After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba by Noelle M. Stout (review)

As a concept undertheorized in political, rhetorical, and anthropological accounts of Cuban culture, intimacy shapes many of the social contours of island life, especially since the Soviet collapse. After the loss of Soviet support, economic restructuring influenced how Cubans made new sense of sexual desire as gay Cubans, foreign tourists, and sex workers reimagined Cuban life. In After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba, Noelle M. Stout explores how sexual encounters in Havana changed in the years between 2001 and 2007 to understand “how people on Havana’s sexual margins marked boundaries between labor and love, affection and exploitation, and desire and decency” (3). Her study charts the major changes in gay and lesbian erotic and economic life in fin-de-siècle Cuba as political battles emerged around queer culture on the island following decades of state-sponsored homophobia. With a shift away from policies overtly criminalizing queerness and prostitution, Cuba’s new orientation towards gays and lesbians reflect major economic changes that have influenced how gay and lesbian relationships emerge on the island.

Thus, After Love focuses on the variety of changing encounters between gay groups in Cuba to understand how intimacy and respectability reshaped queer encounters as new forms of capital began to circulate on the island. Stout’s informants contextualize social shifts in gay and lesbian life in Cuba through commentary highlighting how tourism, prostitution, hustling, and migration to Havana have reorganized Cuban desires as new forms of capital have shifted expectations about sex, work, and family. In this new landscape, Stout argues, “intimacy offered a refuge, a potential sanctuary, but it also emerged as a dangerous terrain in which new inequalities inherent in capitalist markets could undercut loyalty and reframe the meaning of genuine affection” (4).

After Love begins with a discussion of gay urban life in the new century as the Castro regime began official campaigns sanctioning gay tolerance after decades of homophobic social policies. Stout connects new gay tolerance in Cuba to political necessities facing the Castro regime as it attempted to embrace patriotic gay citizens in the wake of social collapse. Because twentieth-century socialist policies often improved the lives of gay and lesbian Cubans through a redistribution of wealth, universalization of literacy, amelioration of malnutrition, gender disparities, and unemployment, the relationship between gay and lesbian Cubans to the state has been uneven and complicated (38). Documenting how the queer reclamation of cultural publics coincided with the explosion of sex work in and around important sites of queer nightlife like the Rampa, Parque Central, and the Payret Cinema, Stout discusses how queer enclaves emerged as state surveillance coexisted with new found sexual tolerance for public queerness (52). Stout argues that tolerance in Cuba, even in the post-Soviet period, has its limits as urban gay anxiety around sex tourism undermines respectability in the new Cuba.

Where Chapter 1 tackles the context surrounding newly emergent queer public spaces in Cuba, Chapter 2 introduces two of Stout’s informants in Havana: gay siblings (Lisette and Osvaldo) who navigate the new circuits of desire in Cuba as commodified sex changes the sexual landscape. As citizens with access to hard tourist currency seek upward mobility in the new Cuba, they are increasingly uncomfortable with emergent queer enclaves, describing public queerness and newly emergent sex tourism as “social decline” (59). Stout argues that the economic crisis in Cuba has propelled Cubans like Lisette and Osvaldo to exist within contradictions about respectability and sex tourism as they built and maintained strategic personal relationships designed to minimize economic hardship. Although urban queers often resisted characterizations of gays and lesbians that marked these citizens as criminal or improper, they also mobilized racial, urban, and gender privilege to separate respectable queerness from highly suspect sex tourism. In the maintenance of heteronormative privilege while identifying as gay, in the prevalence of violence against lesbians, and in...