I am a recovering macho, a product of an oppressive society, a society where gender, race and class domination do not exist in isolated compartments, nor are they neatly relegated to uniform categories of repression. They are created in the space where they interact and conflict with each other, a space I will call machismo. The understanding of machismo requires a full consideration of sexism, heterosexism, racism, ethnocentrism and classism. All forms of oppression are identical in their attempt to domesticate the Other. The sexist, who sees women playing a lesser productive role than men, transfers upon the non-elite male Other effeminate characteristics, placing him in a feminine space for "easy mounting."

This article explores the multidimensional aspects of intra-Hispanic oppression by unmasking the socio-historical construction of machismo. Usually, traditionally disenfranchised groups construct well-defined categories as to who are the perpetrators and who are the victims of injustices. All too often, we who are Hispanic ethicists tend to identify oppressive structures of the dominant Eurocentric culture while overlooking repression conducted within our own community. I suggest that within the marginalized space of the Latino/a community there exists intra-structures of oppression along gender, race and class lines, creating the need for an ethical initiative to move beyond, what Edward Said terms, "the rhetoric of blame." Specifically, this article will present a paradigm called machismo, which explicates intra-Hispanic oppression. The article then employs this paradigm to the Cuban experience by examining intra-Cuban sexism, racism and classism.

THE MACHISMO PARADIGM

To be a man, a macho, implies both domination and protection for those under you, specifically women. It becomes the macho's responsibility, our burden, to educate those below our superior standards. Because of my gender, I confess my complicity with sexist social structures, a complicity motivated by personal advantage.[1] All things being equal, I prevail over women in the marketplace, in the church community and within our Hispanic community because I am male. It is not my intention to speak for women about their oppression, nor to provide them with the necessary pedagogy to achieve liberation. Several, although unfortunately not enough mujerista theologians are presenting this voice.[2] My contribution to the discourse must be limited to how I, as a male, as a macho, facilitates the oppression of my gender Others.

Because sexism reflects one aspect of machismo, I feel it is appropriate to expand the meaning of this term to include all forms of oppression imposed on those who fail to live up to the manly standards of being a white elite Cuban male.[3] Machismo is as much about race and class as it is about gender. For Cubans, seriously dealing with our patriarchal structures must be the first stage in the process of dismantling all forms of oppression, providing for the liberation and possible reconciliation of all, not just women.

History is forged through ones' cojones (balls). Women, non-whites and the poor fail to influence history because they lack cojones, a gift given to machos by the ultimate Macho, God. To call a man lavándole los blumes de la mujer (one who washes his wife's bloomers) is to question his machismo. "El colmo" (the ultimate sin) is to be called a "maricón" (a derogatory term meaning queer or fag), the antithesis of machismo. We white Cuban elite males look into Lacan's mirror and recognize ourselves as machos through the distancing process of negative self-definition: "I am what I am not." The formation of the subject's ego constructs an illusory self-representation through the negation of cojones, now projected upon our Others, whoever identified as non-machos. Ascribing femininity to our Other forces the construction of female identity to originate with the macho. In fact, the feminine Object, in and of itself, is seen as nothing apart from a masculine Subject which provides a unifying purpose.

The resulting gaze of the white Cuban elite male inscribes effeminacy upon Others who are not macho enough to "make" history, or "provide" for their family or "resist" their subjugation to the dominant macho. Unlike the United States', sexual identity for Cubans is defined in terms of masculinity, not in terms of gender. Women are "the not male." When the gender Other demonstrates hyper-macho qualities, they can be praised for being machos. This was the case with both General Maceo, who was black, and his mother.[4]

The phallic signifier of machismo is located in the cojones. For Cubans, cojones, not the penis, become our cultural "signifier of signifiers." The Other, if male, may have a penis, but lacks the cojones to use it. I conquer, I subdue, I domesticate por mis cojones (by my balls). A distinction is made between cojones, the male testicles, and cojones the metaphoric signifier. Power and authority exhibit cojones, which are in fact derived from social structures, traditions, norms, laws and customs created by those very machos, who usually are white and rich.

In reality, no one has cojones. The macho lives always threatened by their possible loss, while the non-macho is forcefully deprived. The potent symbolic power invested in the cojones both signals and veils white elite Cuban male socioeconomic power. Constructing those oppressed as feminine allowed white Cuban men with cojones to assert their privilege by constructing oppressed Others as inhabitants of the castrated realm of the exotic and primitive.[5] Lacking cojones, the Other does not exist except as designated by the desire of the one with cojones. Like a benevolent father, a patrón, it becomes the duty and responsibility of those with cojones to care for, provide for and protect those below. The castrated male (read, race and class Other) occupies a feminine space where his body is symbolically sodomized as prelude to the sodomizing of his mind.

The non-macho became enslaved by the inferiority engraved upon their flesh by the Cuban ethos. Likewise, the macho is also enslaved to his own so-called superiority which flows from his cojones. While non-machos are forced to flee constantly from their individuality, the macho must constantly attempt to live up to a false construction. Both are alienated, both suffer from an obsessive neurotic orientation, and both require liberation from their condition. For Cubans, Gutiérrez' "preferential option for the poor" must be expanded to include a preferential option for those castrated by the macho, be they women, homosexuals, Taínos, Africans, Chinese, or the poor.

How did our neurotic state develop? Cuba, unlike other Latin American nations who enslaved the indigenous people, reduced the Taínos to near extinction. To replace this vanishing population, Mayans and Africans were imported as slaves. Later, Chinese began to take their place. Our concern as slave holders was the acquisition of cheap labor. Hence, slave merchants did not bother bringing women, contributing to a predominately male society. By the same token, the white overlords were also mostly men, searching for gold and glory. Cuba was a stop off point to somewhere else. Those passing through were on their way to discover their riches on the mainland. Few women accompanied these conquistadores. Since the beginning of Cuban European history, its population lacked sufficient women of any color. This absence of women contributed to the creation of an excessively male oriented society, where weaker males (non-machos) occupied "female" spaces. They washed; they cooked; they "entertained."

