Framing the diaspora and the homeland: language ideologies in the Cuban diaspora

1.1 Formation of the diaspora

The Cuban revolution triggered large waves of emigration, and the settlement of heavy concentrations of Cubans in the Miami and New York metropolitan areas. After the revolution in 1959, there were four major waves of immigration from Cuba and continuous immigration in the interludes. The largest number of Cubans arrived in two waves in the 1960s and early 1970s; these early exiles were predominately white and middle class. In 1980, however, the Mariel boatlift brought a smaller, more racially and socially heterogeneous, number of Cubans. With the Balsero or Rafter Crisis in 1994–1996, the diaspora again saw the arrival of a large group of racially and socially diverse Cubans. This group differed from earlier groups in that the majority were born and raised in post-revolutionary Cuba. Although after the Rafter crisis, the US government’s open-door policy on Cuban immigration was reversed, vigorous immigration continued, doubling between 1980 and 2015, with sharp increases of 78% in 2015 and 31% in 2016.

1.2 Language ideologies in the diaspora

From its beginnings, the Cuban diaspora has been profoundly opposed to the totalitarian regime in its homeland. Its language ideology has been shaped by its political origins and history. Thus, counterrevolutionary nationalism underpinned beliefs about the national variety in the diaspora, where authentic Cuban Spanish was believed to be maintained, and in the homeland, where it was believed to be defiled. Although political ideology was at the heart of this language ideology, the regime in Cuba fueled these beliefs with the enactment of language policies that promoted changes, for instance, with the renaming of many geographical names. This intentional “place-making” (Gal 2010: 47) erased what the diaspora knew as legitimate names, grounded in history, and replaced them with names coined by the regime. As Gal (2010: 47) noted: “Knowing what to call a place is as an aspect of belonging, one that makes people members of a social group, recognizable as local persons.” Thus, the conflict between diaspora and homeland played out in not only in politics, but also in language beliefs and practices.

Through its language ideologies the diaspora has secured its legitimization and authenticity (Fishman 1972) outside the homeland. Just as the revolutionary government made intentional efforts to erase the past, the diaspora has relied on erasure and essentialization to fit its language ideology within its political ideology. Erasure, Irvine and Gal (2000: 38) explained, “is the process in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible. Facts that are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get explained away.” Language ideology creates “a totalizing vision”, and when facts do not fit with it, they “must be either ignored or transformed”. The diaspora’s ideological resistance and disapproval of Cuba has involved erasure of the social and linguistic reality of the diaspora community, as well as erasure of the similarities between the national variety in the diaspora and Cuba. In the ideological divide, negative attributes are ascribed to the homeland. Irvine and Gal (2000: 39) noted that “the Other, or simply the other side of a contrast, is often essentialized and imagined as homogenous”. Erasure and essentialism, evident in its language attitudes, are discussed here as means through which the diaspora has achieved differentiation, legitimization, and secured its claims to authenticity.

1.3 Diaspora and homeland attitudes

The diaspora welcomed new arrivals from Cuba with open arms throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The Mariel boatlift, however, changed the diaspora’s attitude towards newcomers. The new arrivals, which the old guard pejoratively labeled Marielitos, turned disproportionately toward criminal activity, especially involvement in the emerging Miami drug trade. Time Magazine’s November 1981 cover story “South Florida: Trouble in Paradise” revealed the criminality of Marielitos to a national audience. The film Scarface (Bergman and De Palma 1983) and television series Miami Vice (Mann 1984) created an image of Miami as a city of drug-fueled mayhem, with its Cuban denizens at the center of the problem. According to Portés and Puhrmann (2015: 41), the newcomers sullied the long-held positive image of the diaspora – Cubans, who were previously considered a “model minority”, became “just another third-world minority forcing its way onto American shores”. In response, after Mariel the diaspora closed off its social networks to the troublesome newcomers, who had proven to be unlike the earlier exiles: “From the viewpoint of earlier and better-established exiles, Mariel and post-Mariel arrivals were different – raised under the revolution, they lacked the work ethic and the principled anticommunist political stance of their predecessors. They could not be trusted” (Portés and Puhrmann 2015: 43).

