Garzona NationalismThe Confluence of Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Cuban Republic Kristie Soares (bio) Although policing the sexual (stigmatizing and outlawing several kinds of non-procreative sex, particularly lesbian and gay sex and prostitution) has something to do with sex, it is also more than sex. Embedded here are powerful signifiers about appropriate sexuality, about the kind of sexuality that presumably imperils the nation and about the kind of sexuality that promotes citizenship. Not just (any) body can be a citizen anymore. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas” [I see them] with their boyish haircuts, their aptitude for sports, and their masculine mannerisms, these biologically degenerate types that among women correspond to the perfect pepillito [gay man]: garzonas [lesbians]. Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, Feminismo: cuestiones sociales y crítica literaria The two epigraphs above are, to the dismay of many, both from feminist thinkers. The first, from well-known Trinidadian scholar M. Jacqui Alexander, outlines the ways that sexuality is not just central to but in fact constitutive of notions of citizenship in the postcolonial Caribbean. The second, from a feminist thinker little known outside her home nation of Cuba, Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, proves Alexander’s point in a haunting way. How two women with such differing views can both identify as feminists is the purview of another article, but central to this one is the question of how these two discourses—that citizenship often requires a policing of sexuality and that feminists themselves have often been the enforcers of such regulation—might help us understand both feminism and nationalism as always already in dialogue with one another. This article examines discourses of lesbian sexuality during the Republican period in Cuba (1920s–30s) to understand how many of our modern understandings [End Page 154] of gender and sexuality, both in the United States and in Latin America, can actually be traced back to this era. Many scholars have argued that the 1920s and 1930s were a fundamental period in the development of a postcolonial Cuban identity.1 It was during this period that Cuban nationals first attempted to articulate a vision of the Cuban character, while finding themselves plagued simultaneously by the memory of Spanish colonialism—having just gained sovereignty from Spain in 1898—and the threat of American imperialism—manifest in the Platt Amendment of 1901, which gave the United States partial jurisdiction over Cuban affairs. Cuban women, in particular, marked this period with an unprecedented amount of involvement in political and literary circles and saw themselves as an integral part of the development of a postcolonial Cuban identity. So successful was the activism that Cuban feminists engaged in during this time period that scholars have called the 1940 constitution “perhaps the most progressive charter in the Western Hemisphere” up to that time.2 It included, among other things, Article 23, which declared all Cubans equal to one another. Leading up to this momentous constitution were several landmark laws passed on behalf of gender equity, including a 1917 law that gave women control of property, the right to sue, and authority over their children; a 1918 law permitting divorces filed by both women and men and requiring that both be responsible for children after a divorce; the overturning of Article 437 of the Penal Code in 1930, which stated that a man could legally kill his adulterous wife; Decree 589 in 1934, promising equal pay for equal work; and a 1937 maternity law giving women time for breastfeeding during the workday and forbidding hiring discrimination in the case of pregnancy.3 Missing from this list is of course the right to vote, which women obtained in 1933 under the one-hundred-day government of Ramón Grau, which the United States did not recognize.4 So successful was Cuba’s feminist movement in these early years that its absence from most narratives of western feminism is both shocking and worrisome. One reason for the relative inattention to early Cuban feminism by US academia is the disconnect that existed between Cuban feminists and US feminists during this time period, with...