Cuba was the last Latin American nation to gain its "independence" from Spain. Rather than having a century of nation building, Cuba spent the 19th century preoccupied with military struggles, contributing to a hyper-macho outlook. The physical bravado characterizing a century of bloody struggle for independence fused manhood with nationhood. Machismo became ingrained in the fabric of Cuban culture. Both sides of the Florida Straits proclaim the same message: Patria is real man's work.[6] Women, gays and blacks are not macho enough to construct patria.[7] Hence Cuba, a predominantly black nation, is ruled by a predominant white hierarchy, while in Miami, CANF was established by fifty white businessmen organizing to create a post-Castro Cuba. Exilic Cuban anthropologist Behar describes the amalgamation of machismo with nationhood when she writes:

In seeking to free Cuba from its position as a colony of the United States, the Cuban Revolution hoped to redeem an emasculated nation. Manhood and nationhood, in the figure of the Cuban revolutionary hero, were fused and confused . . . Manhood is an integral part of the counterrevolution too. As Flavio Risech points out, "neither revolucionario nor anticommunist gusano can be a maricón" . . . If national identity is primarily a problem of male identity, how are Cuban women on both sides to write themselves into Cuban history?[8]

With colonization by the United States immediately following "independence" from Spain, Cuba continued in its emasculated status. The long United States' military occupation, the Platt Amendment and the transformation of La Habana into a Western Hemisphere whorehouse for Anglo consumption meant Cubans lost their manhood, their machismo. To regain our machismo, Cubans learned how to imitate our oppressor by enhancing our forms of domination of non-machos, specifically women. We, who came to this country as infants or small boys seek now to reinstate our machismo. The first generation of the Exilic-Cuban boy in his teen years experienced both peer and parental pressure to "prove their manhood." Machismo means to be sexually ready for anybody, anywhere, anytime.[9] Conquering la americanita (the North American girl) became an adolescent ritual of machismo. Exilic Cuban boys were encouraged to date the americanita in order to prove their manhood, as long as they remembered to marry la cubanita (Cuban girl).

This generations of Exilic Cubans who arrived in this country as children were forced to navigate simultaneously both sexual maturation and cultural adaptation. Both these processes, as author Firmat points out, became interwoven so that gender and cultural identity became integrated. Thus, cultural preference merged with sexual preference. In trying to become a mature man in exile, both regression and assimilation remain constant temptations as I attempt to construct my identity on the hyphen in Cuban-American.[10] To Firmat's description of the attempt to live on the hyphen, I would add the sexual conquest of the americanita. For as Fanon points out, "When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine."[11] Conquering the americanita provided an opportunity for the Exilic macho to converse with the dominant culture from the position of being on top (pun intended).

To tell a man not to be a maricón, also means "don't be a coward." Cuban homophobia differs from homophobia in the United States. We do not fear the homosexual; rather we hold him in contempt for being a man who chooses not to prove his manhood. Unlike North Americans, where two men engaged in a sexual act are both called homosexuals, for Cubans only the one that places himself in the "position" of a woman is the maricón.¹² Only the one penetrated is labeled loca (crazy woman, a term for maricones).[13] In fact, the man who is in the dominant position during the sex act, known as bugarrón, is able to retain, if not increase, his machismo.

While visiting the home of an Exilic Cuban radio commentator (who contributes to the anti-Castro rhetoric common on Miami's airwaves), I noticed a statue proudly displayed on his desk. The statue was of a cigar smoking Fidel Castro on all fours with his pants wrapped around his ankles while a standing Ronald Reagan sodomized him. In the mind of the sculptor and the Cuban men who see the statue, Ronald Reagan is not in any way a homosexual. Quite the contrary, the statue celebrates the machismo of Reagan who forces Castro into a non-macho position. [Figure 1]

Carlos Franqui, director of Radio Rebelde and one of Castro's twelve disciples who came down from the mountain in 1959 to serve as editor of the newspaper Revolución, describes how machismo affects politics. He wrote:

[The politics of gang warfare in the mid-1940's is] disguised as revolutionary politics. Actually, it was a collective exercise in machismo, which is its own ideology. Machismo creates its own way of life, one in which everything negative is feminine. As our Mexican friends Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes point out, the feminine is screwed beforehand . . . [Machismo's] negative hero is the dictator (one of Batista's motto was "Batista is the Man"), and its positive hero is the rebel. They are at odds in politics, but they both love power. And both despise homosexuality, as if every macho had his hidden gay side . . . The two brands of machismo, conservative and rebel, are quite different. The conservatives (generals, soldiers, police) always defend the establishment, while the rebels attack it. Nevertheless, both groups share the same views about morality and culture. They hate popular culture, and all the Indian and black elements in it. Anything that isn't white is no good.[14]

SEXISM

Machismo moves beyond the oppression of women. Although a detail review of the Cuban patriarchal system would reveal a multitude of examples showing how sexism maintains women's repression, this article will instead examine how the overall conquest of "virgin land" was made possible by the initial conquest of female bodies. Cuban machismo and the establishment of patria (Motherland) occurred within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power. Here, land and nationalism are gendered. The land requiring subjection is assigned a female body. Several postcolonialist scholars perceive nationhood as resting on this male projection of identity.[15] The construction of patria, la Cuba de ayer or Cuba Libre, along patriarchal lines, can be understood as a gender discourse. For Resident Cubans, Fidel Castro serves as the father figure, el señor. For Exilic Cubans, the late Mas Canosa was the head of the household, el patrón. Below both exists feminine land, needing the masculinity of those who will construct patria upon her.