Views of newcomers were grounded in the intensely negative attitudes exiles held towards the political revolution from which they had fled and the persons complicit in its formation and development. Their loathing of the revolution, and of persons who had participated in it, whether actively or passively, was now directed equally towards Cubans in the homeland and newcomers. To refer to these interlopers, labels were coined, capturing modes and times of arrival, that took on derogatory meaning in the narratives of established exiles. Thus, Marielito was the Mariel boatlift arrival, balsero was the Cuban who arrived on a raft or other floating vessel, botero was someone who arrived on a boat, and bombero was a US visa lottery winner. Other terms such as comunista, fidelita, and hombre nuevo, a pejorative term reversing the communist ideal of the new man, were deployed to capture the diaspora’s hostility towards homeland politics.

The other political side was not only loathed in the diaspora. Negative feelings towards the exiles were actively promoted within Cuba. Duany (2011: 74) noted that emigrants were stigmatized in Cuba “where Castro’s government branded them as gusanos (worms), counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries, turncoats, and unpatriotic sellouts”, and during the Mariel Boatlift, as lumpen and escoria (scum). Although restricted interaction between the homeland and emigrants later led to some softening of negative attitudes towards emigrants, the relationship between the diaspora and the homeland is different for Cubans than for other national groups, according to Duany (2011: 74), who noted that “the fault lines between Cubans ‘here’ and ‘there’ have been drawn more sharply than among other diasporas”. Despite entrenched differences in their political ideologies, Cubans have a common cultural identity that is based on their shared history and experiences (Hall 1990). Even though Cubans in the diaspora and Cuba disagree vehemently over recent memories and narratives of the post-revolutionary period, Cubans share a longer history, “constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth” (Hall 1990: 226), that is the key to their shared cultural identity.

2.1 The prestige of Spain

Both the earlier and later studies showed that Cubans had very high regard (Preston 2011) for the variety of the diaspora. In both studies, the diaspora was ranked second, after Spain, which received the highest evaluations of correctness (6.34 and 6.31), reflecting the status of Peninsular Spanish as a pan-regional standard. Spain is the seat of the institution with authority over the Spanish language, the Spanish Royal Academy, whose mandate includes maintaining the integrity and unity of the language by regulating changes and authorizing prescriptive norms. Not only do Cubans endorse the legitimacy of Spain as the location of the normative standard, they also revere Spain because the language originated there – Spanish is a legacy from Spain. The perception of Spanish in Spain as the most correct variety was also found in a study conducted in Havana, Cuba with 400 participants, whose views of its correctness were similarly based on the importance of the Spanish Royal Academy and the historical prestige of Spain (Sobrino et al. 2014). This preference for a regional standard beyond the local one has been discussed for French Canadians, who preferred the dialect of Paris, France to their own, and for Greeks, who preferred the Athenian standard to their own (Giles and Niedzielski 1998). When they studied Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala, Alvar and Quilis (1984) found that Peninsular Spanish was preferred over the local dialect. Cubans, surveyed in three cities in the eastern and western parts of the island, showed a strong preference for Peninsular Spanish (60.5%) rather than Cuban Spanish (26.3%).

2.2 Attitudes towards other varieties

In both investigations, Spain and the diaspora received overall scores in the 6-point range, and the next highest scores were for Argentina and Colombia, in the 5-point range, shown in Figure 1 for the first (Time 1) and second (Time 2) studies. The majority of regions received scores within the 4-point range: at the top of the range were Chile, Costa Rica, and Venezuela, in the middle were Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador, followed by Guatemala, Peru, El Salvador, Panama, Cuba-Island, Nicaragua, and Mexico. In the three-point range were Honduras, and Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The regions with the lowest ratings, surprisingly, were Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish, two other varieties of the insular Caribbean, with which Cuban Spanish shares many linguistic features. Nonetheless, diaspora Cubans perceived their own variety as distinct from these varieties, more similar to the prestige standard of Spain.

Figure 1:

Evaluations of regional varieties at two times.

