Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean

Isles of Noise

Isles of Noise

Sonic Media in the Caribbean

Alejandra Bronfman

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2016 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Utopia by codeMantra, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Scott Robinson (https://www.flickr.com/people/84617037@N00), Ripples in Lake Seeley Montana This Summer, 15 August 2005. Wikimedia Commons.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bronfman, Alejandra, 1962–author.

Title: Isles of noise : sonic media in the Caribbean / Alejandra Bronfman.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2016] |Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015046025 | ISBN 9781469628691 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469628707 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Radio—Caribbean Area—History. | Radio broadcasting—

Caribbean Area—History. | Mass media and culture—Caribbean Area—History. | Caribbean Area—Foreign relations—United States. | Caribbean Area—Foreign relations—Great Britain.

Classification: LCC TK6548.C37 B76 2016 | DDC 384.5409729—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046025

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices . . .

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Contents

1 Signal

2 Circuits

3 Receivers

4 Resistors

5 Voice

6 Ears

7 Sign-Off

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

U.S. Marines in Haiti, 20

General Electric Company of Cuba radiotelephony advertisement, 1922, 56

General Electric Company of Cuba advertisement, 1922, 57

Cover art, John Houston Craige, Black Bagdad: The Arabian Nights Adventures of a Marine Captain in Haiti (1933), 68

John Grinan’s broadcasting studio, Kingston, Jamaica, 1938, 84

ZQI broadcasting station logo, 85

Louise Bennett at the University of the West Indies, 1949, 105

George Clark, Suggested Names for Loudspeakers, 1922, 120

Fast Delivery van, Museum of the Revolution, Havana, Cuba, 132

Isles of Noise

1 Signal

Sometime in the spring of 1905, Frank E. Butler boarded a train traveling from Havana to Santiago with so many suitcases full of a great quantity of wire, equipment, etc., that his sleeper resembled a baggage car.¹ The cargo raised suspicion. During a rest stop on the twenty-six-hour journey, the crew removed a large coil of wire they had found in Butler’s compartment. As passengers gathered to stare, the crew interrogated him as to its purpose and demanded a fee for not confiscating it. Once he arrived in Santiago, Butler needed help transporting the equipment. He asked a Cuban army officer he had befriended to find a few boys to help him carry the suitcases and coils to the steamer that would take him to Boquerón, in Guantánamo Bay. In Boquerón, he found a Jamaican man, George Morehead, to assist him. They strapped the equipment on the backs of two horses and began their hike through the jungle to their destination. Butler soon discovered that a clearing in the jungle was his destination; he described the proposed spot for the first wireless station in the Caribbean as dense undergrowth . . . interspersed with low, arid, sand flats: a paradise for mosquitoes, snakes, horned toads, scorpions, tarantulas, wild cats, and all other kinds of tropical creatures, flying and crawling.²

The insects and snakes plagued Butler and his coworkers for a year as they built the station. Swathed in kerchiefs to keep out the swarming mosquitoes, they laid concrete foundations and constructed timber towers that they draped in 45,000 feet of seven-strand, phosphor bronze wire. With romantic flourish, Butler described the completed tower as a hybrid of nature and technology, awash in beauty: The huge cage resembled a giant goldfish globe two hundred feet high, and months afterwards, when the station was in operation, the mesh of wires would emit a bluish brush discharge at night which was beautiful beyond description, and always proved of unending awe to the natives who would stand off from afar and gaze in open mouthed wonder.³ Most often, however, the sublime barely surfaced in the battles with nature that dominated daily life. Lightning struck the station three times. A wildcat fell into their well, compromising their only source of fresh water. Yellow fever spread through the camp. Not that the technology cooperated particularly, either. As if mimicking the dramatic environment, the motor and transformer exploded at least four times between June and December that year.

Butler narrated the establishment of the wireless station in Guantánamo as an adventure, a journey into the tropical wilds in order to fulfill the mission of expanding the reach of wireless throughout the Americas. Guantánamo would serve as a laboratory to test and perfect the equipment and to understand how it responded to a tropical climate. The ubiquitous mosquitos and scorpions constantly threatened to do in Butler’s project of converting his strange luggage into a tower that would send signals to faraway places. What for? In December 1905, ten days after Butler wrote in his journal that the big two-ton transformer blew up, he was able to respond to a Merry Christmas message sent from Navy headquarters in Washington, D.C., with his own Same to you, and many of them. For Butler, these bland exchanges across hundreds of miles marked the end of his story.⁴ His work was done.

