“Fíchenlo, si pueden”: disemi-nación e infancia travesti en Virgilio Piñera

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that, in the short story “Fíchenlo, si pueden,” Virgilio Piñera proposes both a subjectivity and a travesti nation that question the hegemonic masculinity embodied by the revolutionary hero of the mid-century, and later, by Che Guevara's New Man. The writer designs this alternative nation by means of two strategies: on the one hand, through the representation of a travesti childhood and, on the other, through a discussion of the nineteenth-century canon of the Island, particularly, of the binary struggle that the critics developed between the aestheticist literature of Julián del Casal and the patriotic literature of José Martí.