ABSTRACT
Cuban pre-revolutionary cinema was characterized by an absence of female agency. In other words, representation of women was present from the beginning, but not in the characterizations any self-respecting person could identify with. Throughout post-revolutionary Cuban film, themes dealing with a whole range of social issues emerged, hoping that the ideology behind the images would help to shape a revolutionary society with socialist values. Arguably one of the most important revolutionary social changes to have emerged alongside the Revolution was that affecting Cuban women. Paradoxically, the portrayal of the sexes in many post-revolutionary films was at odds with the Revolution’s attempt to revise the female role in Cuban society. This study aims to demonstrate the representations of gendered abuse in post-revolutionary Cuban cinema in the 20th century, exploring two eloquent works directed by Humberto Solás: Lucía (1969) and Mujer Transparente (1990). The selected films, from an earlier and later period of the 20th century, focus on issues of gender abuse in and outside the domestic sphere. Both films resort to different feminine/feminist strategies as resistance to patriarchal oppression, which in a different fashion and degree aim at exploring gender abuse, denouncing the patriarchal system and restoring their authentic feminine identity. I will argue that two decades before the end of the 20th century a shift towards thinking about gendered abuse as a human rights violation can be discerned. This is indicative of a larger attempt to promote gender equality within the Latin American contexts and illustrates a decisive move away from North American and Northern European feminist thought and practice, which is either seen as the female counterpart of machismo or as a form of cultural imperialism that overlooks the cultural specificity of gender identity in the Ibero-American world. The early 1990s represent a turning point in Cuban cinema and a departing point for a “revolutionary” approach to gender representation. At the beginning of the 1990s, female representation in Cuban films shifted from history to stories, from the communal to the individual, from stereotypes to individuals. During the so-called “transitional period”—the Fall of the Revolution (1989–94)—Cuba began to experience a shift in politics, which had a subsequent impact on cinema. This study demonstrates the degree to which sexual politics is interwoven in any economic, political and social formation throughout history, of which Cuba is an enlightening example.
