MY FAVORITE HOTEL in Havana is the Inglaterra, overlooking the Parque Central, one of Havana’s oldest gay cruising areas. It has been operating as a hotel since 1856, which probably makes it the oldest continuously operating hotel in the city. It had Old World charm, however run-down, especially during the first years of my stay in the mid-1990s, before old Havana started to be renovated with the support of unesco. The fact that Cuba’s most respected military general, the “Bronze Titan,” Antonio Maceo—allegedly the only soldier in history to survive 24 bullet wounds—stayed there in 1890 was less exciting to me than the fact that Federico García Lorca did so on a rainy night in 1930. Did Lorca, whose Cuban experience brought out homoerotic elements in his work, note the clandestine cruising activity in Parque Central opposite the hotel?
Lorca’s visit, his fascination with Cuba, and his interest in both Cuban music and homoerotism have been a great inspiration for me throughout my own Cuban experience. I was therefore delighted to stay at a hotel that he visited, and later on to walk into the García Lorca Auditorium in the majestic Gran Teatro de La Habana, home of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, next-door to the Inglaterra, while conducting field research on Cuban ballet in the early 2000s. This research included in-depth interviews with Cuban gay men who agreed to be part of my research.
THE BALLET NACIONAL DE CUBA is considered one of the world’s leading classical ballet companies. According to Sanjoy Roy, dance critic for The Guardian (London), it “fields world-class dancers while remaining culturally isolated from the wider ballet world” (March 16, 2010). It was founded in 1948 by Cuban prima ballerina Alicia Alonso, who, in spite of being in her eighties and almost blind, was still serving as the ballet’s director until the early 21st century.
Ballet is a highly valued and pampered art form in Cuba—the Ballet Nacional de Cuba above all others.
On February 17, 2003, Granma, the official Cuban daily newspaper, reported with pride on Castro’s visit to the theater to honor the premiere of Tocororo, a ballet choreographed and written by Cuba’s most internationally celebrated ballet dancer, Carlos Acosta. Tocororo tells the story of a young guajiro boy whose dream is to become a ballet dancer in Havana. Granma reported that Fidel “manifested his confidence that the country’s current cultural and educational policies will enable more children, like the lead role in Tocororo, to find new and better horizons through dance.”
While the Ballet Nacional is dedicated to classical ballet, Cuba also has a very well-developed and innovative contemporary dance scene. For more on that topic, I would direct you to Contemporary Dance in Cuba: Técnica Cubana as Revolutionary Movement, by Suki John (2012). But here I will concentrate upon the Ballet Nacional and its performances at Gran Teatro, focusing on the gay space created by its audience.
Most Western literature about ballet dancers and choreographers, to the extent that it concerns itself with their sexuality, takes note of the strong association between ballet and homosexuality. This is not the case in Cuba. Despite the regime’s support, or perhaps because of it, some ballet dancers admitted to me that, although being gay is acceptable among the audience, when it comes to the dancers themselves, there are still many gay male dancers who are deeply closeted. I was secretly told about a homophobic vibe at the Ballet Nacional, where apparently Alicia Alonso discouraged any gay relationships or “outing” in the company. I kept hearing comments about Alonso’s viciously anti-gay stance and how much she was disliked by gay dancers.
In my research on Cuban ballet, one informant, Miguel, formerly a ballet dancer at the Ballet Nacional, told me: “You will be surprised, but most of the [male]dancers are straight or pretend to be, and you always hear anti-gay remarks. I knew about two other gay dancers in the group, but they were in the closet—including myself. I remember sometimes seeing some nice man in the audience staring at me, but although I was interested in him, I was careful not to be noticed by the other dancers with all the eye contact going on.”
Performance in the Audience
But if life in the ballet company provides only a highly restricted space for gay identity, the real gay space takes place in the audience. It is a “space within a space,” hidden within the larger context, a private space that’s unnoticed by outsiders using the same public space. Still, several gay ballet fans told me that it was one of the more popular gay cruising options in Havana.
The fact that the ballet enjoys a uniquely privileged status in Cuban culture explains its heavy sponsorship by the government, which makes tickets affordable and accessible to locals. During my research period in Havana in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, foreigners paid about US$20 for their Ballet Nacional tickets (best seats), while Cubans paid the equivalent of eleven to 26 cents. This makes ballet the prime meeting space for Cuban gays who dislike the gay fiestas (parties) and other spaces where they have to compete with tourists for local gay guys. For a Cuban, it’s cheaper to go to the ballet than to a fiesta, and thus a much better place for local-to-local gay interaction, free of jineteros (hustlers), as Rubén told me: “In the fiestas I have no chance to meet a young Cuban guy, with all the rich tourists around. And most of the Cuban guys there are jineteros. The same at Rogelio Conde [Bar de Las Estrellas, a famous drag-show bar], which I cannot afford unless a foreigner invites me, and then I’m stuck with him. I have a much better chance to meet a serious, genuine Cuban guy at the ballet.”
I attended seven different performances of the Ballet Nacional during my fieldwork in Havana and noticed some lively gaydar activity—cruising and socializing—already underway among those waiting in line, though in a discreet way, since they were still outdoors. This activity increased in the hallway, which was a more secure space, and it became even more obvious in the bar during the intermission. During my first Ballet Nacional experience, with Rubén, I noted discreet looks, smiles, and acknowledgments being exchanged just outside the theater and when waiting in the line to get my ticket. Many of his friends (older, more “discreet” types than those I encountered in the outdoor weekend gathering place on the Malecón seaside promenade, and at the fiestas) merely looked our way and nodded slightly. But once inside the hall and during the intermission, they approached us, their mannerisms changing from reserved to “obvious” and even campy, while erotic comments were made about other men in the bar. One characteristic of this space was indeed the lack of tourists and the way it was not financially or socially motivated by their presence. Most of the bar and hall “gaydar” activity and encounters were between Cubans.
