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.

GAY CUBA: OPPRESSION UNDER THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT 1959-1976 by Alaina Mothershead A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The University of Utah In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Honors Degree in Bachelor of Arts in History Approved: ______________________________ Susie Porter Thesis Faculty Supervisor _____________________________ Benjamin Cohen Chair, Department of History _______________________________ Eric Hinderaker Honors Faculty Advisor _____________________________ Sylvia D. Torti, PhD Dean, Honors College May 2019 Copyright © 2019 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Following the otherwise socially progressive Cuban revolution, governmentsponsored 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. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 2 GAY CUBA 4 REFERENCES 35 3 GAY CUBA As one of the last strongholds of twentieth-century communism today, Cuba offers an alternate view on economics, politics, and social order to the dominant Western ideology. In the time between Fidel Castro’s revolution of the 1950s and the ratification of the constitution of 1976, the island nation restructured its institutions to promote dignity and equality for its citizens regardless of class, race, or gender, but this progress excluded one remaining element of intersectionality: sexual orientation. Likewise, historians have often ignored homosexuality or given Cuba a contextualized pass on homophobia when examining the revolution. Finally in the 1980s, Lourdes Arguelles and Ruby Rich—followed by Emilio Bejel, Ian Lumsden, Lillian Guerra, and Carrie Hamilton—pioneered queer Cuban history, but their histories view homosexuality as an issue of cultural gender and machismo and do not meaningfully explore the structural and political relation of heterosexism to state-building as attempted in this thesis. This paper argues that government-sponsored homophobia and anti-gay state-sponsored popular culture, serving as political rather than entirely social tools, constructed a narrative to separate homosexuality from revolutionary modernity and instead associate it with U.S. decadence, therefore justifying the persecution of gay Cubans and establishing a nearly immovable foundation of discrimination with effects lasting into today, all despite homosexuals’ attempts to object through counterculture art and entertainment media. When the Revolution came, nearly every aspect of Cuban society changed. In 1959, rebels led by Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and other members of the 26th of July Movement successfully overthrew President Fulgencio Batista and the Cuban 4 government.1 For years, most notably after the 1953 rebel attack on the Moncada military barracks, university students and other young intellectuals had banded together in protest of Cuba’s corruption and exploitation by the United States.2 Despite having backwoods military reputations, Che Guevara graduated from medical school3 and Fidel Castro studied law at the University of Havana.4 As a movement of scholars, the Cuban Revolution had high hopes for restructuring the economic and social framework of the country. The Revolutionary government would work to achieve these overhauls from its inception in 1959 to the formalization of the constitution in 1976. Economically, the revolution began with more of an “anti-Batista and antiYankee” attitude than any formal ideology.5 The revolution meant to challenge not only the U.S. but also any Cubans complicit in allowing American foreigners to direct the Cuban way of life. Prior to 1959 under the rule of Fulgencio Batista—a U.S.-supported leader—Cubans faced severe economic hardship. In the province of Oriente, for example, high unemployment and underemployment characterized the local economy as agricultural workers earned, on average, the equivalent of less than two U.S. dollars per day during a period of less than five months of steady work.6 President Castro’s extreme economic restructuring sought to end this exploitation. The new, albeit provisional,7 1 Harry E. Vanden and Gary Prevost, Politics of Latin America: The Power Game, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 339. 2 Ibid., 345. 3 Ibid. 4 Peter G. Bourne, Fidel: A Biography of Fidel Castro (New York City: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986). 5 Robert B. Hoernel, “Sugar and Social Change in Oriente, Cuba, 1898-1946,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 8, no. 2 (Nov., 1976): 249. JSTOR (156526). 6 Ibid., 248. 7 Ibid., 62. 5 government valued “power to the worker” in a socially and economically progressive way that eschewed the laissez-faire capitalism of Cuba’s northern neighbors. Agrarian reform, new rent policy, wage regulations, and other changes broke with the conservative tradition of an economy controlled by the landed elite and foreign capital.8 Despite these changes, Cuba did not formally align with socialism until 1961.9 By that time, Sovietstyle socialism presented itself as the antithesis and enemy of U.S.-capitalism, so the antiAmerican Cubans embraced this model and joined the then-termed Second World. The revolution was not just about politics, nationalism, and economics, though. Castro and Guevara saw freedom from social oppression as an equally important factor to Cuba’s advancement. To this day, gender discrimination remains explicitly illegal as established by the revolutionary government’s 1976 constitution and subsequent supporting laws.10 Racial discrimination, a holdover from Cuba’s history with slaveholding plantations and U.S. influence, also violates the constitution.11 Under the new societal model, social justice meant using big government to legally eliminate barriers between less fortunate or marginalized people and their success. For women in particular, groups such as The Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC) or Federation of Cuban Women led by Vilma Espín, wife of Raul Castro, received support from Fidel’s 8 William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 22-23. 9 Peter Roman, People's Power: Cuba's Experience with Representative Government (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 63. 10 Clotilde Proveyer Cervantes, 50 Years Later: Woman and Social Change in Cuba (Havana: Oxfam, 2011), 419. 11 Vanden and Prevost, Politics of Latin America, 341. 