The Cross-Dressed Caribbean

Writing, Politics, Sexualities

Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Bénédicte Ledent, Roberto del Valle Alcalá, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Bénédicte Ledent, Roberto del Valle Alcalá

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813935249
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Studies of sexuality in Caribbean culture are on the rise, focusing mainly on homosexuality and homophobia or on regional manifestations of normative and nonnormative sexualities. The Cross-Dressed Caribbean extends this exploration by using the trope of transvestism not only to analyze texts and contexts from anglophone, francophone, Spanish, Dutch, and diasporic Caribbean literature and film but also to highlight reinventions of sexuality and resistance to different forms of exploitation and oppression.

Contributors:

Roberto del Valle Alcalá, University of Alcalá * Lee Easton, Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning * Odile Ferly, Clark University * Kelly Hewson, Mount Royal University * Isabel Hoving, Leiden University * Wendy Knepper, Brunel University * Carine Mardorossian, University at Buffalo, SUNY * Shani Mootoo * Michael Niblett, University of Warwick * Kerstin Oloff, Durham University * Lizabeth Paravisini, Vassar College * Mayra Santos-Febres, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras * Paula Sato, Kent State University * Lawrence Scott * Karina Smith, Victoria University * Roberto Strongman, University of California, Santa Barbara * Chantal Zabus, University of Paris 13

1

Revolutions in Drag

The Transvestite and Cubanness in Severo Sarduy’s De donde son los cantantes

Paula K. Sato

Three Avatars of Cubanness took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, three embodiments of resistance to a U.S. imperialism that I suggest sought to Orientalize the Cuban. The third, the transvestite in Severo Sarduy’s 1967 experimental novel De donde son los cantantes, the intended focus of this essay, cannot be understood without discussion of the first, made tangible in the person of José Martí, and the second, corporealized in Fidel Castro. Regarding the United States’ Orientalization of Cuba, as nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. politicians entertained dreams of annexing the island, they fed those aspirations with images of their Caribbean neighbor as primitive, as racially other, and as femininely incapable of autonomy. Cuba was a damsel anxiously awaiting U.S. governance, much as the Orient awaited “the shelter of European occupation.”¹ Statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson envisioned Cuba as part of the union from as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, they justified that ambition through their construction of the United States as implicitly “masculine” (capable of governing) and of Cuba as explicitly “effeminate” (incapable of self-government). Whether consciously or not, in 1823 John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, characterized Cuba using the terminology of an Orientalism whose advance from 1815 to 1914 coincided with the expansion of “European direct colonial dominion … from about 35 percent of the earth’s surface to about 85 percent of it.”² He surmised in a message to the U.S. minister in Spain that a Cuba severed from the European fatherland would be “incapable of self-support” and would naturally gravitate toward the United States, who, “by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom.”³ Theodore Roosevelt, who, we know, saw a direct parallel between Europe’s colonization of the Orient and U.S. aspirations to manage Cuba, wrote in a 1904 message to Cecil Spring-Rice of the British Foreign Office, “It is a good thing for India that England should control it. And so it is a good thing, a very good thing, for Cuba … that the United States has acted as it has actually done during the last six years.”⁴ As we recall, the United States had occupied Cuba militarily from 1899 to 1902. It would go on to set up a government of occupation from 1906 to 1909 and would continue to hold considerable sway over Cuban affairs until 1959—to the extent that Eric Williams maintained that by the 1920s, Cuba had become “in every sense of the term an American colony.”⁵ Williams argued that the United States intended to transform the Caribbean into an “American Mediterranean.”⁶ I suggest that it sought to make the Caribbean its Orient, and that Martí’s and Castro’s construction of Cuban Man must be understood within the context of Cuban resistance to a U.S. imperialism that Orientalized and feminized Cuba.

Offering a more nuanced view of gender than that put forth in Orientalist discourse, Martí argued that although the Cuban male was feminine in appearance, demeanor, and sensibility, he possessed a hidden but distinctly masculine, military disposition. Martí’s resistance to U.S. imperialism was a celebration of Cuba’s queerness, its ability to reconcile incongruent elements of race and gender by joining “black” with “white” and “feminine” with “masculine.” His dream of racial inclusiveness had enduring value. Alejandro de la Fuente convincingly argues that political parties and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century, including that of the Cuban Revolution, based their claims to legitimacy on their adherence to Martí’s racial ideals, often in direct defiance of the United States. However, revolutionary Cuba ignored Martí’s queering of Cuban masculinity in its construction of the New Man, its symbol of the nation embodied in the person of Fidel Castro. And the new hypermasculine national identity, intended to send the message to Washington that Cuba would no longer allow itself to be the feminine object of U.S. power fantasies, was accompanied by an oppressive domestic policy against gays, who had come to be seen as effeminate and counterrevolutionary.

