Homophobia going away in Cuba

The New Cuban Revolución

As the daughter of president Raúl Castro, Mariela Castro Espín could have done anything–or nothing–with her life. So why did she decide to become a champion of Cuba’s gay and transgender communities?

By Michael Rowe, Photography by Byron Motley

Mariela Castro Espín

On hot Saturday nights in Havana, thousands of young men and women armed with rum, boom boxes, and guitars transform the Malecón, a four-mile stretch of the city’s north-shore seawall, into a boisterous outdoor bar. Diesel exhaust from 1957 Chevrolet Bel Airs and Russian-made Ladas mixes with cigar smoke and surprisingly sexy cheap cologne. Even in a culture long permeated by machismo, glamorous drag queens and handsome gay machos are among the partyers—as are the roving jineteros, straight hustlers on the prowl for gifts and money from gay foreign tourists. Here they drink, flirt, cruise, and scout for details on a fiesta spontaneously assembled every weekend (the exact whereabouts are kept secret until the last minute to avoid a raid by the police, known to selectively enforce prostitution and public assembly laws). All of this takes place within sight of the 17th-century El Morro fortress, perched high on a rocky promontory, where gay Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas was jailed and brutalized for two years in the 1970s as a result of “ideological deviation,” a postrevolutionary code for open homosexuality. As the light fades El Morro recedes into the darkness like a bad memory, leaving only the revelry of the Malecón.

While authors as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene have extolled the worldly sophistication of Havana nightlife, homosexuality wasn’t decriminalized in Cuba until 1979, following decades of harsh judicial treatment. The very real dangers associated with public displays of same-sex affection increase exponentially the farther one travels from Havana’s urban core. Yet Cuban attitudes toward gay people have evolved significantly in the past few years, thanks in part to an unexpected and powerful ally.

Mariela Castro Espín is a slender, pale, and elegant mother of three children. Married to an Italian photographer, she is straight, even though some Havana gossips suggest otherwise. She is also the 47-year-old daughter of President Raúl Castro, who last year officially succeeded his ailing brother, Fidel, as head of state.

As director of the government-run National Center for Sex Education, or CENESEX, Castro Espín has used her guile and familial clout to push for gay rights in a country where hard-labor “reeducation” camps were once vaunted as an antidote to homosexuality. “Homophobia in Cuba is part of what makes you a ‘man,’ ” she says through a translator. “Boys are taught to have violent reactions so they can show their masculinity. Boys are destroyed in this country this way.”
Castro Espín and I are sitting in the drawing room of a former palazzo that now houses government offices in Havana’s diplomatic Vedado neighborhood. With its velvet and damask antique French furniture bordering on threadbare, the room’s Norma Desmond grandeur is a reminder of Cuba’s aristocratic, prerevolutionary past; marble floors gleam coolly against the patina of the cracked, ornate gold leaf and boiserie wall paneling. As recently as a few years ago, it would have been unheard of for the daughter of the sitting Cuban president to grant a four-hour interview to an American gay magazine—never mind an accession on her part that there be no government representatives present or no preapproved questions.

But these are not ordinary times, and Castro Espín is no ordinary president’s daughter. To the Havana police, she’s the antagonist who shows up at the station on behalf of those arrested on trumped-up loitering or prostitution charges. The transgender populace knows her as the woman who turned her offices into a refuge for those who p have been expelled from their homes (Wendy, a young trans woman, told me how Castro Espín once chased a boy for blocks before collaring him for throwing rocks at “Mariela’s girls”). Her activism doesn’t preclude a wry, socialist wit, however. “Please make sure you don’t write that I live here,” she later says to a photographer while posing gamely at the head of an opulent staircase.

Under Castro Espín’s auspices, 2008 marked a pivotal year for the country’s LGBT rights movement. The government passed a resolution allowing transgender individuals to undergo sex-reassignment surgeries free of charge. And Cuba stepped onto the stage of international gay rights discourse with its inaugural Day Against Homophobia, sanctioned at the highest levels of the Castro government and attended by thousands of ordinary gay and lesbian Cubans as well as activists and government officials.

Castro Espín also is persistently lobbying on behalf of a bill to legalize same-sex civil unions that is proceeding slowly through parliament—the term “gay marriage” being as problematic for Cubans as it is for many Americans. “Instead of just working with Cuban gays and lesbians so they could fit into the rest of society,” Castro Espín explains, “our strategy [at CENESEX] is to work with the population so that they can accept and be educated on sexual diversity. The people who have the problem are not gay people but the general population.”
While her star power is clearly of great public relations value to the Cuban regime, those who have worked with Castro Espín believe she’s more than just a superficial spokesmodel for the Castro family. “It’s very much her own crusade,” says Elizabeth Dore, a professor of Latin American studies at the U.K.’s University of Southampton who met Castro Espín while working on a Cuban oral history project. “Mariela has become increasingly strong in her own ideas and even militant about them. I think she’s also a very hard-headed politician, which played a part in her slowly and delicately convincing people, including many white, elderly men [in power], that it was important for Cuba to change its policies toward gays.”

SOURCE: http://www.advocate.com/News/World_News/Out_in_Cuba/