than even their various mothers had to settle for, adamantly pushed against the still existing constraining sexist obstacles and the patriarchal barriers of economic, financial, entertainment, political and sexual freedoms, and these were freedoms that simply were not being afforded to most women in the United States in those times. One of the important and well-known flappers in those days, was the popular U.S. actress, Clara Bow, who will also be referenced in the play by one the important female characters, Conchita (p.44), who is the oldest daughter of the family patriarch, Santiago and his wife, Orfelia. Conchita will eventually cut her long hair to make it resemble the popular female movie star and flapper, Clara Bow’s hairstyle. Santiago Alcalar is the main owner of the family-owned cigar factory, in Ybor City, Florida together with his quite loyal, but nonetheless very strong-willed wife, Orfelia, and who therefore certainly does not put up with his nonsense (p. 35–38). Anyone growing up in and across the Caribbean, will see many things in a caring, in a loving and strong-willed Orfelia that their beloved mothers, grandmothers and aunts shared with her. Still, an increasingly confident, Conchita eventually will cut her long black hair short as a clear sign of her growing independence from her unfaithful husband, Palomo, whom she still loves and cares for and she does so also increasingly as a sign of her now much more beginning to follow her own personal needs and wants (p. 44–45, 69) All of this on her part, was all very much in keeping with what was happening under many more women, in the changing times of the 1920s, in both the United States as well as in Cuba. Nonetheless, when Conchita and her cheating husband, Palomo discuss his affair and even the possibility of getting a divorce, it quickly becomes clear that neither his nor her family would tolerate such a thing happening (p. 33–35). This is indirectly the only real place in the play, ‘Anna in The Tropics” where the influence of not only Cuban cultural values in those day, but also of the very strong Cuban Catholic culture can be sensed. In this context, one of the rather really strange things in this Caribbean-American play occurring in the Cuban-American exile, migrant and/or immigrant community, is that the play never addresses the ongoing significant role of Catholicism at the very end of the 1920s, in anyway, which simply also does not ring true. This is because certainly the mother, Orfelia as well as at least one of her daughters, would in all likelihood sooner rather than later in those days, refer to the central role of religion in their life, and also about the great importance of going to church, but this never happens in the play. All of this might have also led to some biting comments about the ongoing strong anti-Catholic sentiments still very much alive in the Protestant-Anglo-Saxon-dominated United States in those days.

Still, to place the play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’, in 1929, is also quite interesting from an economic standpoint. This is because it is the year of the ending of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ that began with the collapse of a rather booming Wall Street, on “Black Thursday”, on October 24, 1929, directly leading to the beginning of the horrific Great Depression (1929–1941), and to the explosion of unemployment, homelessness, hunger and also of huge economic and financial difficulties for many more U.S. citizens under President Herbert Hoover (1929–1933). The play, which begins somewhere in the summer of 1929 (p.28), certainly abstractly touches on and it also does indirectly allude to the fact that in the summer of 1929, U.S. consumer spending, had slowed down as a result of an ordinarily recurring capitalist economic recession. It does so by pointing to the fact that the Alcalar family-owned cigar-making business in Ybor City, was having and it was encountering some measure of consumer spending economic blowback and pullback. This was because of the existing U.S. economic recession and maybe even also as a consequence of an evolving U.S. consumer change, in terms of preferring cigarettes to cigars, which the various U.S. consumers, more and more had seen on the big screen, and in those days many more people went to the movies than is the case now, the various big movie stars such as Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, regularly smoking in popular movies, and which was equally starting to transition from the silent era to the so-called “talkies”, as well as the growing competition the Alcalar family cigar factory, was facing from much more mechanized cigar-making companies, although it was also certainly still not an absolutely bad time for them at that point in time (p. 49, 50, 56, 66). These somewhat more challenging economic conditions, including the changing U.S. consumer tastes and the equally deepening and the spreading mechanizing industrial developments, and also about what really to do about all of them, will lead to ongoing tensions and to growing conflicts within the family-owned cigar company with the major antagonist in the play, Cheché, who wants to modernize and therefore to mechanize the production of cigars as well as to get rid of the lector, in order to try and increase the Alcalar family-owned cigar-making production efficiency. He is the half-brother of the owner of the cigar factory, Santiago, the Patriarch of the Alcazar family, who has a big drinking problem and also a gambling problem, in connection with the popular local Cuban American cockfighting at the very beginning of the play. Santiago’s half-brother, Cheché is also part-owner of the family-owned cigar factory, in Ybor City, Florida but he constantly is considered by the others in the tight-knit Alcalar family, to be somewhat of an outsider with his modernization and mechanization ideas of the still hand rolled cigars in the Alcalar cigar factory in Ybor City in those days. Nevertheless, these various challenging modernization and therefore mechanizing ideas of Cheché, were clearly in keeping with the much more scientific management principles that had been put forward by Frederick Winslow Taylor, and which Henry Ford, had also already used in his car factories.