Cubans in the diaspora and in Cuba share attitudes about the correctness of the other insular Caribbean dialects. Cubans in Havana similarly claimed that Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic were among the least correct varieties, but they also considered Cuba among the least correct (Sobrino Triana et al. 2014), a striking contrast to the high regard diaspora Cubans have for their variety. When asked about the difference of other regional varieties, Havana Cubans reported that Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela were the most similar to their own variety (Sobrino Triana et al. 2014). The Cuban linguist Dominguez Hernández (2000) suggested that Caribbean Spanish is stigmatized because contact with black and impoverished peoples influences its acceptance among its speakers, who are linguistically insecure and prefer other varieties. In Cuba, this stigmatization shaped attitudes towards Puerto Rican and Dominican varieties, as well as towards the Cuban variety.

2.3 Cuban Spanish in the diaspora and Cuba

Cubans’ language attitudes were narrowly focused on the diaspora and Cuba, according to the results of cluster analyses, which showed three clusters: one with Spain and the diaspora, a second with Cuba, and a third with all other regional varieties. When the spatial relation of regions was examined with multidimensional scaling, in both studies, the cluster with Spain and the diaspora was on one extreme, the cluster with Cuba was on the other, and the large cluster with other varieties was in the center. The spatial distribution captured the conflict between the homeland and the diaspora, as well as the proximity of the diaspora and Spain, both with a high degree of prestige and correctness. In an early attitude study in Washington D.C., Castellanos (1980) found that Cubans evaluated their variety very highly; so much so that even when they mistakenly identified a variety as Cuban, they judged it very favorably.

Sharp differences in the evaluations of the diaspora and Cuba reflect a belief in their exceptional positions when regarded in terms of correctness. Significant differences in the mean scores for the diaspora and the island were found for both studies (Table 1). The diaspora was evaluated as the second most correct variety in both the first and second study, with overall scores of 6.0 and 6.12. Cuba, on the other hand, placed last in the second study and 16th of 21 regional varieties in the first; it had an overall score of 4.03 in the first study and in the second 3.14, the lowest rating given to any region. The rating for Cuba dropped significantly from the first to the second study, even though the perceptions of other regions proved to be generally stable over the twelve-year period. Fourteen of the twenty Latin American regional varieties surveyed received ratings that were within 1–5% of the score in the earlier study. Another six varieties were 6–14% lower in the second study. The largest differences in the ratings were given to Cuba, which dropped 14%, and to Bolivia, whose rating was 11% lower, most obviously, a consequence of its political move to the left. The diaspora, in contrast to the large drop in ratings for Cuba, increased 2.4% over the twelve years.

2.4 Time in the diaspora

Time in the diaspora was expected to influence beliefs about Cuba Spanish in the diaspora and the homeland. It was predicted that the influence of political ideologies on language ideologies would be most evident in the early exiles, who would have strong beliefs about the prestige and correctness of the national variety in the diaspora and its stigma and incorrectness in Cuba. It was difficult to anticipate the effect of political ideologies on newcomers from the Mariel and post-Mariel eras, particularly the newest arrivals. It was uncertain whether socio-political ideologies of post-revolutionary Cuba would be evident in evaluations of newcomers, or whether they would have beliefs similar to those of the older exiles, judging the diaspora highly and the homeland negatively, even though it was their own variety. Contrary to expectation, it was found that time in the diaspora did not contribute to significant differences: both older exiles and newcomers evaluated the diaspora variety positively and Cuba negatively.

The ratings for the diaspora and Cuba in Table 2 show that the influence of political ideology was clearest among US-born Cubans, who gave Cuba the most negative evaluations, reflecting the generational transmission of implicit and explicit stereotypes and essentialism (Segall et al. 2015). In the diaspora, the second and 1.5 generations learn the political beliefs of their parents and grandparents, which are reinforced in the larger diaspora community. De la Campa (2000: 9) noted:

Miami can breed a very strong sense of Cuban nationalism through a combination of nostalgia and refusal […] Miami is a community built on the premises that Cuba’s prerevolutionary memories are all that matter as far as the nation is concerned, and that they are best kept and reproduced in Southern Florida.

The newest arrivals, from 2000–2010, when surveyed in 2010, gave the highest rating to the diaspora (6.38), but their evaluations of Cuba were low (3.56), only slightly higher than the ratings of other groups. Thus, newcomers erased their linguistic affiliation with post-revolutionary Cuba. There was a drop, from 5.03 to 3.18, in the evaluation the new arrivals gave to Cuba in 1998 and later in 2010. This change in attitudes towards Cuba suggests that newcomers may accommodate to, or be socialized into (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986), the language ideologies of the diaspora.

