Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba

Moshe Morad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317135425
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

The 'Special Period' in Cuba was an extended era of economic depression starting in the early 1990s, characterized by the collapse of revolutionary values and social norms, and a way of life conducted by improvised solutions for survival, including hustling and sex-work. During this time there developed a thriving, though constantly harassed and destabilized, clandestine gay scene (known as the 'ambiente'). In the course of eight visits between 1995 and 2007, the last dozen years of Fidel Castro's reign, Moshe Morad became absorbed in Havana's gay scene, where he created a wide social network, attended numerous secret gatherings-from clandestine parties to religious rituals-and observed patterns of behavior and communication. He discovered the role of music in this scene as a marker of identity, a source of queer codifications and identifications, a medium of interaction, an outlet for emotion and a way to escape from a reality of scarcity, oppression and despair.

Morad identified and conducted his research in different types of 'musical space,' from illegal clandestine parties held in changing locations, to ballet halls, drag-show bars, private living-rooms and kitchens and santería religious ceremonies. In this important study, the first on the subject, he argues that music plays a central role in providing the physical, emotional, and conceptual spaces which constitute this scene and in the formation of a new hybrid 'gay identity' in Special-Period Cuba.

PART I
Understanding … (Setting the Scene)

Chapter 1
Understanding Cuban Homosexualities: From “maricón” to “Gay”

During my first conversations with Ariel I noted a constant switch in terminology when he was referring to gay men from maricón to gay. The pattern was quite obvious. Most of the time he was using the term gay when talking about himself or his friends in Havana. Whenever he was talking about gays in the countryside and the provinces, or even about himself prior to moving to Havana from the perspective of the villagers,¹ he used maricón (“they never suspected I was a maricón”). Also when he was meaning to be derogatory, either to some old-fashioned effeminate queen or describing police harassment and the way the police treat and insult gays (“He [the policeman] treats me like a little frightened maricón”). When I asked him about this he replied without hesitation: “of course, before [coming to Havana] I was maricón, now I am gay.”

Gay identity in the Cuban context is a complex concept. It differs from the concept of gay identity in the United States and Western Europe, which does not only mean practicing homosexuality but being part of a community, having access to gay lifestyle, art, media, legal rights, and politics. The ambiente in Havana provides a certain framework and lifestyle for gays as is described in this book, but it is far from being a Western-style gay scene or community as such. But the Cuban gay ambiente should not be examined from a Western perspective because of the restrictions imposed by the regime, because of its clandestine nature, and also because of the different conceptualization of homosexuality and gayness in Cuban society.

Before looking at Cuban gay identity, we need to understand Cuban homosexuality,² and before that, to understand the key factors in Cuban sexuality as a whole.

Much has been written about Cuban sexuality in recent years. Among the latest publications is Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory, Carrie Hamilton’s account of sexuality in post-Revolution Cuba (2012), with substantial parts relating to homosexuality. In her perception of sexuality, Hamilton refers to Anna Clark’s (2008:3) definition of sexuality “in its widest sense as the desires, relationships, acts, and identities concerned with sexual behavior,” and adds to this spectrum the expression of sexuality through emotion, sexuality as a metaphor for other desires and attachments, and the attempts “to regulate or repress certain forms of sexuality” (Hamilton 2012:11). Following Hamilton and Clark, this book looks at Cuban (homo)sexuality from all these angles.

Works on pre-1959 Cuban sexuality go back to slave society, mostly from the perspective of the white colonialists where the regulation of sexuality, especially female sexuality, was used to control Cuba’s slave society and enforce the Spanish Catholic tradition of protecting family honor and racial purity (Hamilton 2012:23). These values shaped dominating sexual values and practices in Cuba well into the twentieth century, “reinforcing the power and privilege of upper-class white men while stigmatizing Afro-Cuban women in particular” (Hamilton 2012:23).

