Coppelia: Revolutionary Ice Creams

1.     An infinite land of which no one had ever seen the end

In The Infinite Island, Gerardo Mosquera writes that the birth of Cuba in the Western imagination as an exotic and contradictory landscape might be found at the moment of its colonization. When Spaniards landed on the northeastern coast of Cuba in the fifteenth century, the colonizers commanded by Christopher Columbus were trying to decipher whether the territory was indeed an island or terra firma. Its considerable size did not make this obvious to the gaze, so they asked the indigenous inhabitants, the Tainos, about its geography. The Tainos told them it was "an infinite land of which no one had ever seen the end, although it was an island". Cuba was thus born to the West as aporia, exoticizing its insertion in the canonical European corpus, overseeing its complexity, obliterating its inhabitants’ right to narrate themselves.