In the diaspora, new arrivals are immersed in a hegemonic context in which the ideologies of the dominant group of early Cubans are conveyed through social structures and practices (Glick Schiller et al. 1992), including group membership, the media, and patriotic symbols and narratives in the linguistic landscape. Newcomers who seek news and information about Cuba have few local media alternatives other than the ones controlled by the early exiles and their offspring. As Glick Schiller et al. (1992) pointed out:

Within both the United States and the home countries the state and the dominant classes attempt to establish and perpetuate control over their populations. They do this by elaborating systems of domination based on hegemonic constructions and practices in a process that is closely related to nation-building.

In the diaspora, Cuban radio stations, in particular, “fulfill an important role as agents in memory preservation” (Lohmeier 2014: 67). In the community, there is normative pressure to conform to the old guard’s ideological position towards the homeland, and newcomers, despite forming an “economic diaspora” that is “at odds with” the earlier political diaspora (Grugel and Kippin 2007: 157), come to accept the dominant ideologies of the community.

3.1 Time and residence

Although it was predicted that the diaspora would be chosen as the residence of the 1960s voices and Cuba would be chosen as the residence of the 1990s voices, when participants selected residence they did not match the diaspora with the 1960s voices and Cuba with the 1990s voices, as shown in Table 3. Cuba was selected more often for voices from both times (68% and 70%), most likely because of the association of monolingual Spanish with Cuba; the diaspora was selected equally for both times (32% and 30%). It was expected that if there were notable linguistic differences, beyond lexical items, that characterized the diaspora and the homeland, it would be possible to differentiate the voices of the early exiles and the Cubans who arrived thirty-some years later.

Participants were not able to discern the diaspora-homeland opposition, but the presence of standard and nonstandard variants influenced their selection of residence. Five of the ten voices contained nonstandard phonetic variants, including the lateral variant of /ɾ/ in word-final position, and /s/ deletion in word-internal position. As shown in Table 4, voices with nonstandard variants were more often assigned residence in Cuba (79%) than residence in the diaspora (21%). Voices with standard stimuli, on the other hand, were only somewhat more likely to be assigned diaspora residence (52%) than Cuba residence (48%). Thus, although the stimuli representing the diaspora and Cuba did not contain linguistic cues that could be used to geographically place speakers, the presence of nonstandard variants was used to determine that they resided in Cuba. Attributing nonstandard variants primarily to the homeland, rather than to the diaspora, is an outcome of erasing sociolinguistic variation in the diaspora – nonstandard variants are ignored to maintain beliefs about the prestige and correctness of the national variety in the diaspora (Irvine and Gal 2000).

3.2 Residence and correctness

The second question investigated in the matched-guise study addressed whether information about residence in the diaspora or in Cuba would influence beliefs about the correctness of voices. Six stimuli, three from the 1960s and three from the 1990s were presented to participants, who were asked to evaluate them on a seven-point scale, on which seven was most and one least correct. It was predicted that stimuli labeled with diaspora residence would be considered more correct and that stimuli assigned Cuba residence would be judged less correct. These predictions were borne out: US residence received higher ratings than Cuba residence regardless of the presence of standard or nonstandard variants. As shown in Table 5, when the voice was believed to be of a man residing in the diaspora, both stimuli with standard (5.5) and nonstandard (4.9) variants were judged more correct. On the other hand, when the man was expected to reside in Cuba, lower evaluations were given to both the stimuli with standard (3.2) and nonstandard (3.0) variants. The influence of political and language ideologies is clear: beliefs about the correctness, and incorrectness, of the national variety based on its location overrode the linguistic information in the stimuli.

3.3 Summary

The matched guise study examined whether speakers could be placed in the diaspora or Cuba and showed that early exiles could not be distinguished from Cubans born after the revolution and raised in post-revolutionary Cuba. Participants were not able to place voices from the 1960s and 1990s in the diaspora or Cuba. When the influence of residence on attitudes towards correctness was tested, a predictable outcome was found: speech was believed to be more correct when the speakers’ residence was the diaspora and less correct when it was in Cuba. These evaluations of correctness followed the trend found in the two perceptual dialectology studies discussed in Section 2 (Table 6). Across the three studies, the diaspora was evaluated positively in comparison to Cuba, demonstrating that linguistic and political ideology influenced attitudes towards the varieties, their correctness and prestige.

