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This essay reflects upon what happens to the aspirational aesthetic/ethical quality of the fino—with its multiple connotations, ranging from refinement, smoothness, fairness (in color), purity, correctness, education, spiritual goodness, nobility, generosity, glamour, criollo-ness, modesty and demureness, to homosexuality, sexual repression, prudishness, pickiness, favoring of foreign ways, and snobbism—during the Cuban revolution by examining select cultural productions from 1966 to the present. Taking Pedro Manuel González Reinoso’s “Roxy the Red,” a Sovietized Cuban drag libretto, as a point of departure for its characterization of a popular Cuban perception of a “lack” within Soviet aesthetics, this essay then outlines a possible route of the fino through the pre-revolutionary universe of José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (1966); a “transition” evidenced in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres Tristes Tigres (1967) and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s feature Memorias de subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968); into the Soviet Cuban artistic landscape of Enrique Colina’s documentaries, primarily Estética (1984), Chapucerías (1987); and even in the twenty-first century within Arturo Infante’s short Utopía (2004), Colina’s Los “bolos” en Cuba y una eterna amistad (The Russians in Cuba and an Eternal Friendship, 2011), José Manuel Prieto’s Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (2012), and Gertrudis Rivalta’s artistic mock-ups that she began to construct in 2011. Suggesting ways that the very revolution did not abandon this category, but rather adopted it to its end, this essay shows, moreover, how the quest for a certain kind of “harmony” between internal and external composure can be, at times, liberating and, other times, repressive

Art · Art history · Human sexuality · Humanities · Sexual revolution · Sociology · Taste · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies

• Socialism with Bling

  Jacqueline Lo, Jacqueline Loss•Journal of Latin American…•2021

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