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Abstract
This dissertation explores the use of the past in the present through processes of heritage, focusing on Cuba’s revival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of its colonial-era Catholic sacred music. Within this repertory dating from the eighteenth century, I focus on the revival of the music of Esteban Salas y Castro, the Cuban-born chapel master considered Cuba’s first composer. This revival, which takes place via the interconnected study and performance of colonial sacred early music, is an important means through which Cuban cultural authorities have enrolled the fraught colonial past in nationalist endeavors to foster heritage and local identity in place. Examining the use of this repertory since the early-mid twentieth century opens a window onto Cuba’s changing relationship with its colonial past, from its independence from Spain in 1898 through the present day. I examine how major inflection points in Cuba’s history—moments of social change and uncertainty for the Cuban people—have seen a coalescing in the production of Cuban heritage that turns to the colonial past to navigate the present, particularly a revival of the island’s early music via research and performance. Through a combination of ethnographic and archival research methods, this dissertation explores three such moments of change that align with its three central chapters: the 1930s–40s, the 1940s–60s, and the 1990s–present. This view of Cuba’s past and present illuminates how intellectuals and cultural officials have championed elements of colonial art in pursuit of an anti-imperial Cuban history and culture. I unpack how cultural figures and artifacts from the colonial, imperial past—the Church of San Francisco de Paula and Esteban Salas chief among them—are taken up for Cuban anti-imperialist ends. I explore throughout this dissertation how and why colonial sacred music has been revived alongside and within colonial sacred architectural spaces, and reflect through ethnographic accounts the realities of these revival and heritage processes as they continue in Cuba’s challenging present-day conditions and as they confront an uncertain future.