Earlier, the first creation of Cuba required the reduction of women to the status of representational objects.[16] As Mörner suggests, the European conquest of the so-called "New World" began with the literal sexual conquest of the native American woman.[17] Todorov recounts an incident involving Miguel de Cuneo who participated in Columbus' second journey. Cuneo attempted to seduce an indigenous woman given to him by Columbus. When she resisted, he whipped her and proceeded to rape her.[18] The image of land and woman merge. Another example illustrates how Columbus saw the world. To him, "[The world] is like a very round ball, and on one part of it is placed something like a woman's nipple."[19] The concept of "virgin land" represents the myth of empty land. If land is indeed virgin, then, according McClintock, the indigenous population has no aboriginal territorial claim, allowing for the colonizer "the sexual and military insemination of an interior void."[20]

The first European to gaze upon the naked female body of the indigenous people and the virgin land under their feet was Christopher Columbus.[21] Mason shows Columbus' first reaction was not the lack of political organization of the island's inhabitants nor the geographical placing of these islands within the world scheme. Rather, by eroticizing the naked bodies of these inhabitants, visions of Paradise were conjured up, with Columbus receiving the Amerindians' awe and love. Columbus and his men are invited to penetrate this new erotic continent which offered herself without resistance.[22] These naked bodies and "empty" land merge the sexual and the economic preoccupations of the would-be colonizers.[23] Virgin land awaits to be inseminated with man's seed of civilization. A reconstruction and reversal exposing the hidden transcripts of oppression through machismo, provides a fundamental step toward dismantling Cuban oppression as manifested on both sides of the Florida Straits. On our way to that task, we must address next the issue of racism.

RACISM

Race is not a biological factor differentiating humans, rather, it is a social construction whose function is the oppression of the Object-Other for the benefit of the Subject. Racism against the Cuban's Others, Amerindians, Africans, Chinese and any combination thereof, is normalized by the social structures of both Resident and Exilic Cubans. Because domination of a group of people by another is usually conducted by the males of the dominant culture, it becomes crucial to understand the construction of this domination as seen through the eyes of the oppressor. Our patriarchal structure projects unto my "darker" Other the position occupied by women regardless of the Other's gender. For this reason, it is valid to explore Cuban racism as a form of machismo.

By examining the Spaniard's domestication of the Taínos (of the Arawakan nation), I will expose the original typology of intra-Cuban oppression. As previously mentioned, the macho subdues virgin land, relegating her inhabitants to landlessness. According to Kant, "When America was discovered . . . it was considered to be without owners since its inhabitants were considered as nothing."[24] The gendering of Taíno men as non-machos occurred early in the conquest, and provides a prototype for all subsequent forms of Cuban oppression.

By 1535 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, chronicler of the colonization venture, referred to the Amerindians as sodomites in the Fifth Book of his Historia General y Natural de las Indias (General and Natural History of the Indies). There exists no hard evidence about attitudes toward homosexuality among the aborigines, but de Oviedo claims that anal intercourse by men with members of both sexes was considered normal.[25] In a report given to the Council of the Indies by the first bishop of Santa Marta, Dominican friar Tomás Ortiz wrote, "The men from the mainland in the Indies eat human flesh and are more given to sodomy than all generations ever."[26] Juan Suárez de Peralta, a resident of Mexico in the late sixteenth century, describes with obvious distaste, the inverted patriarchal of Amerindian society when he writes:

The custom [of the Amerindians is] that the women do business and deal with trade and other public offices while the men remain at home and weave and embroider. They [the women] urinate standing while the men do so seated; and they have no reluctance to perform their natural deeds in public.[27]

By the eighteenth century, the supposed prevalence of homosexuality among the Amerindians was assumed. Like other "primitives" of the world, the typical Amerindian was regarded as a homosexual and an onanist, who also practiced cannibalism and bestiality. These sins against nature threatened the institution of the patriarchal family and by extension, the very fabric of civilized society. The supposed effeminacy of the Amerindians was further demonstrated by emphasizing their lack of body hair and pictorially displaying their supposedly small genitals. Simultaneously, the Amerindian woman was portrayed with excessively masculine features and exaggerated sexual traits, justifying the need for macho Spaniards to enter the land and restore a proper phallocentric social order.[28]

By constructing people of the periphery as non-machos, you also assign them natural function in life: service to the Spaniard machos. Colonization becomes a form of sexism, the domestication of the indigenous male Other as woman. Thus, Sepúlveda illustrates the masculine superiority of Spaniards to Amerindians by saying that they relate "as women to men."[29] This feminine space constructed for Amerindians was established through brutality. By linking sodomy to cannibalism and bestiality, the Spaniards' treatment of Amerindians was justified because they violated both divine rule and the natural order of both men and animals. The enslavement of the Amerindian was God's punishment for their sins and the crimes they committed against nature.

