Cultural Erotics in Cuban America (review)

Abstract

Although belonging to the medieval period, one misses mention of the historical development of slavery during the middle ages (Charles Verlinden, etc.) and the uses of genealogy (biblical and modem) in conditioning the European emergent views on race. After all, the races of man descend from the sons of Noah (Shem, Cham, and Jafet), who populate different parts of the world (Asia, Africa, and Europe), and who are in different hierarchical relationship to each other. That story constantly appears in European chronicles and paintings , relating to the myth of the Visigothic origins of the Spanish, and conditions the treatment of the subaltern. The introduction also suffers from overuse of critical terminology, often not privileging the texts it explores but what the critics have written about them or about the concept of race. It also makes early reference to some critical concepts (narrativized and denarrativized vision, defamiliarization, subaltern approach, the hegemonic eye, etc.) that often are not explained until pages after their first use. There other aspects of the work are bothersome. Beusterien often tells anecdotes (21, 141, 151, etc.); summarizes what each chapter will treat (25, 29-34, 59, 101-102, 142-143, 173, etc.); and, engages with critics (36, 44, 141, 143 etc.) using the first person. The book also varies labels (for example, Afro-Hispanics 40 and Afro-Iberians 41), and cites titles of works in English followed by Spanish in brackets or Spanish followed by English in brackets. (He clearly indicates that he is doing this on purpose, but one wonders why Eye on Race does not stick to one type of citation.) Many of these stylistic faults (including the occasional typo) should have been caught by an editor and are not the fault of the writer, but good editors are an increasingly rare commodity. In spite of these observations, Professor Beurestein’ s study of this enticing array of texts dealing with race gives much food for thought. The book breaks new ground in the field. FRANK A. DOMÍNGUEZ The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Ortiz, Ricardo L. Cultural Erotics in Cuban America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 337 pp. In response to the growing interest of the last two decades in Cuban-American diasporic studies, in his latest study Ricardo Ortiz looks at the sexual wars that have accompanied various political and cultural wars since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Reaching beyond the typical Miami community and incorporating diasporic cultural expressions from New Jersey, New York and CaliRese ñas 135 fornia, he proposes that these conflicts have taken a “rather distinctive, certainly spectacular form [of] ‘erotics,’ sexuality, passion, kinship, and other often body-based manifestations of nonrational forms of human connection and interaction” (8). Throughout the book, the critic successfully addresses the ramifications of Cuban-American writers and artists that confront the cultural heteronormativity both on and off the island, in order to portray what remains of a Cuban in [North] America. Divided into three distinct parts with a total of eight chapters, the book focuses almost entirely on post revolutionary, U.S.-based, Cuban-American writers . Singling out the novels Antes que Anochezca (1992) and El Portero (1989), in his first chapter Ortiz suggests that Reinaldo Arenas’s writing wrestles with the transition of one cultural and economic environment to another. He effectively adds that within this transition there exists a particular “erotics” that works in and between spaces and subjects of the Cuban-exile imagination. In short, Ortiz analyzes the “the symbolic construction of Cuban political reality as a function of a quasi-oedipal struggle between the hysterically, murderously hated Fidel, el hombre, él, and Cuba bella, la patria…” (44). Accordingly, in his second chapter the critic investigates the unique production of Cuban exile prison writing, concentrating on the literary works of Senel Paz, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Reinaldo Arenas and Severo Sarduy, as well as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film, Strawberry and Chocolate (1993). Arguing that Pau-Llosa’s work is actually more political than the poet cares to admit, Ortiz uses his poetry as an example of how patriarchal traditions and repressed homophobia are carefully hidden among many Cuban and Cuban-American works. By comparing “bodies” of prison...