Baroque Revolutionaries, Communist Fags, and Risky Friendships: Reading the Politics of Friendship in Fresa y chocolate

Abstract

In its Greco-Roman formulations, friendship is conceived as a filial bond established through similitude. Later philosophers claimed it is the belief of knowing a friend as one presumes to know oneself that generates security and a sense of belonging. Moreover, the authenticity of a friend is determined by his self-sufficiency and the total transparency of his actions. Against this classical, androcentric paradigm, contemporary theorists, such as Leela Gandhi and Tom Roach, have valorized friendships that demand risk, discomfort, and becoming Other. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's film Fresa y chocolate presents us with an unlikely friendship between a homophobic, militant communist and a gay, suspected counterrevolutionary. While the larger narrative of the film advocates for a politics of assimilation, paying close attention to expressions of vulnerability, dissymmetry, and irreducible difference, I aim to show how the film unworks the notion of community as shared identity and gestures toward an ethics of hospitality. Betrayals and disguised intentions between the two friends place them in danger of political persecution and exclusion from their respective communities. In my reading of Alea's film, friendship and the insecurity it necessarily entails reflects what Gandhi has described as an extra-institutional and nonofficial ethico-political practice.