When Butler arrived home, he received a note of thanks from his employer, electrical engineer and self-proclaimed inventor Lee de Forest, who noted that he had worked for tedious months . . . in climates scorching and unhealthy, distressed but not baffled by static unknown to other wireless workers. Despite those conditions, Butler had managed to force new secrets from Nature with the new station.⁵ De Forest’s gratitude was tinged with relief that his new wireless communications system had proven viable. De Forest had been tinkering with the possibility of wireless communication in competition with Guglielmo Marconi, who also understood the potential of using the air as a medium rather than telegraph cables, which were too easily subject to political control and sabotage.⁶

Both inventors competed for contracts to extend wireless to a region well connected with telegraph cables and already experiencing the latter’s shortcomings. Initially the Caribbean Sea itself posed an obstacle. According to Charles Bright, who directed the effort, the cables had been laid on what was undoubtedly the worst bottom that any submarine cable has ever been deposited on. Coral reefs that ringed the islands repeatedly cut the thick cable covered with gutta-percha, making the extension of telegraphy to the region an arduous and delicate battle with the sea.⁷ Even as those cables landed, political struggles to control communications were well underway. In conjunction with Western Union, the West India and Panama Telegraph Company had been founded with the intention of connecting the Caribbean islands to points in Latin America as well as the United States in the 1860s. Soon after the first anticolonial conflict in Cuba erupted in 1868, the Cuba Submarine Telegraph Company, also under the auspices of Western Union, had formed in order to avoid dependence on Spanish land lines.⁸ De Forest and his rival Marconi sought to persuade communications companies and governments to support their supposedly less vulnerable wireless communication.

The battle to control and extend communications was thus driven partly by military concerns. In the aftermath of the Cuban Wars of Independence (1868–98) and the U.S. intervention in Cuba (1898–1902), the United States had acquired a bit of land at the far eastern tip of Cuba, intended as a naval base.⁹ Frank Butler had been sent to Guantánamo as part of a contract de Forest had secured from the U.S. Navy in 1904.¹⁰ Butler’s mission was to bring de Forest’s pioneering efforts in wireless communication to the base under construction. This was the third of four stations that would mark the Caribbean expansion of communication networks in an increasingly bellicose period. Stations in Pensacola, Key West, Guantánamo, and Puerto Rico would eventually enable the Navy to send signals from ship to land, facilitating a sense of control over the area. De Forest’s Cuban station was completed just in time. Not long after the holiday greetings traveled across the air from Guantánamo to Washington, D.C., wireless messages confirmed President Theodore Roosevelt’s orders to invade Cuban soil once again, in the wake of a political crisis in 1906. Once the marines had landed, reports of the first skirmishes arrived via wireless.¹¹

Butler has faded from the historical record, and de Forest would go on to a long career marked by battles over patents, lawsuits, and the creation of key technologies that enabled broadcasting and film sound.¹² This forgotten episode in their careers does not fit easily into Cuban or North American narratives of U.S. expansion accomplished with technical certainty or clear-eyed domination over people and environments. Instead, it renders visible the uneven and multidirectional qualities of imperialism.¹³ The United States was a late arrival to the region, and Butler entered a context already saturated with overlapping British and Spanish imperial presences. Indeed, he depended on them, hiring Jamaicans as assistants and translators, and drawing on Cuban and Spanish expertise with regard to the terrain and remedies to alleviate the bug bites, disease, heat, and other discomforts. At times these overlaps laid bare the improvised qualities of the scheme. Butler had hired Joe Francis, rumored to be a murderer, to splice cables 200 feet in the air. When Francis threatened to stop working if his pay was not doubled, Butler held him to his task at gunpoint. A week later, a Spanish surveyor was found stabbed to death on the path near the wireless station. Butler noted that the dead man was very close to his own height and build, and Joe Francis disappeared and was never seen again.¹⁴ This was, in Fred Cooper’s formulation, lumpy imperialism, also itchy, sweaty, and at times, alarming.¹⁵

