No longer a ‘bourgeois social disorder’
By Saul Landau
HAVANA – Angelie Carmen, tall, pretty and very well built sings on weekends at a popular club in Vibora Park, a neighborhood in Havana. In her day job she works at CENESEX, Cuba’s national center for sex education, which includes a dynamic campaign against homophobia and for equal rights for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. Angelie Carmen cares for her 90-year-old grandfather and lives with a guy who until recently worked in the circus. She had her sex change operation in 2007, for no cost, and aside from her singing in weekend shows, she sings the praises of Mariela Castro who has elevated transgender and gay people to equal status with straights – at least inside the offices of CENSEX.
Mariela Castro heads CENESEX and also the yearly gay parade in Havana. As beloved and popular as she is with homosexuals and transgender people, she draws the wrath of those who cling to Cuba’s older and very macho culture. "Lesbians," said one 60-year-old man, "are an aberration. They’re lesbians because they’ve never had a good lover."
He dismisses Marieal’s campaign against homophobia as "faggotry," and a distortion of healthy values. Luis, who lives in one of the many over-crowded cul de sacs in Centro Havana thinks gays deserve equal rights, "but marriage… coño,” he says, “Mariela is pushing too hard. She’s going to corrupt the youth. God did not intend marriage to be between two men or two women, it’s not natural or Christian."
Luis shows us the many new stores and street stands that have recently emerged in Centro Havana, near the huge state-owned Carlos III market. Products previously very scarce now appear in tiny private stores, and customers line up for plumbing material, auto parts, tools and building material abound fruit and vegetable stands and small pizzerias. Luis, seemingly proud of the entrepreneurial openings, has some negative thoughts about CENESEX.
"Mariela has gone too far, beyond the teachings of Jesus Christ," who, he said, had "saved" him. Many of Luis’ buddies, who grew up with him in Centro Havana, share his opinions about CENESEX over reaching on homosexual rights.
"Everyone’s entitled to his opinion and has the right to express himself," says Mariela of her detractors. Her driver, Maggy, a former teen tennis star, feels much relieved since she came out of the closet and still retains a close relationship with her former fiancé. She broke the engagement shortly before the marriage date. She recalls her "in the closet days" when she suffered harassment and humiliation for displaying signs of her sexual preference, including some dirty tricks played against her by supposed friends and teammates in athletic competition. Like many of the CENESEX staff she feels that in her work environment she is liberated from the world of prejudice and judgment by those who cling to the old culture and its unreasonable and irrational macho ways.
Cuban youth, however, don’t get the old form of sex education in school; rather they receive the material prepared by Mariela and her staff. The CENESEX texts and graphics show and tell the process of human reproduction as it is carried out, free of myth and romanticism.
Thanks to CENESEX’s work, Cuban gays and transgender people have more protection for Maria, the janitor at CENESEX, recalled how a highway patrolmen who stopped her car had called her a "tortillera," (or lousy dyke). "I felt very insulted," she said. Her mother still refuses to accept her as a lesbian and will not allow her partner to visit.
Mariela has done her sex education work in Cuba and abroad. In meetings last spring in San Francisco and New York, the local LGBT communities celebrated her arrival with parties and kudos for her leadership in struggling for their rights.
Indeed, as Cuban revolutionary laws guaranteed each citizen the rights to medical care, housing, food, education and the other substantive rights in the UN Convention on Human Rights, a 19-year-old woman was expelled from the Young Communist federation and ousted from the university because she appeared to have pronounced lesbian tendencies. One has to imagine the shock to the system of a young woman dedicated to building an egalitarian communist society getting tossed our for not wearing makeup, earrings and skirts and for not having interest in boys. This happened in the early 1980s under the guise of making communism more perfect.
Lesbians, gay and transgender people have similar stories, all based on their being different – thus frightening to the mainstream, old culture of Cuba. The political and economic systems have changed, but old culture clings inside families and neighborhoods. CENESEX staff try to mediate family conflicts, provide education and counseling and help families to accept their gay or lesbian children while defending homosexuals’ rights before the law.
But where do transsexuals, gays and lesbians go to meet others for socializing and sex? They have made their spots, places where large crowds gather on weekend nights to hook up and go inside a dark place to have sex. CENESEX workers try to distribute condoms as a public health measure, but the police do not break up the crowds or intrude on the indoor private spaces. Hotel rooms are expensive, and few habaneros have access to private space or permission inside their homes to bring lovers of the same sex.
Under Mariela’s leadership and obviously with the at least tacit support of her father, President Raul Castro, CENESEX has made huge strides in enlightening Cuba’s youth and bringing the new culture in to challenge the old. But she knows she has a long way to go before the old macho culture concedes to facts and reason around the issues of homosexuality. Indeed, it took decades before Cuba’s medical profession began to concede that homosexuality could not be simply dismissed as a "bourgeois social disorder."