6 government.12 The 1961 Literacy Campaign to eradicate education-based social inequality and the revolutionary effort to provide childcare, both headed by the FMC, promoted female involvement in the workforce.13 Accordingly, Cuban society welcomed women and minorities into the revolutionary fold with forward-thinking positivity. This push for equality coincided well with socialist ideology as reforms progressed. An individual’s most important identity was as a worker, and more specifically as a Cuban worker, and not as anything else. Not every person engaging in same-sex sexual relations takes on a homosexual identity, but enough people had by the first half of the twentieth century that lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities Cubans existed in society’s underground, often centered in Havana and sharing cultural and physical space with the paid sex industry. Homosexuality remained illegal under the Cuban penal code during the pre-revolutionary era,14 but a gay bar subculture emerged at locations such as the St. Michel, the Dirty Dick, and El Gato Tuerto. In addition to condoning this illegal activity, these establishments often had deeper connections to organized crime.15 Men looking for sex with other men also established cruising grounds in larger cities. A significant portion of documented male-male sex related to larger capitalist structures, though. The influx of American businessmen after the Spanish-American war built a booming tourism industry 12 Rebecca Herman, "An Army of Educators: Gender, Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961," Gender & History 24, no. 1 (April 2012), 93. 13 Ibid. 14 Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich, "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part I." Signs 9, no. 4 (1984): 687. JSTOR (3173617). 15 Ibid., 686. 7 which commodified the bodies, relations, and exploitation of women of all sexual orientations along with gay and bisexual men.16 As such, much of the begrudging tolerance to—and visibility of—gayness came out of an overarching desire for profit.17 A hierarchy based on mobility stratified the sex work industry in the prerevolution era, as did a hierarchy of gender and sexual roles.18 Women with permanent positions in brothels had the highest status of this bottom echelon of society while women working the streets had a much lower reputation.19 A handful of male sex houses sprang up in Havana and Caimanera in the early twentieth century, but men almost always pertained to the ridiculed transient category of sex workers.20 Furthermore, male prostitutes often played the more submissive or receptive role in paid sex which degraded their masculinity under cultural norms of male dominance and sexual penetration.21 As such, male sex workers occupied some of lowest strata in capitalist Cuban society, despite fulfilling a somewhat high demand. Revolutionaries attempted to deconstruct the sex industry and its hierarchies, but they framed this process as a rescue of oppressed women and a rebuke on capitalists. Male sex workers and the other men having sexual relations with men that shared their space did not fit the oppressed narrative, so the new government punished them alongside the perceived capitalist oppressors. The government offered so-called rehabilitation and re-education for female sex workers 16 Ibid. Ibid. 18 Rachel Hynson, “‘Count, Capture, and Reeducate’: The Campaign to Rehabilitate Cuba's Female Sex Workers, 1959–1966.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 24, no. 1 (2015): 130. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 17 8 following the Revolution, hoping to provide these women different skills for employment,22 but treated male sex workers as any other homosexuals, and this treatment was not positive. In part because of homosexuality’s cultural relation to sex work and its implications about gender, the body of historical work on LGBT+ Cubans as a distinct group or topic of study remains scattered into the beginning of the twenty-first century. The inherent problem with the literature comes from its newness as only in the past fifteen-or-so years have multiple historians examined the Cuban queer experience as a distinct topic of study instead of as a facet of another subject. Rather than speaking conceptually about homosexuality, many works have tended to center either gender, sexuality in general, or individual homosexuals. Furthermore, many existing histories focus on the post-constitutional era of the 1980s and onward, framing the preceding decades as historical context rather than their topic of study. This thesis breaks from both of these precedents. When historians have emphasized homosexuality, they have often addressed it at the individual level. Castro supporter-turned-critic Reinaldo Arenas produced and inspired poems, books, stories, and films about his experiences as a gay man in late twentieth-century Cuba that dominate queer Cuban sources. Any library or database search about LGBT+ issues in Cuba—from culture to HIV—yields extensive results from or about this particular man and his colleagues. A significant portion of this media comes from the United States in the 1980s as Arenas fled Cuba and developed most of his 22 Ibid., 131. 9 repertoire in this era. However, the fascination with Arenas and those like him has perpetuated a tradition of biographical and semi-biographical gay histories based on his life to this day. The still-young field of non-homophobic and non-biographical history on this subject began in the mid-1980s and has shakily expanded since. In 1984, Lourdes Arguelles and Ruby Rich published “Homosexuality, Homophobia and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience.”23 The authors argued that understanding the daily lives of individual gay Cubans in the sex economy, counterrevolutionary clubs, and general interactions represented the best avenue to understanding the long history of homosexuality.24 Accordingly, interviews about these experiences constituted the majority of their sources. In a similar vein, Carrie Hamilton’s 2012 Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory builds from Arguelles and Rich by using interviews and oral histories to make the argument that antihomosexuality laws represented a mixture of old and new Cuba during the revolutionary era and created several small revolutionary moments rather than any sweeping change. 25 Regardless of the specific research question, practically all existing secondary sources on LGBT+ Cuba explain homophobia as a matter nearly-inevitable of social context as seen in everyday life and focus heavily on the gay exodus and AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Ian Lumsden’s 1996 Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality calls itself “a response to the lack of information, misinformation, and to prejudiced Arguelles and Rich, "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution,” 685. Ibid. 25 Carrie Hamilton, Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 2. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (422057). 