Description:
Offers alternative insights into the complex relationship between politics and intelligentsia in revolutionary Cuba.

This work offers an alternative insight into the longstanding and conflicting relationship between politics and the (gay) intelligentsia in Cuba by looking closely at political texts, film, documentaries and literature from priorto Fidel Castro’s regime until the present day. The book offers new readings of the work, letters and interviews of two influential voices, Reinaldo Arenas and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Arenas’s material reveals a new account of the nature of ‘the voice of the invisibles’ and the key elements of the construction of a Cuban national rhetoric that looks at (governmental) power and (gay) resistance as being in perpetual tension, which often increases the feelingof moral panic and even social exclusion and displacement among citizens. The book also offers a new interpretation of Gutiérrez Alea’s renowned film Fresa y Chocolate (1994), resulting from the use of unpublished and revealing testimonies of the Cuban dance critic and writer Roger Salas and the secret messages inferred in his short story ‘Helados de pasión: El cordero, la lluvia y el hombre desnudo’ (1998).


CONTENTS:

Introduction

Beyond the Margins of Visibility: Contextualising Homophobia in Cuba

Reinaldo Arenas and His Struggle against Invisibility

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: A Failed Attempt to Portray the Reconciliation with the Marginal

Conclusion and Looking Forward: Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and Leonardo Padura Fuentes

Works Cited