Unlearning el M(U)Chismo Cubano
How Grotesque Imagery Reveals the Paradoxes of Post-Revolution Masculinities in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s El rey de la Habana and Tomás Alea’s Fresa y chocolate
"Cuba Libre (Free Cuba)," Image by Christopher Michel, 2012. Wikipedia Commons.
As the title indicates with the word mucho, machismo is associated with exaggerated masculinity: a lot of bravado and stoicism. Psychoanalytically, machismo is interpreted as “a reaction to deep-seated fears of inadequacy and latent homosexuality,” which results in the exaggeration of physical and personality traits traditionally thought to be masculine (Basham 127). In Latin America, this behavior has been reinforced because governmental policy “has been more socially punitive toward deviations from traditional male appearance and manners than towards homosexual behavior in itself” (Lumsden 30). During the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro’s politics idealized the “New Cuban Man,” a virile revolutionary who prioritized socialist principles before self-interests (Leiner 34). Physically, this vision of acceptable masculinity could include a strong jaw, a furrowed brow, a beard, and a buzzed head, accompanied with the deep-voiced and stoic mannerisms of a guerrilla fighter. Evidently, public figures like Che Guevara and Castro himself complied with these criteria.
Into the 1990’s, referred to as the “Special Period,” Cuban citizens suffered from Castro’s oppressive social programs and extreme poverty due to the U.S. economic embargo and the disintegration of the Soviet block (Marrero 235). As famine ravaged Cuba, Castro’s masculine ideal became a hypocritical mockery of the population’s suffering. As Guillermina De Ferrari points out, the strength and self-sacrificing nature of Castro’s New Man starkly contrasted “the extreme degradation that the new political conditions (had) provoked” (190). Despite the hollowness of Castro’s propaganda, Cubans were still vulnerable to psychological manipulation and political radicalization.
This essay analyzes Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s novel El rey de la Habana and Tomás Alea’s film Fresa y chocolate to show post-revolution masculinities that subvert the rigid standards set by Fidel Castro and demonstrate that education and literacy are key to unlearning toxic social tendencies. In El rey de la Habana, the protagonist Reinaldo (Rey) outwardly tries to embody Castro’s New Man with excessive shows of sexual prowess and aggressive physical behavior towards others. Despite the sexual relations that he has with other men, Rey does not consider himself a homosexual because he is a bugarrón, who assumes the active role in these encounters. On the other hand, Fresa y chocolate depicts Diego, an effeminate artist and critic of Castro, as an intellectual mentor to David, a homophobic university student. Since both works take place in the 1990’s, they reveal how Castro’s regime dictated the perception of masculinity in the decades following the Cuban Revolution. In Alea’s film, however, David unlearns his original prejudices and becomes a writer, which suggests that exposure to international literature and art can free the public from social and political oppression.
Gutiérrez and Alea both subvert the idea that macho men need to be excessively sexual. For example, in Gutierrez’s novel, death and sexuality are described in darkly comic terms. As Rey and his brother ogle a neighbor, their mother confronts them, leading to her accidental death, the suicide of Rey’s brother, and fatal heart attack of Rey’s grandmother in the span of minutes. This chain reaction concludes that Rey must wait for his erection to abate before calling for help. This scene mocks the importance of exhibitionist heterosexual lust by implying that masturbation can have dire consequences. Despite the comic tone of the scene, there is also a tragic element included when the police confirm that Rey will be sent to a home for boys and hint at what tends to occur in those places (17). This reminds the reader of the extreme poverty in Cuba, leaving them unsure of whether to laugh at the scene’s absurdity or cringe at its brutality.
In Fresa y chocolate, David’s aggressive heterosexuality is key to his treatment of others. For example, when he tries to seduce Vivian, she changes her mind, cries, and locks herself in the bathroom. Left alone, David watches another couple through a hole in the wall. Here, the grotesque is three-fold. First, the woman that he sees through the wall has a buxom, Venus-like physique, showing the exaggerated female body as the male gaze perverts it. Second, David contradicts himself because, after having told Vivian that he only desires her out of love, he seeks satisfaction from strangers. Third, David’s body is grotesque in its hypersexuality, contrasted with Vivian’s, which is closed off and unavailable. This scene is a playful mix of comical and serious themes, given the comedy of David’s desperation, and the dichotomic representation of promiscuity and prudence. Ultimately, this reveals the mixed cultural messages being received in Cuba at the time, which promoted Catholic values of peace and conservatism, as well as the aggression and hypocrisy of Macho behavior.
Although the post-revolution masculinities are questioned in both works, Gutiérrez’s message is more pessimistic than Alea’s. When Rey’s machismo culminates in brutally murdering his love interest, Magdalena, it shows that he is incapable of unlearning Castro’s masculinity and, resultingly, unable to distinguish between expressing love and inflicting pain. This implies that masculine identities continued developing according to the prejudices of the Cuban Revolution in a vicious cycle of ignorance and poverty, even decades after Castro’s coup. Additionally, since machismo has appeared throughout Latin American cultures, Gutiérrez’s novel suggests that the perpetuation of toxic masculinity is not exclusive to Cuba.
On the other hand, Alea demonstrates that Diego’s advances toward David constitute not a seduction of the body, but one of the mind. Throughout the film, Diego makes literary references to John Donne, Mario Vargas Llosa, and to censored Cuban writers like Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy, all of which make David realize his vocation as a writer. Ultimately, Diego demonstrates that the values of a machismo, in which art is for the effeminate, do not have to formulate his identity.
Approaching machismo from a comedic standpoint emphasizes the absurdity of extreme masculinity and shows how easily individuals can be led to political and social extremism. This can be seen in both works, in which radicalization and oppression are linked to illiteracy, and sociopolitical freedom is rooted in education. By emphasizing that education and political doubt maintain the checks and balances of power, my approach to machismo demonstrates that unlearning toxic social patterns is impossible without cultural intervention. Ultimately, such studies help the academic community understand the social and psychological condition of Cubans in the present day.
About the Author
Rebecca Barnes is a PhD student in the Spanish Department at Temple University. She specializes in Latin American Literatures, with interests in ecocriticism, gender studies, and philosophy. For her dissertation research, she is pursuing a study of human/nonhuman clashes in Latin American film and fiction. This involves analyzing 20th and 21st century novels and film that not only reflect the violence inflicted on marginalized and subaltern members of Latin American societies, but also strong ties between this violence and social structures/corruption that harken back to colonial exploitation. In her free time, she cooks, plays tennis, and watches films.
Works Cited
Basham, Richard. “Machismo.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, University of Nebraska Press, 1976, pp. 126–43, https://doi.org/10.2307/3346074.
Bakhtin, Mikhael. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. MIT Press, 1968.
De Ferrari, Guillermina, and A. James Arnold. Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction. University of Virginia Press, 2007.
Fresa y chocolate. Directed by Tomás Alea, performances by Vladimir Cruz and Jorge Perugorría. The Cuban Insitute of Art and Cinematographic Industry, 1995.
Gutiérrez, Pedro Juan. El rey de la Habana. Editorial Anagrama, 1999.
Leiner, Marvin. Sexual Politics in Cuba: Machismo, Homosexuality, and AIDS. Routledge, 1994.
Lumsden, Ian. “Machismo and Homosexuality before the Revolution.” Machos Maricones & Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality, Temple University Press, 1996, pp. 28–54.
Marrero, Teresa. “Scripting Sexual Tourism: Fusco and Bustamante’s ‘Stuff’, Prostitution and Cuba’s Special Period.” Theatre Journal, vol. 55, no. 2, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, pp. 235–49.