If it’s not a right, then what is it?

Hanna was always a rebellious woman. She was a rocker, always at the now extinct Patio de María club with her black and wide pullovers, purple lips, very long hair, always worn loose. She had the enormous courage to assume her lesbian identity from the age of 14, a decision that ended her up in her grandmother’s couch when her parents threw the “deviant” girl out of the house.

At 19 she met Aida, and four years later they decided to get married. She, Hanna, always the rebel, did not need anyone’s protection or legal permission. Both dressed in white, looked beautiful, and gave themselves rings of polished bone, and Grandmother Carmen declared them wife and wife in that small apartment in San Agustín, surrounded by friends, but no other family members.

They are part of eight percent of lesbian women who live with their family and their partner. It is one of her greatest achievements. In the survey cited by the Women’s News Service of Latin America and the Caribbean, the numbers speak of an enormous repression regarding coexistence with families: 76 percent coexist only with their families of origin and 16 only with their partner. Almost all must choose.

*****

We’ve been together for 17 years now. Since I can remember we want to have children. Not one, at least two, she laughs. ‘What madness, don’t you agree?’ I have the biological clock screaming. Every time I see a baby on the street I look like an idiot, imagining a scene in which we are mothers. Not even a single woman is admitted to a fertility and assisted reproduction clinic. She must take a man and show that they have tried unsuccessfully to have children. Imagine what it’s like for a lesbian couple.

It has become clear to us that this will not be possible. Not now, not in this country. I am already 36 and Aida’s 34-years-old, we cannot wait for that change to happen for us to become mothers here. Check out the mess created just to approve equality in marriage law, which is only a first step… How long will it take people to understand or accept it? Well I’m not willing to wait for others to understand what fulfills my life. So we’ve been looking at out options. And guess what? There’s nothing out there, of what we want, that can be had for less than $30,000. Nothing! It will take us at least two years to save that amount.

*****

The wedding’s symbolism does not legally protect the rights of this couple before society and the rest of the world, such as the rights to inheritance, adoption, motherhood, representation, accompaniment, etc. The point of equality in marriage, whose wording has just been modified to please the most conservative, is one of the major questions of the next national referendum to approve a new constitution in Cuba.

During the discussion of the project of the next Cuban Magna Carta, the complaints of several protesting churches and their thousands of faithful, advocating for “an original design” of the family (mother, father and baby), has demonstrated the across the board intolerance that still exists in Cuba regarding sexual diversity and respect for the fundamental rights of LGTBQ community. That debate, which in itself was difficult to sustain due to the patriarchal and heterosexist conceptions that predominate on the island, has turned into a battle.

The approval of the Family Code has been postponed for several years already, according to Cuban government officials, due to the emergence of “more necessary laws”, especially those related to the economic sphere. Since 2011, the Family Code has been ready for the FMC, the organization responsible for the legislative initiative in this case, to present it to the Council of Ministers, Minister of Justice Maria Esther Reus told a well-know Cuban gay blogger. The analysis was the responsibility of the 2013 legislature. 

A country with as many problems as this one has not found the time to once and for all rewrite this huge chapter of injustice and discrimination.

“Did you know that being a homosexual here was penalized until 1979? It was then removed, but then what remained forbidden were public expressions,” says Hanna with the round eyes. “You had to pretend. Can you believe it?”

It’s hard to believe. It was in 1997 that this ugly section of the Cuban Penal Code was reformed and eliminated. And even the World Health Organization waited until 1990 to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.

The panorama is not hopeful right now either. According to a compilation of data published in La Vanguardia, being homosexual is still a crime in 72 countries around the world, and in eight of them it is punishable by death. Only nine countries include non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in their constitutions. Of all the nations of the world only 23 accept equal marriage as of 2018.

To this we must add the little that is known about the Cuban LGTBQ community — not even included in official statistics. The last census on the Island was in 2012, and did not register homosexual couples in the country, even when they declared it, since the only criteria registered were those related to unions between men and women. Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, of the National Bureau of Statistics and Information, told Francisco Rodriguez, a journalist and activist for the rights of the LGTBQ community, back then.

Anyway, for Hanna and Aida, as well as for hundreds of others, having a family today is outlawed. And it’s important to note the not so obvious: They are women paying exorbitant amounts of money to have children in a country with a low birth rate and an advanced aging population.

Now the obvious: no human being and their right to form a family can fall outside the law. Not only because it is their right, but because fundamentally this exists as a legal and social order to safeguard rights, not to restrict them.

As if for them having to live each day reaffirming oneself before others was not a challenge.

*****

It’s the same as when an acquaintance asks who the male is? Or when one mentions the other in a conversation and the interlocutor interrupts asking, incredulous more than deaf: ‘Did you say girlfriend?’ Or when you go to the gynecologist and the doctors inquire morbidly about my love-making dynamics instead of asking the reasons for my being there. Sometimes they do not even bother to examine me because there is supposedly no penetration in my sex life. Hell! if one of us is imprisoned, we do not even have the right to conjugal visits.

In fact you can add that for whatever reason we decide to have a child on our own with a friend as donor… there is no legal body to protect the rights of the non-biological mother or that child from bullying and humiliation during childhood. That kind of trauma, we know it well; it scars you for life.

At 20, these things did not bother me. But one’s patience runs out. And I would like to be sure that if something where to happen to me (hopefully not…) no one will remove Aída from the house where my grandmother accepted us when everyone else turned their backs on us. That starts to weigh on me too. My goal is simple: I want to have a child with the woman I love and adore, and since I do not impose rules on the lives of others, I expect the same of them with mine. That’s why we’re leaving. And if it’s cold, even better.