In the contemporary world, everybody is expected to have a nationality, just as everybody is expected to have a gender. However, defining the national identity has been, and still is, a challenge in Cuba. The excessive preoccupation of the leaders and the population in Cuba with defining and redefining their national identity from all possible perspectives has survived all ideologies – socialist, revolutionary, communist and, above all, Cuban heterosexual – but with no success until recently in integrating the homosexual community into the portrait of the nation. As in the rest of the world, though, homosexuals have long existed in Cuba. Due to the strong component of machismo, they have defined themselves within the margins of invisibility, marginality, repression, intellectualism and, in many cases, exile.

The starting point of this chapter is Foucault's idea that the institutionalisation of repressive mechanisms in relation to sexual conduct provokes the opposite effect: that of calling attention to the existence of an alternative discourse on sexuality (Foucault 1992: 155–6). This chapter therefore constitutes an attempt to examine the implications of the debate on homophobia in Cuba following the departure of the Spanish in 1898 and the destabilising effect of this on the numerous attempts to define Cuban national identity.

Homosexuality in Cuba is, as Epps points out, ‘largely a matter of aspect, a problem of public visibility, a highly politicized question of style’ (Epps 1995: 242). In my approach to homophobia in Cuba, the issue of public visibility and body language is essential in connection with the idea of the ‘closet’, which Sedgwick defines as ‘the defining structure for gay oppression in this century’, and which ultimately may cause a problematic space for creativity (Sedgwick 1990: 71). Any study that claims that the ‘closet’ is central to gay identity and experience, Sedgwick says, ‘will risk glamorizing the closet itself, if only by default; will risk presenting as inevitable or somehow valuable its exactions, its deformations, its disempowerment and sheer pain’ (Sedgwick 1990: 68).

Cuban society has long ignored, denied and alienated homosexuals by keeping them in a ‘closet’. This has happened with varying intensity, depending on the epoch. As for the representation of homosexuality in Cuban film and literature and the extent to which it was silenced after Fidel Castro came into power in 1959, it is crucial to look back at the narrative from the end of the nineteenth century onwards.