Enrique Favez, a doctor in Cuba, was the subject of one of the most scandalous trials in colonial Cuba for living and identifying as a man.

Photo by Alexander Kunze on Unsplash.

Exiled in New Orleans, Enrique Favez, who had legally just been declared a woman by colonial Cuban officials, wrote a love letter to his beloved former wife Juana across the sea. In a letter dated August 20, 1824, he told her, “Juana, I don’t know if we will be able to see each other again someday, but I am sure that if we did, I would be willing again to suffer at your side.”¹ Despite having been imprisoned twice and subject to violent examination by doctors and juries, Favez continued to love and live as a man.

In an effort to reclaim the histories of women who made significant strides in science and the arts and have been overlooked in history, the lives and experiences of trans or gender-nonconforming individuals have been erased. The story of Enrique Favez and how his story has been told by some contemporary historians has illuminated the systemic and continued erasure of gender non-conforming individuals in the historical process.

Attempts to Reclaim “Enriqueta” Favez as a Feminist Pioneer

At first glance, the story of an individual called Enriqueta Favez by historians and artists is a powerful one as the story of Cuba’s first female doctor. In Por andar vestida de hombre, Julio César González-Pagés writes that a woman named Enriqueta Favez, born Henrietta in Switzerland, arrived in Cuba in 1818 to practice medicine. According to González-Pagés, Favez assumed a masculine identity in Paris and maintained it for his career, though it should be noted González-Pagés uses exclusively female pronouns to describe Favez. Favez married a woman named Juana de León, who later testified against him in a trial in which his housekeeper found him asleep and naked with the body of “a perfect and whole woman.”² In the trial, Juana demanded Favez be publicly recognized as a woman and appropriately punished. He was found guilty and exiled after a failed suicide attempt.

Contemporary scholarship and representatives of Enrique Favez fail to recognize him as a man. Attempting to reclaim him as a woman reproduces the violence done to Favez, subjecting his body and lived identity to continued interrogation. While working with the National Revolutionary Police of Cuba, González-Pagés produced overly feminized portraits of Favez that erased prominent scars and masculine features that others noticed about him in the trial and other observations.³ These portraits, which are included in his book, serve to confirm for the reader that Enrique Favez must have been and identified as a woman. Such portraits represent “another unwarranted examination by (academic and law enforcement) and results, once again, in his feminization,” as Juliana Martinez notes in “Dressed Like a Man? Of Language, Bodies, and Monsters in the Trial of Enrique/Enriqueta Favez and Its Contemporary Accounts.”⁴

In an interview with the Havana Times, González-Pagés declared that dressing like a man, for Favez, was “an act of rebelliousness against the establishment of her time.”⁵ He believed that Favez dressed like a man should be understood as an unfortunate tragedy of the time that a woman could not openly be a well-respected doctor. He described Favez’s relationship with Juana as a lesbian one. In a documentary, filmmaker Lídice Pérez positioned Favez after consulting with González-Pagés.⁶ The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation shared the story of “the amazing double life of Enriqueta Favez.”⁷ In the present, Favez, whose story had been uncovered and investigated, has been declared a feminist pioneer.

The Real Story of Enrique Favez

The life of Enrique Favez, however, is much more complicated. His uncle remembered that from a young age, he rejected the customs of women from his time and as a result, his family married him off to a man at a young age.⁸ Enrique declared to the jury in trial that he felt most free when dressing and living as a man. He told the jury that he would live his life exactly as he did, if he had to do it all over again. The purpose of the trial was not just to redress the perceived harms against Juana but also “the defamation and scandal that [Favez] has caused the Republic.”⁹ Favez as a man posed a threat to the social fabric of Cuba in the 1800s. Contemporary historians like González-Pagés fail to recognize the complexities of his gender identity and declare Favez to be female.

In “Dressed Like a Man? Of Language, Bodies, and Monsters in the Trial of Enrique/Enriqueta Favez and Its Contemporary Accounts,” Juliana Martínez resists González-Pagés’s narrative and uses masculine pronouns to tell his story. She notes that in the trial, Favez adamantly pushed back against the accusations that he was a monster and a woman. He demanded justice after the trial ended to return to his life as a doctor and as Enrique. On the official trial document declaring Favez a woman, he signed with “Enrique.”¹⁰ In his love letters to Juana dated twenty-two years apart, he again signed with “Enrique.” He loved Juana as Enrique, not Enriqueta.

In Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain, scholar Zeb Tortorici writes, “In colonial New Spain, just as today, the trappings of gender led to conflicted readings of bodies and to misinscriptions of those bodies in the archive.”¹¹ He illustrates the repeated violence - done by colonial officials and again by historians who bring their own ingrained judgments about gender - that can occur to those transgressed rules and expectations around gender in colonial New Spain. Though imposing trans-ness on Favez, who had no concept of contemporary trans identity, can be problematic, the evidence indicates that he lived as a man and understood his identity as a man. Declaring Favez to be a woman, based on his biological sex and the medical examinations of colonial officials who stripped him down, however, contributes to the continued and violent erasure of trans and gender non-conforming people in history.

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