Sexual Politics In Cuba

Machismo, Homosexuality, And Aids

Marvin Leiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000311327
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book, Marvin Leiner analyzes the practice of quarantine in the context of the Cuban Revolution. He also focuses on efforts by Cuban educators to introduce sex education in the schools and to change sexist and homophobic attitudes, discussing their successes and failures with candor and examining the explicit and implicit linkages between machismo and homophobia.

1
The Paradox of Cuba's Revolution

On February 11, 1988, while flying to Cuba, I read a New York Times op-ed piece entitled "Cuba's Callous War On AIDS," by Ernesto B. Betancourt.¹ In 1988 he was a director of Voice of America's Radio Marti, which broadcast to Cuba with the implicit aim of generating opposition to the Cuban government. Naturally, Betancourt was strongly critical of Cuba's AIDS policy, accusing it of violating the human rights of "AIDS carriers" because these people had no choice but to give up their jobs and spend the rest of their lives in a sanitorium, whether or not they were ill. This was a very disturbing accusation that required investigation. It would not be the first time that distorted and even blatantly untrue reports of Cuban life appeared in the United States.

This was also an issue close to my heart. I was coming from New York City, where AIDS was decimating many communities, where I witnessed family and friends suffering and dying, and where I joined others in criticizing a shocking, "tortoise-slow government policy" toward AIES. In fact, the first response of New York City officials had been to deny there was a rampant disease.² As a psychotherapist I knew about the pain of people with AIDS as well as of those testing HIV-positive. I felt deeply hurt about this tragedy in their lives and in the lives of their families and friends.

It wasn't just that I hoped the quarantine report wasn't true. It seemed to contradict my experience of the role of education in Cuba since the Revolution. From the beginning, education had been essential to the revolutionary government's programs to radically transform Cuban society; it was "the path up from underdevelopment" as the government attacked the problems of public health, housing, land distribution, job opportunities, and economic development.³ This meant not only achieving high levels of education but providing the opportunity for education for all citizens. One of the most dramatic and effective educational programs anywhere in the world was carried out in Cuba in the early years of the Revolution—the Literacy Campaign of 1961. Over 700,000 people learned to read and write from young volunteers sent to the remote countryside to teach illiterates on a one-to-one basis.⁴

In all cultures around the world, the AIDS epidemic has brought to the fore deeply entrenched attitudes about men, women, and sex. The way in which any nation responds to a disease such as AIDS "reveals its deepest cultural, social, and moral values. These core values—patterns of judgment about what is good or bad—shape and guide human perception and action."⁵

The Cuban response to the AIDS crisis reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of the Cuban system. On the one hand, there exists a strong national commitment to providing health care—no matter what the cost—in order to serve the common good. This means free health care to all people without prejudice, including the best available treatment for AIDS patients.⁶ On the other hand, under the justification of "the common good," the government has created a draconian institution—the quarantine of all people testing HIV-positive. This is a serious mark against an otherwise admirable public health system.

Those in Cuba who have questioned the quarantine policy are labeled "enemies of the Revolution," thus effectively excluding the possibility of public advocacy for the 703 people in quarantine and for their families.

Lacking an independent press and the right to independent assembly, Cubans were not able to hear and debate publicly the proposed quarantine or possible alternatives. There is no gay rights advocacy group, no Gay Community News or The Advocate (U.S. periodicals concerned with gay and lesbian issues); the Cuban government does not believe in the need for such groups in a society still "consolidating" the revolution.

Organizations such as gay rights groups are seen in terms of their potential for facilitating CIA infiltration. The argument is that the structure of party-based organizations overrides the need for a proliferation of different and overlapping interest groups. Homosexuals, for example, as students, poets, and workers can belong to the writer's union (UNEAC), the women's federation (FMC), the university students association (FEEM), or a worker's union. The concept that a socialist society could also include independent political organizations from the grass roots appears contradictory to those in power. They fail to see that "social control of the major means of production" (nationalization) is not inconsistent with a democratic socialism.⁷

A traditional Latin machismo, which includes a trio of prejudices— against women, against homosexuality, and against public sex education—has combined with historical international reactions to "plagues" to produce policies and practices that encroach on the human rights of Cuban citizens.

Although Cuba is the only nation to institute a quarantine of people testing HIV-positive, the sexual prejudices prevalent there are hardly unique to its culture. While some societies have gone further than others in beginning to overcome these prejudices, they are universal. And everywhere, including Cuba, there are those struggling against homophobia, for the equality of women, and for better sex education. This book is really about change and how difficult it is for an individual and a society to overcome sexism, machismo, and homophobia.

The difficulty is highlighted with the case of Cuba because for the past thirty-four years, government and social institutions there have claimed legitimacy precisely for making some essential breaks with the past. The AIDS epidemic has brought to the fore these deeply entrenched attitudes about gender and sexuality in cultures around the world. Understanding the Cuban experience may help generate better approaches to that epidemic.