Cheché had just seemingly showed up one day at the family-owned cigar factory from the northern part of the U.S. with a birth certificate showing and claiming that he was seemingly the half-brother of Santiago and also of their womanizing father in Cuba. No one in the Alcalar family, in their fundamental cultural understanding of the sexual realities, in Cuba and equally in the Caribbean with many single and also married Cuban men in those times, makes any problems with the veracity of his birth certificate and they simply consequently accepted him as such. Clearly, ongoing Cheche’s position of being somewhat of a frustrated and also of a bitter outsider with his huge modernizing ambitions, in the somewhat conservative petit-bourgeois Alcalar family business, is obviously also a metaphor for and it equally reflects, the ongoing reality of many of the different Cuban American exiles, migrants and immigrants in those days of being considered to be somewhat of “outsiders” themselves with very big dreams of being and of also becoming very successful in many different ways, in an economically and a politically Protestant-Anglo-Saxon dominated U.S.

I must emphasize a spoiler alert here to everyone reading this before I go on to discuss the play in some more depth and in much more detail. This is because I will be touching on many various aspects of the important play and the important relationships between the significant characters within it as well as on some of the things that are dearly missing or were not fully developed in the interesting Cuban-American play, taking place in 1929, ‘Anna in the Tropics’. The play begins at a cockfight with Santiago and his half-brother, Cheché, continually betting on different cocks and with Santiago constantly losing his money by betting on the wrong cocks to win the particular cockfight, and therefore as a result having to borrow more and more money from Cheché. Santiago does so in order to be able to continue gambling on various cocks while at the very same time promising to either repay his half-brother or else he would end up receiving an even larger share in the family-owned Alcalar cigar-making company in Ybor City. The drunk Santiago does this by signing the bottom of Cheché’s shoe, which Cheché subsequently refuses to wear. This is because he wanted to keep the signed shoe sole as a proof of Santiago’s promise to him. From early on, we can clearly see that Cheché, is very individualistic and also very money, success and property-oriented like many others were in the United States in those days in the 1920s. He is certainly much more so than his half-brother, the very proud Santiago, who is much more traditional and he is also very willing unlike his half-brother, Cheché, to seriously take the opinions of his workers in consideration while mostly running the Alcalar family-owned cigar business together with his wife (p. 54–56).

