Race, Class and Gender
Cuban Cinema and Homosexuality
Julio Aleaga Pesant Independent Journalist Havana, Cuba
T
he Cuban cinema’ s top work addressing homosexuality is Improper Conduct( 1984), a documentary filmed in exile by Néstor Almendro and co-directed by Orlando Jiménez Leal. It is a series of interviews with notorious and not so notorious intellectuals and homosexuals, who were discriminated in and expelled from Cuba. It reveals the repression suffered by the LGBTI community under the Castroit dictatorship and covers the period from 1959 until approximately the so-called Mariel Exodus Crisis( 1980), when thousands of them were forced to migrate to the United States. This work has a deep human sense and it ´ s heartbreaking. It was conceptualized starting from the parametration, hence its title, which defined the parameters of personal conduct based on the guidelines given by the State at the First National Congress of Education and Culture( 1971). It’ s a testimony " as brutal as convincing," according to Vicent Camby( New York Times). In 1984, the documentary won the Grand Prix at the Festival of Human Rights( Strasbourg), the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival( San Francisco), and the Best Documentary and Best Documentary Film Awards at the Barcelona and London Film Festivals, respectively. Ten years later, the Cuban government made the motion picture Strawberry and Chocolate, which seems to be its most publicized film abroad, despite being a minor one by filmmaker Tomas
" Titón " Gutiérrez Alea( Memories of Underdevelopment, The Last Supper). The featured film even entered the Oscars’ race in the category of Best Non-English Language Movie. The reaction to its stand resulted from being promoted as the first film dealing with homosexuality in the Cuban cinema under the Castroit dictatorship, namely as example of its tolerance, particularly towards the LGBTI community. Such statement is inaccurate, as the regime remained intolerant especially with those who do not shared their dogmas, inter alia, heterosexuality. The film derived from the Juan-Rulfo- Award short story The Wolf, the Forest, and the New Man( 1992), by Cuban writer Senel Paz. It was released in the middle of the greatest crisis affecting the dictatorial leadership. The film adaptation of the story, as Strawberry and Chocolate, took a couple of years to be completed, and it took another year to stage the same story under the title The Ice Cream ´ s Cathedral. To be fair, before Strawberry and Chocolate there were films that dealt with issues of homosexuality from the perspective of the cinema monopoly Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry( ICAIC), such as Parallel Lives and The Beauty of The Alhambra, directed by Pastor Vega and Enrique Pineda Barnet, respectively. The difference is that homosexuals were then stigmatized as degenerated counterrevolutionaries( Parallel...) or frustrated artists( The Beauty...), while
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