Honcho (August 1985), Part Two

In April of 1980, Fidel Castro rejected thousands of dissidents from Cuba, causing over 125,000 refugees, many criminals and the mentally ill, to flood the eastern coast of the United States. As public fears consumed the nation, many were transferred to Fort Chaffe in western Arkansas, where violence quickly erupted and prompted military intervention. Although a majority of the country called for their immediate deportation, others, including members of the gay community, sympathized with the refugees. In fact, the empathy of these homosexuals mirrored similar sentiments from 1965, when the New York Mattachine Society staged their Cuban Labor Camp Protest over governmental internment of homosexual Cuban migrants in labor camps. In this August 1985 issue of Honcho (which had been broken into two parts), the short story “Cuban Carne” explores these shared feelings of persecution as the narrator houses two refugees assisted by the Gay Action League. Included in the second half (see the first half here) are the short stories  “Assault by Night” (which deals with gay-bashing), “Hitched” (about a hitchhiker’s encounter with a gang of bikers), and “Tail Spin” (chronicling the narrator’s lust for his cousin) and photospreads titled “Central Park in the Dark,” “Desk Set,” “Mid-Summer Madness,” and “Strange Places, Strange Things.”