Seneca in Cuba: Gender, Race, and the Revolution in José Triana's Medea en el espejo

Abstract

This article places renewed emphasis on the gender and racial dynamics in José Triana's Medea en el espejo (Medea in the Mirror; Havana, 1960) by examining its relationship to Lucius Annaeus Seneca's Medea, a major source of inspiration for the Cuban dramatist that has been overlooked in contemporary scholarship. It demonstrates that Triana appropriates the image of Medea as a vengeful witch from the Roman text and accordingly constructs a heroine oscillating between antithetical subject positions: man and woman, master and slave, self and other. Situating the play in its sociopolitical context, the article argues that the indeterminacy of Triana's heroine, a mulata named María, for artistic and cultural reasons, is symptomatic of Cuba's liminal position and the collapse of hierarchical distinctions with the advent of the revolution in 1959, a temporal border that marked the beginning of a new era and caused the blurring of social boundaries. Triana, I conclude, revisits the myth of Medea and uses it as a vehicle for raising questions about the abuse of power and the continuous suppression of black agency under Castro.