Cuban gays celebrate their victory by referendum granting them the right to marry their partners in a landslide victory. The gains of the Cuban Revolution have finally been extended to the LGBT community.
“This change is very important because it the political will of the state and the government to advance a human rights agenda and extend it to as many areas as possible. It is time that the people of Cuba understand the need to recognize and protect the rights of everyone, without excluding people because of their sexuality, their gender identity, disability or race. This is the law of all laws and is about guaranteeing all possible rights.”
–Mariela Castro, Director of the National Center for Sexual Education, to the BBC on 30, November 2018.
IN DEFENSE OF THE CUBAN WORKERS STATE
On Sunday 25 September 2022, a national referendum was held in Cuba on the country’s Family Code. It asked one simple question: “Do you agree with the Family Code?” This new family code extended protection to women, children and elderly as CNN reported. It also extended protection to the LGBT community including the right to marry and adopt children. The Cuban Electoral Council reported that exactly 74.1% of those eligible to vote casted their vote in that Sunday. By Monday morning the votes were counted found that two-thirds of Cubans vote YES on the new family code making Cuba the first deformed workers state to legalize gay marriage. These Yes votes even included that of the president Miguel Díaz-Canel, his wife, and Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez. The passing of the new family code represents a truly historic and revolutionary moment with the extension of the gains of the Cuban Revolution to the LGBT community. The British-based Pink News hailed this triumphant moment headlining their coverage with “Cuba just voted to legalise same-sex marriage and adoption for queer couples: ‘Love wins!’” Marxists welcome this referendum and its results, acknowledging that this was probably the most progressive deed by the Havana Stalinists in decades aside from being forced to defend the Cuban Revolution from U.S-backed counter-revolutionary terrorists, mobs and hooligans.
On my Instagram post of 27 September, I stated incorrectly that “I cannot think of another country other than Cuba, where capitalism has been overthrown in 1960, that the majority of the population voted to legalize gay marriage.” In actuality, Cuba was the second to legalize gay marriage by popular vote. The first was Ireland in November 2015 which symbolized the awakening of the Irish people who had three years later voted to legalize abortion at the height of their battle against the Roman Catholic Church seeking reparations for generations of abuse of women and children by priests and nuns. It clearly was the realization that they were supporting the same laws and hating the same people and practices that their tormentors were telling them to through their “moral teachings.” The Irish referendum of gay marriage was lamented by the Catholic Church with the Archbishop of Dublin/Primate of Ireland Diarmuid Martin telling Irish TV, “We have to stop and have a reality check, not move into denial of the realities.” This was followed by the Vatican’s secretary of state Pietro Parolin loudly bemoaning: “I was deeply saddened by the results. The church must take account of this reality, but in the sense that it must strengthen its commitment to evangelization. I think that you cannot just talk of a defeat for Christian principles, but a defeat for humanity.” So much for the “progressive” and “gay friendly” Pope Francis poppycock!
However, Ireland unlike Cuba is a capitalist state and one of the main pillars of capitalist rule in Ireland has been the Catholic Church that has for generations wielded political power. This means the bourgeois state can and may be in the future in a position to overturn gay marriage and abortion rights in Ireland even if it is not put to the vote. Cuba is a deformed workers state where capitalism has been overthrown by a social revolution but political power rests in the hands of a parasitic bureaucratic caste resting above the masses, not the working class. The decision on the recent Cuban referendum was made at the very top after years of struggle and awareness campaigns made to enlighten the masses including winning influential sympathizers within the Stalinist bureaucracy which makes its reversal even less like likely than in Ireland short of an outright counter-revolution. On that note, it must be stressed that one-third of Cuban society voted against gay marriage meaning that the old crap is very much present especially in the Havana bureaucracy. In other words, there are would-be Gorbachovs and Yeltsins that can potentially garnish a counter-revolutionary force backed by imperialism that can overturn the gains of the Cuban Revolution.
Unsurprisingly, coverage of Cuba’s Family Code referendum in the imperialist media was absolutely minimal. And the outlets that did cover Cuba’s legalization of gay marriage reported with the utmost neutrality. This is after more than decades of screaming for Cuban blood from the overthrow of capitalism to the killing of gusano terrorists, imprisoning of open counter-revolutionaries, and suppression of anti-Communist mobs, some of which included comparing Cuba to Nazi Germany and these actions as a prelude to a second Holocaust. At the same time, neither Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, nor any of the other pro-imperialist NGO’s who are quick to cry a Niagara Falls worth of tears for the anti-Communist dissidents imprisoned in Cuba have even mentioned the legalization of gay marriage in Cuba by referendum. All you will find in their categories on Cuba are horror stories of mass arrests and hunger strikes by these angelic activists who want nothing more than “freedom and democracy” for the Cuban people and other such balderdash. None of these groups including Amnesty International ever called for the freedom for the Cuban Five – the five Cuban intelligence officers imprisoned in the United States for infiltrating gusano exile terrorist groups – much less place them on their “prisoners of conscious” list.
