A pájaro counterarchive of the Cuban sexile

LOGLINE

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In 1980, the Mariel Boatlift expelled more than twenty thousand queer Cubans across the Florida Straits. Four decades later, a Cuban refugee filmmaker and the few survivors he can still find are haunted, together, by the ghosts of what their homeland refuses to remember.

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Director Statement

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Amidst the Cold War escalations between Cuba and the United States, the largest sexile in the Western Hemisphere was silently happening. I was born ten  years later, in the Cuban countryside, but no school curriculum on the island ever mentioned what happened. The first time I heard the word marielito spoken with affection rather than scorn was in 2015, in Burlington, Vermont, when Eloy Guzmán came up to me after a screening of my film Masks. A year later, I claimed asylum at Miami International Airport.

Sexile is the film I have been making since that day, in the company of a few survivors, such as Nelson D'Alerta, and his alter-ego, the fabulous Catherine White. Another marielito, René Valdés has haunted me, as another presence to listen to, through his afterlives in diaries, letters, erotic self-portraits, and AIDS-era correspondence.

By listening to their different accounts of sexile, I've been overcoming my own sense of loss. The film, as an unruly diary, documents those feelings while trying to contest an archival silence. Ghostly emanations, silences, empty pages of public sex, guide me through cities such as Miami, San Francisco, Minneapolis.  Their stories are also a history of AIDS and survival to a carceral state that criminalized the marielitos, and confined them to indefinite detention in American refugee camps. Either on the Cuban or the American shore, these pájaros of sexile were doubly rejected, unable to fit within dominant models of citizenship. Yet, in their endless refusals,  they also wrote another silent page: the entrance of so many  "homosexual aliens" to the United States represented an unthinkable precedent for immigration laws. 

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