Exposing Cocksman Charisma: Sex and the Dic(k)tator's National Romance

Just eight pages into CRISTINA GARCÍA's King of Cuba (2013), the elderly protagonist El Comandante, a fictionalized FIDEL CASTRO, recalls being a young "despot-to-be" and worrying to his mother about his pinguita's size. He dreams of it growing to be the largest and most formidable penis in the Western Hemisphere—"a massive flesh-toned dirigible draped with parachute huevones and a proud snout that served as the control room for the whole impressive operation."¹ Turns out, GARCÍA predicted "Big Dick Energy." The Big Dick Energy (BDE) meme (2018) articulates charisma through the cultural logic that having a large penis endows a person with innate magnetism and thus access to sexual and sociopolitical power, while also employing cognitive dissonance to reject the correlation of confidence with male virility. BDE's paradox proclaims that charisma and capability are in no way compensatory to the physical organ and its stud status, as it has been most popularly applied to men not considered to be hypermasculine or hypersexualized, such as MR. ROGERS or BOB ROSS, as well as women with no balls at all, such as CATE BLANCHETT and CHARLIZE THERON. Thus, BDE is not about the size of the boat, but the motion of the ocean: self-assurance without cockiness.

From across the Straits of Florida, García remains unimpressed with Castro's swells. García's Comandante finds himself an old man reminiscing about the Big Dick reputation that installed him into power and about his days of whoring as the Head of State. However, far from possessing the biggest dick in the Western Hemisphere, he displays instead what we might consider "Tiny Hand Energy," the very foil to BDE applied to people whose cockiness far exceeds their charisma. Those with Tiny Hand Energy (THE) experience anxiety trying to convince others of their big dicks because they fail to see beyond the penis as a biological organ. By literalizing what they think is the seat of power, they bare their own toxic masculinity and insecurity. In King of Cuba, García writes the dic(k)tator's politics into impotence in the estimation of her Cuban body politic and his body into impotence in the imagination of her audience, thus condemning El Comandante's nostalgia and anxiety over power in relation to the disenchantment of the nation.

In playing with El Comandante's dick, Cristina García and fellow Cuban American novelist Ana Menéndez expose the cocksman charisma of two of history's most recognizable revolutionary figures and thus subvert the national romance constructed by the Cuban Revolution. In García's debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), grandmother Celia del Pino pines for Cuba's passionate Líder and fantasizes about pleasing the powerful and potent man.² In Menéndez's Loving Che (2003), the novel's male protagonist, Che Guevara, is young, virile, and apparently rather smelly, though what can you expect from a man hiding out in the Sierra Maestra mountains? Nevertheless, he sexes up the Revolution, at least for his married side-piece, Teresa de la Landre, who narrates their affair to her estranged daughter through a series of letters.³ And although Cuba's leading man titillates in García's first novel, by King of Cuba (2013), El Comandante is feeble, impotent, and odiferous from the flatulence of old age and infirmity. Destabilizing Castro's and Guevara's charisma by literalizing their penises, García and Menéndez imply that the Revolution's national romance is built on a fragile masculinity that has left Cubans unsatisfied.

In this article, I define variations on the literary romance in the ways that García's and Menéndez's revolutionary commentaries revise romance's gendered power dynamics. I propose these variations as a heuristic for critiquing other dick-centered romances. The traditional romance genre uses literary tropes to explore the political anxiety of power redistribution. According to Doris Sommer, in nineteenth-century Latin American romances, heterosexual marriage allegorizes the conception of a nation's anticolonial origin story, while...