Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory

1 Sexual Evolutions

one Sexual Evolutions While there is no single overview of the history of sexuality in Cuba before and after the revolutionary victory of 1959, a number of studies engage with different aspects of that history.This chapter offers a critical overview of some of these works, which come from various disciplines: history, sociology, demography , anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. The aim is to summarize and assess competing interpretations of the history of sexuality in modern Cuba and to provide the historical context for the chapters that follow. Family, Honor, and Sexuality before 1959 Research on Cuban sexuality in the colonial and republican periods focuses on the relationship between sexuality, family, class, and race.1 For the era before 1898 the most important contribution is Verena Martinez-Alier’s Marriage , Class and Colour in Nineteenth-century Cuba,2 a materialist study based on judicial records. Martinez-Alier argues convincingly that the regulation of sexuality, and female sexuality especially, was vital to the construction and maintenance of Cuba’s slave society. The value placed on family honor and racial purity, inherited from the Iberian tradition,3 fundamentally shaped sexual values and practices, reinforcing the power and privilege of upper-class white men while stigmatizing Afro-Cuban women in particular. The preoccupation with family honor led elite families especially (but not exclusively) to attempt to control female sexuality, in particular through the valuation of white women’s virginity4 and the prohibition against interracial marriage. Martinez-Alier’s study is a model of what I call an intersectional approach to the history of sexuality, one that sees it as inextricable from relations of class, race, and gender. Notwithstanding the abolition of slavery in 1886 and the end of Spanish colonial rule in 1898, hierarchies of race and class, as well as gendered divi- 24 sexual evolutions sions of labor, remained entrenched in Cuban society in the first half of the twentieth century. During this period intellectual debate, campaigns for social reform,and changes to laws regulating sexuality took place in the context of competing definitions of Cuban identity and visions for the nation’s future. In her study of the Cuban women’s movement in the early twentieth century,5 K. Lynn Stoner argues that women’s demands and the legal changes they sometimesgeneratedmustbeseenaspartofthemodernizationprojectdriven by Cuban reformers in the period leading up to the Constitution of 1940. Early Cuban feminists, most of them white, middle-class, and urban, sought not to challenge the basic structures of Cuban society (including the heterosexual couple and family), but rather to improve women’s status within it and to challenge the worst abuses of male power. Although Cuba was no longer a Spanish colony,in the early 1900s male authority was still formalized through the Spanish law of patria potestad, under which men held legal control over their wives and children.6 The family remained a cornerstone in competing definitions of Cuban national identity, and the related principles of honor, female sexual purity, and male domination continued to shape social relations well into the twentieth century. Feminist attempts to “legislate morality” in the 1920s and 1930s re- flected concerns to preserve families while protecting women and children from aggressive forms of male domination that resulted from traditional ideas of honor and shame,7 particularly adultery8 and lack of rights for illegitimate children.9 Reforms in the areas of family law and “morality” challenged some of the most violent aspects of the Spanish colonial legacy without fundamentally undermining social power relations in Cuba. Although Stoner’s book focuses on the efforts of middle-class white feminists,her analysis of the persisting inequalities between informal and formal unions, and between legitimate and illegitimate children, clearly indicates that the concept of honor was widespread during the first half of the twentieth century, helping to maintain hierarchies of race and class, as well as gender. anyone studying the history of sexuality in Cuba since 1959 will be frustrated by the relative lack of academic attention to the two decades succeeding the Constitution of 1940.10 An important—albeit incomplete and uneven—exception is the unpublished doctoral thesis of Mirta de la Torre Mulhare, which analyzes sexual trends in Cuba in the pre-Castro years.11 An anthropological study based on fieldwork conducted in Cuba and among Cuban migrants to sexual evolutions 25 the United States, de la Torre Mulhare’s work focuses largely on what she calls...