4.1 Erasure

The diaspora holds negative views of the national variety in Cuba, believing it is the product of deep social, cultural, and moral degradation produced by the political system that had overturned the social hierarchy. The Spanish of Cuba was judged as either the least correct, or among the least correct of regional varieties, and nonstandard phonetic variants triggered associations with residence in Cuba rather than the diaspora. This position requires the diaspora to ignore sociolinguistic diversity and variation in the community. Although the majority of early exiles were from the middle classes, there were also Cubans from the lower classes and peasants. However, the diaspora does not acknowledge that the nonstandard phonetic and grammatical variants found among its lower middle class, working classes, and peasants are, in fact, the same variants found in Cuba. The diaspora disregards evidence of similarities between the sociolinguistic variants of the despised post-revolutionary hombre nuevo in the homeland and many diaspora Cubans. Particularly striking is that newer arrivals engage in erasure, too, attributing high prestige to the diaspora variety and low prestige to Cuba, even though it is their own variety. The political and linguistic hegemony of the diaspora creates a situation in which later arrivals accommodate to and reproduce the stereotypes and beliefs about their own group that are held by the dominant group of early exiles (Lambert et al. 1960; Glick Schiller et al. 1992).

Among the earlier exiles, lower-status groups do not recognize the similarity of their own speech to that of newer arrivals and Cubans in Cuba. A case that illustrates this is María, an elderly woman, who arrived in Miami in the 1960s. Although she resided in a small town before emigrating, she was from a poor family that lived in the countryside. She did not attain a level of education higher than early primary school (third or fourth grade) and she married a man with a similar level of education whose occupation in Cuba was taxi driver. María’s speech reflects her educational level and rural origins – she uses variants that are stigmatized in Cuban Spanish, and in the Spanish-speaking world in general. For instance, she uses nonstandard [nos] instead of standard [mos] in first person plural verb forms, using íba[n]os instead of íba[m]os “we were going”; she uses nonstandard aspiration of onset /s/, pronouncing nosotros “we” as no[h]otros instead of no[s]otros; and she uses the highly stigmatized verb nonstandard variant haiga rather than haya. These variants are categorically absent from middle-class speech. Although María expresses a high degree of linguistic security and is concerned with, and convinced of, the correctness of her speech, she is unaware of using stigmatized variants that distinguish her from the diaspora’s middle class, despite being in intense contact with it for over forty years.

Along with negative views of the island, diaspora Cubans were also found to have negative views of the correctness of the varieties of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. These two Caribbean varieties share many linguistic features with Cuban Spanish, including aspiration and deletion of /s/, lateralization of /ɾ/, and velarization of /n/, a tendency for preposed, overt subject pronouns, and numerous lexical items not used in other regions. When they downgrade the correctness of Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish, Cubans erase the many similarities among varieties of the insular Caribbean. Linguistic and social facts that are not compatible with the group’s ideologies are erased. The high linguistic security of the diaspora makes erasure more likely because reality must be made to fit with its perception of the correctness and prestige of its variety.

4.2 Essentialization

The process of ignoring or transforming sociolinguistic elements and highlighting linguistic differences in another group involves essentialization, viewing the group as homogenous, without internal social or linguistic variation (Irvine and Gal 2000). The social aspects that are essentialized, and their degree, vary in different cultures, and within subgroups of different cultures (Segall et al. 2015: 543). Cubans essentialize race: their preference for areas that they perceive as European and white, instead of Native American or African, was captured in the evaluations of regions. In fact, positive correlations were found between racial composition and the correctness ratings Cubans gave countries in both the first perceptual dialectology study (r=0.60, p<0.01) and the second (r=0.61, p<0.01). The perception of correctness and race related in large part to geography: Spain, the diaspora, and the countries of the Southern Cone are considered European and white, the countries of Central America, Native-American and mestizo, and the Caribbean countries, African and black or mulatto. That both Spain and the diaspora are considered white European entails viewing the diaspora as a social group devoid of racial diversity. Moreover, race is often erased among Cubans of color in the diaspora, whose new identities are not racial, but national or ethnic (Glick Schiller et al. 1992). Toribio (2003) argued that black Dominicans in the US diaspora emphasized ethnolinguistic identity, and their use of Spanish, over racial identity, to differentiate themselves from African Americans.