At the very same time, Santiago’s wife Orfelia, and their daughters Conchita and Marela, are at the harbor, eagerly awaiting the arrival by boat of the new lector from Cuba. As the playwright, Nilo Cruz, correctly points out in an afterword to his play that lectors (readers) had been part of the cigar-making process and the cigar-producing tradition in Cuba going back hundreds of years to the Taino Indians (p. 87). The women express that what they wanted most of their new young Cuban lector, who came to them with strong recommendations, is namely that he had a very good and a very solid voice so that all of the workers in their cigar factory, could clearly hear him and also that he would read from his heart as well as with a singular passion for whatever it was that he was reading. In this context, we equally encounter also the literary element of magical realism (e.g. Marquez and Borges), which was a natural and an inherent part of the complex evolving multilayered Caribbean everyday reality, up to over some forty years ago now, and that is quite well-known to anyone who grew up in The Caribbean (obeah, zombies, spells and curses etc.) during those times. Still, this magical realism touch, is a very nicely indigenizing element in the Caribbean-American play and it could have been developed much more. The youngest daughter, Marela, in the harbor while they are awaiting the arrival of the new Cuban lector from Cuba, relates to also having done so, to her mother and older sister, Conchita. Marela had used a spell on the advice of her palm reader by writing the lector’s name on a piece of paper and by placing it in a glass of water with brown sugar and cinnamon, in order to ensure that indeed the new eagerly awaited Cuban lector, would ultimately come their way. Her mother, Orfelia, who had grown up in Cuba, is not very happy with what her youngest daughter, Marela, had done to the new lector, and again she emphatically warns her youngest daughter about the dangers involved, in playing with spells, which the mother, was very afraid could alter a person’s destiny, in a very bad way and they gave her an example of this happening in the past. Marela sadly ends up saying to both her mother and her older sister that they had made her feel very bad for having done so in regards to the new lector (p. 14–15). When the women finally encounter the new Cuban lector, Juan Julian, especially Conchita and her younger sister, Marela, are nearly immediately quite taken by his good looks, his suave ways and also by his easygoing confident manner.

It is important to equally explain here that this longstanding magical realism aspect of the complex and the multilayered evolving Caribbean reality, can also be understood to be an epiphenomenon of the very fact that so many people, in different parts of the Caribbean region in the past, had so very little control over their daily life, which was being controlled by so many different influential local forces and mostly by powerful foreign forces and influences that they could not control or often even make any good sense of it. In other words, using spells and going to palm readers or believing in obeah, and/or in the power of curses and even in zombies, give these different Caribbean people some desperate sense of agency and of control that they did not otherwise possess. To a certain extent this is also very inherent at least early on, in the lives of exiles, migrants and immigrants, who are constantly adjusting and adapting themselves to their new ways of living in their new country without any significant measure of control at least early on as well, and all of this always involves within it and also very much around it, the various elements of comparing and contrasting as well as the mixing and the matching of their former lives and ways with their new evolving lives and ways in their new country. None of this magical realism really exists any longer under most of the people in many different and equally much more socio-economically developed places in the Caribbean nowadays.

The playwright also emphasizes the crucial fact here that the lectors, who entertained and enlightened the workers, would very soon be completely disappearing from the cigar-making factory floors in 1931, in the United States (p. 89). They would continue to be used in Cuba. Still, this was a direct result of the increasing use of various noisy cigar-making machines as well as a consequence of the fact that the U.S. factory owners, viewed the lectors as a threat. The owners viewed the lectors as a threat fundamentally because of the radical labor press and the daily news these various lectores, were regularly reading to the workers at a time of growing economic and political unrest under U.S. workers, leading up to and during the Great Depression, and this was something, which the factory owners wanted no part of. In other words, ‘Anna in The Tropics’ can be viewed in many ways as really a theatrical elegy to the quickly coming disappearance of lectors in U.S. cigar factories in 1931, which is strongly underscored in the play with the murdering of the lector, Juan Julian by a lonely and a deeply frustrated Cheché towards the end of the play. In this context, Cheche’s U.S. wife Mildred from Atlanta, had earlier on run away with one of the lectors, which had left him feeling very lonely and also angry and frustrated with the new lector, Juan Julian, whom he believes only serves to distract the cigar workers from their work by reading the classic Russian novel about a troubled marriage and the complex passionate infidelity on the part of the wife, Anna Karenina. The story also constantly reminds him of his wife and of their troubled relationship. We also see this play out in Cheché’s strong critique of his half-niece, Marela’s quality of work (p.59–60), and whom he increasingly takes a strong sexual liking to, which she very strongly rejects. He adamantly criticizes her poor cigar work that he believes is a result of Marela, being strongly distracted while doing her cigar-making work, by her listening to Juan Julian’s strong and very passionate reading of Leo Tolstoy’s classic 1878 novel, Anna Karenina. In this context, it is also important to point out that Marela, who is quickly coming-of-age, also takes a strong romantic liking to Juan Julian, but he does not respond to her longings and/or romantic interest. This is because Juan Julian develops a very passionate sexual relationship with her older and married sister, Conchita, who is increasingly disappointed with the status of her marriage to Palomo, a fellow cigar worker, in the Alcalar family-owned cigar business, who is busily having an affair with another woman. It is an increasingly disappointed and a rather frustrated Conchita, who powerfully and succinctly sums up the crucial role that the reading of the classic Russian novel Anna Karenina, comes to unleash in many different ways in the play by her stating: ”What is happening in the novel has been happening to us.”

