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gays in cuba
A book review of “Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality,” by Ian Lumsden. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
In “Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality,” Canadian political scientist Ian Lumsden analyzes Cuban homophobia, its historical and cultural roots, and the improving situation of gays in Cuba today.
A gay leftist, Lumsden writes as both an advocate of gay liberation and an “ambivalent” supporter of the Cuban revolution. He criticizes the government of Fidel Castro for a number of its policies concerning gay rights, while, at the same time, he opposes the U.S. blockade and defends the gains of the revolution in health care, education, nutrition, and culture.
Lumsden bases his book on academic research and participant observation among gay men during extensive stays in Cuba since 1965. He does not address the situation of lesbians because he did not make the close contacts with them that he believes would be necessary to do justice to the issue.
Lumsden reports that after the triumph of the revolution in 1959, there was very little government discrimination against gays. However, at various points between 1965 and 1975, the revolutionary regime interned a number of gays in labor camps, purged gay figures in education and the arts, banned gays from the military, and censored homosexual themes in literature.
Lumsden observes that these anti-gay policies conflicted with the progressive thrust of the revolution, which improved the conditions of working people and upgraded the status of two other oppressed groups, women and Blacks.
Lumsden attributes the persecution of gays to a combination of factors, including the Spanish colonial legacy of machismo, or male domination of women, and contempt for effeminate men (maricones). Such prejudices, he points out, may be found as well in other parts of Latin America, where cultural values are similar to Cuba’s.
Another element contributing to Cuba’s past anti-gay policies was that for a time, the government adopted the Stalinist position, practiced in the Soviet Union, that homosexuality is a form of “bourgeois decadence.”
Lumsden asserts that since the mid-1970s, systematic discrimination against gays has greatly diminished. The “last gasp” of institutionally promoted homophobia, he says, occurred during the 1980 Mariel exodus, when government propaganda singled out the large number of gays among the 10,000 Cubans who left the country.
Controversial AIDS Program
Lumsden disputes the claim made by foreign critics that Cuba’s policy of quarantining HIV/AIDS patients in sanatoriums, which began in the 1980s and lasted until 1994, was motivated by anti-gay bigotry. He points out that the program was consistent with the government’s radical response to prior epidemics and that the regime has not scapegoated gays for AIDS.
However, Lumsden criticizes the pre-1994 quarantine as being unnecessarily restrictive of individual rights in the fight against the spread of AIDS. He welcomes the 1994 liberalization that allows patients who have completed a virtually mandatory HIV/AIDS education program to leave the sanatoriums and return to normal life.
Lumsden reports that patients at the sanatoriums enjoy excellent medical care and living conditions. He also notes that the majority of gays seem to support the program because they see it as in their interests.
Although Lumsden recognizes that AIDS has been contained in Cuba so far – to a greater degree than perhaps any other country – he questions whether the pre-1994 quarantine was the main reason. He considers other factors as being responsible and suggests that widespread safe-sex education and voluntary and anonymous HIV testing would ultimately be the most effective solutions.
Cuban policy today includes mandatory HIV testing of al youth entering the armed forces and all pregnant women. More than 20 million HIV tests have been conducted. As opposed to the United States, no social stigma or persecution is attached to people with HIV/AIDS.
Lumsden cites many signs of significant but, what he calls, limited progress of gays since the late 1970s. This includes the formal decriminalization of homosexuality, the adoption of a gay-tolerant sex education program, the greater openness of the arts to gay themes, the liberalization of sexual attitudes generally, and the increasing “social space” and visibility of gays in public life.
Lumsden’s book takes note of the impact of the internationally acclaimed 1993 Cuban film, “Fresa y chocolate” (“Strawberry and Chocolate”).
The production of this film, he states, “was a landmark for Cuban gays. It unleashed a popular discourse about a culturally tabooed and politically repressed issue that went beyond the confines of the film itself.”
As a result, observes Lumsden, “Gay literature, public lectures about homosexual novelists and poets, and theatrical productions containing homosexual characters are beginning to form a part of the capital’s cultural scene and mass culture.”
Lumsden asserts that most of the job discrimination that gays currently face is informal, not institutionalized. While in his view some discriminatory laws remain, he asserts that police harassment is the most direct and visible aspect of gay discrimination today – as it is in most countries.
Lumsden observes that despite the homophobia of the regime, the revolution has “planted the seeds of liberation of gays” by raising their expectations for personal development by fostering health, education, culture and material security. Also, gains that women have made in education, employment, the professions, and access to contraception, abortion, child care, and divorce have eroded machismo.
Need for Institutions of Workers’ Democracy
However, the progress of gays and women is limited by the lack of autonomous gay and feminist movements that can challenge the machismo throughout society.
The absence of these two movements, Lumsden explains, flows from a larger problem stemming from the still-existing prohibition of organizations, institutions, and media that are independent of control by the Communist Party.
Lumsden argues that both the full liberation of gays and the defense and revitalization of the revolution lie with the democratization of the Cuban state, based on the existing socialized economy.
He indicates that such democratization is the logical, progressive solution in Cuba to the growing contradiction between the sociocultural development made possible by the revolution and the regime’s bureaucratic methods of rule in regard to decision-making in critical arenas.
He states, “Democratization does not necessarily require a multiparty system – which has hardly brought liberation to the oppressed either in the United States or in Latin America – but it does entail ‘the institutionalization of effective decision-making power and control by the popular masses over economic and social choices.’”
It is noteworthy in this regard that Lumsden’s citation is from “Cuba: The Revolution in Peril,” the pro-revolution analysis of Cuba today by a French leader of the Fourth International, Jeanette Habel.
His reference to institutionalized workers’ democracy is akin to the councils of workers’ and peasants that constituted the formal government of the early Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Lumsden also proposes, within the context of a democratic workers’ state, the establishment of nongovernmental organizations and an independent media.
Within a framework of Cuba socialist democracy, gays should be free to form their own movement, to build their community, and advance their rights. Aside from granting gays what they rightfully deserve, such reforms could counter the bitterness that many gays understandably feel toward the revolution, given their past persecution.
Although Lumsden wrongly rejects the Leninist principle of a vanguard party and democratic centralism, he rightly calls for the separation of party and state.
Lastly, Lumsden warns that U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution and capitalist restoration would be disastrous for gays, as well as for women, Blacks, and working people generally.
He points out that the right-wing Cuban exile community in Miami, whose capitalist class would preside over such a reactionary transformation, is a bastion of deeply entrenched economic inequality, racism, sexism, and homophobia.
The above book review was written by Gordon Schulz, and originally appeared in the October 1998 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