Mapping Wires and Waves

As Sidney Mintz has succinctly put it: Caribbean people have always been entangled with the wider world.¹⁶ If Mintz and many others dwelled, for good reason, on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slavery and commodity production as a way to understand those enduring connections, this book brings a concern with those crossings and interlacings into the twentieth century. The construction of a wireless station in Guantánamo is part of a longer story of the entangled relationships linking communications technologies, nature, empire, and the poetics of listening. The divergent imperial trajectories of Spain, the United States, and Britain slid past each other in the early twentieth-century Caribbean. Spanish possessions, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the eastern half of Hispaniola, were emerging from distinct processes of decolonization. Yet even as Spanish colonial governments departed, thousands of Spanish immigrants arrived in the region. Britain had established its earliest colonies in the seventeenth century and marked the region in important ways. By the early twentieth century, however, imperial expansion marginalized the British Caribbean in relation to the more absorbing potentials of India, Africa, and the Middle East.¹⁷ Labor rebellions of the 1930s resulted in a degree of attention to this region, as colonial officials sponsored a flurry of analysis and social reform projects intended to quiet the unruly subjects who had incited those rebellions. But in some ways it was too late, as another war and increasingly vocal anticolonialism pushed British rule toward obsolescence.¹⁸

At the same time, the U.S. presence in the Caribbean greatly expanded in the early twentieth century. If Puerto Rico was the only official U.S. territory, Americans insinuated themselves into Caribbean economies and cultural practices and used military occupations to wield power. Throughout the region, residents encountered U.S. expansionism in different ways. The United Fruit Company and the Panama Canal spurred the movement of thousands of workers throughout the region. In 1917, the United States purchased the Danish Virgin Islands.¹⁹ Cuba developed various ties of singular intimacy with its northern neighbor: occupied from 1898 to 1902 and 1906 to 1909, it also witnessed expansive U.S. investment in sugar and other industries. Baseball, cinema, and consumer goods circulated freely.²⁰ Haiti was subjected to a longer occupation (1915–34) and received considerably less investment.²¹ Marines were a stronger presence there than businessmen, and while U.S. film stars flocked to Cuba’s swanky hotels, American anthropologists roamed Haiti in search of exotic forms of blackness.²² By World War II, when it built military bases in Trinidad and Jamaica, the United States was a voluble presence and the source of ambivalence, as Caribbean people both acknowledged its appeal and worried about its increasing clout.²³

The early and relatively widespread acquisition of radio technologies both propelled and enabled these shifting geopolitical concerns. The region served as a laboratory for trials in technology, format, and content. Following Butler’s efforts, the U.S. military quickly recognized the utility of wireless communications, and Guantánamo became a point through which information about various military ventures flowed. Occupying marines transported radio equipment along with guns to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Intensified commercial ties stimulated plantation owners and emerging enterprises such as the United Fruit Company to implement radio technology to administer their expanding Caribbean ventures.²⁴ Amateur radio operators fanned out in the region, many as employees of sugar plantations, and began tinkering with their equipment to see how far their signals could reach. Between transmitting sugar prices and transport information, they experimented with broadcasts of concerts and sports events. During this period, communications between the islands and New York or Key West were faster and more frequent than those between the East and West Coasts of the United States. Along the way, radio broadcasting inserted itself into those circuits. The New York–based station WEAF opened sister stations in Havana in 1922 and San Juan in 1923. As a result of this early phase of experimentation in which producers and consumers of radio in the Caribbean proved essential, a nascent, unreliable medium became the ubiquitous and enduring global phenomenon.

Mapping wires and sound waves as they revised sonic spaces requires attending to shifting notions of the region itself. The Caribbean is not a firmly bounded place but rather a set of claims about space.²⁵ As soldiers, colonial officials, anthropologists, students, planters, merchants, writers, musicians, ham radio operators, engineers, and laborers moved around the Caribbean and North America—Havana, Port-au-Prince, Santiago, Cap Haïtien, Kingston, New York, Washington, Key West—they traced the outlines of a territory with the Caribbean Sea at the center, a region dense with military, commercial, and cultural circuits. None of these would have been possible without the spatial reimagining afforded by wireless and broadcasting assembled alongside, and as part of, changing geographies of power.

The narrative of this book follows the commercial, political, and military concerns that shaped the material transformation of electronic communication. In addition, it attends to the implications of those material transformations for ordinary people. Conceiving of listening as an active rather than passive pursuit enables a quotidian understanding of how Caribbean people might have experienced broadcasting as denizens of neighborhoods, cities, nations, empires, or transnational commercial and military cultures. The analysis takes its cue from Mintz’s observations about the Caribbean’s connections to the wider world, but it also offers a genealogy of those spatial categories. People experience the wider world, after all, in part through the mediated information to which they have access. How did the media in question participate in the production of knowledge about shifting relationships to the wider world? Under what material circumstances did this occur, and who consumed this knowledge? I argue that wireless and broadcasting helped generate the very idea that the Caribbean and the wider world ought to be imagined as distinct and distant even if increasingly connected. Transformations in practices of communication and listening have been rendered as invisible in the scholarship as the wires erased from Jamaican postcards in order to emphasize the region’s picturesque nature.²⁶ Attending to the power and poetics that informed the implementation of wireless and broadcasting in the region, this book writes wires back into Caribbean history.

