Unmapping knowledge: connecting histories about Haitians in Cuba

Abstract

This article is an exercise in comparing narratives that depict the ‘presence’ of Haitians in Cuba. It focuses on the creative forms through which groups of residentes and descendientes, formally designated asociaciones, are experimenting with new modes of creating relationships with kin, histories, places and times. Rather than emerging exclusively from the memories of past experiences of immigration and the belonging to ‘communities’, these actors seem to emphasise that histories apparently associating them with certain bounded existential territories can in fact be created and recreated in multiple forms, mediated by diverse objects and events, and apprehended through a critical perspective, albeit one subject to personal interpretations.