Mrs. Watson in Havana: Private eyes with an antigay attitude

Rex Stout, the author of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, once wrote an ironic but suggestive article called “Watson Was a Woman.” In it he proved by inductive reasoning that Dr. Watson’s first name was Irene and that he—or rather, she—was actually Sherlock Holmes’s wife. Many years later Leonardo Acosta, the Cuban critic, took this hypothesis to its logical extreme when he demonstrated conclusively that Stout’s detectives, Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, are, respectively, the macho and the maricón of a gay couple. Acosta pointed out the peculiar symbiosis between Archie’s hard-boiled adventuring and Wolfe’s womanish taste for orchids and gourmet cooking. While Archie beats the streets, talks trash with Sergeant Cramer, and makes witty chitchat with gorgeous dames, the squishy and temperamental Wolfe skulks around the house in silk pajamas.

Of course, suspicious sexualities have always been a staple of detective fiction. The cold war stereotypes of the effeminate, fetishistic Eastern type—think of Ernst Blofeld obsessively stroking his fluffy white cat—the sinister and delicate Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, and Mike Hammer’s evil transvestite girlfriend Juno are just a few examples. But we should understand Acosta’s point in the context of Cuban detective literature as a whole, which, as it turns out, is one of the most peculiar attempts to reinvent pop culture ever undertaken by a political entity.

In the early 1970s the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, known by the acronym MININT, launched the socialist detective novel precisely for the purpose of beating the Rex Stouts and Mickey Spillanes at their own game. The new genre projected an idealized image of socialist society, complete with instructions on acceptable behavior, attitudes, and even sexuality. Unlike its frothier British or American counterparts (which had been extremely popular in Cuba before the revolution), the socialist detective novel was sponsored by the government, a fact that has become a source of embarrassment to many Cuban writers who originally embraced it. The government saw mass-market fiction as a way to export ideology, and the new detective stories were shipped throughout Latin America, Spain, Angola, and especially the Eastern bloc. What some now refer to as the “gray decade” in Cuban letters was an era of popular literature at rock-bottom prices: the government pushed reading to capitalize on the results of the literacy campaign, and enormous editions—especially by today’s standards—often sold out weeks or even days after going on sale.

The socialist detective novel epitomizes the disastrous effects of inserting politics into literature. Early contributors included policemen, engineers, and soldiers who saw a chance to write about their adventures during the early years of the new regime. Others took their plots directly from Moncada, the MININT propaganda magazine. The new genre was part of the project of ideological retrenchment often referred to as the “consolidation” of the revolution, and efforts to guide cultural production in general intensified.

Just what the government hoped to accomplish through detective fiction soon became evident. The socialist detective novel combined a Manichaean brand of social realism with a celebration of the manly virtues of the revolution. Erudite, experimental writers of the previous generation, like José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, were known to be homosexual, and the detective genre was perceived as democratically accessible, an antidote to the prerevolutionary penchant for the complex. It was a simple equation: homosexual = elitist = counterrevolutionary.

Cuban detective writers not only presented an idealized view of socialist society; they also tried to correct the ideological errors of their predecessors. They rejected the hard-boiled school, especially Mickey Spillane, whom they saw as gratuitously violent. The classic British-style mystery story, with its country estate settings and dilettante detectives, was criticized as bourgeois. As a representative of the new Cuban man, the socialist detective fell neatly between two extremes: the effeminate, crepuscular Hercules Poirot and Nero Wolfe, on the one hand, and the excessively macho James Bond and Mike Hammer, on the other. In keeping with Marxist-Leninist ideas, Cuban detectives were mostly generic policemen who embodied the values...