This is also where one of the biggest and the most problematical dramatical weaknesses of the play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’, is also situated namely in the very fact of the Caribbean-American play, following the story of Tolstoy’s great novel too closely and not much fundamentally critically enough, and all of this is exactly happening at the very time when Cuba, was once again intensely beginning to resist the ongoing indirect U.S. domination under the U.S.-backed increasingly violently dictatorial Presidency of Gerardo Machado (1924–1933) in the late 1920s, and also against the backdrop of the fact that cubanidad, which is all about the ongoing development of an independent national Cuban identity that goes back to the 1790s, in a colonized Cuba by Spain, had been further developed in literature and culture, in an “independent Cuba” during the 1920s. It might therefore be okay to allow a young, naif and a quickly coming-of-age Marela, to follow closely and also to imagine along in her profound longing for living a much more interesting and adventurous life outside of the factory confines, with what was going on the novel, Anna Karenina, but to have also her older sister, Conchita, doing the very much same thing makes little or no dramatical and theatrical sense at all. It makes it look as, if all of these different female Cuban-American exiles, migrants and/or immigrants, are completely dependent on imitating northern white people’s lifestyle choices, and equally as if they cannot think for themselves, which at the very same time is exactly what the play is so eloquently arguing against and for by affording many of these Cuban workers, a rich poetic voice constantly full of verbal allegories. Therefore, Marela, can then be the one to have the very intense relationship with Juan Julian while also violently being sexually abused by her half-uncle, Cheché. She tells Juan Julian, who suspects something bad had happened, what her half-uncle, Cheché, had done to her, and the new lector, decides to confront an angry, alienated and deeply frustrated Cheché, which ultimately leads to him then getting murdered by Cheché. Maybe Conchita could have been seen to be greatly tempted to have a relationship with the impressive new lector, Juan Julian, but at the very last moment, she rejects doing so by pushing away Juan Julian, and by proudly explaining to him that she was not Anna Karenina, but Conchita from Cuba, living in the United States, and that she therefore wanted to at least one more time try and re-establish a good relationship with her husband, Palomo, who spies on her pushing away Juan Julian. This for him surprising act on her part, is something, which then causes Palomo, to reconsider what it is he is doing to his wife by regularly cheating on her with another woman. The play could then also end in the very same way that it is written and which would also mean very much more with a changed or a changing Palomo, steps in to fill the shoes of the murdered Juan Julian, and therefore setting out to honor Juan Julian by completing the reading of Anna Karenina for the cigar-workers, but also especially for his wife (p. 83–84).

