There is enough evidence against Spanish pedophile network that operated in Cuba

Roots of Homophobia in Cuba during the Revolution
Roots of Homophobia in Cuba during the Revolution - Havana Times.org

The last of six installments from “Cuba Since the 1959 Revolution”

By SAMUEL FARBER

HAVANA TIMES, Dec 23, 2011 — The widespread sexism that has existed in revolutionary Cuba, particularly against gays, has long been an uncomfortable issue for supporters of the Cuban regime, particularly in countries such as the United States where vital and influential women’s and gay liberation movements developed in the wake of the 1960s.

Susan Sontag, the prominent cultural critic (among others), tried during her Fidelista political phase to minimize the problem with a false cultural relativism full of condescension.

As Sontag put it in 1969: “Suspicious as we are of the traditional puritanism of left revolutions, American radicals ought to be able to maintain some perspective when a country known mainly for dance, music, prostitutes, cigars, abortions, resort life, and pornographic movies gets a little up-tight about sexual morals and, in one bad moment two years ago, rounds up several thousand homosexuals in Havana and sends them to a farm to rehabilitate themselves. (They have long been sent home.)”187

Many left-wing activist gays have had much more difficulty reconciling the sympathy they harbor for Castro’s government with their own interests as gays and loyalty to oppressed gays in other countries, let alone the widespread hostility to Castro’s government among gay communities all over the world.

Left gay writers have tried to reconcile these conflicting sentiments with various interpretations of the Cuban regime’s homophobia.

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Transvestite dies after beating by police
Muere travesti tras golpiza propinada por policías | Cubanet

By Dania Virgen Garcia

HAVANA, Cuba, 16th of January (Dania Virgen García) - From the Ceramica Roja provincial prison, inmate Rolando Castro Sanchez from detachment 3 reports that on a Wednesday night, January 4th, a transvestite was assassinated at the police station of Guaimaro in Camaguey.

Eighteen-year-old Leidel Luis, who was known as Jessica, originally from the province of Santiago de Cuba and who lived with his partner named Yariel in Las Tunas, died after receiving a brutal beating.

The young man had arrived at the inspection station "The Yellows" (a state traffic inspection station) located at the exit of Guaimaro and was on his way to Las Tunas when for no reason at all he was detained by several police officers who began yelling and calling him a "faggot nigger and disgusting." They then began to beat him severely before transferring him to the police station in Guaimaro.

According to the source, when they arrived at the station, police officers Galindo Yarian Larena, Juan Ramon Lorenzo, their commanding officer Heriberto, and the sector chief Boris Luis Caballero, beat Leidel once again before tossing him into a jail cell handcuffed and unconscious.

The inmates in neighboring cells called out to him but he did not respond. At 1:35 am on January 5th, the police found him dead in his cell. They wrapped his body in a sheet and took the cadaver to an unknown location.
dania.zuzy@gmail.com

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Gay activists in Cuba demand that parliament respect their rights
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/28/2873429/gay-activists-in-cuba-demand-that.html

By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

Cuban gay activists held a kiss-in demonstration and presented a demand for respect to the country’s parliament on Thursday, as they prepared for the upcoming island’s second annual Gay Pride parade.

Fifty people — mostly gay rights activists but also a handful of dissidents such as Guillermo Fariñas and Martha Beatriz Roque — signed a petition calling for civil rights and handed it to the National Assembly of People’s Power, said Ignacio Estrada, a gay activist and dissident.

“Our document calls on the Cuban government to fully comply with international agreements it has signed on human rights, especially those that apply to LGBT rights,” Estrada said after delivering the petition.

The petition also calls on lawmakers to launch an investigation of the Military Units to Aid Production, or UMAPs — hard-labor camps created by Fidel Castro during the 1960s to detain homosexuals and government critics — and requests trials for government officials responsible for the camps.

Activists are also demanding that authorities stop applying the vaguely worded crime of “pre-criminal dangerousness” to gays and instead investigate complaints of those who are beaten or fired from their jobs because of their sexual orientation, Estrada said.

