“Her body was my country”: Gender and Cuban-American exile-community nationalist identity in the work of Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the work of Gustavo Perez Firmat, a well-published, exile-identified Cuban-American writer. In many ways, his Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming-of-Age in America and his Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban American Way are illustrative of the exile-imagined nation. In these texts, Perez Firmat, like many exile writers, locates the “real” Cuba in a grand past and a triumphant future – a future without Castro. He employs a disturbing sort of erasure that claims Cuba for “real” Cubans, that is, those elites who left after the revolution. To a startling degree, Perez Firmat participates in the acutely gendered dimensions of Cuban exile-community nationalism and politics, even as he constructs a complex sense of biculturated identity. His work, which includes essay, criticism, fiction and poetry, continues to configure Cuba as a mother – often fearsome and castrating. However, Perez Firmat defines Cuban and Cuban-American identity not merely as a matter of male honor, but as a matter of white, male privilege and unquestioned, hyper-heterosexual masculinity. In Perez Firmat's work, maternal bodies – coded as monstrous or as part of Cuba's oceanic landscape itself – serve to illustrate a sense of emasculation and powerlessness.