4 - Rebellious Women and Men Without Futures

Summary

Crises of masculinity are a consistent feature in the theatre of Eugenio Hernández Espinosa. María Antonia (1964) and Alto riesgo (1996) mark crucial moments in the development of Hernández's oeuvre and, in particular, his use of theatre to engage with pressing questions concerning Cuban social and cultural history. More specifically, these plays provide key tools to explore Hernández's use of theatre to interrogate sexual politics in Cuba and to highlight the precarity of masculinity within this context. Both plays depict passionate confrontation between Cuban men and Black Cuban women on stage. Written five years after the Revolution, María Antonia depicts an environment of social crisis which is meant to represent the immediate past. Alto riesgo is set in the mid-1990s and unapologetically reflects the social catastrophes of the moment in post-Soviet Cuba in which it is staged. With three decades having elapsed between the conception and production of both plays, the social worlds which they both represent are understandably different. Equally different are the direct cultural milieu and, at face value, the associated thematic concerns which the plays articulate. I argue, however, that read together these plays suggest a troubling tenacity of ideologies of control in which gender castigates women and immobilizes men. Both plays reveal the intransigence of gender in Cuba as well as the unyielding race/class hierarchies to which it is inextricably connected. As I have been suggesting throughout this book, these dynamics are most patently revealed through the politics of intimacy. Erotic politics, then, become an important conduit through which key constituents of Cuba's social history in the latter half of the twentieth century are communicated and decried.

The dual preoccupation with heteronormativity and crises of masculinity which is exposed in the plays discussed in this chapter calls into question the way Cuban socio-cultural structures are shaped (even dictated) by the various contingencies which have defined the nation's relationships with different foreign economic interests in the twentieth century. The erotic choices which Hernández's characters make, or which are unavailable to them, are to a large extent inseparable from either the forced reliance on US capital in neo-colonial Cuba, or (as some would argue) the equally pernicious dictates of European capital in post-Soviet Cuba, as a neoliberal economic strategy begins to emerge on the island during the Special Period.