CHAPTER 24

THE PRISON-HOUSE OF SEXUALITY: TOMÁS GUTIÉRREZ ALEA’S STRAWBERRY AND CHOCOLATE

Despite the fact that he was from Cuba, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928–1996) appeared to make only the movies he wanted to make and to retain complete artistic control over them. Once the he country’s foremost director and a committed supporter of the Communist revolution, Gutiérrez Alea nonetheless frequently used his films either to satirize the flaws and stupidities of Castro’s regime or to treat sympathetically those Cubans who have been marginalized by their own government. Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), for instance, darkly ridicules the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of postrevolutionary Cuba, while Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)—the Cuban cinema’s one great international success—explores the soul-searching alienation of a bourgeois intellectual who chooses to remain in Castro-country rather than flee his beloved Havana for Miami. Guantanamera (1995), for its part, is a black comedy that follows one family’s attempts to transport a corpse from Guantanamo to Havana during a time of acute gasoline shortages; whereas Strawberry and Chocolate (1994), though not without its comic moments, is essentially a serious, compassionate consideration of homosexual life—and heterosexual response to that life—in a country not known for its tolerance of “alternative lifestyles.” Indeed, thousands of homosexuals were sent to concentration camps (UMAP, the Spanish acronym for Military Units to Aid Production) in Cuba in the late 1960s, where they were greeted with a slogan similar to the one encountered by Jews at Auschwitz: “Work will make you men.” Although the camps were dismantled after a few years, the official policy of homophobia was not: numerous homosexuals, for example, were subsequently purged from the ruling Communist Party, in which they continue to be denied membership. Many gay men and women were among the 125,000 Cubans to flee the island during the Mariel boatlift in 1980; those who remained and later tested positive for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, were quarantined as were not anywhere else in the world. Strawberry and Chocolate takes place in 1979, prior to the Mariel boatlift and the onset of the AIDS-epidemic, and during a cold war between America and Cuba—epitomized by the United States’s fifty-five-year economic and trade blockade of this West Indian island—that today still shows no signs of letting up. Orlando Jiménez Leal, a once-banned Cuban director now living in New York, and Mario García Joya, the cinematographer for this film (together with several others by Gutiérrez Alea) who was granted political asylum in the United States,

221 Chapter 24 have argued that Strawberry and Chocolate is a “safe,” even slyly propagandistic film about homosexuality from the Cuban government’s point of view, since it deals with discrimination or intolerance in the past, after the shutting down of the concentration camps and before Mariel as well as AIDS; and since it shows a heterosexual man and devoted Marxist overcoming his aversion to homosexuals if not embracing homosexuality itself. But Gutiérrez Alea’s film also depicts a gay man who is driven to defect, presumably to the United States, less because he rejects Communism (which he in fact toasts at one point with the words “Long live democratic Communism”) than because Communism rejects him by denying his kind a fulfilling emotional and professional life. To be sure, Strawberry and Chocolate isn’t “simplistic, anti-Communist propaganda” (26), either, which is the counter-charge that Gutiérrez Alea made in the New York Times in 1995 against Improper Conduct (1983), a documentary by Jiménez Leal and the late cinematographer Nestor Almendros (who fled Cuban homophobia to have a distinguished career in France and America) about Havana’s official campaign of harassment against homosexuals. “Art is one thing and propaganda another,” the gay Diego himself declares in Gutiérrez Alea’s film, and Strawberry and Chocolate comes down firmly—perhaps I should say subtly—on the side of art by avoiding the shrill oversimplifications of the factual Improper Conduct, on the one hand, and the sentimental equivocations of the fictional (Brazilian-generated) Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), on the other. The (at the time) sixty-six-year-old Gutiérrez Alea, who called in Juan Carlos Tabío to co-direct after he fell ill during the filming, had the Cuban writer Senel Paz adapt the screenplay for Strawberry and Chocolate from one of his own short stories, “The Wolf, the Forest, and the New Man.” The focus here is on the relationship between two men, but as they mix with the “foreignness” in each other rather than with foreign women. There is no overt foreign presence in this film, because ever since Castro took over, the Cubans have resisted the Americanization of their culture, which is not to say that they have totally rejected American goods—Diego drinks Johnnie Walker Red, for example, and reads some of “the enemy’s” magazines. (Ironically, Strawberry and Chocolate was the first movie ever to be entered by the Cuban government in the Oscar-race for best foreign-language film; it was duly nominated for [but did not win) the award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, that symbol of the American perversion of cinematic art for the sake of capitalistic commerce.) Ever since Castro, the Cubans have also naturally resisted the division of people into social classes, the goal being a dictatorship of the proletariat if not a totally classless society. The Americans and all like them have been banished from Havana; what remain are the believers, like David, and those like Diego who are true after a fashion. Strawberry and Chocolate opens with just the right kind of tease—or rather two of them. David, a peasant’s son, political science student at Havana University, and ardent Communist, takes his girlfriend Vivian to a cheap hotel to make love for the first time. Upon seeing her (crocodile) tears, however, the noble David announces

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