“El mundo de los enfermitos”. Social health, nationalism and sexuality in Cuba during the sixties

• In Event: Narraciones paranoicas de la enfermedad, la degeneración y el contagio en la cultura cubana (XIX-XX)

Abstract

In this paper I want to discuss the ways in which Cuban nation was perceived by the revolutionary nationalism as a “sick body” during the sixties. In 1959 the moral panic was the frame to break up with all the imaginaries tied to the former government. By then, the political rhetoric was engage in a crusade against sins and vices to ensure the national regeneration and at the same time, political and social control over alternative identities and social dissidence. However, in the sixties that frame was replaced by a complicated “social engineering” system. In this regard, the paper will be oriented to assemble an analytic framework to analyze the linkages between nationalism, sexuality and the notion of “social illness”. By using medical, psychiatric and propaganda sources, among others I will argue about how the medical discourse was essential in the production of national stereotypes, in the politicization of sexuality and legitimization of rehabilitation´s politics and reeducation developed by the revolutionary pedagogy.

Author

• Abel S Sierra-Madero, New York University