23 24 10 opinions”26 and steps away from the oral history format but still treats the revolutionary era as the precursor to the 1980s. Emilio Bejel’s 2001 book Gay Cuban Nation, refers to homosexuality as a “gender transgression” which challenged the national model of maleness illustrated in the primary source novels and writings of important Latin Americans like José Martí and Benjamín de Céspedes.27 Lillian Guerra’s 2010 article “Gender Policing, Homosexuality and the New Patriarchy of the Cuban Revolution, 1965-70” has a more narrow timespan and narrow topic but focuses on official policy and machismo rather than official policy and anti-Americanism.28 As such, this thesis stands apart from other works in the field. Instead of instituting protections or offering an avenue to social justice, the Cuban government used its immense reach and power to further oppress known nonheterosexuals and deter others from coming out. In 1961, the state-backed police force performed Operation P, also known as the Night of the Three Ps, a raid on those labelled as social deviants and counterrevolutionaries, demonstrated the openness of the oppressive government in its campaign to “purify” the nation. While original accounts of this phenomenon remain elusive for various sociopolitical reasons, Carlos Franqui, leader of the Cuban newspaper Revolución until his 1968 exile from the Castro government, supplies an account of this night in his famed tell-all Family Portrait with Fidel. “Operation P,” he explains, “was the first massive socialist raid of the Cuban 26 Ian Lumsden, Machos Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), xxiii. 27 Emilio Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), xvii. 28 Lillian Guerra, "Gender policing, homosexuality and the new patriarchy of the Cuban Revolution, 196570." Social History 35, no. 3 (August 2010): 271. History Reference Center, EBSCOhost (52497758). 11 revolution.”29 The Castro brothers and Ramiro Valdés, in an experiment with mass arrests, conducted two roundups across “bohemian” Havana neighborhoods such as Colón. The first tapped anyone in the vicinity without identification, but the second utilized lists of counterrevolutionaries as determined by nearby Defense Committees.30 The letter P referred to prostitutas (prostitutes), proxénetas (pimps), and pederastas (pederasts)—or in slang, pájaros (birds). The final P, no matter the insult used, referred to men who had sex and relations with other men. Fidel and his comrades committed a cultural faux pas when rounding up these supposedly undesirable peoples, though, as famed and well-liked artists and writers such as Virgilio Piñera found themselves caught up in the raids. In Franqui’s words, “the operation managed to annoy the whole country” because it “went too far.”31 Cuban culture was in no way friendly to anyone perceived as homosexual, but full-scale targeted raids represented a whole new level of gay-bashing. A celebrity-like figure such as Piñera would not have been targeted the same way by regular citizens. In a way, the disapproval of Piñera’s treatment shows that non-state-sponsored pop culture slowed the roll of the administration’s heterosexism as the public. The officials stood by their actions but agreed that homosexuals would simply be removed from cultural influence rather than prosecuted.32 This slight backpedaling did not last into the long term, though. Eventually, 29 Carlos Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York: Random House, 1984), 139. 30 Ibid., 138. 31 Ibid., 140. 32 Ibid., 141. 12 Cuba’s gay men would experience high-level discrimination and abuse on all fronts as leaders and media directors ramped up the abuses against homosexuals. Following the dramatic Night of the Three Ps, the writings and speeches of important figures such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro began to draw an increasingly harsh division between the ideal Cuban and the homosexual. On March 13, 1963, el comandante Fidel Castro delivered a speech from the steps of the University of Havana commemorating the sixth anniversary of the student-led attack on the presidential palace.33 He mostly extolled the virtues of revolutionary youth, acknowledged the fallen student leader José Antonio Echeverría, affirmed the Revolution’s commitment to religious freedom—yet another example of social progress, and railed against the United States. Throughout this diatribe, he illuminated the vices of capitalists such as theft and prostitution. According to the official transcript, the audience, in keeping with the fairly participatory style of Castro’s orations and as a demonstration of the heterosexism of Cuban society, urged their leader to include homosexuality in the list. Fidel agreed heartily, jokingly chastising his listeners for not letting him finish, and complained of—as translated—“the sons of the bourgeoisie” with tight pants, “Elvispreslian attitudes,” and the audacious desire to organize womanly shows freely in public spaces.34 This connection of homosexuals to imperialists tarnished their credibility as revolutionaries Fidel Castro, “En la Clausura del Acto para Conmemorar el VI Aniversario del Asalto al Palacio Presidencial” (speech, Havana, Cuba, March 13, 1963), Departamento de Versiones Taquigráficas del Gobierno Revolucionario, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1963/esp/f130363e.html. 34 Ibid. 33 13 and Americanized gayness. Calling these youths “crooked trees,” Castro declared that socialist society would not allow such denigration. “Do not,” he warned, “confuse the serenity of the Revolution and the equanimity of the Revolution with weaknesses of the Revolution.”35 This statement demonstrates how the otherwise socially progressive revolutionary government allowed for homophobia. Other social movements represented a forward-thinking worker’s paradise, but accepting homosexuality would have meant inviting a perceived weakness into the nation’s framework. Interestingly, at this early date, Castro explained that he harbored no intentions to apply “drastic measures” to these youths, but this speech nevertheless would catalyze extreme actions. Interestingly, Castro gave a speech about women later that same year that went so far as to deny the existence of counter-revolutionary women, making it impossible for lesbians to receive the same public bashing. And who are the revolutionaries in the society of man? […] In simple terms, the exploited and the discriminated. Because woman is not only exploited as a worker when she works for an exploiting monopoly, for a society of exploiting classes, but even as a worker she is the most exploited worker, with the lowest salaries, the worst conditions, with a series of contradictions among her social functions […] Thus, logically, women are revolutionary, […] they must be revolutionary.”36 35 Ibid. Fidel Castro, “Speech to Women’s Congress,” (speech, Havana, Cuba, January 16, 1963), CIA translation approved for release 2005. 