Spaniards seeing Taínos in the position of women, waged a ruthless war against el vicio nefando (the nefarious sin - a euphemism for sodomy).[30] This crusade was waged with righteous indignation on the part of the colonizers, who had the Amerindians castrated and forced them to eat their own dirt-encrusted cojones.³¹ So also, conquistador Vasco Núnez de Valboa had forty Amerindians thrown to the dogs on charges of sodomy.[32] Spanish machismo entailed contempt and rage toward the non-macho, which displayed itself in barbarous acts. Las Casas writes, "[The Spanish solders] would test their swords and their macho strength on captured Indians and place bets on slicing off heads or cutting of bodies in half with one blow."[33] According to the licenciado Gil Gregorio, the only hope for the Amerindian was acquiring civilization by working for the Spaniards so that they could learn how to live "like men."[34] Meanwhile, their not being machos allowed the Spaniards to take Amerindian women and daughters by force without respect or consideration of their honor or matrimonial ties.[35]

Cuba's African population also was categorized as feminine. Undergirding the construction of race is the perception that blacks are non-machos.³⁶ Quoting various anthropologists of his time (i.e., Klemm), Fernando Ortiz, the Cuban sociologist, classifies humans into two groups: active or masculine, and passive or feminine. Using morphology, he decided that African skulls reveal feminine characteristics.[37] Machismo manifested as racism can be observed in the comments of the nineteenth century Cuban theologian José Augustín Caballero, who wrote, "In the absence of black females with whom to marry, all blacks [become] masturbators, sinners and sodomites" (italics mine).[38] Until emancipation, the plantation ratio of males to females was 2:1, with some plantations imbalances reaching 4:1.[39] Usually, black women lived in the cities and towns. Hence, slave quarters, known as barracónes, consisted solely of men, creating the reputation of their non-macho roles as voiced by Caballero. Skewed sex ratios made black males the targets of the white master who as bugarrones could rape them. The wives and children of the male slave were also understood to be the master's playthings.[40]

Paradoxically, while the African man is constructed as a non-macho, he is feared for the potential of asserting his machismo, particularly with white Cuban women. White women who succumb to the black man, it was thought, are not responsible for their actions because they were bewitched through African black magic.[41] Thus, attraction becomes witchcraft and rape. Likewise, the seductive negra (Negress) is held responsible for compromising the virtues of the white men.[42] A popular Cuban saying was "there is no sweet tamarind fruit, nor a virgin mulatto girl." Fanon captures the white Caribbean's sentiments when he wrote:

As for the Negroes, they have tremendous sexual powers. What do you expect, with all the freedom they have in their jungles! They copulate at all times and in all places. They are really genital. They have so many children that they cannot even count them. Be careful, or they will flood us with little mulattoes . . . One is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis. (italics mine)[43]

The African-Cuban may be a walking penis, but a penis that lacks cojones. White Cubans project their own fears and forbidden desires upon the African-Cuban through a fixation with the black penis which threatens white civilization. The black penis is kept separate from power and privilege that come only through one's cojones. Casal documents this white Cuban fixation with the black penis in recounting oral history of blacks being hung on lamp posts by their genitals in the central plazas throughout Cuba during the 1912 massacre of blacks.[44] The massacre was fueled by news reports of so-called black revolt leading to the rape of white women. This peculiar way of "decorating" the lamp posts perfectly express the sexual mythology created by Cuban white racism.

In this analysis we must also include Asians. Asian laborers were brought to Cuba as "indentured" servants, an alternative to African slavery. Landowners were not necessarily interested in obtaining new slaves. Their concern was to procure domesticated workers. Although Coolies were technically "free," their conditions were as horrific, if not worse than slavery.[45] Many died during their long voyage to Cuba, ironically, on the same ships previously used to transport Africans. As in slave-ships, an iron grating kept Coolies separated from the quarterdeck. Cannons were positioned to dominate the decks in the event of a rebellion. A Pacific Middle Passage was thus created. In some instances, almost half the Coolie "cargo" perished in transport.[46]

Cuban structures of white supremacy constructed the Coolie laborer similarly to African slaves. Like Africans, few Chinese women were transported to Cuba. Market demand dictated the need for young men to work the sugar fields, not women. According to a 1861 Cuban census, there were 34,834 Chinese in Cuba of which 57 were women. By 1871, out of 40,261 Chinese in Cuba, only 66 were women.[47] As with Africans, the lack of women created the construction of the Chinese sexual identity as homosexual. Cuban ethnologist Ortiz credits the Chinese for introducing homosexuality (as well as opium) to Cuba.[48] For Martinez-Alier, the consequence of Chinese rejection by the white and black woman led society to conclude that they succumbed to "unspeakable vices," a euphemism for sodomy.[49]

The Cuban Asian, African and Amerindian share a sacred bond. These three elements of our Cuban identity represent God's "crucified people," incorporated into the expansion and development of capitalism. These elements of our ethos literally bear the sins of the modern world. As a crucified people, who are seen as the feminine Other by machos, they provide an essential soteriological perspective on our history.[50] Sobrino, developing the concept of a crucified people, maintains God chose those oppressed in history and made them the principal means of salvation, just as he chose the "suffering servant," the crucified Christ, to bring salvation to the world.[51] This theme of solidarity between the crucified God and the suffering of the non-machos (in our case the Amerindians, Africans and Asians) is supplemented with atonement for the macho perpetrators (the Europeans: Spain and the United States). Recipients of society's power and pretensions, the emancipation of the non-macho, crucified people also liberates the rest of society.

CLASSISM

The Amerindian, African and Asian were constructed as feminine for the benefit of the machos. Similarly, those who were poor, regardless of their whiteness, were also seen as being emasculated. Whatever wealth Cuba produced was accomplished by the sweat, blood and corpses of God's crucified people. If Amerindians, African and Asians represent the oppressed elements of our culture, then our Spaniard and Anglo roots represent the oppressive elements. Classism among Cubans can be understood as a manifestation of machismo where a dialectic is created between the subject (Spaniard and Anglo men) and the object (Amerindian, African, and Asian), consisting of the continuous progressive subordination of the object for the purposes of the subject. Writing the narrative process by those with cojones constructs non-Europeans as a secondary race needing civilization to be mediated through the paternal white hands of the macho.