Estrada married Wendy Iriepa last year after she underwent transgender surgery. At the time, Iriepa claimed that Mariela Castro, Cuban President Raúl Castro’s daughter and head of the National Center for Sex Education, fired her from her job at the CENESEX for consorting with a dissident.

Estrada said three gay rights groups that are independent of the CENESEX — the Cuban League Against AIDS, the Open Door Foundation and LGBT Observatory — will stage the island’s second annual Gay Pride march on Sunday.

Before last year’s parade, Cuba didn’t allow the march, which marks the Stonewall riots against police raids in New York in 1969, saying that the demonstration wasn’t necessary on the island. Police detained a number of gay activists last year to keep them away from the march, but about 20 managed to join.

The march this Sunday will start at the Capitol Building, once home of the Cuban government, move down Paseo del Prado boulevard and end at the seaside Malecón, Estrada told El Nuevo Herald by phone from Havana.
The “Kiss-In for Diversity and Equality” at the Ramón Fonst sports arena was organized by Project Rainbow, which calls itself an “anti-capitalist and independent LGBT group,” to mark the Stonewall riots.

The group was founded last year by Yasmin Portales Machado, who is described in her blog as a mother, a feminist and a “critical Marxist.”

“With this public and affectionate action we invite you to make the LGBT community in Cuba visible,” the group said in a statement. “We are part of the nation."

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The Cuban League Against AIDS Report of Human Rights Violations to the LGBT Community in Cuba
The Cuban League Against AIDS Report of Human Rights Violations to the LGBT Community in Cuba / Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada | Translating Cuba

Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada
Havana Cuba

General Report of the Cuban League Against AIDS on Human Rights violations to the community of Lesbians, Gays,Bisexuals and Transgenders.

It has been five decades from that fatal triumph led by people wearing olive green clothes coming down from the mountains, and proclaiming a society of equality for all, without discrimination by race, religion, political and sexual orientations.

Not many years went on before the first exclusions of all Cubans who had a sexual behavior — defined by the emerging government as embarrassing and as a way of life that endangered the socialist morality of the Cuban nation — started to be seen in workplaces, educational and state institutions.

Our people lived through years of confinement, forced labor camps, repudiation acts, and as if that was not enough, in many cases, some were stoned and forced to go into exile, separating them from their families and friends.

Cuban history contains the anecdotes and the suffering of Reinaldo Arena, Virgilio P., Lezama, and those others whose names remain forgotten and whose bodies are found in the waters between the Florida straits and the Cuban shores.

Fifty years later history repeats itself, and the violations of human rights continue targeting the LGBT community in Cuba. The rulers have been changing the ways in which they commit these violations, but when you start analyzing the situation that the LGBT community faces, you see that it is the same.

The lack of public spaces, freedom of expression, freedom of association, the right to have a relationship and marry in equality of rights, and the right to decide the appropriate moment to tell their families about their sexual orientation are some of the violations that the LGBT community in Cuba is constantly facing.

While the State institutions like the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX) run by Mrs. Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of the current ruler of the nation, speak to the world about the certain openings that guarantee human rights for the LGBT community, the reality of the island is completely different; one that she would not hesitate to silence because of her fear of losing the large amounts of money collected for ghost projects that only respond to the interests of the Cuban State and not to those of the LGBT Cuban community.

There are daily reports on the island of the arrests of LGBT people, accompanied by heavy fines, deportations for homosexuals that are not from Havana, extortion and blackmailing by the police authorities or the law enforcement officers who want to benefit from the suffering of those who fall into their hands. There are also beatings, temporary detentions, searches in public places, among other actions of arbitrary nature.

There is evidence, from 2010, of layoffs based on the employee’s sexual orientation, layoffs of members of the LGBT community because they are following the government’s political ideology or simply because they are friends with someone who was a LGBT rights activist.

Violence caused the death of six homosexuals who died under an unknown situation. The death of a young transvestite from negligence and inattention in a police station was denounced, as well as the layoff of a transsexual woman, Wendy Iriepa Díaz, for marrying a human rights activist, and the arrests of homosexuals in public places and the removal of homosexual from the streets for supposedly harassing tourists.