36 14 Queer women were rendered almost entirely invisible during the revolutionary era because of their ideological incompatibility with burgeoning concepts of Cuban homosexuality and womanhood. To be a homosexual meant living a bourgeois capitalist lifestyle and/or supporting capitalist men through sex work. Revolutionaries congratulated themselves on rescuing women from heterosexual sex work and exploitation, though, so this aspect of homosexual depravity could not cross-apply to women. The “elvispreslians,” and related archetypes that appeared later tied Americanism to effeminacy and sissified weakness—both physical and ideological. This narrative did not work for women either, though. A woman’s feminine traits increase her gender-conformity and therefore her normalcy. In a related way, due to patriarchy, masculine-coded traits—in moderation—only increased a woman’s social standing. An overly masculine woman could certainly garner criticism, but the idea of a rough working-class laborer aligned well with revolutionary and socialist ideals. In this sense, the main arguments against homosexuals made little reference to lesbianism. Female homosexuals and counter-revolutionary women would require a different propaganda framework. Counter-revolutionary women existed, of course, but the government promoted a message of saving them and turning them into their ideal revolutionary selves. The target demographic included women with ties to capitalists, like people involved in heterosexual sex work. Therefore, the female version of male anti-homosexual policies dealt with the straight or straight-for-pay women sharing space with gay men and male prostitutes, not homosexual women. Lesbianism did not have the same cultural visibility 15 as male homosexuality, nor did it have the same financial implications. At the beginning of the revolution, the rescue or re-education system for female sex workers mostly employed catch-and-release tactics and persuasion in order to convince sex workers to abandon their trade.37 The idea was to speak to prostitutes but not punish them for the crimes of the capitalists. Police raids found female sex workers then gave them food and resources along with missionary-style encouragement to find other work. By the mid-1960s, on the other hand, this process grew into a detainment program—though it became steeped in the same savior mentality. Women entered camps or mansion-style institutions to learn new trades and agricultural skills while also taking classes on revolutionary beliefs and mainstream Cuban romantic and sexual culture.38 Sometimes the employees at these sites would restrict the women’s ability to leave if not deemed properly rehabilitated. High class escorts were, nevertheless, often encouraged to leave the country altogether if they refused to become working-class laborers.39 These negative policies against heterosexual and straight-for-pay women further demonstrate that the revolutionary government cared about American decadence much more than about who had sex with what genders. The revolution’s social progressivism was about constructing an “us” of greater Cuban society across almost all walks of life and a “them” of Americans and broader capitalism, so sex workers of all genders and male homosexuals by association became targets. Hynson, “Count, Capture, and Reeducate,” 139. Ibid., 142. 39 Ibid., 133. 37 38 16 Setting the tone for more “us” and “them” heterosexism to come, revolutionary leader and communist statesman Ernesto “Che” Guevara publicly outlined the nation’s incohesive progressivism in his March 1965 open letter to the Uruguayan magazine editor Carlos Quijano, “El Socialismo y el Hombre en Cuba” or “Socialism and Man in Cuba.”40 He claimed that despite capitalist critiques saying that socialism hinders individualism, the new Cuban system simply integrated people into a society of equals. The “Hombre Nuevo” or “New Man” rejected empire and discrimination while upholding community-mindedness and work. Herein lay the social foundation of progressive Cuba. Race and class could no longer separate the people, and while gender roles remained, they had no hierarchy. Sexual orientation, to the opposite effect, divided people, especially men, from the otherwise cohesive Cuban workers’ society. Although Che did not specifically call out homosexuality in this paper, the idea of the New Man would be deployed continually to explain the failure of gay and bisexual citizens to uphold their duties as revolutionary citizens. The public largely came to support their leaders and the proposed social exclusion of homosexuals as a wave of anti-gay sentiment flowing through Cuban popular culture worked to ramp up hatred and alienation. Many of the strongest examples of this homophobic echo chamber developed out of student organizations, the social groups which most vocally opposed homosexuality. The published propaganda pushed the state’s official stance: homosexuals contradicted the revolution. Appearing in a May 1965 40 Ernesto Guevara, El Socialismo y el Hombre en Cuba, March 12, 1965, Open Letter to Carlos Quijano (1965), https://www.marxists.org/espanol/guevara/65-socyh.htm. 17 edition of the periodical Mella, an extended political cartoon which reads like a short comic book centered on the fictional Florito Volandero.41 The author and illustrator of this piece demonstrated artful mastery of propaganda. Every detail of “Vida y Milagros de Florito Volandero”—or in English, “Life and Miracles of Florito Volandero”— stabbed at homosexuals and the U.S.A., often associating the two together. Starting at the title quadrant of the comic, the name of the character alone speaks to his infantilization and feminization. The diminutive “-ito” on a first name equates to prefacing one’s name with “little” in English. Young children often go by their diminutive form, but adults rarely retain their nicknames. Without the “ito,” the character’s name is flor, which means flower. Also, the name Florito is not especially popular, nor was it in the 1960s, demonstrating this character’s position far from the everyman. As for Florito’s surname, Volandero can mean loose and shifting or, when describing a person, restless. Additionally, “volandero” can describe the situation of a bird ready to fly. Pájaro, the Spanish word for bird, also served as a slang term for homosexual men. From the start, the reader knows that the character is childlike, flighty, and gay. Accordingly, the story of Florito described a young homosexual man who tried to be a revolutionary but utterly failed in his efforts and eventually ran away to the United States. This young man epitomizes an unsympathetic main character. He did not solve his own problems, instead fleeing from them, and had few contemporary or relatable traits. Mella alienated Florito Virgilio Martínez Gaínza, “Vida y Milagros de Florito Volandero,” Mella (1965): 20-21, in Keen’s Latin American Civilization, edited by Robert M. Buffington and Lila Caimari, 10 th ed., vol. 2, (Boulder: Westview Press, 2016), 316-319. 