A somewhat isolated, frustrated and ambitious Cheché, who is the major antagonist in the play, is regularly trying to gain some more influence one way or the other, on the way in which the Ybor City family-owned and run cigar factory operates by regularly calling for the use of machines in the family-owned cigar factory, as well as with the doing away with the new lector, but no one pays any attention to him, which only serves to make him even much more frustrated and much more of an outsider in the Alcalar family (p. 57–58). Only Palomo at a certain point backs his adamant and ongoing push to use machines as well as to get rid of the lector, Juan Julian, as the American cigar owners were busily doing in those times, and after a returning Santiago to the family-owned factory floor, had called for the controversial proposal to be put to a vote (p. 54–55). Again, this vote once again underscores Cheche’s position as an outsider-insider with few backers and takers of his modernizing ideas and their consequences, as the cigar workers (p. 50–51) point out that the installation of the new modern machines, could eventually mean that many of them would lose their precious jobs in the cigar-making family-owned factory. They therefore told Cheché to take back his machine to the factory or to where he had bought it, and in the very same process with Santiago paying him back the money, which he had borrowed from him in the beginning of the play in order to cover his increasing gambling debts (p. 56). In paying back his half-brother the money that he had owed him, Santiago, re-establishes his personal standing, his family’s reputation and also his position as the main person running the factory going forward. In 1929, all of these various things, would have absolutely been very important in the various Caribbean and also in Caribbean-American communities. Still, we equally interestingly see here the Cuban American workers in 1929, echoing the notion once taken by the Luddites in the United Kingdom in the 19th century, as the ongoing modernization and the mechanization of factories in many different ways, continued to seriously threaten the livelihood of the workers. This continuing modernization again is something, we are once again urgently experiencing with the ongoing robotization of factory production and also with the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in many different and new ways in various factories and businesses at present.

Still, here is also exactly another one of the great dramatical and structural weaknesses of the play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’ namely the very fact that all the new Cuban lector, in the play, Juan Julian, is allowed to read in the Alcalar family-owned factory, is the classic 1878 Russian novel, Anna Karenina, and not the quite radical labor press in those times and/or the newspapers as was always the case with the lectors. This is something that simply absolutely also does not ring true in the then highly-politicized environment at that time under most of the Cuban exiles, migrants and immigrants in the United States, and it equally certainly does not ring true, again unless we had earlier on seen and/or heard that both Santiago and Orfelia, were very much against such a thing happening in their cigar factory, but this is not the case. We can see hereby the rather profound conservatism inherent in the play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’, which may reflect the fact that Nilo Cruz, who had left Castro’s socialist Cuba in 1970, and he had also grown up in a deeply Creole Cuban dominated anti-Castro Miami during those times. Again, all of this is quite problematical because the different Cuban workers in the United States, were also in those days very much at the very forefront of the radical struggle for the real independence of Cuba, in regards to a still U.S. dominated “independent Cuba” under the Platt Amendment (1902–1934), and which gave the U.S. ongoing military, economic as well as political control of an increasingly restless Cuba in those time. Against this backdrop, what is also so deeply troubling and lacking in the play, is the very fact that no one in the cigar factory, asks the new lector directly coming from Cuba, anything about what was going on in Cuba under the increasingly brutal dictatorship and the political violence on the part of President Gerardo Machado y Morales, and against which many more Cubans were starting to fight and to resist, and also equally all of this happening at a time when there had recently been an election in the United States that had led to Herbert Hoover (1929–1933) becoming the new U.S. President. In other words, politics would have inevitable and necessarily been very much alive during those changing times in Cuba as well as in the Cuban-American exilic, migrant and/or immigrant air and community in Ybor City.

When asked, the new Cuban lector, Juan Julian could have briefly described what was going on in Cuba during that time in 1929, and some could have said that they had left Cuba and they absolutely were not interested in what was happening there while a few others could have justified what the brutally dictatorial President Machado was doing by claiming that he was stopping Cuba from becoming communist, and many others could have expressed their strong support for real Cuban independence as well as for a much more radical reform of the Cuban society as such, the last of which was also very much more in keeping with José Martí, the leading thinker of the progressive raceless Cuban independence movement, in the late 19th century, and who whenever possible used to also read to Cuban workers in Florida (p. 88). None of this questioning and/or eventual interesting exile, migrant/immigrant political discussion ever occurs in the 1929 play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’, which greatly impoverishes the play as a direct consequence and also because at least for some time the various Cuban American exiles, migrants and immigrants, would absolutely continue to in many different ways live “in-between” Cuba and the U.S. All the play ever talks about in regards to Cuba, are family memories and family situations, which is way too limiting and one-dimensional, in terms of the multilayered complex acculturating lives and processes of the Cuban exiles, of migrants and of immigrants of those times in Ybor City, Florida. The play also does not do a good enough job in showing that and of how the various Cuban American exiles, migrants and immigrants oftentimes and in various ways and to differing degrees, greatly longed for and they also missed Cuba, which is something the coming of the new lector, Juan Julian, could have been used to help underscore in many different ways, but this is really not done. We only really see this to a certain extent in Juan Julian and Orfelia expressing their longing sentiments for Cuba in his various comparisons of the Florida landscape with Cuba, which he points out has many more mountains and hills than Florida and in regards to the evolving building city of Tampa, which the new Cuban lector feels as if it is strangling him while, on the other hand, Orfelia says that they are trying to build a city like those they had left behind in Cuba (p. 22, 41). What Juan Julian is indeed pointing to in this context, is the ongoing estrangement of more and more people in the north and in the west, who are increasingly beginning to live in more and more concrete and asphalt urban areas, unlike most of those still living in Cuba in those days, and therefore in so doing they are already in the north and west, becoming nearly completely alienated from nature over time, and how very problematical this would end up being as we know can see with global warming and also with the ongoing destruction of the environment worldwide. Again, this is all part of the comparisons and the contrasts that most exiles, migrants and immigrants regularly engage in, on many different levels and also at different times, in their new country and all of this as a direct result of their complex ongoing acculturating lives.