It is not only Cuban gays who consider the ballet as one of the prime gay meeting places; it is the popular conception among intellectual heterosexuals as well. When I asked Alfredo, age 45, a heterosexual musician, ballet composer, and writer, about where gays in Havana hang around, he replied: “The young, uneducated ones in the Malecón, and the educated ones in the ballet.” Another of my informants, Raúl, age 37, worked for many years as an usher in the Gran Teatro. He himself was not gay but had many gay friends. When asked to describe the gay cruising scene in the theater during performances of the Ballet Nacional as “discreet” or “obvious,” he replied: “It is the most obvious discreet gay space in Havana.”
An important characteristic of the ballet that helps make it a gay space is its escapist nature. From many conversations with Cuban gay ballet aficionados, I encountered four words that came up again and again when referring to ballet: “European,” “international,” “glamor,” and “escape.” The European aura of the ballet provides Havana’s gays with an escapist getaway from their dreary lives. Many feel trapped on the island, lacking any chance to travel or emigrate. They dream of life in Europe as a cradle of art and culture. It is interesting to note that, while the dream destination for life outside Cuba for most heterosexual Cubans, as well as for most younger gays that I met, was the United States, many of the older gays said they would rather live in Europe—especially France, Italy, or Spain. The ballet, which appeals to older gay men (those forty and over), provided an escapist solution based on a “European dream” to life during the “Special Period” following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. As Rubén told me:
I love going to the ballet because I can be myself there. I can close my eyes and dream I am in Paris or Venice, and enjoy the beauty of the music and the dances, feel romantic, in another world, so different from my street in Centro Habana. But I also like it because there are many good-quality Cuban men there, unlike in the Malecón. If you see a man going alone to the ballet, or with only male friends, you know he is gay.
The elevated status of ballet in Cuba and its role as a gay space is full of paradoxes, at least when viewed from a “Western” perspective. One paradox is the fact that ballet, which in much of the world is associated with “high culture” and a social elite that can afford to attend, is affordable and democratic in Havana. For this reason it provides a local-to-local gay meeting space, a place for expressing gay identity that’s more “Cuban” than the Malecón and the gay fiestas. What’s more, it is largely free of jineterismo, the local brand of sex work and hustling. Another paradox is the way in which the ballet shifts the gay space from the stage to the auditorium and the audience.
Camping at the Old Ballet
Performance in its wider sense is to be found everywhere in the Cuban gay scene. The concept of human social behavior as performance has been widely discussed in the social scientific literature, and the performance and performativity of gender in queer theory, by Judith Butler, among others. In the case of Cuban gays, one could speak of the performance of gender, sexuality, race (when applicable), latinidad, and cubanidad. Various other roles come into play in interactions with tourists.
In gay culture, performance is often related to the concept of camp. Camp is an æsthetic or stylistic commitment that celebrates what Susan Sontag, in her classic 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” called a “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Is ballet camp? It’s a matter of interpretation, of course. Drag shows are clearly campy in an intentionally comical way. But classical ballet is “serious.” In fact, as Rubén quipped, ballet is “so serious it is camp.”
In a mini-survey that I conducted during my fieldwork in Havana, I asked forty Cuban gay men who attended both ballet and drag shows on a regular basis why they attended. Did they go purely for fun/pleasure, or was it to socialize with other gays and express their gay identity? (Agree or disagree: “I also go [to the ballet]because I am gay, as a declaration of gay identity, and in order to meet other gays (socializing).”) The results showed a similar pattern for the two venues. For drag shows, thirty percent went for “fun/pleasure only,” while seventy percent also went for “gay identity/socializing.” The corresponding numbers for the ballet were 35 and 65 percent. A large majority of the men were willing to declare their gay identity as an aspect of their attendance at both drag shows and the ballet.
Manuel is a 37-year-old gay pharmacist who regularly goes to both drag shows and the ballet. He took me on a Saturday night to yet another performance of Giselle, by the Ballet Nacional (Alicia Alonso’s favorite piece), and later that evening we went to a drag show at the Bar de Las Estrellas. On our way, I asked him about the different experience in both spaces. Here is his reply:
When I go to the ballet I dress up nicely, very elegant, and put on my special perfume which I received as a gift from my German amigo, and I feel elated. I often go alone to the ballet and hope to meet there the man of my dreams, maybe even a mature and educated Cuban like myself. Money is not everything in life. Now, going to Bar de Las Estrellas is a different story. I will never go there alone, always with a group of friends and a tourist or two who can help us with the price of the tickets and the rum. I wear more outrageous clothes sometimes—more loca if you know what I mean. I drink there a lot and laugh. I don’t really expect to find anyone, just to have a good time and a good laugh, behave like a loca [“raving queen”], which I wouldn’t dare do anywhere else, and forget the daily lucha [struggle], but sometimes I find myself exchanging telephone numbers with a tourist who was there. We gays love this world—el chow [Spanglish for “show”]! We love to see the dancers, the drag queens, we love the chow, but if you have good sensors, you will notice that the real chow is not on the stage but in the audience.
Moshe Morad is the author of Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba (Routledge, 2015), from which this article is excerpted and adapted.
