“Ojos muy grandes que llamaban la atención”: Alicia Alonso Performs as a Revolutionary Supercrip

Studies of revolutionary Cuba’s allegorical new wo/man have disentangled that figure’s ambivalent and often pathologizing relationship to traits perceived as inferior, including femininity, non-heterosexuality, and non-whiteness. Yet even as (dis)ability saturates cultural production surrounding the 1959 Revolution’s core projects of universal healthcare, literacy, and industrialization, scholars have not examined the new wo/man’s entanglements with medically diagnosable physical and cognitive differences. I contend that revolutionary State discourse regarding ideal socialist citizenship considers disability as both conducive to and incompatible with utopia. Cuba’s masses, using their heterogenous capacities, were to collectively build an ideal society, led by icons such as partially blind ballerina Alicia Alonso. Treating her as an exemplary model of what I call revolutionary supercrips, I analyze filmic representations of Alonso from the Revolution’s earliest decades until the 1990s that depicted her un-sightedness as a simultaneously individual and collective struggle that Cuba’s new wo/men could and should overcome on the path to liberation. Representations of Alonso’s performances often restored her to full sightedness via narrative or filmic prosthetics, therefore privileging able-bodiedness as an unquestionable ideal. Behind these aesthetic manipulations, I suggest, lie traces of socialist eugenic desires embodied in the revolutionary new wo/man.