In Transformismo, M. Myrta Leslie Santana draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island. Once banned and censored in Cuba, drag performance is now a state-sponsored event. Transformismo suggests that these performances make critical interventions in Cuban trans/queer life and politics and in doing so, the volume offers critical insight into how Cuba’s postsocialist reform has exacerbated racial, sexual, and economic inequalities. Leslie Santana argues that mainstream trans/queer nightlife in Cuba is entangled with the island’s tourism economy and has shaped the aesthetics and social makeup of transformismo in coastal Havana, which largely caters to foreigners. Leslie Santana considers how Black lesbian and transgender transformistas are expanding understandings of sexual selfhood and politics on the island, particularly questioning the ways that Black women’s creativity is prominently featured in the aesthetics of tourism and trans/queer nightlife, while Black women themselves are denied social and material capital.

M. Myrta Leslie Santana is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California San Diego.

Contents

Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
Why Cuba?
Introduction
Transforming Cuba
Chapter One
Las Vegas: Transformismo and Cuba’s Capital
Chapter Two
Apocalipsis: Transformismo at the End of the World
Chapter Three
El Mejunje: Provincial Transformismo
Chapter Four
Transformista, Travesti, Transgénero: Performing Trans/Queer Subjectivity
Chapter Five
Transformismo Masculino: The Social Project of Havana’s Drag Kings
Coda
The Future of Transformismo
Toward a Glossary
References