We must continue denouncing the unjust prison sentences, from two to four years and the forced labor fields, for homosexuals because they are wandering around at night in the streets of Cuba, or drinking alcohol, or have decided no to work for the Cuba State because their families support them from abroad.

“Cuba is a country where the authorities are not prepared to confront radical changes like same sex marriage, adoption, and coexistence.” While the government gives this explanations, we Cubans wonder: how did they come up with this criteria? When we go out into the street, people smile at us and compliment us, not because of our sexual orientation, but because of what we stand for.

The true guilty people for the constant violations that the Cuban LGBT community faces are the State and its institutions, the real homophobic and discriminatory weapons. There is no power or people more discriminatory in this nation than its rulers.

The rise of male prostitution, within the community of men who have sex with other men, has resulted in 8 out of 10 of those infected with HIV being men, which is the largest number ever reached in the history of this community.

Despite totalitarianism, despite the fierce power of the State, the Cuban LGBT community now rises and emerges from the ashes, like a phoenix, showing a beautiful plumage and the colors of our unique flag demanding and recovering all the places usurped by the State power and the lies.

Today we demand our rights, we want to walk as a nation, as an independent community, as a community that advocates for the rights of all and not the rights of the minority in power.

The reason for our existence is to fight for the civil, political, economic and cultural rights of the LGBT community in Cuba. Our voice today demands to be heard and we want shout out that we exist and we are working to find a solution and looking forward to the future.

Ignacio Estrada Cepero
Executive Director
Cuban League Against AIDS

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Sandokan said:

Cuba has been compare to Thailand as a “paradise of sex tourism” (Sex Tourism and Child Prostitution in Cuba, Redirecting...). There is a very simple answer to the problem of prostitution: change the Castroit regime and the problem for the most part will solve itself, since the women will no longer need to prostitute themselves out of necessity. This is the result of the poverty created by 54 years of dictatorship.

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foadi said:

Cuba doesn't even have the largest P4P scene in the Caribbean. To compare it to Thailand is laughable.

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foadi said:

Thanks for the warning.

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Koros said:

You're wasting your breath responding to this thread. It is really nothing more than an occasionally necroed repository of Sandokan's rage.

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The proposed 1978 penal code details "crimes against the normal development of sexual relations, and against the family, childhood, and youth," but does not specifically prohibit homosexuality between consenting adults. However, according to this proposal, fines or imprisonment may still be imposed for "displaying this (homosexual) conduct in an ostentatious public manner" or "offending decency and proper customs with … scandalous public acts" or producing "publications, tapes, movies, photographs, or other obscene objects which might tend to pervert and degrade proper customs" (taken from Juventud rebelde, a Cuban Communist youth daily, translated in Gay Community News, Boston, October 7, 1978). In other words, the new law would make a distinction between public and private homosexuality, and put severe restrictions on dealing with themes of homosexuality in cultural productions.
Homosexuality in Cuba by Jump Cut editors

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zyzygy said:

What a boring blog.

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Self-Portrait of a Hooker
Self-Portrait of a Hooker* / Iván García | Translating Cuba

By Iván García

It is Mayra’s first day on the street. The entire family is glad she is back. The atmosphere is very different from before, when she went to prison. Now her parents do not get upset when her eleven year old son tries to make them laugh with a stories about the comandante.

Her mother, with her back turned, laughs at the boy’s joke. Myra is astonished. Before, her parents were constantly monitoring her speech. Under no circumstances would they have allowed her to say anything bad about the comandante or the Revolution. They would become incensed and explained why she should be eternally grateful: “Thanks to the revolution you have a house, an education, you don’t pay anything when you get sick.”

Sitting in the patio, breathing the fresh air, she thinks back again to her cell, the bricked-up windows, the humid air, and a stench of urine and excrement. She blinks. She feels a sense of relief. Yes, things have changed at home. Her parents now complain about “how bad things are.” One by one they count their “chavitos”—their small change in convertible pesos—to see if they have enough to buy a liter of cooking oil.

