Strawberry and Chocolate: Sexuality and Film in Cuba

Homosexuality In Cuba In Revolutionary Cuba, homosexuality faced the double stigma of machismo and decadence. It was associated with US imperialist influences (part of the “lazy youth” stereotype denounced by Castro in his March 1963 speech) Castro’s anti-gay policies mostly targeted young people and those in influence over them. He believed that older homosexuals were “trees that had already grown twisted” In the mid sixties, the University of Havana held a three year campaign in which students were encouraged to denounce any gay peers. Thousands of students were taken before University tribunals in order to renounce any counter-revolutionary sexual leanings. In 1965 the UMAP camps were erected, because Castro believed that homosexuality was an urban phenomenon and rural labor would cure it. In 1971 A National Congress of Education and Culture was held where it was declared that due to their potential for “negatively influencing” the young, homosexuality would not be tolerated among artists and educators.

After 1971 Homosexuals who had any contact with youth through cultural or educational activities were shifted to different organizations. Any artist suspected of “questionable morals” would be barred from representing Cuba abroad. Castro would eventually use the Mariel exodus as an excuse to exile gays from the country. Samuel Farber explains several influences that led to the Cuban persecution of homosexuals, including the masculinist militancy of revolutionary culture, long traditions of machismo inherited from Spanish colonialism, Soviet associations of homosexuality with decadence transmitted by the old Communists. Farber suggests that the biggest influence was Fidel himself, who had an animus toward “effeminate” men as evidenced in some of his earliest speeches.

Strawberry and Chocolate One of the last films produced by Tomás Gutierrez Alea shortly before his death in 1996. Gutierrez Alea had a long career as a cinematographer in Cuba: One of the founding members of ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica), an organization dedicated to spreading revolutionary ideas through cinema.

Alea would go on to direct some of the earliest documentaries of the Cuban Revolution: "You just had to set up your camera in the middle of the street and something interesting would happen. That is how we learned to make movies in Cuba." Although supportive of the Revolution, Alea was also critical of it, has described himself as “a man who makes criticism inside the revolution, who wants to ameliorate the process, to perfect it, but not to destroy it.” Gutierrez´s works are considered typical of “Third Cinema”, a movement dedicated to consciousness raising and opposing neocolonialism through film which emerged in Latin America in the sixties. Fresa y Chocolate follows this philosophy.

Fresa y chocolate, a collaboration between himself, Juan Carlos Tabio and Robert Redford, would go on to be one of his most internationally acclaimed films. The film was nominated for an academy award in 1994. It also received a Jury Prize a the Sundance Film Festival and a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.