Workers.org – By Leslie Feinberg
Lavende & red, part 105
‘Butterflies on the Scaffold’ (‘Mariposas en el andamio’), a 1996 documentary, offered a profoundly thoughtful and moving account of how Cuban women construction workers literally made room for cross-dressing performance art in the workers’ cafeterias in their neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, called La G’inera. The film was directed by Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe Bernaza.
Gilpin reported that the preliminary cut had to be shown 11 times at the Havana Film Festival in December 1995 to accommodate the crowds. In April 1996, the film won the best documentary and the popularity award at the lesbian and gay film festival at Turin.
The word ‘butterfly’ (‘mariposa’) refers to male-bodied Cubans whose femininity is either a part or the whole of their gender expression.