Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Political Intersections

Political Intersections CONDUCTA IMPROPIA (MAUVAISE CONDUITE/IMPROPER CONDUCT) Released in 1984, Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez-Leal’s Conducta impropia1 (I will use the title with which it is known in the Spanish-speaking world and among Hispanic scholars ) was one of the first major international documents to protest human rights abuses in Castro’s Cuba, which along with the issue of Cuban political prisoners is an extremely touchy and tendentious subject (two reliable albeit outdated sources are Amnesty International and Timerman ). There had, of course, been a steady stream of attacks from various right-wing sources, including, obviously, the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who had left the island and in a large number of cases settled in Miami, where they created an organized base of resistance and a welloiled (and well-financed) propaganda machine (two personal testimonials that received considerable international press are those of Valladares and Valls). But the majority of the international community, especially writers, artists, intellectuals, and scholars, had supported the need for a revolution in Cuba, the effects of the successful Castro operation, and the social reforms it had put in place, with the consequence that Cuban cultural production attracted considerable attention and made Cuba— at least during the 1960s and 1970s—a central point of reference for knowledge about Latin America. Those who have historically supported the Castro revolution have 51 Political Intersections Camp unbecoming to a revolutionary accepted a truism of all revolutionary societies: there will be a certain amount of social injustice because of the sheer scope of the operation and the very tangible ineptness—and certainly, frequently, self-interest—of so many of its agents. While injustice can never be really tolerated from the point of view of the socially committed, one recognizes that it is necessary to work with a calculus of phenomena of injustice: is the injustice of the revolution in some way substantially less than the injustices of the ancien régime (whose horrors are what led, in large measure, to the revolution in the first place)? And what are the chances that the new injustices will be corrected as the revolutionary operation establishes its authority in a society and regularizes—i.e., hierarchizes and effectively and efficiently supervises—its operations? The promise held out by a truly socially revolutionary society is that, by its very nature, social (and thus personal) injustices will not occur, and what will occur is only the legitimate persecution and excision of those elements that are resistant to and unreconstructed by the revolutionary process. When Castro instituted the program of the UMAPs (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción) in 1964 to reeducate social dissidents, he was working off of a number of major ideological postulates: the necessary organization of society (unidades); the appropriateness of appealing to the privileged agents of social changes, the military, which was instrumental in bringing him to power and in providing structural support to his regime; the imperative to organize society toward a common goal of social assistance (ayuda); and the accompanying imperative that that assistance involve ‘‘production’’ (which, in this case, meant agricultural harvesting) in the face of radical economic threat to Cuba’s economy represented by the U.S. embargo and the need to establish a functioning 52 Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema program of international trade (I believe this came as part of the realization by the government that industrialization was not going to prosper and that Cuba was ignoring its long-established base of international trade, which was agriculture), and therefore, the UMAP program was to be of assistance in reinvigorating the agricultural sector (for an account of the camps see Lumsden, Machos, 65–71, and Leiner, 28–33). On the surface, the UMAP program was of a whole with the need to purge Cuban society of antirevolutionary elements, always of major concern to socialist revolutions as well as neofascist military coups. Moreover, the UMAP program reinforced a major semiotic axis of the Cuban revolution, which was to reconstruct the relationship between a dominant urban society (the seat of the bourgeoisie) and the neglected countryside (which was controlled by the absentee bourgeoisie from its base of power in La Habana and, by extension, in foreign centers of capital). If the campaigns, first of literacy, took city people into the country , it was an effort enhanced by the recruitment of urban youth also...