While Castro challenged many backward ideas as remnants of the old society, he embraced with enthusiasm the homophobia of Latin machismo and Catholic dogma, elevating it into a fundamental tenet of Cuba's new socialist morality. Idealising rural life, he once claimed approvingly that "in the country, there are no homosexuals".
When Cuba adopted Soviet-style communism it also adopted Soviet-style prejudice and puritanism. Ever since Stalin promoted the ideology of "the socialist family" and recriminalised gay sex in 1934, communist orthodoxy dictated that homosexuality was a "bourgeois decadence" and "capitalist degeneration". This became the Cuban view. "Maricones" (faggots) were routinely denounced as "sexual deviants" and "agents of imperialism". Laughable allegations of homosexuality were used in an attempt to discredit "corrupting" western influences, such pop music, with the communists circulating the rumour that the Beatles were gay.
In the name of the new socialist morality, homosexuality was declared illegal in Cuba and typically punishable by four years imprisonment. Parents were required to prevent their children from engaging in homosexuals activities and to report those who did to the authorities. Not informing on a gay child was a crime against the revolution.
Official homophobia led, the mid-1960s, to the mass round up of gay people, without charge or trial. Many were seized in night-time swoops and incarcerated in forced labour camps for "reeducation" and "rehabilitation". A few disappeared and never returned.
At the First National Congress on Education and Culture in 1971, it was decreed that homosexuals were "pathological", "anti-social" and "not be tolerated" in any job where they might "influence youth". Widespread anti-gay purges followed in schools, universities, theatres and the media. Gay professors, dancers, actors and editors ended up sweeping roads and digging graves.
The repression did not begin to ease until the mid-1970s and even then it was not because the Cuban leadership recognised their error. They halted mass detentions and reduced sentences largely because they were shamed by the international protest campaigns organised by newly formed gay liberation movements and left-wing intellectuals such as Jean Paul Sartre.
A more significant softening of official attitudes took place in the 1980s. With the advent of Aids, the Cuban authorities eventually showed greater tolerance towards homosexuals in order to win their confidence and support for safer sex. At around the same time, the secondment to Cuba of East German doctors and psychologists, who viewed homosexuality as a natural minority condition, prompted more enlightened thinking among medical staff and health educators.
While the 1979 penal code formally decriminalised homosexuality, the legal status of lesbian and gay people in Cuba today is still ambiguous. Homosexual behaviour causing a "public scandal" can be punished by up to 12 months jail and this law is sometimes used to arrest effeminate gay men and transvestites. Discreet open-air cruising in public squares and parks is tolerated, although often kept under police surveillance. Most gay bars are semi-legal private house parties and are subject to periodic police raids. Homosexuals are still deemed unfit to join the ruling Communist Party (being gay is contrary to communist ethics) and this can have an adverse impact of a person?s professional career when senior appointments depend on party membership. Lesbian and gay newspapers and organisations are not permitted. The Cuban Association of Gays and Lesbians, formed in 1994, was suppressed in 1997 and its members arrested.
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Communism is anti-homo!
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Re: Communism is anti-homo!
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