The macho subject sees himself in the mirror of commodity purchasing as one able to provide for family, thus strengthening the patriarchal system. For Exilic Cubans, Cuba's economic difficulties proved Castro's inability to provide, forfeiting his role as patrón, as the head of family. Re-membering la Cuba de ayer as economically advanced, like the United States, justifies the need to reeducate Resident Cubans in a post-Castro Cuba so as to return to her former glory. Their inability to provide demonstrates the Resident Cubans' lack of manhood, and like children they require instruction in the ways of freedom and capitalism. The relationship Exilic Cubans hope to reestablish is one where Miami positions itself "on top of" La Habana.

Historically, the top of Cuba's social hierarchy was occupied by whites, divided into a variety of stratified economic classes. Regardless of the degree of whiteness, all enjoyed equal political privileges: namely, the right to own as many slaves as desired, and the right to acquire wealth in any manner whatsoever. The apex consisted of whites born in Spain called peninsulares who dominated the property market. They also dominated the commercial sector and held the majority of colonial, provincial and municipal posts. They were preponderant in the Cuban delegation to the Spanish parliament, and in the military and the clergy. They represented the majority of high court presidents, judges, magistrates, prosecutors, solicitors, clerks and scribes. More than 80 percent of the peninsular population was qualified to vote, compared to 24 percent of the entire Cuban population.[52] The peninsulares saw themselves in Lacan's mirror as machos, while viewing the white criollos (those born on the Island) as effeminate and culturally backward. A frequent peninsular charge against the criollos was their effeminacy, their non-macho position.[53]

Below the peninsulares in the social hierarchy were these same white criollos. Antagonism between them and the peninsulares was checked by a shared racial fear. At the bottom of the white stratum were the monteros or guajiros who lived in the shadows of the white elite. While their lifestyle economically differed little from the slaves, peninsulares and white criollos conferred upon them the distinction of being superior to all the non-whites.[54] Valuing their elevation above blacks, they served as vigilantes during "slave revolts," showing intense viciousness in their suppression of blacks.[55]

After the Spanish-American War, a dependency relationship with Cuba developed. It was, then, on the safe domain of Cuban land where the United States first launched its venture into world imperialism.[56] Maturing as an empire, the United States was less interested in acquiring territory than in controlling peripheral economies to obtain financial benefits for the center. A dependency relationship with Cuba, masked under the guise of independence, was preferable to incorporating an "effeminate" people into the Union. Theodore Roosevelt and his virile "rough riders" established the myth of United States' masculinity later incarnated as John Wayne and the Marlboro man. Attributing effeminacy to the Cubans justified the economic control of the Cuban periphery. Secretary of War Elihu Root, referring to Cuba, said it best: "It is better to have the favors of a lady with her consent, after judicious courtship, than to ravish her."[57]

On March 16, 1889, an article published in The Manufacturer questioned whether the United States should annex Cuba. Developing a case against it, the author writes:

The Cubans are not . . . desirable. Added to the defects of the paternal race are effeminacy and an aversion to all effort, truly to the extent of illness. They are helpless, lazy, deficient in morals, and incapable by nature and experience of fulfilling the obligations of citizenship in a great and free republic. Their lack of virile strength and self-respect is shown by the apathy with which they have submitted to Spanish oppression for so long. (italics are my own)[58]

According to the Manufacturer, Cuban submission to Spain identified the Cubans as an emasculated people, unworthy of being accepted into the macho Union.[59]

The economic result of colonialism was the reduction of machos to effeminate positions. The 1959 revolution was an act to reclaim our masculinity. Likewise, the exilic experience for those of us who came to these shores was in part the establishment of our machismo along North American paradigms as accomplished through the capture of Dade County's political, social, economic and cultural power structures. To my mind, white Cuban men with power and privilege in both communities continue to benefit from repressive social structures based on the concept of machismo.

CONCLUSION

When machos gaze upon the Latino's Other, what do we see? How we "see" them, define our existential selves as machos. To "see" implies a position of authority, a privileged point of view. "Seeing" is not a mere innocent metaphysical phenomenon concerning the transmittance of light waves. It encompasses a mode of thought which radically transforms the object being seen into an object for possession. The white Latino elite macho understands who they are when they tell themselves who they are not. Machos as subject are defined by contrasting themselves with the seen objects: Amerindians, Africans, Asians, women, and the poor. In defining what it means to be a macho by emphasizing the differences with our Others, there exists established power relations which give meaning to those differences.

Specifically, when a macho gazes upon one of God's crucified peoples, they perceive a group which is effeminate. When the macho looks at himself in Lacan's mirror, he does not see a maricon hence he projects what he is not into his Other so as to define himself as a white, civilized macho. The power of seeing becomes internalized, naturalized and legitimized in order to mask the dominant culture's position of power. Our task as Hispanic ethicists is to move toward dismantling machismo, to go beyond machismo, by shattering the illusions created in our hall of mirrors.

[1]. According to Shute, sexism names social structures and systems where the "actions, practices, and use of laws, rules and customs limit certain activities of one sex, but do not limit those same activities of other people of the other sex." See Sara Shute, Sexist Language and Sexism, Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis, ed. by Mary Vetterling-Braggin (Boston: Littlefield, Adams, and Company, 1981) 27.

