Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory by Carrie Hamilton (review)

In the field of Cuban studies, sexuality under the Revolution has quickly become one of the most rapidly growing subfields, a topic of widespread and interdisciplinary interest. As many scholars have noted, the reasons for the sudden attention are unmistakably contemporary: the vast expansion of public displays of sexuality in Cuba following the fall of the Soviet Union, with sex tourism constituting the most obvious and unavoidable example of the penetration of “private” acts, feelings, and identities into the public sphere of Cuban life. Equally significant, however, has been the patronage offered to many scholars and activists by CENESEX, or the National Center for Sex Education, run by Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of Raúl Castro and Vilma Espín. That institution was particularly central to the drafting of Carrie Hamilton’s Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory, which is the first of several soon-to-be-published monographs drawing from the roughly one hundred interviews conducted as part of the Cuban Voices oral history project, launched in 2005. It is also one of the first book-length historical treatments of sexuality under the Cuban Revolution to be published in several decades.

Oral history has been a notoriously fraught enterprise in revolutionary Cuba, and the last wide-scale effort, undertaken by Oscar and Ruth Lewis in 1969, was quickly shut down by revolutionary officials dismayed at the heterodox responses that had surfaced over the course of the project. The Cuban Voices enterprise did not escape this kind of controversy, and it, too, met an untimely end, despite the support of CENESEX and its prominent director and the generally pro-Revolution sentiments of many of the interviewees. One of the project’s directors attributes the summary termination to the frank responses of the interviewees, who, despite the bias in selection toward participants with a favorable view of the Revolution, spoke in surprisingly open ways when asked about family, romance, and even homosexuality.

The juxtaposition of their voices, to which Hamilton affords primacy of place, aims to provide a view from “below” of the relationship between “politics and passion” in the crosshairs of individual, collective, and official memory. Moving through topics such as marriage, family, contraception, and family planning, as well as homosexuality, homophobia, and official and unofficial repression, Hamilton emphasizes continuity and flexibility, as well as the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. On the basis of the oral histories, she concludes that the “transformation in sexual values and practices did not happen from one day to the next” and that “sexuality is one area where we see most clearly the coexistence of the old and the new in revolutionary Cuba” (232). Indeed, as the pluralized “revolutions” of her title suggests, Hamilton argues that the “changes in Cubans’ sex lives since 1959 are best understood not as a singular event—a ‘sexual revolution’—but a process that has been, like the Cuban Revolution itself, both uneven and ongoing” (232).

In broad terms, Hamilton’s emphasis on popular voices in historical context is a welcome and important contribution to the literature on sexuality under revolution. That orientation is put to best use in a chapter titled “Homosexual Histories,” which provides an extended account of the social, professional, and sexual trajectory of “Pachy,” an older white man who self-identifies as homosexual. This chapter does much to address the urban bias of scholarship on sexuality in Cuba by bringing attention to internal migrations as a crucial vector in sexuality studies. In recounting Pachy’s story, Hamilton also helpfully draws attention to both outright repression and evidence of everyday anguish: the persistent unavailability of housing, discrimination at work, and street harassment from police as critical factors shaping his experience of his sexual identity.

Fascinating evidence of everyday homophobia also comes to light in the preceding chapter, “Memory, Revolution, and Homophobia.” The stakes of this chapter are unmistakably weighty, as the official repression of...