Plus ça Change… Gender and Revolutionary Ideology in Cuban Cinema of 1968

Abstract

Ernesto “Che” Guevara said it himself: “Let me say to you, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”¹ This statement, made in 1965 in the now-iconic essay “Socialism and Man in Cuba” and frequently seen as symbolic of the Argentine doctor’s own devotion to revolutionary struggles (Cuban and otherwise), significantly and explicitly connects affect with the political. The revolutionary connects with the revolution emotionally rather than rationally; the motivating force is not so much the head as the heart. Yet while the “love” that he speaks of is ostensibly a love for “the people” as a whole and for the sacred cause of revolution, Guevara’s own parenthesis—the revelation that by acknowledging his love he risks “seeming ridiculous”— suggests that gender roles and expectations of masculine performance are intimately connected to the revolutionary enterprise. In fact, it is in this same essay that he coins the term “new man” to describe the kind of transformed individual the Revolution would create.² For this “new man,” love for the people bleeds over into a love for the project itself; the revolutionary is, in a certain sense, wedded to the revolution, something Guevara suggests later in his essay when he comments that women and families will be part of the general sacrifice to the revolution.³ Where, then, do other affective relationships fit into this panorama?