[2]. Mujerista Theology is both a response to the sexism existing within our Hispanic community and the racial, ethnic and class prejudice existing within the Anglo feminist community who ignores the fundamental ways white women benefit from the oppression of women of color. A mujerista theology attempts to find liberation as a member of the Hispanic community who obliterates those institutions which "generate massive poverty, systematic death, and immense inhumane suffering" so that all, women and men, can find fullness of "life, justice, and liberation." See María Pilar Aquino, "Doing Theology from the Perspective of Latin American Women," We are a People: Initiatives in Hispanic American Theology, ed. by Roberto S. Goizueta (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) 90. Absent from the discourse is the privileged position occupied by Exilic Cuban Latinas. Obviously, Exilic Cuban women still face discrimination, especially outside of Dade County. But, the existence of an ethnic enclave facilitated Exilic Cuban women in obtaining higher status jobs otherwise unavailable. Recently arriving Latinas often obtain employment characterized as dangerous, low paying and degrading. This was also the case with Cuban women arriving in the 1960s. Cuban women were able to gain employment faster than their male counterparts, because the unskilled jobs that were available preferred women who could be given lower wages. By 1970, Exilic Cuban women constituted the largest proportionate group of working women in the Untied States. Their role as wage-earners was more a response to economic survival than a response to the feminist movement of equality. See María Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994, (Berkeley: University of California, 1996) 109. Eventually, the establishment of the economic ethnic enclave of Miami shielded more recent arrivals from the predicament still faced by other non-Cuban Latinas. Among some Exilic Cuban women, status and social prestige are measured by the ability to hire una negrita (a black girl - regardless of age) or una india (a mestiza) to come and clean house. Missing from a mujerista discourse is how race and class impacts intra-Latina location and oppression.

[3]. Machismo has recently become a popularized term. Although it is used synonymously with sexism, it originally referred to a celebration of conventional masculinities. The term machismo is neither solely associated with the oppression of women, nor solely used in a pejorative sense. Machismo described the values associated with being a man, a macho. Similarly, the celebration of female attributes is known as hembrismo. See Ian Lumsden, Machos, Maricones and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996) 217. A popular Cuban saying is "soy tan hembra como tú macho" (I am as much woman as you are man).

[4]. Antonio Maceo, Cuba's black general during the Wars for Independence, not only symbolized the hopes of Cuba's blacks, but embodied the macho qualities of honor, bravery, patriotism and the best that Cubans can hope to be. His exploits on and off the battlefield served as testimony to his testosterone gall creating the Cuban compliment "Como Maceo" (Like Maceo) said while upwardly cupping one's hand as if to weigh their enormity. Blacks who demonstrate white qualities of machismo may receive admiration and praise even while being denied earned positions of power and privilege within Cuban society. Likewise, women who demonstrate macho attributes will receive praise for their manliness while being denied positions of responsibility. For example, José Martí, father of Cuban independence, honored Maceo's mother, Mariana Grajales Maceo, for impressive procreation of male patriots while glossing over, if not totally ignoring the efforts of Cuban women of all colors who raised funds, aided refugees, outfitted insurgent forces, attracted Anglo support, fought as mambisas (female freedom fighters), and served as spies and couriers. Women in Cuba Libre were to serve as repository of inspiration, beauty, purity and morality lest the unleashed powers of female passion generate the destructive passion of men. For a brief history of Martí's attitudes toward women and their role in Cuba Libre see Nancy A Hewitt, "Engendering Independence: Las Patriotas of Tampa and the Social Vision of José Martí," José Martí in the United States: The Florida Experience, ed. by Louis A. Pérez, Jr. (Tempe: Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies, 1995) 23-32.

[5]. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1990) 115-45.

[6]. Lumsden in Machos, Maricones and Gays, quotes Castro as stating, "[Revolutionary Cuba] needed strong men to fight wars, sportsmen, men who had no psychological weakness. (53-54)" Additionally, in a 1965 interview with El Mundo, Samuel Feijoo, one of Cuba's most prominent revolutionary intellectuals stated, "No homosexual [represents] the revolution, which is a matter for men, of fists and not of feathers, of courage and not of trembling. (61)" Likewise, Exilic Cubans consider patria building the task of real men of valor. Joan Didion, Miami (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1987) cites an interview with The Miami Herald, where Miriam Arocena, wife of a convicted Exilic Cuban terrorist responsible for several bombings, told the reporter, "This [her husband's terrorist actions] is a thing for men of valor, not for weaklings like you. (99)"

[7]. Between 1965-68 thousands of artists, intellectuals, hippies, university students, Jehovah Witnesses and homosexuals were abducted by the State Secret Police and interned, without trial, in Military Units for Assistance to Production (U.M.A.P.), reeducation labor camps. Because they were dissidents to the normative gaze, they were constructed as homosexuals as illustrated by the slogan posted at the camp's entrance: "Work will make men of you."

[8]. Ruth Behar, "Introduction," Bridges to Cuba, ed. by Ruth Behar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 12.

[9]. Lumsden in Machos, Maricones, and Gays cites Mirta Mulhare de la Torre's (no relation) doctoral dissertation (University of Pittsburgh, 1969) who studied Cuban sexuality: She writes, "The dominant mode of behavior for el macho, the male, [was] the sexual imperative . . . A man's supercharged sexual physiology [placed] him on the brink of sexual desire at all times and at all places. (31)"

[10]. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994) 41-45.

[11]. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967) 63. For Fanon, the fantasy of the colonized man is to occupy the space of power and privilege belonging to the colonizer. McClintock points out that the desire of the colonizer differs between the man and the woman. The white male has the luxury of seizing any woman of color, while the white woman who sexually engages the man of color accepts him. Instead of seizing, it is giving. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) 362.

[12]. For a more detailed discussion on the construction of Cuban homosexuality see: Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich, Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes Toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey (Markham, Ontario: New American Library, 1989); Henk van de Boogaard and Kathelijine van Kammen, "Cuba: We Cannot Jump over Our Own Shadow," IGA Pink Book, 1985: A Global View of Lesbian and Gay Oppression and Liberation (Amsterdam: COC, 1985); Lumsden, Machos; and Flavio Risech, "Political and Cultural Cross-Dressing: Negotiating A Second Generation Cuban-American Identity," Bridges to Cuba: Puentes a Cuba, ed. by Ruth Behar (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995).