The Book’s Pieces

The various parts required to generate listening publics organize the narrative. I am interested in what wireless and broadcasting machines were made of, where and how they traveled, and the requirements for their marketing, maintenance, and repair.²⁷ This widens my perspective to include materials such as mica and Bakelite, the laborers involved in assembling the equipment, and the energies and resources required to transport, sell, fix, install, share, and use broadcasting and listening devices. Media history, in this understanding, involves much more than a few men making decisions about the content of a broadcast.²⁸ Radio relied on a series of circuits that connected extractive industries and factory work with the organization of family and work in the Caribbean. Once assembled, voices and machines circulated within economies of desire and belonging that ignored national boundaries even as they reproduced or generated new social and racial inequalities. The emphasis on things arriving in the Caribbean contributes to and complicates historiographic tendencies that concentrate on things extracted from, or circulating within, the region. Broadcasting and wireless did not arrive fully formed; instead, I argue, the circumstances of their arrival shaped emergent technologies.

In A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon recalled the importance of technology to the making of a revolution in French-occupied Algeria. Radios, as material objects arriving from France, carried meanings that changed over time. Before they even spoke, they were the material representation of the colonial configuration.²⁹ Although a majority of Algerians may have been able to afford radios, they were unwilling to purchase them and in so doing appear to take up the francophone bourgeois enthusiasm for all things French. Over the course of the revolution, however, the radio came to be the only source of news of the war from a rebel perspective. Possessing a radio came to mean an association with the anticolonial struggle and a connection to other listeners across Algeria united in that struggle. Fanon’s emphasis on the object itself and its mutable nature reminds us of the ambiguous place of technology in narratives about empire and decolonization. The usual elements of a narrative are marginalized here: ideologies, armies, and geopolitical considerations are refracted through their presence or absence on the radio, as Algerians might have experienced them. Those elements existed to the degree that news about them arrived in Algerian homes or cafés. Fanon’s account centers on radios as things and follows the implications of their consumption and circulation. I invoke Fanon as a scholar whose identification of the relevance of technology to empire and decolonization might prompt a rethinking of its role in Caribbean history.

Chapter 2 uses the U.S. occupation of Haiti to consider the ways that wireless, as a collection of things and practices, became a tool of governance. I argue that as a tool it wielded a great deal of power but that it was at the same time fragile and poorly understood. The malfunctions and sabotages are as much a part of the story as the chilling uses to which wireless was put. Chapters 3 and 4 move about the Caribbean, settling on episodes that are variations on this theme. Radio and broadcasting grew in Cuba in step with the economic growth of the first decades of the century. Cuban markets seemed a natural target for expanding radio industries. Cubans incorporated long-standing listening habits to the new rhythms and regulated time of broadcasting. In Jamaica, by contrast, broadcasting was a late and rather aloof arrival, controlled by elite aspirations to use the radio as an instrument of social reform. As Haitians acquired control of broadcasting, they seduced wary listening publics with local musicians and radio personalities. Attention to the diverse conditions in which broadcasting took hold and convoked listeners decenters histories grounded in North American or European experiences.

From radios came sounds. In Edouard Glissant’s terms, in the Caribbean the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse. This must be understood.³⁰ Glissant roots that observation in a history of slavery and the essential aural communications that occurred between masters and slaves, more often screeches and barks but also whispers and songs. Kamau Brathwaite’s 1979 lecture History of the Voice (eventually published as a short book) links Fanon and Glissant as an extended meditation on voice and language, and makes a performative gesture toward the relevance of technology. He anticipates the new framework for cultural history as elaborated by what, in the last decade, has come to be called sound studies.³¹ His book takes up the question of nation language, the term he coined to refer to the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and laborers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors. More important than its distinctness from English in words and syntax are the rhythm and the registers those rhythms create.³² For Brathwaite, language and, through that, culture, were enacted through sound: The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song.³³ Moreover, orality was conducive to community: The noise and sounds that the maker makes are responded to by the audience and are returned to him. Hence we have the creation of a continuum where meaning truly resides.³⁴ Brathwaite harnesses technology to make his point about multivocality, accompanying his lecture with a series of recordings. In the written version, the list of recordings is like a submerged soundtrack affirming the primacy of voice. The sounds of the Jamaican and Haitian versions of nation language pervade the pages of this book, and their relationship to electronically reproduced sound was not at all straightforward. Putting creole languages and broadcasting in the same analytic frame troubles dichotomies of tradition and modernity, colonizer and colonized. It recovers a way of imagining nation languages and technology that may be closer to Brathwaite’s presentation of them as mutually constituted. Chapter 5 approaches these questions by seeking out Creole voices in Jamaican and Haitian broadcasting. Through the voices and interventions of people such as Louise Bennett and Daniel Fignolé, radio amplified and complicated the race of sound, and the sound of race.³⁵ As I argue, these were interventions in conversation with histories of theater and of social science, as creole languages became points of inflection in nationalist politics.

