Singing an absent Cuba

aspects of nostalgia and temporalities in Gloria Estefan's album Mi Tierra (1993)

Abstract

The paper analyzes aspects of nostalgia, and its temporal articulations, in the album Mi Tierra (1993) by exiled Cuban singer Gloria Estefan. Released in the context of the Latin Decade and considered as one of the main Latin music albums of the 1990s, the album Mi Tierra was a collective production that had as a guideline to elaborate a narrative about Cuba from anti-Castro and anti-revolutionary visions defended by sectors of the exiled community. Such narratives aimed to produce an album Before Castro, to be released worldwide, in the context in which Cuba was facing the Special Period in Times of Peace and the Balseiros Crisis was beginning to take shape in the country. To this end, the articulation with signs that evoked visions built in common sense about a pre-revolution country were central, with the mobilization of musical genres, narrative axes and themes that allowed the presentification of multiple temporal layers potentiating the narrative that marked the culture of the exile. Articulating debates linked to the history of the present time and studies on exile, this article aims to problematize and denaturalize some of the operations that made possible the instrumentation of nostalgia in Mi Tierra (1993).