41 18 from the reader at every turn in order to erase any goodwill toward him and—by extension—any homosexuals. The artistic rendering of Florito and his counterparts also infantilized and feminized the titular character, and the cartoon’s creators extend the argument to associate the United States with militarized decadence. Florito’s shape consisted of slender limbs and curvaceous hips, demonstrating his less-than-masculine traits through physicality. Plus, he ran with a dramatic flourish, and his handwriting bounced and curled. His wide eyes and rounded facial features depicted him as a feminine child, especially as compared to the well-built, mature revolutionaries or the square-jawed thuggish Americans. Florito’s few sympathizers also had exaggerated cartoonish features while the artist drew the Cuban communists more realistically. Representing the U.S.A., stocky soldiers appeared grouchy and unintelligent. In a side-by-side comparison, the panels showing Mella’s society demonstrate order, cooperation, and purification, whereas the U.S.-focused stills capture shady military agents and an announcement for a new gay magazine. Cuba looked optimal to readers while its northern neighbor could only mean paradise to a thug or a homosexual. Mella asserted the normalcy and heroism of revolutionaries by way of trashing America. As a final insult to Florito, the quintessential American “Johnny” receiving Florito’s final pleas for protection did not appear particularly pleased to help the newcomer despite evidence of the upcoming Gay Liberation movement. The Cubans shed no tears in letting Florito go either. The tone of the piece shows a mocking, comical 19 attitude implying a resounding “good riddance.”42 Despite the formation of their new society of equals, the Cubans in Mella’s world felt no comradery with gay people, a group deemed incompatible with the revolution anyway. As the magazine has described his pitiful tale, Florito presents a direct contrast to Che and his “New Man.” While the state promoted men of strength and revolutionary dedication, Florito—the pinnacle of all things stereotypically gay—showed weakness and disloyalty. Mella’s union of the bourgeoisie and the homosexuals made both of these groups more depraved in the eyes of the general public which already disliked both. As much as Florito provides the clearest and most artful example, the student media’s hatred toward homosexuals appeared in several publications. Just one week after the cartoon, Mella published a flowery, rhetoric-laden statement labelled “La Gran Batalla del Estudiantado” or “The Students’ Great Battle.”43 This article praised the strength of the working class throughout Cuban history and the power of the revolution as a social equalizer. It continued by explaining the obligation of the hardworking student to protect the university system and “el campo de las ideas” or the land of idea cultivation.44 The author, signing for the Young Communist League (UJC) and Union of Secondary Students (UES), specifically targeted counterrevolutionaries and homosexuals, explaining the two options for these people: to be destroyed or reeducated in the army’s workforce.45 Existing homophobia therefore channeled into the developing purification movement. 42 Interestingly, many gay Cubans would embrace this attitude and leave Cuba in the 1980s, bolstering the gay communities of Miami, New York, and other diverse urban centers accepting immigrants. 43 “Students” could be substituted with “Studentry” here. 44 “La Gran Batalla del Estudiantado,” Mella no. 320 (May 1965): 2. 45 Ibid., 3. 20 Any state-sponsored homophobic policy would not only influence the minds of the general public but come from them as well. Popular hatred of homosexuals would validate their persecution which would, in turn, justify and produce more hatred. Non-homophobic straight Cubans may have existed, and perhaps the state and media acted in contrast to the actual opinions of some citizens on this matter, but there would be no way of knowing this after the fact. With such strong and prevalent rhetoric against homosexuals, many people, of all orientations, likely would have preferred to stay silent for their own best interest. The Cubans upset by the harassment of famous artists in Operation P in 1961 probably did not have so much dedication to celebrities so as to challenge the government or cultural tide in the media. Regardless of personal opinions, no one who intended to remain a part of Cuban society would have wanted a counterrevolutionary label. Furthermore, even if allies had tried to speak out, the state would have silenced their voices. Censorship blocked anti-revolutionary documents, and magazines like Mella and Alma Mater belonged to nationalized organizations. The state controlled popular culture, so an opposing view would fail quickly unless presented by someone with even higher sway than the previously-persecuted Virgilio Piñera. Unfortunately, government scientists and social scholars also played a role in casting homosexuals and bisexuals as cultural deviants at this same time. The Cuban Ministry of Health’s 1965 report on homosexuality offered particularly negative commentary on gays by claiming that homosexuality developed from solely social 21 causes.46 The ministry claimed that no biological cause existed for homosexuality, nor did a medical cure. Affirming the Freudian theories of the day, the ministry argued that gayness came from alienation from the father and association with the mother47—of course, this argument ignored lesbianism in classic revolutionary Cuban fashion. Around the world, related psychoanalyses gave the general populace justification to abuse and exclude gays from society, and in Cuba, this report helped spur the government into inventing social cures for this so-called societal ill. Back on the pop culture side of society, the hits kept coming. Alma Mater, a similar magazine to Mella under the Federation of University Students (FEU), provided another popular culture insight into Cuban students’ views, this time without the humorous presentation. On June 5th, 1965, Alma Mater published an article titled “Nuestra Opinión” or “Our Opinion” discussing counterrevolutionaries and homosexuals.48 The authors quickly rejected the notion of a revolutionary witch hunt yet expressed their support for Depuración, the formal purification of Cuban society. They explained that counterrevolutionaries and homosexual individuals