3 Homophobia in Ena Lucía Portela’s Cien botellas en una pared

I looked at how repressive mechanisms were exacerbated during one of the most critical times of the revolutionary government, the Special Period, due to the fall of the communist bloc in 1991. The economic depression of this period was at its most severe in the early to mid-1990s and slightly declined in severity towards the end of the decade. The Special Period was an especially hard period for the Cuban population due to the frequent electricity and water cuts and the restrictions on basic goods. At the time, the Cuban government/State intensified the control over people’s beliefs and behaviours, allegedly for the benefit of the revolutionary project, and catalogued as a dissident anyone attempting to challenge the official discourse.

Until the mid-1990s, many homosexuals were imprisoned, and some were sent into exile. Others pretended they were heterosexual and stayed. Only a few have managed to articulate credible accounts of their trauma for being treated as dissidents due to their sexual identity. I looked at the testimonies of writers like Reinaldo Arenas and others in documentaries like Conducta impropia,2 Mauvaise conduite (Conducta impropia), dir. by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez-Leal (Cinevista, 1984). as well as fictional works that were inspired by real-life events, like Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s Fresa y chocolate,3 Fresa y chocolate, dir. by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos, 1993). and, more recently, the novels by Leonardo Padura Fuentes and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, among others. The study of this material allowed me to verify the frustration of this community under the dynamics of control and discipline led by the government for decades. I also verified how those initially at a disadvantage managed to endure the political violence and State repression enacted by the government.

From that study, I learnt that what makes the US–Cuba confrontation so interesting worldwide is that it tells the story of how a less powerful force (Cuba) manages to articulate a convincing discourse for many against the supremacy of its opponent (the US) in the world. The Cuban government has publicly criticised US presidents while setting up commercial alliances with the old USSR bloc and, more recently, China. The State apparatus has constructed institutional symbolism with which it has shown that it does not intend to give in to the commercial interests and interferences of Washington, for example on human rights issues. We could see this in, for example, Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba in April 2016, which revealed that the issue of human rights was at a standstill in Cuba. We will come back to this event later.

Homosexual dissidents’ methods of resistance to State repression varied depending on individual circumstances and whether they were in exile or on the island. Reinaldo Arenas, as well as others, attacked the Cuban government with his loud accounts of his experience on the island under censorship and homophobic policies, his imprisonment and his bizarre departure in 1980. Among those who stayed in Cuba, some adapted to the regime and wrote about the many positive things the government was doing in other fields, such as the education and healthcare programmes. Many provided veiled criticisms of the system in their works of fiction.

All of this has been useful to the study of Cien botellas en una pared4 Ena Lucía Portela, Cien botellas en una pared (Doral: Stockcero, 2010). Hereafter, I will refer to this novel as Cien botellas. by Ena Lucía Portela (born in Havana, Cuba, on 19 December 1972) and the literature by Wendy Guerra, addressed elsewhere in this book.

Cien botellas offers a first-hand testimony of the tense power relations between the Cuban dissidents and the government during the Special Period. While the novel does not openly address the disciplinary measures, Portela highlights that the political violence against sexual minorities and others at the time was exacerbated and manifested in various ways, including State repression, police violence, censorship and parameterisation.

Cien botellas narrates the random life of Zeta, a 28-year-old amateur writer, a victim of gender-based violence, a displaced individual with no hope for the future and a dissident of the system, who is accidentally involved in two deaths in ruinous Havana during the chaos unleashed by the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1991. In the text, the connection between biological sex and gender performance is arbitrary; virtually all of the female characters are lesbians, while the male characters are either gay or emasculated heterosexuals. With a bold and hilarious style, Zeta recounts the lives of her lesbian friends, including famed crime writer Linda Roth, as well as her tormented relationship with Moisés (a former Supreme Court magistrate and a law professor). Moisés embodies a hypermasculine role model, who shows his power over Zeta with physical violence and convinces her that women are inferior to men because they are mad and frivolous. The denouement of the novel shows that the machista mentality of Moisés, so deeply rooted in the region, can fall apart and break. His tragic ending can be interpreted as an allegory of the collapse of the revolutionary project at the time.

Cien botellas does not present a nostalgic account of this time period but rather focuses on the mechanisms used by the protagonist and her friends to endure the State censorship, political persecution, institutional homophobia and material shortages in the midst of the political crisis that nearly put an end to the revolutionary government. Zeta and her friends are thus anti-heroes in a claustrophobic environment that reflects the government’s old slogan: ‘Dentro de la revolución, todo; fuera de la revolución, nada’ (‘Everything within the revolution; against the revolution, nothing’).5 Fidel Castro, ‘What Are the Rights of Writers and Artists, Revolutionaries or Non-Revolutionaries?’, Biblioteca Nacional, 16, 23 and 30 June 1961; http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/esp/f300661e.html [accessed 17 October 2020]. They embody, without realising it, a challenge to the pre-established idea of dissidents as powerless individuals with little or no choice but to resist the harsh constraints at the time. By placing them at the centre of the plot, Portela gives relevance and a voice to those who have been removed from the official account of the country. Ultimately, they embody the last stronghold of resistance in a decaying Havana and defenders of the human rights on the island.

We shall see that Linda’s guarida (den) offers a space where Zeta and her friends can take refuge from the vigilance led by the Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (Committees for the Defence of the Revolution) (CDRs) and other control mechanisms, such as parametrización (parameterisation), which was a code-based legal system that aimed to filter which education and culture workers could continue their work based on certain parámetros (parameters).

In giving a voice to Zeta, which is the last letter of the alphabet, and her friends, many of them writers, lesbians and gays, Portela warns us: the stigmatised have not actually been defeated. Their alleged lack of morals (according to the ideology of the system on gender norms and sexuality) is in fact the central pillar of their resistance to the State repression. In other words, the chaotic lives of Zeta and her friends become the best weapon of defence. This makes their lives an object of interest. Yet Cien botellas says something else: those who feel displaced find it difficult to cope with their disappointment with the revolution and are unable to engage with the harsh reality, which they often find unreal. In this way, the novel indicates that a transgressive mentality leads citizens to endure a stark self-evaluation and survival process in a hostile environment. This idea makes Portela’s characters and plot credible and gives relevance to her veiled criticism of the political violence in Cuba.

Cien botellas addresses how homosexuals, lesbians and intellectuals resisted the political violence inflicted at the start of the 1990s. However, let us not forget that Portela published the book in 2003, and it has now been three decades since the start of the Special Period. This makes us wonder how the political changes of the last 30 years have affected the lives of dissidents in particular.

This chapter first addresses the advances in the defence of human rights and freedoms on the island in the 21st century. It then looks at how State repression has affected the situation of homosexuals in particular and has impacted Portela’s career. Next, it focuses on the purpose behind making Zeta, a prototype of a dissident in the Special Period, the protagonist of Cien botellas. Finally, it addresses the representation of the impact of homophobic policies on Zeta’s friends, the majority of whom present a challenge to the ethos of the regime regarding gender and sexuality. It also considers Zeta’s violent relationship with Moisés, who replicates the machista ideology that inspired the construction of the concept of the ‘new man’ on the island.