Cuba's Successful Revolution

As context to our story some statement on the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro's role is necessary. The Revolution took place in one of the most culturally homogeneous nations of the world.⁸ All but a few thousand Cubans spoke Spanish. The island nation did not suffer from the separatism and strife of land disputes or severe tribal and religious differences that beset other countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. There was, however, a large black minority and a large portion of people of mixed race in the population. While the 1953 census classified 26.9 percent of the people as black or "mixed race" the true proportion was undoubtedly much higher; mulattos consistently underreport their blackness because of extensive economic and social discrimination. "The man of dark skin was in general greatly disadvantaged in prerevolutionary Cuba. But this racial cleavage was not so complete as to constitute an enduring impediment to mobilization and cultural transformation after Castro came to power." Even today, however, at least 50 percent of the population is black or mulatto while the census reports 33 oercent.⁹

There was and is no overpopulation problem in Cuba, and in climate and geography the country has no extreme conditions or natural barriers. Aggregrate measures of Cuba's economic and social conditions in the 1950s, notably gross national product per capita, placed it among the top seven Latin American countries. These measures revealed nothing, however, of vast inequalities. Large percentages of material goods, such as television sets and radios, and of services, such as those performed by doctors, were available only to the rich, the small middle class, and tourists in the large cities of Havana and Santiago. According to a 1950 study of rural Cuba, 60 percent of the island's rural families lived in dwellings with earth floors and roofs of palm leaves; two thirds lived in houses without water closets or latrines; only one in every fourteen families had electricity.¹⁰ Rural families were also the most neglected in respect to education. Still, although 43 percent of the rural adult population could not read or write, they were, as Nelson Lowry concluded in 1950, "anxious for better educational facilities for their children."¹¹

During my trips to Cuba, teachers and educational leaders often recounted the conditions in Havana before the Revolution—the commercialization of sex and the widespread control of the city by organized crime during the 1950s. Notorious corruption was prevalent in all sectors of public life. Lourdes Arguelles and Β. Ruby Rich, researchers on the Cuban lesbian and gay experience, in a review of the prerevolutionary period describe an atmosphere of decadence and sexual degeneracy reflected in gambling, drugs, and prostitution, and the staggering statistic of more than two hundred thousand workers hired as petty traders, casino operators, entertainers, servants, and prostitutes.¹² At least half of these are estimated to have been women, either directly or indirectly engaged in prostitution.

In March 1952 a military coup made Fulgencia Batista the head of state. He immediately stopped the electoral process including elections for the Chamber of Deputies in which the young lawyer, Fidel Castro, was to have been a candidate. The opposition movement, eventually led by Castro and his 26th of July Movement, was not only against Batista's dictatorship but against all the corruption, crime, and poverty as well. And, above all, it was a movement of Cuban nationalism growing out of a history of colonialism and subjugation by foreign powers. "Most nations outside Europe and North America have had the course of their development shaped by imperialist domination. But few have experienced the degree of subjugation suffered by Cuba during its 400 years under formal Spanish control as a colony and its 60 years under the de facto control of the United States."¹³

On July 26, 1953, when Castro and his fellow insurgents led a daring attack on the Moneada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, they initiated an armed struggle that had roots in almost 100 years of a national campaign for independence. The new movement's heroes were those of the late nineteenth century wars of independence—Antonio Maceo and José Martí.¹⁴ After imprisonment and exile, Castro and 82 other rebels returned from Mexico to begin guerilla warfare in the eastern mountains, the Sierra Maestra. They gained growing support, primarily in the countryside but also in the cities.

On January 8, 1959, two years after landing on the coast of Oriente, Fidel Castro and his guerilla fighters entered Havana. They were greeted by ringing church bells, blowing factory whistles, and tens of thousands of enthusiastic Cubans.¹⁵ That night Fidel spoke to those thousands of Cubans, the first of his long public talks on what became major themes of the Revolution. He emphasized the Rebel Army's responsibility for victory, the need for continued revolutionary unity, and the national task of achieving social justice in an independent Cuba. When he finished speaking, two white doves appeared on his shoulders. Tad Szulc, in his thorough biography of Castro, calls the march into Havana an "apotheosis, marvelously staged" and represents the climactic appearance of the doves as the beginning of a kind of deification of Castro:

This astounding symbolism touched off an explosion of: "FIDEL... FIDEL .., FIDEL!" as the night was caressed by the dawn. Cubans are a people with powerful religious and spiritistic superstitions, going back to the Afro-Cuban traditions of slavery, and that night in January confirmed their faith: The dove represents life and now Fidel had their protection.... The deification of Fidel Castro became a phenomenon in Cuba in the aftermath of his victory, so greatly had he touched the hearts and souls of the people.¹⁶

The new government provided large budgets for school construction, program development, teacher training, and national mobilization to eliminate illiteracy. This was a truly radical policy symbolized by the dramatic closing down of the schools and tapping the energy of idealistic adolescents who spent months in remote areas teaching adults to read. It was an education for everyone. It built real support for the Revolution and created a faith in education as necessary to any kind of progress. In both planning and practice, education was of the highest priority. Children became the raison-d'être and the darlings of the Revolution.

Schooling became available to all, especially to the poor in rural areas.¹⁷ For the first time there came into existence widespread training programs for particular technical skills. Science and mathematics became favored subjects in an attempt to eradicate traditional suspicious attitudes toward modern agricultural methods and the technology of industrialization.

Education was also to be the antidote to the cesspool Havana had become under Batista in the 1950s—a city of commercial sex, gambling casinos, drugs, and organized crime. This thrust was vividly illustrated for me one afternoon in 1969, when I was observing the introduction of modern mathematics to young children at the Liberty City educational complex in Havana.¹⁸ The teacher proudly demonstrated the use of the small plastic disks the children were moving around in little piles to solve problems. With a twinkle in her eye, the director asked whether I knew the origin of these teaching materials. I guessed Sweden, knowing that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 The Paradox of Cuba's Revolution
• 2 The Homosexual in the Revolution
• 3 Changing the Role of Women and Breaking the Taboo: Initiating Sex Education
• 4 The Audacious Subject: The Sex Education Program
• 5 AIDS: Cuba's Effort to Contain
• 6 The Cuban Revolution in Crisis
• About the Series
• About the Book and Author
• Index