From: read@athena.mit.edu (Read Weaver)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: LesbiGay Life in Cuba/WW
Date: 30 Jul 92 16:54:50 GMT
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I'm copying this from alt.progressive because of all the Cuba bashing
I see here.

In article <1992Jul29.192103.19252@mont.cs.missouri.edu>, nyxfer%panix.com@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (N.Y. Transfer) writes:
|> 
|> 
|> Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit
|> 
|>               Report on lesbian and gay life in Cuba
|>                  `A lot of changes are happening'
|> 
|>                          By Sharon Ayling
|> 
|> [Sonja DeVries is a lesbian political activist who recently
|> returned from Cuba, where she spent six months with Vikki Dow
|> conducting research for a book on lesbian and gay life there. The
|> following are excerpts of an interview with her by Workers World
|> reporter Saul Kanowitz in San Francisco June 29.]
|> 
|> When we asked for visas from the Cuba Interest Section in
|> Washington, D.C., we said it was to research lesbian and gay life
|> in Cuba. They said great, it was an important thing to do, and
|> they wanted to help.
|> 
|> When we got to Cuba, someone from the Central Committee of the
|> Communist Party put us in contact with people from the many mass
|> organizations. They were all willing to discuss the gay issue
|> with us and to help us out. They were also really willing to
|> acknowledge that prejudices still exist and that there had been
|> some hard things that had happened in the past.
|> 
|> I felt we were working in a really supportive atmosphere. We went
|> wherever we wanted to go, talked to whomever we wanted to talk
|> to, from counter-revolutionary to pro-revolutionary--a really
|> wide range of official and non-official people. We had access to
|> legal records and all kinds of things.
|> 
|> A lot of changes are happening in Cuba. For example, the national
|> sex education program does education about homosexuality in a
|> positive way. It's a government-funded program that educates
|> doctors, mental health workers and teachers. They recently
|> started putting this into the national teacher training program
|> to make teachers more supportive when gay students need to talk
|> with them. They are also talking with therapists to get families
|> to do therapy around supporting and accepting their kids or other
|> family members if they are gay.
|> 
|> Both gay men and lesbian women are more visible than when I
|> visited two years ago. There are tea houses where younger
|> lesbians and gay men hang out. The atmosphere is very open.
|> Everybody knows that's where the gay people hang out. They are
|> basically left alone. I didn't hear of any cases of gay bashing
|> while I was there.
|> 
|> The Communist Youth have this mobile disco and one weekend they
|> brought it to the gay beach. Some straight man started harassing
|> this gay man who was in drag. The gay man went to the police and
|> told them--and the police arrested the straight guy.
|> 
|> There is a play about a friendship between a gay man and a young
|> communist straight man, which ran for four months. It's all about
|> the prejudices that this young communist has against this gay man
|> and how through discussion they become friends. It was reviewed
|> in the paper and the radio, which said it was a really important
|> play because it dealt with people's prejudice.
|> 
|> Then there was an art show sponsored by the AIDS information
|> bureau that we saw in April. It was basically this very
|> homoerotic art about people with AIDS in this public gallery. I
|> walked in there and was completely blown away, with all the stuff
|> here around the National Endowment for the Arts and the
|> censorship of homoerotic art.
|> 
|> In terms of where homophobia stems from, the general sentiment is
|> that homophobia has existed for centuries, that it was part of
|> the Spanish colonial heritage and the Catholic Church--things
|> that have influenced many aspects of Cuban society. The gay
|> people I interviewed were really clear that while the leadership
|> and people in the government have been influenced by the
|> homophobic culture, it's not that the revolution itself is
|> homophobic--or that socialism is inherently homophobic.
|> 
|> There is no law against homosexual acts, no "sodomy" laws. The
|> first revised penal code after the revolution did away with the
|> "sodomy" law but made it illegal to "publicly demonstrate your
|> homosexual condition." In 1987, the penal code was revised and
|> that law was thrown out. There is still a law against
|> aggressively pursuing a homosexual relationship with someone who
|> doesn't want one. Hopefully, this law will be thrown out soon,
|> too. Hopefully, that law will be thrown out too.
|> 
|> There is no law against gay people being in the Communist Party.
|> It is more a matter of prejudice, which is really changing.
|> Someone who is gay was just elected to the Central Committee of
|> the Communist Party of Cuba.
|> 
|> While we were there, the Union of Young Communists had a congress
|> and during a discussion on AIDS, a psychiatrist said that
|> effeminate boys should be counseled to change so that they didn't
|> have family problems. Vilma Espin, who's the head of the
|> Federation of Cuban Women and a member of the Council of State,
|> interrupted and challenged him. She said this is completely the
|> wrong approach. We don't need to work on changing people who are
|> homosexual but accept them and work on our own prejudices. We
|> need to make lesbian and gay youth feel accepted within our
|> ranks.
|> 
|> For someone who is so public and so identified with the
|> revolution to be saying that is very exciting. It shows that's
|> the direction they are going.
|> 
|> People feel really strongly that gay people shouldn't be
|> discriminated against. What's most important is that this is in
|> the context of a society that is basically very humane.
|> 
|> To me, gay liberation is about a lot more than gay rights. Gay
|> rights are important. We all benefit from them. But they don't
|> give us housing or health care or education or any of those
|> things that are basic human rights. Cuba does recognize those
|> rights. If a person is sick in Cuba, you don't have to worry if
|> you can afford treatment or not.
|> 
|> To me things like these are really important, like the fact that
|> the Cuban government is fighting racism and sexism on a concrete
|> basis.
|> 
|> I feel we need to connect all those things. Gay liberation is
|> about fighting racism, classism, all these things. That is the
|> reason that I have always supported Cuba as a lesbian and just as
|> a human being.
|> 
|>                                -30-
|> 
|> (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted
|> if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21
|> St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@cdp!igc.org".)
|> 
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