In the 1950s these white men versus black women sexual power relations were translated in Havana’s thriving American-funded nightlife into visiting US males–local females relations. The revolutionary regime’s sexual politics were aimed at the eradication of both the 1950s “Havana as a sex haven” scene and the colonial and post-colonial social structure, with national campaigns against prostitution and for bringing women into the labor force. Yet, “the attempt to break with Cuba’s colonial and post-colonial past … was complicated by the fact that revolutionary leaders—most of them male, white, and middle class—had been raised under traditional sexual ideology” (Hamilton 2012:27). Whereas there were radical changes in sexual perceptions and sexuality after the Revolution, thanks to the suppression of the Catholic Church, fundamental concepts such as male superiority, feminine inferiority (including both women and feminine men), and the feminine sexual role to please the dominant male, have remained embedded in Cuban sexuality.³ These notions were resisted and challenged in Special Period cultural representations, such as dance-floor activity. As Hamilton concludes, “sexuality is one area where we see most clearly the coexistence of the old and the new in revolutionary Cuba” (2012:233).

Cuban homosexuality is also a blend of old and new concepts. It is not a primitive form of homosexuality nor a restricted one, as some US queer activists claim,⁴ but rather a different brand of homosexuality, where old and new, global and local, African and European heritages, coexist. Furthermore, Cuban homosexuality is a transcultural hybrid of indigenous and global concepts about sexuality and gender, based on behavior, sexual preferences, sexual practices, old and new traditions, revolutionary ideas, tourism, and outside influences.

Unlike the common Western perception of homosexuality as the tendency of a person to be sexually attracted to his own sex, throughout history and even within the time frame of this research, Cubans have acquired different perceptions of homosexuality and different stigmas related to homosexuals, based on behavior and on sexual roles rather than the choice of partner. Masculine “active”/“top” homosexuals (penetrators) are not stigmatized in the way sexually passive (penetrated) homosexual men are, who, in the Latino understanding, take the role of women both in their social behavior and in bed and therefore deviate “from traditional male appearance and manners” (Lumsden 1996:29).⁵ This is why it is easier sometimes for Cubans to accept transvestites or transsexuals who are “men turned into women” (and therefore abide to the clear male–female dichotomy), than to accept effeminate homosexual men who are “in between,” or masculine men who like to be sexually penetrated.

As this macho/maricón distinction relates directly to sexual behavior, which in most cases is discreet, it is obviously based and concerned with “what seems to be the case,” based on behavior, look, and image portrayed, rather than on “the real thing.” Allen takes this reservation further and argues that “the claim that ‘all macho are activo’ is unsupported,” and that “sex between men in loving or trust-filled friendships sets the conditions for more flexibility in sexual behavior than has been previously reported” (2011:126). Whereas this is the case when it comes to proper relationships, especially with the emergence of a new gay identity in Cuba as described in this chapter and the next one, I argue that in Cuban street discourse macho is still associated with being sexually insertive as well as masculine behavior and other virtues Allen mentions when he describes hombría (manhood) in the Cuban sense:

Hombría stresses sexuality in which the most powerful of men must dominate men and women in order to gain access to the widest expressions of his (sexual) desire. Hombría is among the most prized values in the society because it is always already constitutive of honor, dignity, strength, and bravery, and it is the “opposite” of homosexuality. Cuban heterosexism prizes manliness and eschews effeminacy—read as “homosexuality.” (Allen 2011:126)

Another fundamental aspect of Cuban homosexuality is discretion or even secrecy.⁶ Whereas this can be easily understood in light of the machismo, homophobia, and repression of gays in Cuban society, it also has deeper historical and cultural roots relating to the honor of the family and maintaining family life. As in many other cultures, occasional male-to-male sex was not necessarily seen as a threat to normal heterosexual relations and family life, whereas leading a public life as gay was seen as a threat (Hamilton 2012:153).