Another important issue that the Cuban exiles, migrants and/or immigrants would have inevitably confronted in the United States in those days and also against the backdrop of the recent closing down of the U.S. borders in 1924, and again this is something that once again, is being dealt with in the United States, is the very issue of Hispanophobia. In those days, the Mexican-Americans, were regularly facing Hispanophobia everywhere in the United States of America, and this is something that they would to some extent, also have encountered, as either Spanish-speaking Cuban-Americans or as many of the Cuban-American exiles, migrants and/or immigrants, still speaking English with a strong Spanish accent. Nowhere in the play set in 1929, and dealing in various ways with the ongoing complex and at times ambiguous acculturation of these Cuban-Americans, is this significant issue of Hispanophobia even briefly touched on in passing. The last big problem with the interesting play, ‘Anna in The Tropics’ is the fact that not one of the characters in the play, is an Afro-Cuban, and although it must be said here that most Afro-Cubans in those days had refused to come to the United States because of the rampant ugly U.S. Jim Crow racism, they had seen being imposed on Cuba by the U.S. in the early 20th century, nonetheless still some Afro-Cubans, had come to the United States, hoping to create a better life for themselves and for their families in the complex and challenging process. An Afro-Cuban character in the Cuban-American play and also working in the Alcalar family-owned cigar-making business, would have certainly greatly enriched the play by putting the ongoing important issue of racism and of discrimination as well as the ongoing profound marginalization of most Afro-Cubans both within the virulent Jim Crow United States in those times and also within the Creole Cuban-American community right on the table. These were certainly also urgent issues that Cuba in 1929, was equally very much dealing with as well. José Martí, whom the playwright points to in his afterword, had promised the resisting Afro-Cubans in the late 1800s, a radical raceless independent Cuban nationalism and Cuba. To overlook and to silence these still very crucial issues as a Cuban-American playwright, also belonging to a vibrantly Cuban-American multi-ethnic and multicultural community, is to once again greatly impoverish this interesting play.

The last issue that the play causes one to ponder and to consider, but which it does not answer itself, is what is eventually going to happen to the Alcalar family-owned cigar-making business and factory, as they had decided not to mechanize their cigar-making processes (p. 54–56), and I have to say that in all probability, they would be forced to shut down and/or either to sell their factory with the quickly coming economically brutal Great Depression. This was because eventually Santiago would have to repay the money that he had borrowed to repay his gambling debts to his half-brother, Cheche, and also as a result of the fact they would no longer really be able to compete in the intensely multilayered changing smoking market place, and this would be the case even with the making of a new and of very good cigars by hand, one of which, will be named as was always the case in Cuba, after women and romantic love stories, Anna Karenina, and with a picture of his dressed up youngest daughter Marela with a flower in her hair as was the case in those days with women in Cuba (p. 71–73).

©Gregory Gilbert Gumbs