Generally speaking, the main focus in Cuban migration studies has been on recent emigration streams to the United States, following the fall of the USSR and its consequences for Cuba’s economy and quality of life. However, historically there has been a longer migration tradition between the Canary Islands (Spain) and Cuba considering that, apart from Andalusians, many Canarians took part in the colonisation process of the Americas and settled in the “Pearl of the Antilles”, i.e. Cuba (e.g. Macías Hernández 1992). Despite this well-known historical fact, as already pointed out by Valdés Bernal (2007: 29), relatively little research has been conducted on the consequences of this migration flow from a dialectological and socio-cultural perspective, which, as such, takes into account the distinctive dialectological and socio-cultural differences that can be found between the different geographic varieties of Cuba and their speakers. Although this migration stream between the Canary Islands and Cuba has existed since the 16th century and continued up until very recently (1980), it should not be forgotten that it was also bidirectional, meaning that there was also a migration flow from Cuba to the Canary Islands, a fact that has not received any attention at all within sociolinguistics nor sociocultural studies. The current study is an attempt to remedy this and aims to compare the socio-cultural and linguistic consequences of the transnational migrations between Cuba and the Canary Islands, and in particular between the provinces of Pinar del Río and Tenerife.
References
Macías Hernández, Antonio Manuel (1992) La migración canaria, 1500-1980. Gijón: Júcar.Valdés Bernal, Sergio (2007) ‘Las bases lingüísticas del español de Cuba’. In: Domínguez Hernández, Marlen (ed.) La lengua en Cuba. Estudios. Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 27-55.