Reviews
Sexual Politics in Cuba: Machismo, Homosexuality, and AIDS by Marvin Leiner, Westview Press, 1994, 184 pp., $47.50 (cloth). At the end of Tomtis Gutferrez Alea's popular film Strawberry...
...And though Leiner 48 NMI1A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS analyzes the consequences of the belief that male desire is "an uncontrollable force," he does not examine the particularly Latin American construction of that ideology...
...The book's prologue sets the Gramscian tone for this project by asking how "the state's hegemonic project has been influenced by the force of popular experience and mobilized popular expectations...
...The state offers "AIDS patients and those testing HIV positive the best in medical care," but the government has created "sanitariums for the compulsory isolation of those Cubans who test positive for HIV antibodies...
...At the end of Tomtis Gutferrez Alea's popular film Strawberry and Chocolate, the straight and gay characters embrace...
...The revolution, especially in its early years, did little to change the homophobic attitudes inherited from traditional Cuban society...
...The reader interested in gender studies may, however, find Leiner's book lacking...
...The Cuban response to AIDS, contends Leiner, mirrors the best and worst of the revolution...
...This readable collection does an enormous service to the study of twentieth-century Mexico simply by framing the question in that way...
...Leiner has lived on the island and proudly touts its achievements in health and education...
...Kurt Shaw Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule of Modern Mexico Edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Duke University Press, 1994, 432 pp., $59.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper...
...by contrast, the Communists called homosexuals "decadent" and "bourgeois," exacerbating the pre-revolutionary stereotype...
...Che Guevara's "new man" showed his proletarian moral courage in work, fortitude, and manly strength...
...Though he cites Michel Foucault as a major influence, Leiner fails to use Foucault's insights to elucidate one of the book's most provocative and intriguing hypotheses, that "for many Cubans, a man is a homosexual only if he takes the passive receiving role...
...In spite of this lacuna, Sexual Politics in Cuba provides both sound analysis and excellent information on AIDS, homophobia, and sex education in Cuba...
...This is a fascinating collection of speculative essays and historical case studies of the local experience of the Mexican revolution and the formation of the modem Mexican state...
...The collection is the outcome of a conference organized by the editors in 1991 that attempted to link an understanding of that long political process "from above" and "from below...
...Instead, by examining the revolutionary process in a wide variety of regional settings, they tease out an understanding of the mixture of ruling-class hegemony and popular resistance continually present in the complex process called "the revolution...
...Focusing on the interplay of official and popular ideologies, these essays and studies try to avoid the debates between those who argue that the revolution was early on reduced to a "state cult," and those who argue that it was the (uneven) outcome of a set of genuine popular uprisings...
...These "gilded prisons," formally dissolved since the publication of the book, illustrate the sins, virtues and contradictions of contemporary Cuba...
...Thus, his trenchant critique of machismo, homophobia, and discrimination against HIV-positive people carries considerable weight...
...Marvin Leiner's Sexual Politics in Cuba leaves the reader much less sanguine about the future of homosexuals in Cuba...
Vol. 29 • July 1995 • No. 1
