Moisés is an ex-judge of the Supreme Court and a professor at a faculty of law. The endless replay of Moisés’s violent sexual encounters with Zeta and his frequent beatings and attacks against women, as well as his belief in their supposed stupidity and general inferiority, are actually futile attempts to reinforce his unstable male identity. There is some parallelism between Moisés and the collapsing revolutionary system, so Moisés’s repeated attempts to dominate Zeta ultimately present him as a lame illusion of the hypermasculine essence of the revolution.
Moisés represents the worst face of the machista ideology, embedded in male hegemonic power over women and other males in society, which inspired the construction of the ‘new man’ concept on the island. González Pagés defines the Cuban macho as follows:
[…] the macho, bearer of the ideology of
machismo, is built from childhood with the demand to constantly demonstrate virility, which is reinforced with the phrase: show that you are a man; failure to do so immediately turns the person into lazy, weak and effeminate, attributes that are assigned to the homosexual, who is viewed with contempt, especially in Latin societies with strong homophobic roots.
1 Spanish original: ‘[…] el macho, portador de la ideología del machismo, se construye desde la infancia con la exigencia de demostrar constantemente la virilidad, la cual es reforzada con la frase: demuestra que eres un hombre; pues el no hacerlo convierte de inmediato a la persona en floja, débil y afeminado, atributos que le son asignados al homosexual a quien se ve con desprecio, sobre todo en las sociedades latinas de fuerte raíz homofóbica’; Julio César González Pagés, ‘Género y masculinidad en Cuba: ¿El otro lado de una historia?’, Nueva Antropología, 18.6 (September 2002), 117–26, p. 119.Zeta and Moisés’s abusive relationship thus questions the exacerbated machista ideology in Cuba at the time – an ideology that makes Moisés constantly test his strength, push himself to the limit and conquer everything in his path. For Moisés, violent conduct is a way of adhering to the revolutionary system according to the parameters of the ‘good revolutionary’. To Zeta, who is oblivious to any moral view, violent Moisés represents quite the opposite:
A work of art. A living colossus. A Greek god […] the head of the pantheon, the leader, the patriarch, the well-preserved tremble who seduced all women and struck down all the mischievous with his lightning bolt. A miracle of Creation.
2 Spanish original: ‘Una obra de arte. Un coloso vivo. Un dios griego […] el jefe del panteón, el líder, el patriarca, el temba bien conservado que seducía a todas las mujeres y fulminaba con su rayo a todos los traviesos. Un milagro de la Creación’; Cien botellas, p. 124.Zeta’s admiration for Moisés is so strong that she accepts his violent treatment as proof of his love for her: ‘His love also included blows, with a clean hand or with a belt buckle, bites and pinches of those who mark, scratches, dry penetrations and other delicacies’.
3 Spanish original: ‘Su amor también incluía golpes, a mano limpia o con la hebilla del cinto, mordidas y pellizcos de los que marcan, arañazos, penetraciones en seco y otras delicadezas’; Cien botellas, p. 11. Her body becomes the object of Moisés’s attacks and represents a discharge of the State repression. His attacks are cyclical and prolonged, like the difficulties that led to material shortages on the island.
Zeta submits to Moisés’s repressive force out of fear but also out of her craving for ‘the pleasure’ of it: ‘that barbarian style, that sadomasochistic wave, I loved it. It drove me crazy to the point that I became addicted, needing it like a drug. I felt fear, of course, but also the pleasure of fear’.
4 Spanish original: ‘aquel estilo bárbaro, aquella onda sadomasoquista, me encantaba. Me enloquecía al punto que llegué a enviciarme, a necesitarlo como si fuera una droga. Yo sentía miedo, claro está, pero también el placer del miedo’; Cien botellas, p. 171. Consequently, Zeta subordinates to him, loses control of her will and starts thinking that women are insane individuals who are intellectually inferior to males. This is presented as a form of brainwashing that prevents Zeta from abandoning the perpetrator: ‘I don’t know exactly what linked me to that man. But I know it was something strong, very strong. Something that I could not (perhaps did not want) to fight’.
5 Spanish original: ‘No sé con exactitud qué me unía a aquel hombre. Pero sé que era algo fuerte, muy fuerte. Algo contra lo que yo no podría (quizás no quería) luchar’; Cien botellas, p. 215. Nara Araújo explains that the abusive relationship between Zeta and Moisés is one such
escenario (situation) in which the body becomes a territory that serves a destructive pleasure, which is pleasant because it is perverse. It is the impulse of annihilating and sacrificial repetition, from which a more than erotic pleasure is derived.
6 Araújo, ‘Erizar y divertir’, p. 82.Moisés’s adherence to the regime is in crisis, maybe due to the events that accompanied the fall of the socialist bloc. This is shown by his outbursts of anger at the governmental attempt at ideological control: ‘His surroundings were then dyed red, fire red, iron red, vibrant flares, with Moisés in the centre, freaking out with horns and tail’.
7 Spanish original: ‘Su entorno se teñía entonces de rojo, rojo fuego, rojo hierro, llamaradas vibrantes y Moisés en el centro, enloquecido con cuernos y cola’; Cien botellas, p. 1. In this way, the former judge unleashes his frustration with the system on Zeta because she is a young, aspiring woman writer with hardly any family in a dirty and collapsed city. She has no power. In doing so, he replicates the suffocating mechanisms led by the government against common citizens.
At the end of the novel, we see how fragile the social construction of masculinity is: Moisés falls and dies, pushed through a window by another character, Alix, or perhaps by Zeta. His contempt for women makes his death at the hands of a woman even more revealing. With elements of both irony and poetic justice, the ending of Cien botellas presents an anti-essentialist view of gender normativity in Cuba in that it questions whether power and domination are the exclusive domains of males.