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CUBA: There Are No Tough Guys; It’s Tough To Be a Guy

By Dalia Acosta

It has been three years since he separated from his second wife and realised he did not have a home to return to. Although he has always been able to count on a helping hand from one friend or another, and his children help him out now and then, Humberto Martínez spends most nights sleeping on a park bench in the Cuban capital.

"During this time I’ve found work as a night watchman in places where I could sleep. But now I’ve been unemployed for a few months. Sometimes I sleep in the hall of some building, or on the roof of a friend’s place, but it can get really cold up there. I almost always end up in the park," Martínez, 59, told IPS.

He stresses that he always has money in his pocket and clean clothes (stored at a friend’s place), and that he bathes regularly. He has strived his whole life to be an honest, hard-working man, he adds. But when his life touched rock bottom, he did not have a single friend or relative in a position to give him a place to live.

With his first wife, the mother of two of his children, a woman he says he still loves "as much as I did on the very first day," he was not even able to remain on friendly terms. Looking back, he admits that he drank too much, arriving home late and inebriated every night. He says he covered her material needs, but did not give her what she really needed: "She never had me."

His three children are now grown up and busy with their own lives. Despite the occasional gesture on their part, their father has essentially been abandoned and left on his own. "There are no tough guys here," reflects a teary-eyed Martínez in one of the most hard-hitting scenes in the documentary "El padre nuestro: Lo masculino y lo femenino de nuestras almas" (Our Father: The Masculinity and Femininity of our Souls).

Cuban director Lizette Vila chose Martínez to serve as the central thread running through a story aimed at "recording in real time" the social construction of masculinity from a point of total emotional, sentimental and human vulnerability.

A victim of one of the most critical social problems facing Cuba, the housing shortage, Martínez is also the epitome of the working-class guy who has been taught from childhood to conform to the narrow confines of the dominant heterosexual male model of masculinity. It is only being pushed to the edge that has made it possible for him to confront and discuss his emotions.

"If only men realised that they have a right to cry, to talk about their feelings in public, to wear more pleasing colours, to live in harmony with the human and the divine, then maybe we wouldn’t be here talking about violence, about human vulnerabilities, about challenges that become increasingly difficult to overcome," Vila commented to IPS.

The general director of the Palomas cultural project and director of a long list of documentaries, many of them about men, Vila is convinced that the Cuban "macho man", like his counterparts in Mexico and Latin America in general, "suffers a great deal because he hasn’t been given the chance to build his identity from a place of peace."