lacked the capability to carry the workload of La Revolución. Universities, explained the students, retained no responsibility to rehabilitate or reeducate such enemies of the revolution. Just months after the publication of Che’s famous letter, this document reinforced the duties of the “New Man” and explicitly denied the existence of a gay revolutionary. Although Alma 46 Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation, 102. Ibid. 48 “Nuestra Opinion,” Alma Mater no. 49 (June 1965): 2, http://www.annaillustration.com/archivodeconnie/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/AM-NuestraOpinion65.pdf. 47 22 Mater delivered no suggestion of army work camps, it explained an important position quite clearly. Counterrevolutionaries and homosexuals were one and the same, and their freedom to practice their unusual activities reached its limits where the government’s job to protect the people from American Imperialism began. This defended the state’s power to persecute homosexuals as political enemies and promoted anti-homosexual sentiment in the public. Outside of the student realm, writer Samuel Feijóo harkened back to Fidel’s speech in an editorial for El Mundo. His writings would become a reference point for other pop culture submissions and official policy. 49 Feijóo explained, “The conditions of virility found among the Cuban peasantry do not permit [homosexuality]. But in some of our cities it proliferates. ... Against it, we are struggling and we will struggle until we eradicate it from a virile country, wrapped up in a life and death battle against Yankee imperialism.”50 He once again tied gayness to American capitalism then extended his argument to debase homosexuals as weak and trembling. This editorial demonstrated El Mundo’s willingness to publish such an opinion and gave a nod of approval to the government’s mistreatment of gay citizens. In a chilling judgment, the author declared, “We are not talking about persecuting homosexuals but of destroying their positions in society, their methods, their influence. Revolutionary social hygiene is what this is called.”51 The targeting of gay Guerra, “Gender policing, homosexuality and the new patriarchy of the Cuban Revolution,” 271. Samuel Feijóo, “Revolución y Vicios,” El Mundo (15 April 1965): 4. 51 Ibid. 49 50 23 people did not relate to a general distaste but to a belief in a fundamental incompatibility with a functioning society. Framed in terms of protecting the people and the state, this hygiene or Depuración would become official policy. Corresponding to the pro-state pop culture movement against gay people, the statements of Castro, Guevara, and their state scientists transformed into legislation which encouraged discrimination against LGBT+ people in the workforce, politics, and greater socialist society. By the end of 1965, the most heinous example of policy-driven gay persecution in Cuba, Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP) or Military Units to Aid Production, appeared, echoing the requests in Mella. These units worked on labor sites and consisted of dissidents and homosexual men not seen as suited for the regular military. Records indicate that the government instituted at least one women’s UMAP camp in Camagüey and sent some lesbians there, but the camp largely housed female sex workers since the UMAP era coincided with the era of prostitute rehabilitation.52 Mostly, UMAP camps served as a combination of penitentiaries, rehabilitation centers, and work camps for men,53 demonstrating the lengths to which the government was willing to go to bring their rhetoric and written policy, as well as the views of state infotainment sources, into physical fruition. An “otherness” ascribed to homosexuals that stemmed from the main argument that gay men represented the decadence of the non-working class justified the production of these camps. In addition to forced labor, the UMAP employed conversion-aversion therapy in an attempt to change Hynson, “Count, Capture, and Reeducate,” 151. Abel Sierra Madero, ““El trabajo os hará hombres”: Masculinización nacional, trabajo forzado y control social en Cuba durante los años sesenta.” Cuban Studies 44, no. 1 (2016): 311. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/613550. 52 53 24 prisoners’ sexual orientations. This tactic was founded in the assumption that gayness had a psychosocial explanation. Gay UMAP survivor Héctor Santiago explained: They thought they could apply that [Pavlovian experiments] to the gays. Then they would give you an insulin shock and an electric shock while they showed you photos of nude men and afterwards they gave you, while they gave you food, gave cigars, they showed films of heterosexual sex. They thought like that they could … convert you into a heterosexual … Sometimes they left you without food and water for three days and then they showed you photos of nude men and later they gave you food when they showed you the photos of the women. If you are not diabetic, and they give you an insulin shot, it shocks you, you urinate and defecate and vomit … Electric shock … you lost your memory and two or three days after you don’t know who you were and you are catatonic and you cannot speak.54 Although testimony remains scarce from homosexual UMAP internees, with little likelihood of more emerging as these events fall deeper into history, memories from other prisoners corroborate Santiago’s statement.55 Quite obviously, Castro’s previous claims against “drastic measures” had fallen out of favor by 1965. Heavy anti-gay publicity pushed the societal agenda away from even the mildest tolerance, leading to state- Joseph Tahbaz, “Demystifying las UMAP: The Politics of Sugar, Gender, and Religion in 1960s Cuba,” Delaware Review of Latin American Studies 14, no. 2 (December 2013). https://www1.udel.edu/LAS/Vol14-2Tahbaz.html. 55 Improper Conduct, Directed by Néstor Almendros (1984). 