Reviewed by Edward J. Tejirian, Ph.D.

In Gay Cuban Nation, Emilio Bejel has set out to fill a gap in the study of Cuban nationalism which, he points out, has until now largely focused on the relation of nationalism to class, colonization, the role of women, and relationships to the United States. The focus of Gay Cuban Nation is the connection between Cuban nationalism and homosexuality, a negative connection in which homosexuality has been deemed incompatible with patriotism and national identity. That negative connection reached its most corrosive expression in the early seventies, under Castro, with the establishment of forced labor camps for homosexuals. However, Bejel points out that this negative connection was already implicit in the 19^th century, in the writings of Jose Marti, the exiled writer and poet who was the literary father of Cuban nationalism and who died fighting for Cuban independence from Spain.

A professor of Spanish American literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Bejel traces the evolution of the same-sex theme (regarding both women and men) in Cuban literature, from Marti and going up through contemporary Cuban-American writers. Although the citations include some early medical/scientific treatments of homosexuality as a “condition,” most of the works discussed are fiction (with the notable exception of the autobiography of Reinaldo Arenas, discussed below) Bejel brings to this effort a post-modernist approach, which focuses on the multiple levels of meaning, implicit as well as explicit, within any given work—or “text” (the post-modernist term for any work subjected to analysis.)

Bejel persuasively asserts that the obsessive attempt to marginalize homosexuality with respect to Cuban nationalism has the paradoxical effect of making it central, through negation, to Cuban national consciousness. The project of Gay Cuban Nation is to trace how this theme winds its way through Cuban texts of the past hundred years.

For the cultural theorist as well as the psychologist two questions occur in relation to these texts. 1) What light do they shed on the Cuban nationalist myth that pairs Cuban identity with heterosexuality? 2) What is their relation to the realities of sexual behavior of men and women living within the framework of Cuban culture? The author does not appear to answer these questions directly except in the case of Hombres sin mujer (Womanless Men), a novel of the late 1930s by Carlos Montenegro. The story is set in prison and is based on what Montenegro himself experienced and saw while in jail from adolescence until the age of thirty-one. Bejel points out that, “In Cuban society,” as in Mexican and other Latin cultures, “homoerotic relationships are often based on the masculine/feminine binary” (p.149). The novel describes pairings of macho and marica (“macho-faggot”) that conform to this binary construction of sexual roles. However, it also focuses on a love affair between an older black inmate and a blond boy of eighteen, where a genuinely loving bond that does not conform to stereotyped role playing—but by implication is also based on realities of prison experience—is central to the relationship. Taken in its totality, Bejel says, “Hombres sin mujer can be read as a metaphor of the nation at large…and…its contradictory machista code" (p.89).

Whereas Hombres sin mujer is a novel based on Montenegro’s prison experience, Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls) by Reinaldo Arenas is an actual autobiographical account, by a well-known Cuban writer and dissident, of his life before and during the Castro regime, and of his later exile in the United States. Although this is a volume of memoirs, Bejel appears to treat it as a fictionalized “text,” referring to Arenas as “the narrator-protagonist” as if he were the central character of a novel written in the first person. Noting that Arenas claimed to have had, by the beginning of the 1970s, sex with some five thousand men (Arenas was born in 1943) Bejel labels this “hyperbole” (p.149) and, while citing no evidence to back it up, effectively accuses Arenas of lying when he observes, “…the exaggerations of the text are hard to believe. The liar (italics mine) is so dangerous because he undermines not only conventional morals, but also…the truth.” Yet at the same time he pronounces Before Night Falls “…one of the most dramatic and compelling autobiographies ever produced in Latin America” (p.155).

Since Arenas indicated that his sexual attractions and interactions were not with other gay men, but rather those who would be termed “macho,” Bejel says that Arenas was unable "to free himself" (p.149) from the masculine/feminine binary, while he passes over the way in which Arenas’s account undermines the very nationalistic myth of which that binary is a key component. My reading of Arenas indicates that, while he was attracted to males, he did not regard himself as feminine. But more crucially, even if Arenas had sex with a quarter of the five thousand men he claimed, the fact remains that non-homosexually identified sexual partners were remarkably available, not infrequently among young recruits in the Castrista militias, even at the peak of the regime's virulent homophobia. In terms of the Cuban machista myth, these young recruits were not considered maricas. Objectively however, what they were doing was homosexual, psychologically as well as behaviorally.

By failing to take this into account, Bejel passes over the connections that beg to be made between these facts and the reality of Cuban sexual psychology, which seems to be that male same-sex attraction is deeply rooted in Cuban culture and psychology, even as it is the object of deep ambivalence. In fact, a similar observation could be made about other Latin as well as (North) American cultures. In both the Cuban machista code and in contemporary America, the capacity and reality of same-sex attraction that is a normal component of male psychology is handled by the mechanisms of splitting and projection. In the Cuban case, the passive component in relation to another man is split off and projected onto the marica, while the active component is retained by the macho partner. In America, on the other hand, the split is gay versus “straight”—in which active as well as passive components of men’s sexual feelings—conscious as well as unconscious—are projected onto the figure of the gay man in order to maintain a publicly heterosexual persona or identity for the rest.

The psychologically minded reader, then, is left wishing that Gay Cuban Nation had explored more thoroughly the deeper psychological reasons for the obsessive concern with homosexuality in the Cuban national myth. Perhaps its not doing so do reflects a general limitation of post-modern theory which, while correctly pointing out the way in which culture constructs sexual and gender roles, has a less well-developed understanding of the intrapsychic and the ways in which individual sexual emotion is experienced outside those roles.

These reservations for the psychologist notwithstanding, the student of Latin American literature will find in Gay Cuban Nation an erudite and comprehensive introduction to the treatment of a central but problematical theme in Cuban history and society.