Originally delivered as a talk in a New York University conference titled Queer Cuba, organized by José Esteban Muñoz and others, this essay explores the present and the past histories of homosexuality and revolution, and it zeroes in on the work and presence of a group of young Cuban exiles that composed the Antonio Maceo Brigade in 1980 and that returned to Cuba in order to reconnect with their roots and build factory workers’ dwellings outside of Havana. It argues that the homosexual in Cuba is a subject that participates in a revolutionary history that is always recounted in a linear, chronological fashion and that gays and lesbians have always been positioned by the state as subjects that are both within and outside the island, and it underscores the relationship between queerness and modernity. It is from these tenets that the formation of the Maceo Brigade, and the relative public or private vision of homosexuality by some of its members, can be explored.