54 25 sponsored human rights atrocities such as UMAP. The UMAP program ended in 1968, but the oppression of homosexuals did not. Gay people responded to the severity of the government and societal norms as negatively as they dared during this repressive era. In a classic example of trying to break the cycle with gay-produced entertainment media, Cuban author José Lezama Lima defiantly published an explicit novel with homosexuality as a main theme in 1966, despite the possibility of retaliation. Paradiso, unlike the journalistic style of magazine pop culture, presented neo-baroque, poetic stylization. The main character José Cemí travelled through life’s trials and triumphs along a backdrop of pre-Revolutionary Cuba and into the Castro years. Notably, Cemí and his counterparts experienced Havana gay life in multiple detailed scenes. At school, José Cemí observed homoerotic masturbatory performances by upperclassmen Farraluque and Leregas, each described in awe and appreciation.56 The author framed these experiences positively, using phrases such as “After Farraluque was temporarily exiled from his burlesque throne, José Cemí had an opportunity to witness another phallic ritual.”57 By likening these situations to burlesque and describing them as opportunities, Lezama Lima set a positive, curious tone in Cemí’s experiences. José Cemí’s voyeurism, nevertheless, pales in comparison to the author’s description of Farraluque’s sex life in chapter eight. The apparently bisexual adolescent 56 José Lezama Lima, Paradiso, trans. Gregory Rabassa (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000), 197-198. Ibid., 198. This quotation carries the same vocabulary and connotation in the original Spanish: “Después que Farraluque fue confinado a un destierro momentáneo de su burlesco poderío, José Cemí tuvo oportunidad de contemplar otro ritual fálico.” 57 26 had multiple explicit relations with females and males about which the author left no mystery. Lezama Lima’s bravery in writing this work is evidenced by his equal attention and positive erotic association to both heterosexual and homosexual sex scenes. With a woman, “Farraluque undressed swiftly and leaped onto the patchwork of delights.”58 Just as eagerly with a man, “he began to undress the priapic one as if turning him on a lathe, caressing and greeting with a reverential sense all the erogenous zones.”59 Furthermore, Farraluque has both anal and non-anal sex with males and females alike in the book. Lezama Lima explained that the character saw no difference in his partners; he just loved sleeping with people.60 This narrative directly countered the message of the state. While policy and most popular culture insisted on a vast difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality, one so insurmountable so as to alienate homosexuals from Revolutionary society, Lezama Lima pushed a new agenda, drawing such similarities and compatibility between the two orientations that they manifest in one person. In chapter nine of Paradiso, Lezama Lima proceeded in his presentation of alternative views on homosexuality without using any of his characters as a literary metaphor. Instead, he offered an earnest dialogue between José Cemí and his friends Ricardo Fronesis and Eugenio Foción spurred by the attempted suicide of their classmate Baena Albornoz who was caught having sexual relations with Leregas.61 Fronesis viewed homosexuality as a pure—but ultimately condemnable—childlike creativity based in a primitive paideuma. Foción argued that homosexuality had no real explanation nor 58 Ibid., 201. Ibid., 207. 60 Ibid., 208. 61 Ibid., 246. 59 27 element of choice and did not indicate a person’s morality. This conversation positioned the issue of homosexuality as a debate between friends and equals instead of a judgement passed by the government. None of the opinions voiced in the chapter reflected the kind of harsh rhetoric that led to UMAP camps or conversion therapy, and Lezama Lima never framed any of the discussion’s participants as unintelligent or incorrect. The author offered an alternative, nonviolent way of talking about homosexuality and situating it in historical, cultural, and philosophical context. While a reader might not have bought into the message of sameness Lezama Lima conveyed in chapter eight, he or she could have possibly accepted the call for multi-perspective discourse in chapter nine. Entrenched in the personal stories of the characters, Lezama Lima’s work lacks the attention to the revolution seen in other media of its time. While many writers emphasized the glory of the new government, Lezama Lima chose to tell a human story that touched on historical philosophy and extended metaphors. Nevertheless, he never actively opposed the government and had been involved in previous anti-imperialist political movements,62 so, interestingly, this disregard to politics did not signify a disdain for Castro, just for homophobia. Despite the novel’s controversial topic and unpatriotic focus, Lezama Lima’s popularity as an author, in a similar fashion to that of Piñera, saved his work from the permanent blacklist—although it did face a printing halt in its early years—even though the government eventually called him into court for counterrevolutionary behavior. 63 Unfortunately, likely unintentionally, by setting Cemí’s 62 63 Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation, 114. Ibid., 115. 28 life in capitalist Cuba, Paradiso related homosexuality to the U.S. and its decadence, much like revolutionary media. Whether this detail factored into the common interpretation of the novel or not, in decades to come, Cuban students would study censored versions of Paradiso and poems by the famed writer.64 As such, Lezama Lima demonstrated the gay man’s ability to reject state-sponsored homophobia through art. Not all pop culture supported the regime. Regardless of this cultural activism, in 1971 homosexuals found themselves barred from certain industries and forms of employment. The First Congress of Education and Culture defined homosexuality as a social pathology and determined that gay individuals should not have the opportunity to influence the nation’s youth.65 Severe penalties would befall homosexuals found corrupting the morals of minors.66 Furthermore, gay Cubans could not represent Cuba in cultural engagements abroad.67 Again, gays signified capitalist decadence, especially that of the United States. This hard line pushed Cubans out of their jobs for homosexual—or alleged homosexual— tendencies. As much as this article implemented unforgiving policy, the government could not see its own harshness. With qualifying statements such as—translated to English—“homosexuality should not be considered as a central or fundamental problem in our society” and “an analysis is needed to determine how the presence of homosexuals in different organisms of the cultural front should be addressed,”68 the congressional 64 Ibid., 116. “Declaración del Primer Congreso Nacional de Educación y Cultura,” La Gaceta de Cuba 90-91 (MarchApril 1971): 2-13. