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• LGBT rights in Cuba

Sexual relations between same-sex consenting adults sixteen and over have been legal in Cuba since 1992, though same-sex relationships are not presently recognised by the state. Restrictions on public assembly and all non-state approved organizations effectively means that LGBT associations are not permitted.

Public antipathy towards LGBT people is high, reflecting regional norms. This has eased somewhat following cultural changes to Cuban society in the 1990s, and subsequent gradual measures undertaken by the Cuban Government. Educational campaigns on LGBT issues are currently implemented by the National Center for Sex Education headed by Mariela Castro.

Contemporary Cuba

Carlos Sanchez, the male representative of the International Lesbian and Gay Association for the Latin America and Carribean Region, reported on a 2004 trip to Cuba to participate in the Third Hemispheric Meeting Against the ALCA (Area of Free Commerce of America). After talking with the lesbian and gays in Cuba, he made the follwing observations

1. Neither institutional nor penal repression exists against lesbians and homosexuals.
2. There are no legal sanctions against lgbt people.
3. People are afraid of meeting and organizing themselves. It is mainly based on their experience in previous years, but one can assume that this feeling will disappear in the future if lesbians and gays start to work and keep working and eventually get support from the government. (The National Center for Sexual Education is offering this support).
4. “Transformismo” (transgender) is well accepted by the majority of the Cuban population
5. There is indeed a change in the way people view homosexuality, but this does not mean the end of discrimination and homophobia. The population is just more tolerant with lesbians and homosexuals.
6. Lesbians and gays do not consider fighting for the right to marriage, because that institution in Cuba does not have the same value that it has in other countries. Unmarried and married people enjoy equal rights.

Public attitudes

Though public antipathy towards homosexuals is gradually easing, it remains quite high according to a survey conducted in Cuban cities in 2002. More than half of the respondents believed gays and lesbians were “people with problems,” and more than one in five said they were sick and needed medical treatment. Six out of seven persons expressed aversion to lesbians, with the antipathy particularly strong among women.

Sex change operations and hormonal therapy

The Cuban National Center for Sex Education is presently proposing a law that would give transsexuals free Sex reassignment surgery and Hormone replacement therapy in addition to granting them new identification documents with their changed gender. A draft bill was presented to the Cuban National Assembly in 2005. It is expected to come up for a vote in December 2006. If approved, it is suggested that the bill would make Cuba the most liberal nation in Latin America on gender issues.

History

Post revolution Cuba

Following the 1959 revolution, Cuba’s communist government embarked upon a pervasive effort to rid the nation of homosexuality, which was seen as a product of a capitalist society. Through the 1960s and 1970s this campaign included the frequent imprisonment of lesbians and gays (particularly effeminate males) without charge or trial, and confinement to forced labor camps. Parents were legally required to report their gay children. This period was dramatically documented by Reinaldo Arenas in his 1992 autobiography, Before Night Falls, as well as his fiction, most notably The Color of Summer and Farewell to the Sea. While many have argued that Arenas overstated the abuses — and even the most devoted of his readers agree that he used dramatic license to underscore his arguments — it is widely acknowledged that during this period, Cuba was engaged in active persecution of homosexuals on a scale not seen in the Western world during the same period. Homosexuality was formally decriminalised in 1979, and a year later the Castro government tried to purge Cuba of "anti-social" dissidents, criminals and homosexuals by allowing them to emigrate to the US in the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

Cuban society has become more welcoming to gays and lesbians since the 1980s, and toward the end of the decade, literature with gay subject matter began to re-emerge. In 1994, the popular feature film Strawberry and Chocolate, produced by the government-run Cuban film industry, featuring a gay main character, examined the nation's homophobia. The year prior to the film's release, Fidel Castro stated that homosexuality is a “natural aspect and tendency of human beings”, and gay author Ian Lumsden claims that since 1986 there is "little evidence to support the contention that the persecution of homosexuals remains a matter of state policy". However, the state's treatment of homosexuals remains a subject of controversy, and like other subjects relating to Cuba, the accounts of supporters of the Castro government are often quite different to those of its opponents. In 2006, the state run Cuban television began running a serial soap opera titled The Dark Side of the Moon with story lines that focus on HIV infection and AIDS. Cuban gays describe a narrative in this soap opera capturing one character's sexual awakening as a pivotal moment in Cuba's long history of discrimination against homosexuals.

Public decency laws

In 1979, Cuba removed sodomy from its criminal code, but "public scandal" laws sentenced those who “publicly flaunted their homosexual condition" with three months to one year in prison (Article 359 of the 1979 Penal Code). The International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) reports that "public flaunting" could be interpreted to include visibly transgender people and "effeminate" men, in addition to same-sex public displays of affection. The 1979 penal code also categorized “homosexual acts in public, or in private but exposed to being involuntarily seen by other people” as “crimes against the normal development of sexual relations.” A reform of the penal code in 1988 instead imposed fines on those who "hassle others with homosexual demands" (Article 303a, Act 62 of the Penal Code of April 30 1988), and then in 1997 the language was modified to "hassling with sexual demands" and the phrase "public scandal" changed to "sexual insult".

