¡Oye Loca!: From the Mariel Boatlift to Gay Cuban Miami by Susana Peña (review)

Given the heightened public visibility of the gay movement in Cuba over the last several years and the recent series of setbacks in LGBTQ civil rights in the United States, ¡Oye Loca! is exactly the kind of research we need to think through the relationships between sexualities, social anxieties, and politics across national borders. Susana Peña explores the development of Cuban male homosexual identity in Miami following one of the most significant immigration crises in modern US history: the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, a mass exodus of nearly 125,000 Cubans, including many homosexuals, to the United States. Peña suggests that the distinctive political status of gay Marielitos as “refugees” of Cuba’s “failed Communism” enabled many of them to evade US immigration restrictions on homosexual immigrants amid renewed Communist fervor in the United States. The politically expedient acceptance of gay Cuban immigrants enabled these Marielitos to forge a unique gay Cuban culture in Miami defined by the visibility of gender-transgressive male homosexuals, or locas.

The strengths of this book lie in its powerful challenge to the conventionally homogeneous view of Miami’s Cuban American community. Peña unveils multiple fractures among Cuban Americans along generational, political, and social lines. Indeed, the very premise of the study problematizes the facile dichotomy between the so-called Golden Exiles of the 1960s and the Marielitos, who were negatively perceived to be poorer, blacker, criminal, less educated, and more likely homosexual, in part due to the active policy of the Cuban government to grant exit visas to scum (escoria), individuals deemed unrevolutionary. Peña argues for recognizing the Marielitos as a distinctive immigrant group rather than accepting the negative racialized, classed, and sexualized characterizations, or attempting to downplay their uniqueness.

Peña also dispels myths of Cuban American political and social views as uniformly and stalwartly conservative. She critiques the unproblematic acceptance of narratives linking Cuban Americans to antigay activism (chapter 1). Instead, she shows that Cubans also composed an important part of south Florida’s emerging gay movement, as, for example, in the short-lived gay rights organization, Latins for Human Rights, and the initially unsuccessful movement against Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children Campaign to overturn legal antidiscriminatory protections for homosexuals. Peña also foregrounds Cuban Americans’ advocacy for including sexual orientation under Miami-Dade County’s antidiscrimination clause, even though the majority of Cuban Americans opposed this (chapter 5). These valuable interventions portray Cuban Americans as complex social and political agents with diverse and evolving views.

This welcome departure from essentializing narratives of Cuban Americans comes at the expense of the monolithic treatment of Cuba as a repressive, antigay state without meaningful gay activism. Certainly no narrative of gay Cuba would be complete without a detailed discussion of state repression. Yet relying almost exclusively on published state sources such as laws or speeches by Cuban government officials predictably emphasizes official depictions of homosexuals as effeminate, weak, selfish, and unable to contribute to society productively or reproductively—the antithesis of the New Man, a fundamentally masculine, virile, strong, hardworking socialist man. Official views of homosexuality as inherently unrevolutionary fueled the state’s persecution of “visible” homosexuals through various means: internment in reeducation camps called Unidades Militares para el Aumento de Producción, designed to rehabilitate gay men by forcing them to “perform manly acts”; laws targeting homosexuals for “public scandal” and “social dangerousness”; and other “routine persecutions” such as exclusion of gays from the Communist Party and certain jobs (6). Moreover, the narratives of gay Cuban Americans, in turn, foreground exile as the only way to resist state repression.

A more congruent comparison of gay life in Cuba and Miami needed to acknowledge both activism in Cuba and antigay repression in the United States. Even the limited sources on Cuba used in this study suggest, albeit obliquely, that gay Cubans were not merely passive recipients of state repression. Passing references to...