Racial essentialization carries over to the homeland. The explanations participants gave to justify their low evaluations of Spanish in Cuba centered on race. They shared the belief that Spanish in Cuba had been negatively influenced after the revolution by the exalted position of Afro-Cuban culture, and the large number of black Cubans, which allowed the linguistic features of Afro-Cuban Spanish to encroach on general Cuban Spanish. These changes, according to participants’ narratives, were driven by political changes that had altered the social structure and the educational system. Race relations were viewed as a political maneuver – the revolution had diminished the power of white Cubans and empowered previously disempowered black Cubans. The revolutionary government had, in fact, promoted racial equality, although institutional racism and discrimination persisted in Cuban society throughout the 1960s (Benson 2016) and continues to the present (Clealand 2013).

The irony is that Cuban culture is built primarily on Spanish and African cultures, a syncretization that evolved in Cuba (Castellanos and Castellanos 1994; Cohen 2008; Hall 1990). Castellanos and Castellanos (1994) rejected the terms European and African, and instead conceptualized Cuban culture in terms of two poles, one eurocubano (Euro-Cuban) and another afrocubano (Afro-Cuban). Thus, they emphasized the processes of acriollar o aplatanar, terms that reference adaptation of Europeans to the new world. All Cubans, and Cuban culture, they noted, are situated along a continuum between Euro-Cuban and Afro-Cuban; some are closer to the Afro-Cuban pole, and others are closer to the Euro-Cuban pole. Nonetheless, the African elements of Cuban identity, evident in its music, art, literature, cuisine, and the phenotypes of the population (Castellanos and Castellanos 1994), are ignored or reinterpreted in favor of European elements. Hall (1990) explained that Caribbean identity is made up of three main presences: African, European, and American presences. It is the African presence that diaspora Cubans perceive as located elsewhere, in the homeland, in the Caribbean, but it is not part of their own cultural identity. According to Hall (1990: 231): “Everyone in the Caribbean, of whatever ethnic background, must sooner or later come to terms with this African presence. Black, brown, mulatto, white – all must look Présence Africaine in the face, speak its name.” Diaspora Cubans, nonetheless, engage with the European presence and erase the African presence in their own cultural identity. It is the European presence that is dominant and has power, derived from colonialism, poverty, and racism (Hall 1990). Cubans value their shared history with Spain and hold in high regard the white-Spanish elements of their culture, including the Peninsular variety, which they consider the most prestigious. On the other hand, Cubans do not acknowledge ties to Africa, and they readily dismiss obvious African influences. The low regard they have for Caribbean varieties of Spanish underscores widely held beliefs about the influence of race on language.

The racial ideologies that interact with political ideologies and play out in attitudes about language varieties have historical roots in Cuban society. Despite attempts to quell racial discrimination after the revolution, black Cubans have continued to experience individual and institutional discrimination in Cuba (Clealand 2013). Peña et al. (2004) measured implicit and explicit racial prejudice among white and black participants in the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and found significantly higher implicit bias in the three Caribbean countries than in the United States. In Cuba, and in the other countries, implicit prejudice was found among both white and black participants, but it was higher for white Cubans. Explicit bias was studied with participants’ degree of agreement to two statements: “Blacks are less intelligent than other groups” and “Blacks are less capable than other groups” (753). Of the countries studied, Cuba had the highest score for explicit bias.

Thus, in Cuban society, racial prejudices are not only implicit, they are also explicit and openly communicated when participants are surveyed. However, explicit means of transmitting racist ideologies may be less important than implicit means. Segall et al. (2015: 553), in a study of ethnic essentialism carried out with parents and children in Israel, discussed similar overt expression of attitudes among Jewish Israelis, whose negative attitudes towards and stereotypes of Arabs were explicit in a context in which there was “tolerance to explicit ethnic attitudes in the Israeli political environment”. Despite the explicit nature of attitudes, they found that social essentialism was not transmitted explicitly, but rather implicitly, from parents to children. The racial discourse that frames the language ideology of Cubans, therefore, although explicit, has an implicit dimension that is communicated through nonverbal behavior (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005). The racial bias that has long existed in Cuban society is central to beliefs about the national variety in the diaspora and in Cuba; racial essentialization of Cuba and erasure of racial diversity in both the diaspora and the homeland are embedded in racial prejudice.

