NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5433

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Subject: LesbiGay Life in Cuba/WW
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Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit

              Report on lesbian and gay life in Cuba
                 `A lot of changes are happening'

                         By Sharon Ayling

[Sonja DeVries is a lesbian political activist who recently
returned from Cuba, where she spent six months with Vikki Dow
conducting research for a book on lesbian and gay life there. The
following are excerpts of an interview with her by Workers World
reporter Saul Kanowitz in San Francisco June 29.]

When we asked for visas from the Cuba Interest Section in
Washington, D.C., we said it was to research lesbian and gay life
in Cuba. They said great, it was an important thing to do, and
they wanted to help.

When we got to Cuba, someone from the Central Committee of the
Communist Party put us in contact with people from the many mass
organizations. They were all willing to discuss the gay issue
with us and to help us out. They were also really willing to
acknowledge that prejudices still exist and that there had been
some hard things that had happened in the past.

I felt we were working in a really supportive atmosphere. We went
wherever we wanted to go, talked to whomever we wanted to talk
to, from counter-revolutionary to pro-revolutionary--a really
wide range of official and non-official people. We had access to
legal records and all kinds of things.

A lot of changes are happening in Cuba. For example, the national
sex education program does education about homosexuality in a
positive way. It's a government-funded program that educates
doctors, mental health workers and teachers. They recently
started putting this into the national teacher training program
to make teachers more supportive when gay students need to talk
with them. They are also talking with therapists to get families
to do therapy around supporting and accepting their kids or other
family members if they are gay.

Both gay men and lesbian women are more visible than when I
visited two years ago. There are tea houses where younger
lesbians and gay men hang out. The atmosphere is very open.
Everybody knows that's where the gay people hang out. They are
basically left alone. I didn't hear of any cases of gay bashing
while I was there.

The Communist Youth have this mobile disco and one weekend they
brought it to the gay beach. Some straight man started harassing
this gay man who was in drag. The gay man went to the police and
told them--and the police arrested the straight guy.

There is a play about a friendship between a gay man and a young
communist straight man, which ran for four months. It's all about
the prejudices that this young communist has against this gay man
and how through discussion they become friends. It was reviewed
in the paper and the radio, which said it was a really important
play because it dealt with people's prejudice.

Then there was an art show sponsored by the AIDS information
bureau that we saw in April. It was basically this very
homoerotic art about people with AIDS in this public gallery. I
walked in there and was completely blown away, with all the stuff
here around the National Endowment for the Arts and the
censorship of homoerotic art.

In terms of where homophobia stems from, the general sentiment is
that homophobia has existed for centuries, that it was part of
the Spanish colonial heritage and the Catholic Church--things
that have influenced many aspects of Cuban society. The gay
people I interviewed were really clear that while the leadership
and people in the government have been influenced by the
homophobic culture, it's not that the revolution itself is
homophobic--or that socialism is inherently homophobic.

There is no law against homosexual acts, no "sodomy" laws. The
first revised penal code after the revolution did away with the
"sodomy" law but made it illegal to "publicly demonstrate your
homosexual condition." In 1987, the penal code was revised and
that law was thrown out. There is still a law against
aggressively pursuing a homosexual relationship with someone who
doesn't want one. Hopefully, this law will be thrown out soon,
too. Hopefully, that law will be thrown out too.

There is no law against gay people being in the Communist Party.
It is more a matter of prejudice, which is really changing.
Someone who is gay was just elected to the Central Committee of
the Communist Party of Cuba.

While we were there, the Union of Young Communists had a congress
and during a discussion on AIDS, a psychiatrist said that
effeminate boys should be counseled to change so that they didn't
have family problems. Vilma Espin, who's the head of the
Federation of Cuban Women and a member of the Council of State,
interrupted and challenged him. She said this is completely the
wrong approach. We don't need to work on changing people who are
homosexual but accept them and work on our own prejudices. We
need to make lesbian and gay youth feel accepted within our
ranks.

For someone who is so public and so identified with the
revolution to be saying that is very exciting. It shows that's
the direction they are going.

People feel really strongly that gay people shouldn't be
discriminated against. What's most important is that this is in
the context of a society that is basically very humane.

To me, gay liberation is about a lot more than gay rights. Gay
rights are important. We all benefit from them. But they don't
give us housing or health care or education or any of those
things that are basic human rights. Cuba does recognize those
rights. If a person is sick in Cuba, you don't have to worry if
you can afford treatment or not.

To me things like these are really important, like the fact that
the Cuban government is fighting racism and sexism on a concrete
basis.

I feel we need to connect all those things. Gay liberation is
about fighting racism, classism, all these things. That is the
reason that I have always supported Cuba as a lesbian and just as
a human being.

                               -30-

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted
if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@cdp!igc.org".)

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