I have come across many Cuban terms and street-discourse expressions for various kinds of homosexual behavior. The abundance of terms is indicative of the various types of homosexuality in Cuba, in contrast to Western binary or trinary categorizations of sexual behavior/choice of partner: homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The most common term—used both by homosexuals and heterosexuals in Cuba—is maricón, equivalent to fag or faggot in English. Initially used as a derogatory expression, also meaning coward,⁷ maricón was later appropriated by homosexuals as a way of calling themselves and each other, in a similar process to the re-appropriation of the derogatory term “queer” by gays in the United States and the United Kingdom. Other expressions derived from maricón include marica, maricona, mariquita (feminine forms), and mariconsón. While maricón denotes a passive (thus stigmatized) homosexual, the term bugarrón (bugger) indicates a virile macho man, who penetrates (anally or orally) maricones, either for pleasure or for financial gain. In “pre-gay” Cuba, maricones were looking for buggarones for sex and for relationships.⁸ Another frequently used term is loca (literally, crazy woman, here meaning “screaming queen”). Other street-discourse expressions I encountered for passive/effeminate gay men include pájaro (bird), pájara, loca de carroza, pargo, cherna (a type of fish), pato (duck), patín (roller-skate), and patineta (skateboard). Some older terms are mariposa (butterfly), invertido (inverted), ganso de ambiente (of the ambiente), and entendido (understood, inconspicuous), a subtle “old-school” term.⁹

To understand the complexity of Cuban homosexualities,¹⁰ and the Cubans’ approaches to gender and sexuality, one needs to take into consideration the four main cultural layers upon which Cuban history is based: each one with a very different approach toward homosexuality—the African slave heritage, the Spanish Catholic conquerors’ heritage, the combination of the two described by Ortiz as transculturation, and the latest mid-twentieth-century addition to the cultural/conceptual mix—the Revolution and its ideology.

In Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, 1940), Cuban ethnomusicologist and culture researcher Fernando Ortiz coined the term “transculturation,” as a means of explaining Cuba’s cultural evolution. Unlike acculturation, which, according to Ortiz “is used to describe the process of transition from one culture to another, and its manifold social repercussions” (1995 [1940]:98), and “implies the acquisition of a culture in a unidirectional process” (Coronil, in Ortiz 1995 [1940]:xxvi), transculturation, the notion of converging cultures, is based on the destruction of the original culture (deculturation) and the creation of a new culture (neoculturation) (Coronil, in Ortiz 1995 [1940]:xxvi). The new term was developed further in the 1970s and 1980s by Angel Rama in reference to Latin America (1985 [1982]), but was subsequently disputed as archaic and replaced by scholars with other conceptual categories such as hybridity and heterogeneity (Cornejo Polar 1994; Trigo 2000). In the early 1990s the term has been gaining popularity again, and Trigo suggests “the possibility of an epistemological updating and pragmatic re-activation of transculturation under the current transnational framework,” and adds that this is less thanks to “transculturation’s epistemological competence than to its ideological and affective resonances” (2000:85). Trigo also reflects on the nostalgic and allusive charm of the term “which had fascinated Rama—and which constitutes an important anticipation of postmodern dissemination” (Trigo 2000:86).

Transculturation’s modernized versions—“transnational transculturation,” “hybrid transcultures,” and “transcultural heterogeneity” (Trigo 2000:102)—are used by contemporary scholars in relation to the ongoing processes of urbanization, mestizaje (the fusion of various ethnicities and cultural traditions), and migration in Latin America. However, originally Ortiz coined transculturation with a much wider scope in mind, intending it to act as the key for understanding “the evolution of Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual, or other aspects of its life” (1995 [1940]:98). In fact Ortiz pinpointed Cuban sexuality as one of the fields affected by the process of transculturation, and I propose using the concept of transculturation to understand the evolution of homosexuality and gay identity in Cuba.¹¹

Looking at Cuba since the onset of the Special Period brings the term transculturation and the processes it involves back to life: the Special Period itself is characterized by the destruction of old values and the creation of new, liberal, and capitalist values. Cuban homosexuality during this period likewise has been going through a deculturation process through the destruction of old concepts of “homosexualities” ruled by the old maricón/bugarrón duality, and neoculturation through the emergence of a new global gay identity influenced by tourism and by global trends. When trying to understand contemporary Cuban homosexuality, one must look at the original cultural sources leading t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Music Examples
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I UNDERSTANDING … (SETTING THE SCENE)
• PART II DANCE MUSIC AND THE FIESTAS
• PART III “EL CHOW”: PERFORMANCE, PERFORMATIVITY, AND AUDIENCE
• Conclusion, and Some Theoretical Framing
• Epilogue: ¡Ya empezó la fiesta! (The Party Has Already Begun!)
• Appendix: In the Field: Methodology and Ethics
• Bibliography
• Index