Gays in Cuba after the Revolution
Gays in Cuba after the Revolution - Havana Times.org
The fifth of six installments from “Cuba Since the 1959 Revolution”
By SAMUEL FARBER
HAVANA TIMES, Dec 16, 2011 — In spite of not having been allowed to organize independently to articulate and defend their interests, Cuban women benefited in some ways from the revolutionary process. Some traditional forms of patriarchal sexism have become weakened, such as the power of husbands at home.
Women’s incorporation into the labor force and the occasional implementation of affirmative action policies have led to a much greater occupational differentiation and to a larger number of women playing prominent roles in the economy and society.
However, the opposite has been the case for Cuban gays, who have suffered greatly, particularly during the first thirty years of the revolutionary period. For reasons that will be elucidated later on, the Cuban government forced gays out of the closet and politicized their situation to significantly increase their oppression.
As part of this process, the revolutionary leadership created a climate of opinion that not only dismissed gay oppression as a legitimate issue but also portrayed gay life as a symptom of social decay
For example, when in 1967 the British House of Lords accepted the Wolfenden Report and abolished the UK’s laws against sodomy, the Cuban press portrayed the event as a further example of the decline of the British empire. Bohemia, Cuba’s most influential magazine, marked the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the United States with a cartoon portraying, in a derogatory manner, two men getting married in a church ceremony.160
A long series of events are “high” points of the decades-long trajectory of the persecution of gay Cubans by the revolutionary government. As early as 1962, the government conducted a massive raid known as the “night of the three Ps,” that is, prostitutas (female prostitutes), proxénetas (pimps), and pájaros (birds, one of the many derogatory Cuban terms for gay men). The raid netted thousands of people who were arrested and taken to police stations and city jails.