Faces, Bodies, Personas: Tracing Cuban Stories (review)

Living any form of alternative lifestyle in contemporary Cuba is a complicated proposition. Even to be Cuban is to be isolated – and not only from the political and economic rhythms of the rest of the world, but the social and psychological currents as well. So to be gay on the enigmatic island is to enter into the realm of the outsider's outsider, a netherworld of sexual and identity politics where merely waking up can become an existential journey. For sure, the days when homosexuality was considered a crime by the eager social engineers of the revolution are long gone. In 2010 Fidel Castro even went so far in an interview with the Mexican newspaper La Jornada to express his regret over "moments of great injustice" to Cuba's gay community. But still today certain aspects of homosexual behavior – holding hands in public, for instance, and other outward shows of affection – can bring official sanction in the form of arrest, steep fines or the loss of a job, and a long-standing and powerful cultural tradition of machismo only contributes to the forces of marginalization. In Cuba, to live openly as a queer, a lesbian, a transvestite or gay man invites considerable risk.

In Faces, Bodies, Personas: Tracing Cuban Stories, the Canadian-Iranian photographer Babak Salari focuses his camera on life at this margin of Cuban society. The resulting collection of black and white images – first exhibited at the Provincial Centre of Fine Arts and Design in Havana in 2006 – offers a penetrating glimpse into what, in a companion essay, the Cuban poet, playwright and journalist Norge Espinosa Mendoza calls "the secret tradition of Cuban gays" (p. 18). Studying the images more than two years after they were first shown, Espinosa writes: "When I see the portraits now I understand the looks in the eyes – which a fragile time on the wall makes eternal – form a map of what those lives were, a map of desires that can serve as a hidden guide" (p. 7).

Salari is hardly the first visual artist to explore the evocative universe of Cuban homosexuality. Indeed, recent representations of gay Cuba have come to occupy a special niche in the cultural imagination of the wider world, and a number of works engaging in the theme have gained critical and popular acclaim. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's hugely successful 1993 film Fresa y chocolate is just one example. Yet as Espinosa's intimation of secrets and mystery suggests, many of these mainstream projects fail to plumb beyond stereotyped spaces of erotic tension and political intrigue where drag queens stage beauty pageants at fabulous underground fiestas. To Espinosa, who owns a singular perspective as both critical commentator on and subject of Salari's lens, the result is all too often mere artistic voyeurism, a cynical, unwelcome gaze that provides little deeper insight into the lives of the majority of Cuban gays (p. 22).

Salari's work rejects this ideal of exotic otherness to focus instead on the more mundane, day-to-day aspects of gay life in the impoverished, improvised space-time of 21st-century Cuba. As in the exhibition, the images in Faces are divided into two thematic sets. The largest of the two, entitled Faces, comes at the end and is comprised of portraits of artists, writers, poets, musicians, academics and filmmakers, many of whom are gay or otherwise work to "fill some vacuums that other cultural discourses have silenced" (p. 114). These are public, if not celebrity figures who have been simultaneously embraced and demonized, revered and ostracized as they judiciously navigate a cultural landscape rotted through by "discrimination and contempt" (p. 20). In his essay, entitled "A Map of Desires," Espinosa writes of these figures – his fellow "creators"– by name, and their portraits appear alongside short biographical sketches, descriptions of their work that serve as testimonials to a certain status and hard-won legitimacy. Few are household names, even inside...