Eugenio Hernández Espinosa (b. 1936) is one of Cuba's most prolific dramatists. He is also the dramatist who has been most relentless in representing the African Cuban experience in theatre. In addition, his large corpus of works shows a firm commitment to the interrogation of the way gendered attitudes retard social and political progress within black Cuban communities as well as in the wider society. In this article I examine two of his early plays, El sacrificio (1961) and María Antonia (1964), in an attempt to highlight a set of political preoccupations concerning gender, marginality and resistance in Cuba. Read together, the plays encode a series of meanings concerning gender entrapment and suggest a conviction that at times neither passive sacrificial dispositions nor attitudes of transgression lead to female liberation in black communities maimed by masculinist control.

Both plays present what at first seem two very different versions of black womanhood in pre-revolutionary Cuba. In El sacrificio Matilde is the overacquiescent wife and mother whose sacrificial disposition culminates in attempted suicide. María Antonia, on the other hand, is an extremely rebellious character whose transgressions eventually lead to her death. What eventually becomes apparent is that both women have more in common than might be initially perceived. Both are ‘privatized’ by the socio-cultural economies in which they are forced to live. Neither has the space nor the capacity to speak because their physical and psychological pain destroys their language.