4.3 Nationalism, authenticity, and legitimization

Language ideology and attitudes showed the influence of political and social ideologies on Cubans’ regard for their own and other regional varieties of Spanish. The perceptual dialectology studies found that Cubans were focused on their own variety and the physical and temporal distinctions embodied in the Spanish of the diaspora and the homeland. Perhaps this is not surprising if it is viewed from the perspective of Cuban exceptionalism. For instance, the world maps used in schools in Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s placed the island in the center of the map, according to Pérez Firmat (2010: 111), who pointed out that

the hemisphere depicted in the map, with Cuba at the center, does convey what Cubans tend to think: that the world revolves around us. Scholars of Cuban culture have called this perspective on Cuba’s place in the world ombliguismo; ombligo is navel – hence, Cuba is the navel of the planet, and its natives are given to navel-gazing.

Cuban exceptionalism produces a view of the world that centers on Cuban culture and society; Pérez Firmat (2010: 113) rightly pointed out: “For Cubans, it’s all, and always, about us.” Indeed, Cubans singled out the national variety from other regional varieties, both because of its extremely high (diaspora) or low (Cuba) degree of correctness.

The ideological split with the homeland shifts Cuban exceptionalism to the diaspora. It is believed that the national variety in its pure, pre-revolutionary state is found in the diaspora, and a corrupt, post-revolutionary version exists in Cuba. The perceived degradation of the variety in Cuba stemmed from language changes at the lexical level that occurred either through unplanned innovations that arose in response to the circumstances of life under the new government, or through policies designed to change the language (in itself a form of erasure) as happened with many place names, including the country’s provinces, or the ironic renaming of Isla de Pinos [Isle of Pines], an island off the southwest coast of Cuba where countless young Cubans were imprisoned, tortured, and executed, as Isla de la Juventud [Isle of Youth]. The debasement of the variety in the homeland was also attributed to policies of the government that eradicated the class structure and was believed to have altered the racial hegemony. Negative beliefs about the homeland variety most often centered on impoverishment and race.

Changes in the Cuban variety in Cuba, whether they occurred naturally or were part of language planning attempts by the government, posed a challenge to the diaspora’s sense of belonging to its homeland, and, as a consequence, its authenticity. National identity is based on knowledge of cultural practices, rituals, and places. In diasporas there are “enduring links to a real or putative homeland through collective memories, myths, and rituals” (Duany 2011: 3). Nonetheless, one can ask at what point a diaspora ceases to be part of its homeland (Cohen 2008). What degree of cultural and linguistic change must occur before a diaspora is no longer part of the national group? When does the diaspora cease to be Cuban? In a diaspora the “sense of connection must be strong enough to resist erasure through the normalizing processes of forgetting, assimilating, and distancing” (Clifford 1994: 310). The diaspora’s belief in its social and linguistic authenticity is thwarted by its displacement. Clifford (1994: 307) noted:

Whatever their ideologies of purity, diasporic cultural forms can never, in practice, be exclusively nationalist. They are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms.

Viewing the diaspora and the homeland through the lens of socio-political and language ideologies, the diaspora is able to assert its authenticity and legitimacy, its Cubanness, even though it is not in Cuba. The homeland variety is perceived as a highly stigmatized, corrupt version of the diaspora variety, which is accorded a high degree of prestige. The legitimacy and authenticity of the diaspora is buttressed by its beliefs about the illegitimacy of linguistic changes in the variety in the homeland, whether from the regime’s intentional efforts to erase or shape history through language, or from unintentional changes that occurred in response to political and social factors. The findings of this research showed that the sharp contrast between the prestige of the diaspora and the stigmatization of the homeland was persistent. To maintain these beliefs, social and racial diversity in the diaspora, and in the homeland, are erased, and Cubans in Cuba are racially essentialized. The research discussed here showed that the processes of erasure and essentialization were crucial to framing the positive-negative opposition between the diaspora and the homeland.