LGBT Rights in Cuba

The Brazilian press is agog at the prospect that Cuba might one day have the most progressive legislation in Latin America regarding human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. President Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela Castro Espin, who is Director of Cuba’s National Centre for Sex Education (CENESEX), has proposed that the island’s laws be changed to bar discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity. That would include the legalisation of same sex unions and adoption rights. This would indeed be an enormous shift in official attitudes. Machismo was always a central part of Cuban revolutionary zeal, and many Cuban gays — including the writer Reindaldo Arenas — fled the island to escape persecution.

Nonetheless, things have been improving for LGBT people in Cuba over the past 15 years. A milestone in this direction was the release in 1994 of the film ‘Fresas y Chocolate’, by Tomas Gutierre Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio. This is a bitter-sweet comedy about a cultivated gay man who forms an attachment with a very straight and straight-laced young Communist party activist. By chance I was in Havana when the film came out, and I will never forget the atmosphere in the cinema that evening. At first, many of the young men in the cinema were whistling and making catcalls whenever the gay character was in view, while their girlfreinds were trying to silence them. But by the end of the film, almost the whole audience was cheering on the gay character and the film got a standing ovation.

The reason Brazilians are so fascinated by all this is that Brazil and Cuba are unusually close culturally and sociologically, even though one was a Portuguese colony and the other Spanish. They both had an influx not just of European settlers, but also of African slaves; miscegenation was rife and the end result in each case has been a rainbow nation of highly sensual people, who love music, dance, ritual, celebration and sexual ambiguity. In Brazil, this comes to a head at Carnival time, when cross-dressing is endemic. But transvestite artistes (and prostitutes) are a year-round national institution. The hairdresser’s across the road from where I am staying seems to be run by one, and there is a transvestite drug gang leader currently terrorising parts of the state of Ceará. It’s enough to keep journalists and academic sociologists busy for years. It would be a supreme irony if Cuba leapfrogged Brazil by changing relevant laws more quickly.