In this essay I will examine Sarduy’s use of the Sino-Cuban transvestite in relationship to three constructions of Cubanness: Martí’s late nineteenth-century queering of Cuban identity; the revolutionary government’s mid-twentieth-century hypermasculine, and obligatorily heterosexual, New Cuban Man; Orientalization of Cuba that constructed her as effeminate and in need of the United States’ masculine guidance and protection (read control and intervention). I will situate Sarduy’s transvestite both as a return to the effeminate and queer origins of Cuban identity in Martí and as an extension of the Cuban leader who in his bid for racial inclusiveness overlooked the thousands of Chinese who came to Cuba as contract laborers from 1847 to 1874 and who fought in the Cuban wars of independence.⁷ I will also situate Sarduy’s transvestite as a subversion of the revolutionary government’s hypermasculine, heteronormative construction of Cubanness, which transformed the Cuban homosexual into a social pariah and thus an internal exile.

Martí’s Queering of Cuban Identity in Response to U.S. Imperialism

When campaigning for the second Cuban war of independence (1895–98) in the late nineteenth century, Martí concluded that defeat in the first (the Ten Years’ War of 1868–78) was due to Cuba’s failure to unite across color lines. In consequence, his dream of an autonomous Cuba became inseparable from his desire for racial fraternity.⁸ In a well-known passage from “Mi raza” (My race)—an article published in Patria (1883), the newspaper founded by Martí in New York in 1882 and generally recognized as the Cuban independence movement’s official organ—Martí proclaimed that Cuban whites and blacks were united by their jointly shed blood in the independence struggle: “To be Cuban is more than to be white, mulatto or black. On the field of battle, the souls of the whites and blacks dying for Cuba have ascended, united with one another in the air.”⁹

Martí’s dream of racial unity became consolidated with his resistance to U.S. imperialism as he awakened to the threat of racial violence during his fourteen-year exile in the United States (1881–95). In his article titled “A Terrible Drama: The Funeral of the Haymarket Martyrs,” he wrote that the land that had promised to be a beacon of liberty and equality had become a monster of intolerance and greed that wanted to spread its tentacles to the entirety of North and South America. The violent massacre and lynching of Chinese immigrants, blacks, Amerindians and Italian Americans on U.S. soil became the topic of articles that Martí penned from September 1885 through March 1891.¹⁰ He dedicated his final years to unifying a nation that would be self-governing and that, unlike its North American neighbor, would ensure the inclusion of all its citizens. Martí, who admired the French statesman who had served as major-general in the American Revolution, took Lafayette’s failed dream of America as “a cherished and safe asylum” of “tolerance,” “equality,” and “peaceful liberty” and made it his dream for Cuba.¹¹

In addition to defining Cuba as taking up the United States’ dropped mantle of tolerance, Martí appropriated North America’s construction of the Cuban as the United States’ inassimilable racial, effeminate Other. In an article titled “Do We Want Cuba?” appearing in Philadelphia’s Manufacturer on 16 March 1889, prominent Republican congressmen contended that Cuba was made up of three classes of people—Spaniards, “Negroes,” and native Cubans of Spanish descent—all with varying degrees of inassimilability.¹² Moreover, the congressmen’s language, uncannily similar to that of European Orientalism, painted Cuba as the United States’ depraved racial, feminine Other incapable of self-rule and civic responsibility.¹³ According to the Manufacturer, the Spanish race was the most inferior of all the white races. Cuban Negroes were more barbaric than the most degraded Negro in Georgia. And native Cubans of Spanish descent had not only the moral deficiency of the Spanish race but also an “effeminacy” and “lack of virile strength” that made them incompetent in matters of self-governance and incapable “of fulfilling the obligations of citizenship in a great and free republic.” The U.S. congressmen concluded that if Cuba were to become a state in the United States, she would have to be populated with people of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity: “Our only hope of qualifying Cuba for the dignity of statehood would be to Americanize her completely, populating her with people of our own race.” Rather than repopulating Cuba with “better” racial stock so that it could grant her the rights and privileges of statehood, the United States endeavored to impose its own racist structure on the island through discriminatory policies during its first military occupation and during Cuba’s first (1902–33) and second republic (1933–59).¹⁴ The same terminology that Edward Said uses to describe Europe’s vision of the Orient at the time can be used to describe the United States’ vision of Cuba. The United States saw Cuba as a space of “feminine penetrability,” as “a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction, even redemption,” to borrow Said’s terminology.¹⁵ And the United States’ construction of Cuba as its racial and effeminate other, functioning in a similar manner to Orientalist discourse, was used to promote interference in the island’s affairs.