Mami is now 65 years old. She is fatter, spilling over the chair in front of the sewing machine. She works mending clothes for the neighbors. Papi is bony and ten centimeters shorter than five years ago. In two more days he will turn 70. He is retired from the Revolutionary Armed Forces and gets a “chequera,” a pension of 320 pesos, some thirteen dollars. He also works as a nightwatchman at a business near his house. He cleans patios and makes some extra money.

It is difficult for Mayra to imagine that once they went to the Plaza to joyously scream their support for the Revolution and Fidel Castro. They dreamt of a paradise where there would be no social inequalities and the exploitation of man by man would not exist. They believed in the Constitution, which compelled them to memorize the passage in the Preamble by José Martí: “I want to see that the first law of our Republic requires devotion by Cubans to the full dignity of man.”

But when the “special period” arrived in the 1990s, fanatics like her parents lost their enthusiasm. They began to tell her to talk in a low voice when she complained about those scheduledpower blackouts that lasted twelve hours a day, or when she occasionally even complained about the supreme leader. Now they become deaf and dumb when her son tells them that his dream is to become a ball player, to be able to travel, to live far away and to make a lot of money.

Dreams like that take her back to Doña Delicia, a women’s correctional facility. Images come to mind of when she went to work as a “jinetera”— a prostitute —on Fifth Avenue in Miramar. Images of police, acts of solicitation, a danger to society and five years in prison. It all happened so quickly. So stupid!

“I don’t have a ‘machango,’” she told the police. “If I had given them what they wanted, taken the easy route, I would not have gone to jail. But I would not let myself be blackmailed and so off I went. Who would have thought this would all get so complicated? It’s because of that son-of-a-bitch policeman, who tried to force me to kiss him. He was so disgusting. No, I am not sorry. If it happened again, I would do exactly the same. Ultimately, life is a game of Russian roulette.”

It seemed to Mayra that she was seeing the face of her father at the trial, the same one he had when her mother begged him to make piece with their other child, her brother, a “marielito,” one of the more than one hundred thousand people who left Cuba in 1980 through the port of Mariel. “We were dying of hunger,” she says, “but my father always had his pride. Even when Mami was sick with optical neuritis and almost died.”

“He now receives remittances from Miami, ’the nest of worms.’ How funny. When I went to prison, he was the president of the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. A few days later he resigned. He got a letter inviting him to visit his family ’in the bowels of the beast.’ At any rate he learned that it does not matter what path you take if you are following improbable dreams. I only want to get out of all this ****. That’s why I understand my parents, their silence, their sadness.”
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Toronto sex offender could be first Canadian convicted of child sex tourism in Cuba
Toronto sex offender could be first Canadian convicted of child sex tourism in Cuba | Toronto Star

Toronto man James McTurk, 78, has been convicted twice on child porn charges, and now faces charges of child sex tourism for abusing children in Cuba.

By: Jennifer Quinn Robert Cribb and Julian Sher

James McTurk is 78. He has wispy white hair and glasses, and speaks with a soft Scottish accent. He lives on a pension — and in a jail cell.

The Toronto man has been convicted twice on child pornography charges, and his legal troubles have just intensified: McTurk could become the first person in Canada to be convicted of child sex tourism for abusing children in Cuba.
He is now one of a very small group of Canadian men to face charges for the crime of child sex tourism. Only five are known to have been convicted.

McTurk does not travel to Cambodia or Thailand, destinations of choice for those who seek sex with children. All of his known and alleged victims have been Cuban girls. All were young, and some were very young — police currently allege some as young as 4 years old.

McTurk has spent several years on Canada’s National Sex Offender Registry, but he was able to make repeated trips abroad until he was caught last summer, almost by accident. He was arrested at Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson airport upon his return, once again, from Cuba. According to court documents — and to McTurk himself, in interviews with police — he travels there frequently.

Like tens of thousands of convicted sex offenders across Canada, McTurk was free to come and go, whenever he wanted, to destinations where sex is cheap and victims are young. Despite an addition to the Criminal Code in 1997 allowing the prosecution of Canadians for crimes committed against children outside the country, child sex tourists appear to be undeterred, and mostly undetected.

A succession of Canadian governments have declared their intention to eradicate the problem of child sex tourism, saying children abroad are as deserving of protection from predators as kids here. UNICEF estimates there are as many as 2 million children involved in the sex trade.

