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.