Homosexuality and Invisibility in Revolutionary Cuba: Reinaldo Arenas and Tomas Gutierrez Alea

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 Tomas Gutierrez 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also offers a new interpretation of Gutierrez Alea’s renowned film Fresa y Chocolate (1994), resulting from the use of unpublished and revealing testimonies of the Cuban dance critic and writer Roger Salas and the secret messages inferred in his short story ‘Helados de pasion: El cordero, la lluvia y el hombre desnudo’ (1998).

Dr MARIA E. LOPEZ is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Sociology at London Metropolitan University and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London.