But there are significant loopholes in the system. Supervision of the travel of sex offenders is lax. The privacy of convicted offenders is prioritized. The process of laying sex tourism charges is an arduous one for police. Ultimately, it appears Canada is failing in its moral obligation to protect children.

“Talking about child protection is really easy for governments to do because there is nobody who is going to argue the other side,” says Mark Hecht, a co-founder and legal counsel for Beyond Borders, a Winnipeg-based group that fights global child exploitation. “If you stand up as a government and say you stand firmly against children being sexually abused, who is going to say they disagree with that?

“But if you actually break that down into what that requires, that’s where there is a lack of political will.”

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Sandokan said:

The Toronto Star story report the recent arrest of a Canadian sex offender who traveled to Cuba regularly in order to satisfy his twisted appetite for young kids with impunity. Canada has begun to prosecute sex tourists, and Mr. McTurk is the first one of these perverts linked to the Castroit regime.

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Fearandloathing said:

There have been a couple of dozen prosecutions for "Sex tourism" in south east Asia. Cuba has been far less a problem to date. The last sentence I saw was 12 years per count and a rare ruling to be served consecutively for 60 years. That's extreme in Canada

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How Cuba became the newest hotbed for tourists craving sex with minors
How Cuba became the newest hotbed for tourists craving sex with minors | Miami Herald Miami Herald

AVANA -- These stories are the result of a joint investigation by Toronto Star reporters Robert Cribb, Jennifer Quinn and Julian Sher, and El Nuevo Herald reporter Juan O. Tamayo.

The 50-something Canadian steps inside a downtown bar, his left arm wound tightly around the waist of a young prostitute as he flashes a sly grin. A winking bartender welcomes him like an old friend.

“It’s hard not to be inspired by this,” Michael says, looking over his companion for the night. “And that,” he adds, his eyes pointing to one of the other young women in the bar. “This is the promised land.”

Michael, a retiree from Vancouver Island, spends up to six months a year in Havana, where he says he has discovered easy access to young women willing to ignore age differences — in exchange for as little as $30 for the night.

Foreign tourists, especially Canadians and Spaniards, are travelling to Cuba in surprising numbers for sex — and not just with adult prostitutes. They are finding underage girls and boys, a joint investigation by The Toronto Star and El Nuevo Herald has found.

Havana’s conspicuous scenes of street-level prostitution are the outward face of a hidden prostitution trade in minors, some as young as four, some with families complicit in their exploitation, the newspapers found.

Cuba holds unique allure for Western sex tourists. It is closer and cheaper than other sex destinations, such as Thailand. And HIV rates are lower than in other Caribbean sex tourism hotspots, such as the Dominican Republic or Haiti.

While the size of the island’s underage sex market remains a mystery — the communist government denies it is a problem and fosters the image of an island free of the social ills that plague other nations — it clearly goes on.

• A confidential Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report in 2011 showed Cuba was one of the main destinations in the Americas for Canadian sex predators, along with the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil and Mexico. More than one million Canadian tourists visited Cuba last year.

• Cuba’s government “made no known efforts to reduce the demand for commercial sex,” noted the 2012 version of the U.S. State Department’s annual report on global Trafficking in Persons (TIP).

• The 2003 version noted that some officials of Cuban state enterprises such as restaurants and hotels “turn a blind eye to this [child] exploitation because such activity helps to win hard currency.”

• A dispatch by U.S. diplomats in Havana in 2009 noted that “some Cuban children are reportedly pushed into prostitution by their families, exchanging sex for money, food or gifts,” but gave no overall numbers.

Pimps, cabbies and tourist hotel staffers can procure discreet meetings with underage prostitutes, according to the RCMP report.
“That’s prohibited here in the hotel,” a security chief at a Havana hotel told a journalist posing as a tourist in search of underage girls. But, he added helpfully, they can be found “in houses waiting for the call from pimps.”

Clients can take them to private homes, known as “casas particulares,” the security man noted, where tourists can rent rooms for $10 a night and do “whatever you want. Orgies, anything.”
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