[13]. Missing from this analysis is the space occupied by lesbians, known by Cubans as tortilleras (derogatory term translated as dyke). While maricones constitute a "scandal" as men forsaking their manhood, tortilleras are usually ignored due to the overall machismo of the society that grounds its sexuality on the macho's desires, repressing feminine sexuality. Tolerance of lesbians is partly due to their unimportance to the macho's construction of sexuality. They simply have no space in the dominant construction. For lesbians, as well as homosexual men, the adage "se dice nada, se hace todo (say nothing, do everything)" remains the accepted closeted norm of the Cuban community.

[14]. Carlos Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel: A Memoir, trans. by Alfred MacAdam (New York: Random House, 1984) 150.

[15]. Several postcolonialist scholars who analyze the gendering of nationhood and land are Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Others (New York: Routledge, 1990); McCintock, Imperial Leather; David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1984).

[16]. Spaniards' understanding of racism was unlike the North American which passed laws prohibiting racial mixing. For Spaniards sexual relations were as natural as breathing or eating. Spaniard men took indigenous women as bed-partners, concubines or wives. The children of these unions, claimed by the Spaniards as their own, took their father's name. It is estimated that by 1514, 40 percent of Spanish colonizers had indigenous wives. By 1570, in accordance with the Council of Trent elevation of marriage to a sacrament, the Crown forbade married men from traveling to the Americas for more then six months without their family. This resulted with more single men heading west, stimulating a rise of a miscegenate population. See Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967) 35-52; and Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) 199.

[17]. Mörner, Race Mixture.

[18]. Todorov, 48-49.

[19]. Ibid., 16.

[20]. McClintock, 30.

[21]. The entry in his travel diary for Thursday, October 11^th reads:

Immediately [the morning of Friday the 12th, after land was sited at 2:00 a.m.] they saw naked people, and the admiral went ashore in the armed boat . . . The admiral called two captains . . . and said they should bear witness and testimony how he, before them all, took possession of the island . . . They [the land's inhabitants] all go naked as their mothers bore them, and the women also . . . they were very well built, with very handsome bodies and very good faces.

See Christopher Columbus, The Journal of Christopher Columbus, trans. by Cecil Jane (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1960) 22-24.

[22]. Columbus records indigenous accounts about an island called Matino believed to be entirely peopled by women, see Columbus, (January 15, 1493) 150-51. Rather then visiting it, Columbus returns to Spain, possibly indicating that he and his crew have had their fill of native, erotic women.

[23]. Mason, 170.

[24] Immanuel Kant, "Zum ewigen Frieden," Schriften von 1790-1796 von Immanuel Kant (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1914) 444; quoted in Luis N. Rivera Pagán, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville: Westminister/John Knox Press, 1992) 11.

[25]. Mason, 56-57

[26]. Francisco López de Gómez, "Historia General de las Indias (1552)," Vol. 22, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles ed. by Enrique de Vedía (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1946) 155-294; quoted in Rivera Pagán, A Violent Evangelism, 137.

[27]. Juan Suárez de Peralta, Tratado del descubrimiento de las Indias (Mexico, 1589) 5; quoted in Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 174-76. Pagden also quotes Cieza de León who wrote, "Many of them (as I have been reliably informed) publicly and openly practiced the nefarious sin of sodomy." Also, he quotes Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo as stating, "[They even wore jewels depicting] the diabolical and nefarious act of sodomy."

[28]. Mason, 67, 173.

[29]. Rivera Pagán, 135.

[30]. Sven Lovén, Origins of the Tainan Culture, West Indies, trans. by anonymous (Göteborg: Elanders Bokryckeri Akfiebolag, 1935) 529.

[31]. Diana Iznaga, "Introduction" to Fernando Ortiz, Los negros curros (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1986) xviii-xix.

[32]. Mason, 56.

[33]. Bartolomé de Las Casas, History of the Indies, ed. and trans. by Andree Collard (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 94. Las Casas' accounts of the barbarism inflicted upon the indigenous people lead to the construction of the Black Legend. The Black Legend justified the superiority of Protestantism over Catholicism for Anglos, diverting attention from the treatment of the indigenous population of North America. Regardless of how the Black Legend was constructed for Anglo consumption, it cannot be denied that within one lifetime, an entire culture of a people, developed upon the Islands of the Caribbean, was exterminated. Those few Taínos who physically survived were assimilated within the dominant Spanish culture.

[34]. Pagden, 49.

[35]. Bartolomé de Las Casa, "Historia de las Indias" in Two Worlds: The Indian Encounter with the European 1492-1509, ed. and trans. by S. Lyman Tyler (Slat Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988) 156.

[36]. In spite of machismo positioning the black man as a woman, it must be noted that within Cuban African culture, sexism also is prevalent. Ibos girls are taught to obey and serve men while boys learn to look down at their mothers. The machista ethos of the abakuá only allow intercourse if the man is on top and is the only one who is active. See Lumsden, 47, 221-22; Enrique Sosa, El carabalí (La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1984) 50-51; and Manuel Martínez Casanova and Nery Gómez Abréu, La sociedad secreta abakuá (Santa Clara: Universidad Central de Las Villas, n.d.) 16-17. The bantú uses the word "man" to solely apply to the members of their nation. All other Africans are not men. See Fernando Ortiz, El engaño de las razas (La Habana: Editorial De Ciencias Sociales, 1975) 37.

[37]. Ortiz, El engaño, 60, 88.

