Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo) is the masterpiece of the celebrated Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. It concerns the seduction of a teenage girl, Elena, by an older man, Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual struggling to make sense of the changes in his life following the self-exile of his wife and parents to the United States. His struggle is made more complex by Alea with the use of documentary footage of the critical period of Cuban history between April 1961 and October 1962,the month of the Cuban missile crisis. The use of documentary footage underlines the political implications of Sergio's personal behaviour. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between the personal and the political in terms of structural violence and masculinity theory, whilst not ignoring the importance of form and technique. Three theories will be of greatest importance to the study: Johan Galtung's notion of structural violence, R.W. Connell's explanation of masculinities and changing 'hegemonic standards' and Birjana Scott's understanding of irony and echoic mention theory. Ultimately, the paper seeks to argue that both pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary hegemonic standards of masculinity amount to forms of structural violence which affect both men and women in Cuba.