In Orientalism, Said demonstrates the ways in which an implicitly masculine imperialist discourse justifies the invasion of sovereign states through simultaneously feminizing the colonized and conflating the category “woman” with the need of masculine Western protection. Ironically, as it does so, it also constructs the Oriental woman as sexually willing, available for sexual exploitation, even rape.¹⁶ The Orientalization of Cuba has arguably been a component of Western conceptualizations of the island since Columbus first took possession of her, mistaking her for the Far East. The United States continued to Orientalize Cuba by inscribing her as a feminized social and geographical space in need of the United States’ tutelage, protection, and occupation.

It is interesting to note that Martí did not counter U.S. claims with a categorical denial of Cuban effeminacy. Instead, he published the piece titled “A Vindication of Cuba” in the New York Evening Post on 25 March 1889. In the article he maintained that Cubans should not be “considered as the Manufacturer does consider us, an ‘effeminate’ people” simply because Cuba’s “half-breeds and city-bred young men are generally”—and one could say the same of Martí himself—“of delicate physique, of suave courtesy and ready words, hiding under the glove that polishes the poem the hand that fells the foe.” Cubans were fighting men who knew how to pawn their “trinkets” in a day in order “to pay their passages to the seat of war.”¹⁷ Thus, even though Cubans might seem “effeminate” because of their feminine appearance (delicate physique), courtly manners (suave courtesy), feminine gestures (polishing), feminine apparel (glove), feminine possessions (trinkets), and poetic sensibility, they “fought like men.” This is because the Cuban, according to Martí, has the “happy faculty” of allying incongruities—of uniting not only “moderation with exuberance” and black with white, but also, it seems, the delicate appearance and poetic temperament of a woman with the fighting nature of a man.¹⁸

Sarduy’s Transvestite as Parody of Martí’s Queer Cuban

The central characters of Sarduy’s novel, transvestites Auxilio Chong and Socorro Si-Yuen, reenact in parodic form Martí’s construction of the Cuban as both artist of effeminate appearance and combative military man. In the opening lines, Auxilio, statuesque, but not in the classical sense, has sculpted herself in neon colors and camp. “Striped,” she calls to mind the geometric shapes of Victor Vasarely (1908).¹⁹ In Socorro’s words, “You look like graph paper. Vasarelic” (92). Auxilio’s speech is as much an imitation of art as is her appearance. As Roberto González Echevarría, the editor of Sarduy’s novel, notes, her existentialist statement “I will be ashes, but I will have meaning./Dust will I be, but dust in love” is a paraphrase of the seventeenth-century Spanish sonnet by Quevedo y Villegas titled “Amor constante más allá de la muerte” (Steadfast love beyond death; 91, n. 2). Socorro is no less a reiteration of art than Auxilio. She labels herself Velázquez’s “infanta” and “plateresque” (175), thus as self-consciously baroque and as belonging to the style of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish architecture that mixed Gothic elements with Renaissance and intricate ornamentation with extravagant decoration (175, n. 2). Auxilio and Socorro also embody the masculine side of Martí’s construction, becoming hypermilitary as they wield “Thompson machine guns, two-pronged knives, javelins, flamethrowers, pum-pum guns, hand grenades and tear-gas bombs” (117). Thus, as concomitant effeminate-appearing artists and military men, they possess the felicitous faculty of allying incongruous signs of gender that Martí both embodied and saw as distinctively Cuban. Queerly feminine and masculine, they are “bearded ladies in a Mongol circus,” singing in soprano and bass, wearing a fragrance identified as both Fleur de “Racaille” de Caron and Shoulton Old Spice (125, 151–52, 204, emphasis added).²⁰

However, Sarduy surpasses Martí in his vision of racial inclusiveness by creating a space in the island’s landscape for Cubans of Chinese descent. Incidentally, if the Oriental is already a feminized male in Orientalist discourse, then Sarduy’s Chinese transvestites are hyperfeminized. However, their femininity packs a punch. We have seen how Martí subverted the Manufacturer’s feminization of Cubans by revealing that their seeming “femininity” housed hidden agency and empowerment (hiding under the glove that polishes is the hand that fells the foe). Similarly, Sarduy reveals that the effeminate Oriental, far from being the silent, supine, passive figure that Orientalist discourse makes her out to be, is not anxiously awaiting Western man to define, conquer, or shelter her. Sarduy’s transvestites wield an arsenal of weapons that are not just technological. While we see a temporary liaison in De donde between an older white male (the General) and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Revolutions in Drag
• 2 “Passing” through Time
• 3 Theories in the Flesh
• 4 Symptoms and Detours
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index