Sexual Politics in Cuba: Machismo, Homosexuality, and AIDS by Marvin Leiner, Westview Press, 1994, 184 pp., $47.50 (cloth). At the end of Tomtis Gutferrez Alea's popular film Strawberry and Chocolate, the straight and gay characters embrace. Marvin Leiner's Sexual Politics in Cuba leaves the reader much less san- guine about the future of homosex- uals in Cuba. Leiner has lived on the island and proudly touts its achievements in health and educa- tion. Thus, his trenchant critique of machismo, homophobia, and dis- crimination against HIV-positive people carries considerable weight. The Cuban response to AIDS, contends Leiner, mirrors the best and worst of the revolution. The state offers "AIDS patients and those testing HIV positive the best in medical care," but the govern- ment has created "sanitariums for the compulsory isolation of those Cubans who test positive for HIV antibodies." These "gilded prisons," formally dissolved since the publi- cation of the book, illustrate the sins, virtues and contradictions of contemporary Cuba. The revolu- tion, especially in its early years, did little to change the homophobic attitudes inherited from traditional Cuban society. Che Guevara's "new man" showed his proletarian moral courage in work, fortitude, and manly strength; by contrast, the Communists called homosexuals "decadent" and "bourgeois," exac- erbating the pre-revolutionary stereotype. The reader interested in gender studies may, however, find Leiner's book lacking. Though he cites Michel Foucault as a major influ- ence, Leiner fails to use Foucault's insights to elucidate one of the book's most provocative and intriguing hypotheses, that "for many Cubans, a man is a homosex- ual only if he takes the passive receiving role." And though Leiner 48 NMI1A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS analyzes the consequences of the belief that male desire is "an uncon- trollable force," he does not exam- ine the particularly Latin American construction of that ideology. In spite of this lacuna, Sexual Politics in Cuba provides both sound analysis and excellent infor- mation on AIDS, homophobia, and sex education in Cuba. -Kurt Shaw Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule of Modern Mexico Edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Duke University Press, 1994, 432 pp., $59.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper). This is a fascinating collection of speculative essays and historical case studies of the local experience of the Mexican revolution and the formation of the modem Mexican state. The collection is the outcome of a conference organized by the editors in 1991 that attempted to link an understanding of that long political process "from above" and "from below." Focusing on the inter- play of official and popular ideolo- gies, these essays and studies try to avoid the debates between those who argue that the revolution was early on reduced to a "state cult," and those who argue that it was the (uneven) outcome of a set of gen- uine popular uprisings. Instead, by examining the revolutionary process in a wide variety of regional set- tings, they tease out an understand- ing of the mixture of ruling-class hegemony and popular resistance continually present in the complex process called "the revolution." The book's prologue sets the Gramscian tone for this project by asking how "the state's hegemonic project has been influenced by the force of pop- ular experience and mobilized pop- ular expectations." This readable collection does an enormous service to the study of twentieth-century Mexico simply by framing the ques- tion in that way.
