Gay Cuba: Oppression Under the Revolutionary Government

Following the otherwise socially progressive Cuban revolution, government-sponsored homophobia and anti-gay state-sponsored popular culture constructed a narrative to separate homosexuality from revolutionary modernity and instead associate it with U.S. decadence, therefore justifying the persecution of gay Cubans. This paper explores how official speeches and popular media worked together with state policy to attack homosexuals, all despite homosexuals' attempts via Cuban fiction and foreign appeals to socialism to mitigate these effects.