[38]. José Agustín Caballero y Rodríguez de la Barra, "Exposición relativa al matrimonio entre esclavos y otros asuntos relacionados con la población de la isla, así como algunos aspectos de la vida sexual de los esclavos," C. M. Morales no. 9 (La Habana: Biblioteca Nacional José Martí); quoted in Lumsden, 50.

[39]. Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1970) 76-78; and Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 87.

[40]. White Cubans constructed an illness that could only be cured by having sex with a black woman. In Esteban Montejo The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, ed. by Miguel Barnet and trans. by Jocasta Innes (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), he wrote:

There was one type of sickness the whites picked up, a sickness of the veins and male organs. It could only be got rid of with black women; if the man who had it slept with a Negress he was cured immediately. (42)

[41]. A case study of this phenomenon is presented by Fernando Ortiz, Los negros brujos: Apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal (Miami: New House Publishers, 1973) 325-30.

[42]. Quoting Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Ortiz shows how the myth of the black man's overly extended penis (when compared to the white man) and the white woman's small clitoris (when compared to the black woman) creates a need for precautions least the white woman be damaged, as well as spoiled. See Ortiz, El engaño, 87-88.

[43]. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 157-59, 170. Fanon continues by asking:

Is the lynching of the Negro not a sexual revenge? We know how much of sexuality there is in all cruelties, tortures, beatings. One has only to reread a few pages of Marquis de Sade to be easily convinced of the fact. (159)

[44]. Lourdes Casal, "Race Relations in Contemporary Cuba," The Cuban Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. by Philip Brenner, William M. LeoGrande, Donna Rich and Daniel Siegel (New York: Grove Press, 1989) 472.

[45]. I use the word Coolie to refer to the Chinese laborer because this word best describes their social location of oppression. The word Coolie is composed of two Chinese characters, coo and lie. Coo is defined as "suffering with pain;" lie means "laborer." Hence the Coolie is the "laborer who suffers with pain," adequately describing their condition in Cuba.

[46]. The first shipment of Coolies by Waldrop and Company sailed from Amoy on February 7, 1853 with 803 Chinese and arrived in La Habana with only 480. In 1859, the Spanish frigate Gravina embarked with 352 Coolies and arrived with 82. See Duvon Clough Corbitt, A Study of the Chinese in Cuba, 1847-1947 (Wilmore, KY: Asbury College, 1971) 16, 54. For a graphic documented description of the suffering and humiliation caused by their brutal treatment by "civilized" Cubans, see Ch'ên Lanpin, Chinese Emigration: The Cuba Commission Report of the Commission sent by China to Ascertain the Condition of Chinese Coolies in Cuba, trans. by A. MacPherson and A. Huber (Shanghai: The Imperial Maritime Customs Press, 1876); and, Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 3-124.

[47]. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 188. By 1942, the Chinese Consulate in Cuba had 18,484 Chinese registered, of which 56 were women. Social and legal regulations forbade African (or white) and Asian intermarriage. See Corbitt, 114-15.

[48]. According to Fernando Ortiz, in Los negros brujos: Apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal (Miami: New House Publishers, 1973), "The yellow race brought the addiction of opium, its homosexual vices and other refined corruptions of its centuries-old civilization. (19)"

[49]. Martinez-Alier, 79. Early during Castro's regime, China sent over a shipment of "socialist" condoms. Machos refused to use them claiming they were "too small," thus contributing to both the myth of the Chinese's small penis and to a national rise in pregnancy. See Carlos Franqui, Family Potrait with Fidel: A Memoir, trans. by Alfred MacAdam (New York: Random House, 1984) 146.

[50]. Ignacio Ellacuría, "The Crucified People," Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. by Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino and trans. by Phillip Berryman and Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993) 580-81.

[51]. Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth, trans. by P. Burns and F. McDonagh (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993) 259-60.

[52]. Franklin W Knight, Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1970) 88-89; James S. and Judith E. Olson, Cuban Americans: From Trauma to Triumph (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995) 13; and Pérez, Cuba, 135, 152.

[53]. Robert L. Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1988) 48, 91.

[54]. The lyrics of a slow rumba sung in Matanzas by slaves after emancipation serve as a hidden-transcript describing the new economic reality for both the ex-slaves and the poor whites:

En el año `44 In the year `44 (year of a preemptive violent repression toward a supposed slave revolt)

yo `taba en el ingenio I was on the sugar mill

En el año `44, negra, In the year `44, negra,

yo `taba en el ingenio I was on the sugar mill

Ahora, ahora Now, now,

negro con blanco black with white

chapea cañaverá weeding in the canefields

See Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 255.

[55]. Knight, Caribbean, 177; Olson and Olson, 12; and Paquette, 43.

[56]. Earlier conquests of Texas and Northern Mexico represented the expansionist ideology of extending the United States boundaries and physically possessing and repopulating the new lands. Cuba represented a shift toward imperialism. The late nineteenth century represents a transition in the United States from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism. This new stage of capitalism merged with imperialism and found its first expression in Cuba.

[57]. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Essays on Cuban History: Historiography and Research (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995) 39.

[58]. José Martí, "Manufacturer's Do We Want Cuba?" Our America by José Martí: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, ed. by Philip S. Foner and trans. by Elinor Randall, Juan de Onís and Roslyn Held Foner (New York: The Monthly Review Press, 1977) 229.

[59]. Martí found it necessary to defend Cuban machismo. In "A Vindication of Cuba," Our America, he responds:

Because our half-breeds and city-bred young men are generally of delicate physique, of suave courtesy, and ready words, hiding under the glove that polishes the poem the hand that fells the foe - are we to be considered as the Manufacturer does consider us an "effeminate" people? . . . These "effeminate" Cubans had once courage enough, in the face of a hostile government, to carry on their left arms for a week the mourning-band for Lincoln. (236)