Marilyn Bobes’ short story “Somebody Has to Cry,” originally published in Spanish under the title “Alguien Tiene Que llorar” in 1995, constructs the queer woman at its centre through the empty space left behind after her self-inflicted death. Her representation is fragmented and heavily filtered through the narrative voices’ heteropatriarchal lens, constructing an image of her as much as of the attitudes towards women and queerness that formed her social-cultural context. This paper examines the legal and cultural contexts that have impacted women and queer people in Cuba under Spanish-Catholic colonialism, during the Revolutionary Era, which privileged the heterosexual nuclear family and masculinity in men as a Revolutionary ideal, and during the severe economic crisis known as the Special Period in Post-Soviet Cuba. By contrasting and exploring the different narrative voices that form the story, this paper examines how these influences become visible in the characters’ representations of the protagonist, and how the visibility and invisibility of the protagonist constructs an image of machismo and marianismo culture and queerness in the context of Cuba in the late twentieth century.