Enforcement of public decency laws anywhere in the world is typically varied, as they may be interpreted broadly by police, for exmple in England and France, when laws against sodomy were struck from the statutes, prosecutions of homosexual men increased for some time under public decency laws and in China they have been the main legal means of persecuting homosexuals. Recent attempts to crack down on crime and to prevent Cuba becoming a haven for “sex tourism” has resulted in raids on locations which gays frequent, and arrests have occurred. According to a Human Rights Watch Report, "the government also heightened harassment of homosexuals [in 1997], raiding several nightclubs known to have gay clientele and allegedly beating and detaining dozens of patrons."

Freedom of association

According to the World Policy Institute (2003), Cuban government prohibits LGBT organizations and publications, gay pride marches and gay clubs. All officially sanctioned clubs and meeting places are required to be heterosexual. The only gay and lesbian civil rights organization, the Cuban Association of Gays and Lesbians, which formed in 1994, was closed in 1997 and its members were taken into custody. Private gay parties, named for their price of admission, “10 Pesos”, exist but are often raided. In 1997, Agencia de Prensa Independiente de Cuba (the Cuban Independent Press Agency) reported, that Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar and French designer Jean Paul Gaultier were among several hundred people detained in a raid on Havana’s most popular gay discotheque, El Periquiton. In a U.S. Government report reprinted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Cuban customers of the club were fined and released from a police station the next day, although according to a 1997 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, many of the detainees claimed physical abuse and that two busloads of foreigners were transported to immigration authorities for a document check. The crackdown extended to other known gay meeting places throughout the capital, such as Mi Cayito, a beach east of Havana, where gays were arrested, fined or threatened with imprisonment. According to Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, several of the dozen or so private gay clubs in Havana have been raided, including, Jurassic Park and Fiestas de Serrano y Correa.

HIV and AIDS

Cuba has undertaken aggressive campaign against AIDS focussing on education, isolation and treatment, and in 2003 Cuba had the lowest HIV prevalence in the Americas and one of the lowest ratios in the world. According to the UNAIDS report of 2003, there were an estimated 3,300 Cubans living with HIV/AIDS (approx 0.05% of the population). Since 1996 Cuba has produced generic versions of some of the common anti-retroviral drugs, reducing the costs to well below that of developing countries. This has been made possible through the Cuban government's subsidies to treatment. Other treatments remain out of reach.

From 1986 until 1994, Cubans with HIV were forcibly quarantined to sanatoriums ("sidatoriums"), ostensibly for treatment. Widespread international condemnation of this practice did result in a modification of the quarantine in 1994, when "confiant" (trustworthy) inmates were allowed to move out. HIV positive individuals are now required to spend at least three months in a sanatoriums (which are said to provide good care) and educated about transmission of the virus and living with HIV. They can then be released into the general public if they are considered sexually responsible and agree to disclose the names of any sexual partners from the last 5 years. Those sexual partners are then traced and tested for HIV. If someone refuses to disclose, they can be taken to the sanatorium where they will be held until they cooperate. In 2003, 48% of Cuba's HIV population lived in the sanatoriums, with the rest living outside and receiving care at a few specialty centers.

Same-sex unions

Under Article 2 of the Family Code, marriage is restricted to the union of a man and a woman. No alternative to marriage such as civil unions or domestic partnerships is available.

Cuban socialism and masculinity

While traditional Spanish machismo and the Catholic Church have disdained effeminate and sexually passive males for centuries, the Cuban revolution in the 1950s ushered in a new era of anti-homosexual repression which coincided with a "masculinization of public life". Barbara Weinstein, professor of Latin American history at the University of Maryland and co-editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review, claimed that the Cuban revolution had "a stronger sense of masculinity than other revolutions." Cuban gay writer Reinaldo Arenas wrote that in Communist Cuba, "the 'new man' was being proclaimed and masculinity exalted."

Castro's admiring description of rural life in Cuba ("in the country, there are no homosexuals") echoed the traditional socialist conception of homosexuality as bourgeois decadence, and he denounced "maricones" (faggots) as "agents of imperialism". Castro explained his reasoning in a 1965 interview:

“ [H]omosexuals should not be allowed in positions where they are able to exert influence upon young people. In the conditions under which we live, because of the problems which our country is facing, we must inculcate your youth with the spirit of discipline, of struggle, of work... [W]e would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist must be. ”

Many gays were attracted to the socialist promise of an egalitarian society; some of them important figures among the left-wing intelligentsia, such as the writers for the popular journal Lunes de Revolución. A couple of years after Castro's rise to power, however, Lunes de Revolución was closed down amidst a wave of media censorship; its gay writers were publicly disgraced, refused publication and dismissed from their jobs. In the mid-1960s, the country-wide UMAP program sent countless gays (particularly effeminate males) to forced labor camps for "rehabilitation" and "re-education", without charge or trial. Even after the end of the UMAP programs, effeminate boys were forced to undergo aversion therapy. A 1984 documentary, Improper Conduct, interviewed several survivors of the camps.

External links

• Gay Rights in Cuba Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 181 October/November 2004
• CÓDIGO PENAL de Cuba (in Spanish)
• CÓDIGO de la FAMILIA de Cuba (in Spanish)
• Homosexuality in Cuba: Revolution within the Revolution, Jo Ellis, Green Left.News, 4 July 1999
• What is the status of homosexuals in Cuba? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
• Gay Cuba 1997-2003 Stories about gay Cuba 1997-2003

See also

• Human rights in Cuba
• Socialism and LGBT rights
• Improper Conduct (1984 documentary on the prison camps for gays and other dissidents)
• Mariela Castro, Cuban LGBT-rights activist
• Women in Cuba