To what end? Historian Reynaldo González’s brilliant book Llorar es un placer (Crying is a pleasure), accounts for the popularity of radio in Cuba. In radionovelas, he argues, voices and words provoked in listeners the pleasure of weeping. The melodramatic serial called up emotions and sensations that, according to him, shaped habits of perception and the foundations of behavior. González’s insistence on the affective dimension of media informs this book.³⁶ While he invokes ideological manipulation as an interpretive framework, however, I emphasize listening as an active, rather than passive, pursuit. The creation and dissolution of different kinds of listening publics depended on listeners’ openness to being moved as much as on radio’s ability to move listeners.³⁷ That ability was not a given but rather always in play and at risk. Chapter 6 uses the notion of fidelity, meaning both loyalty and approximation to truth, to draw together different dimensions in the creation of listening publics.³⁸ Thinking with fidelity deepens Kate Lacey’s formulation of the audience as listening public. Lacey posits listening as a link between the concept of audience and an understanding of the public based on active and engaged listening as a participatory act. The listening public in this sense is an always latent public, argues Lacey, attentive but undetermined. Any intervention in the public sphere is undertaken in the hope, faith or expectation that there is a public out there, ready to listen and to engage.³⁹ Deviating from Michael Warner’s idea that publics form and disperse, Lacey conjectures a more constant state of listening in and asks how it might have shaped political life.⁴⁰ Similar to Rosalía Winocur’s notion of mediated citizenship, Lacey’s emphasis is on the political aspects of the aural.⁴¹ To these I add an affective notion of fidelity as a node through which listening publics, as what Warner has called extraordinary fictions, were produced and experienced.⁴² Beyond an intellectual engagement, listeners’ ties to radio worked through the mingling of desire and habit as they sought entertainment, or information, or provocation. They listened for veracity or fabrication and settled into habits with their attention, giving it to certain stations, or voices, or programs. In particular, I am interested what Brian Larkin has called the media’s locus as sites for political contest.⁴³ As tools, wireless and broadcasting proffered new repertoires of contention and participated in, rather than merely reporting on, the events at hand.⁴⁴

Historical actors from all points on the ideological spectrum came to comprehend electronically transmitted sound as the idiom through which politics could be conducted. I suggest that attention to technology underwrites an alternative to narratives of political polarization, one that is attuned to transnational networks and emphasizes shared political practices rather than radical ruptures. As the stakes intensified in anti-Batista struggles in Cuba or in the complex electoral politics of 1950s Haiti, radio demanded the fidelity of certain publics, seeking them out in efforts to consolidate power. Subsequently, the radio wars in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and Duvalier’s rise in Haiti amplified political struggles as far as the relentless and ferocious transmissions could reach.

It is difficult to know where this story ends. Chapter 6 ends with silence as a counterpoint to all the noise. Broadcasting did not blanket the Caribbean with full-blown, completely interconnected circuits but rather created voluble, dense media contexts while other zones remained electronically silent.⁴⁵ This seemed particularly true in Jamaica, where radio’s relatively late implementation, the mountainous terrain, and continued control by elites wary of the boundaries between proper and improper English diminished its utility as an instrument of politics. Yet listening publics did gather there, if beyond radio’s reach. Sound systems shaped sonic bodies, and unmediated political oratory swayed Jamaican voters in the contests leading up to and immediately after independence.⁴⁶ So it is on the interplay of noise and silence, the contrapuntal relationship linking many voices, on the media and off, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in dissonance, that the narrative finally settles.⁴⁷

But of course it doesn’t really end. As media became more and more invisibly part of everyday life, they both extended their reach and increased their