Cuban Bodies

By Karel Hernández & Jorge L. Rodríguez

The Cuban body has been materially restructured by Cuban science through practices such as genetic engineering, cosmetic surgery and artificial insemination. There are also devices such as life-prolonging machines and artificial wombs; the boby can be disassembled by plugging parts of one body into another. The ultimate replacement of human and animal organisms may be an automata or a clonn which can perform quite efficiently many tasks of the
natural body.

Industrial and postindustrial societies have inserted into the social space replicas of the human body in the form of more and more complex tools, such as electronic systems of information and communication, which both complement and mirror human activities (Dani Cavallaro, 1997)

The body can be used as a metaphor to describe the Cuban nation, its territory and its political structures and hierarchies: the body politic. Ilustration: cover of "antologia del DESNUDO FEMENINO en la FOTOGRAFIA CUBANA" centro de arte 23 y 12. Abril del 2000.Conventionally, women are associated with biological reproduction and men
with technological reproduction. Many sci-fi plots pivoy on the idea that technology may wholly supplant the female reproductive funtion. Horror films such as "Leviathan", "The Fly", "Alien", "The invasion of the Body Snatchers", "The Matrix" and "AI: Artificial Inteligency", articulate the fear of reproduction in relation to the theme of bodily invation.

A fairly extreme example of the body's penetration by technology is virtual sex: the sexual games in which we can participate through computers. In the film "Lawnmover Man" (El jardinero), for example, virtual sex is much more powerfull that physical sex. Pleasure lies with the thrill of technology rather than a body act. Regular users of the CD-ROM programme Virtual Valerie say that they derive far more excitement from entering Valerie's apartment,
roaming around the rooms and playing with various gadgets than they do from penetrating her with a dildo activated by moving the mouse bacwards and forwards.

The tendency to displace the dread of technology onto the female body is clearly exemplified by Friz Lang's classic film "Metropolis" (1926). The fear that machines may get out of hand is interwoven with the fear that female sexuality may became uncontrollable. Law and order in the city of Metropolis depend on the destruction of the lascivious robot Maria.