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 65 29 body refrained from wholly damning gay citizens. These nuances in policy would ultimately fall meaningless as society took the government’s advice and purged known homosexuals from their jobs in various societal sectors, though. In this way, policy justified persecution by the general populace. In the midst of the punishment and Americanization of Cuban homosexuality, and as a product of the growth of the GLBT movement in the United States in the 1970s, U.S. gay groups weighed in on their Caribbean neighbors’ experiences. Since the 1969 Stonewall riot, the underground gay community of the U.S. had started to coalesce into a vocal and political force known as the Gay Liberation movement. LGBT+ people from the U.S. weighed in on the treatment of the community worldwide and other current events. Despite clear separation between homosexuality and the Cuban revolution, gay socialists existed, albeit as a group on the extreme fringe of society, and argued their case. Following the publication of the Gay Revolution Party Manifesto—a document with a hazy origin story—in New York in 1970, various groups took up the mantle of the proposed GRP as their own. The party rejected heteronormative, androcentric social structures that contributed to racism, sexism, and classism.69 Homosexuality did not necessarily conflict with socialism or class liberation. In 1971, one incarnation of the GRP used the manifesto’s anti-imperialist, anticapitalist undertones to make an argument for socialism that rejected the Cuban “Gay Revolution Party Manifesto,” 1970, as cited in Stonewall: Riot, Rebellion, Activism and Identity, https://stonewallhistory.omeka.net/items/show/19. 69 30 mistreatment of homosexuals.70 The article appeared in Come Out, a U.S. gay publication, and utilized an excerpt from Granma, a state-sponsored Cuban news source. The Granma section summarized the First National Congress on Education and Culture’s Declaration allowing discrimination against homosexuals in the workplace and society atlarge. Straight society as personified by this policy, the Come Out writers argued, enforced inequality, while Gay society inspired community-mindedness. Based on these authors’ opinions, the deep divide between socialist revolutionary attitudes and gayness did not come from some inherent quality as argued by the communist leaders. The Americans argued that in order to achieve the egalitarian qualities espoused by socialism, a society must embrace various tenets of gay culture rather than enforce straightness. This idea represented a direct challenge to the Cuban administration’s incompatibility narrative. These U.S. writers saw Fidel and Che as homophobic but not the communist ideology as a greater whole. More importantly, out of the Cuban censors’ reach, U.S. fringe media published cubano examples undermining the homosexual-revolution-incompatibility theory. In the same August 1971 edition of the underground New York newspaper RAT, a gay brigadista wrote in to defend the Cuban government against criticism and remind readers about the gay men fighting for the revolution,71 and an article on Cuba referenced celebrations in Havana’s gay bars following the revolutionaries’ success.72 Undoubtedly, 70 "CUBA," Come Out 2, no. 7b (Spring-Summer 1971): 4, Archives of Sexuality & Gender (accessed October 4, 2017). http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/5EfktX. 71 "To the Staff of RAT," RAT, August 2, 1971, 12. Archives of Sexuality & Gender, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/5EgVR1. 72 "Background on Anti—Homosexual Policies in Cuba," RAT, August 2, 1971, 12. Archives of Sexuality & Gender, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/5EgVR1. 31 some bisexual and homosexual Cubans supported the revolution, even though the mainstream media in Cuba erased this fact. Therefore, the heterosexism of Fidel and Che’s society came of reasons beyond actual ideological irreconcilability; incompatibility made for an easy narrative for pop culture but did not reflect reality. After over a decade of provisional government, the 1976 Constitution appeared, enshrining heterosexism and the narrative of a decadence-homosexuality link. In most ways, the 1976 constitution guarantees progressive and egalitarian civil liberties. Statements about marriage such as, “It is based on full equality of rights and duties for the partners,”73 “All children have the same rights, regardless of being born in or out of wedlock,”74 and “Neither marriage nor its dissolution affect the citizenship status of either of the spouses or their children”75 affirm the country’s forward-thinking attitude on gender and partnership. However, in Article 36 of Chapter 4, the law reads as translated, “Marriage is the voluntary established union between a man and a woman.”76 Same-sex marriage had no legal standing anywhere in the world at this time, so Cuba’s law indicated no particularly oppressive stance. Nevertheless, seeing as United States gay liberation activists had already set the marriage equality fight in motion via Baker v. Nelson in 1970, this constitution reflected a far-from-progressive attitude on this issue. Furthermore, the ratification of a one-man-one-woman principle into the constitution rather than as a regular law would prove particularly damning to future movements. 73 Cuban Constitution Chapter IV, Article 36. Ibid., article 37. 75 Ibid., Chapter II article 31. 76 Ibid., Chapter IV, Article 36. 74 32 The Constitution likewise guaranteed equality to its citizens with the declaration that “Discrimination based on race, color of the skin, sex, national origin, religious creeds, or any other type offending human dignity, is prohibited and punished by the law.”77 Again, though, these protections did not apply to LGB+ people. Sexual orientation stands apart from the listed protection categories, and—based on previous policy and the societal opinion—discrimination for this reason would not offend human dignity. As such, the 1976 Constitution offered no relief for homosexual and bisexual Cubans and instead permitted the abuses of these people as non-protected citizens. As seen before, official policy justified, and could easily embolden, popular affronts to gay Cubans in greater society. This time, though, the laws would extend into a new era: the constitutional phase of the Castro regime. Accordingly, communist Cuba’s record on LGBT+ rights has struggled to move forward in a positive direction against the restrictive norms established during the interim period between the Revolutionary victory and the constitution. Cuba has since decriminalized same-sex sexual activity and overturned employment discrimination but has not done much else legally, despite the efforts of Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela and other prominent activists. These individuals have an extensive precedent working against them. Setting the stage for institutionalized discrimination, the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated a ramping up of heterosexism and homophobic attitudes in both policy and popular opinion. Operation P and Fidel and Che’s statements coupled with the articles in Mella, Alma Mater, and El Mundo, all justified in their time or retroactively by the 77 Cuban Constitution Chapter V, Article 42. 33 Ministry of Health, promoted hate. 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