Now, if you were to ask a liberal from the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, United States or Canada about the recent Cuban referendum, s/he will likely insist their country is way ahead of Cuba because they had legalized gay marriage in a span of just under the first two decades of the 21st century. The legalization of gay marriage has sprouted a new promotion for white supremacy, i.e the belief that the West is far superior to countries of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This widely held belief ignores the fact that these same Western countries implanted homophobia in these lands as they carved them up and absorbed them into their respective empires as a means of bringing ‘Christian civilization” to these dark-skinned heathens. What Western liberals will ignore is that in not a single imperialist country was gay marriage legalized by popular vote. But rather LGBT activists and their allies in these countries applied arm-breaking force to liberal lawmakers by exposing their pretentions of universal human rights, democracy and all the other crap they spew, essentially forcing them to break with a centuries old religious based tradition so the imperialist ruling classes can claim to uphold what they claim to cherish. Given the existence of the “silent majority” in the imperialist countries, there is no doubt that if the question of gay marriage was put to the vote, the results would almost certainly be in the negative.
Whenever Cuba makes the headlines – usually involving a crackdown on openly counter-revolutionary dissidents and/or riots – imperialist politicians cannot find the words strong enough to revile Cuba with. But now that the Cuban people have put them all to shame on the gay rights issue by passing a law via popular vote that gives full protection under the law including the right to marry, the imperialists have suddenly become silent. Not a peep from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or any LGBT and “LGBT friendly” politician in the United States or the West was heard about Cuba following the Family Code referendum! Even the openly gay 2020 presidential candidate and Biden’s current secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg was silent, proving that imperialist politicians who rode the gay rights wave care nothing about LGBT rights and that their loyalty lies unconditionally with racist and anti-gay imperialism. But they’re cynical enough to weaponize gay rights to rally support among silly liberals to back their wars of aggression against a targeted third world country! In the same way the accuse the target of perpetrating a second Holocaust.
CASTRO’S AND CHE’S PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS
Before I go into the status of homosexuals in Cuba after the revolution, I want to go into Marxism with respect to gay rights. Homophobia is rooted in the reactionary institution of the heterosexual and monogamous family unit that has been for centuries pushed by religion and is today upheld by capitalism. This is the same dogma in which women’s oppression and the anti-sex crusade have been based as defining elements of capitalism’s patriarchal society. Anything outside of the heterosexual “norms” specified by “one man, one woman until death” such as polyamory, sex for pleasure not procreation, pornography, prostitution, same-sex relationships, divorce, and abortion is considered sinful, an abomination against God almighty, and the family. From the days of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communists have always stood against the rule of the family fortified by the bourgeoisie, which means fighting for women’s rights and against anti-gay bigotry. As they wrote in Chapter 2 of The Communist Manifesto:
Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The world saw this put into practice in Russia after the Bolshevik victory in the October Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Yet liberals and many self-ascribed “socialists” in the West still maintain that the Bolsheviks were tyrannical and deposed a royalist democracy under the ultra-conservative Romanov dynasty! The Bolsheviks wasted no time in overturning Czarist “norms” and granted women the vote, access to free abortions, and the right to obtain a divorce. This was accompanied by the decriminalization of homosexuality, prostitution, and all of the other “moral crimes” that had no victims. These were the result of the separation of church and state. In addition, to be homosexual for the first time was not a decisive factor in employment, the ability to run for office, or determine one’s position in society. The Bolshevik militant and first Soviet foreign minister Georgy Chicherin was an openly gay man. Essentially today when some Western conservative accuses the Bolsheviks of “violating God’s laws”, “Satanism”, and demolishing “traditional Christian values”, they are not wrong. Marxists take no offense to these charges and flaunt them proudly.
The failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to spread beyond the borders of Russia, particularly the defeat of the German Revolution 1919 left the Bolshevik Russia an isolated state with industry and production ravaged by wars: the first inter-imperialist war and the civil war leaving the country with limited food production and necessities. This allowed a bureaucracy to emerge headed by Joseph Stalin that by 1924 usurped power from the working class, establishing itself as a parasitic caste above the working class as a Bonapartist dictatorship. The Bolsheviks’ internationalism was replaced with an anti-Marxist lie of Socialism in One Country, and eventually all of the democratic gains of the October Revolution was reversed which the economic structure remained untouched. Stalin returned restored the patriarchal society under the term “Socialist family” that meant women should submit to men while continuing to promote the participation of women in Soviet society. Abortion and homosexuality were recriminalized that carried a prison sentence. These contradictions represented a degeneration of the Soviet state. Every workers state that later emerged was deformed from birth with a Stalinist bureaucracy at the top with the same social conservatism. Although, after Stalin’s death in 1953 some of these workers states such as East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary decriminalized homosexuality it continued to be a criminal offense in the Soviet Union and many of the other workers states who continued to revile homosexuality as bourgeois decadence.
The Cuban Revolution in addition to ripping the island away from the U.S imperialists brought enormous gains for working people, peasants, blacks, and women that included employment, education, housing, and a healthcare system that rivals that of the first world. For blacks it meant the overturning of the racist institutions from the days of Spanish rule and brought greater rights for women including the right to an abortion and obtain a divorce. But for LGBT Cubans it meant continuing the institutionalized discrimination and machismo in society keeping gay man in particular marginalized and oppressed, including those who supported the Revolution. The anti-gay Public Ostentation Law of 1938 remained in place. Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara perceived known gay bars and clubs as centers for counter-revolutionary activities and were subsequently shut down, and gay men rounded up and sent to prison camps or forced to perform menial labor for their “crimes.” In a typical Stalin-style party purge, gay members of the Communist Party of Cuba were expelled and found themselves in the same predicament with other penalized gays, even if they did take part in the Revolution. They found themselves alongside Cuban Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (POR-Partido Obrero Revolucionario).
Gay men were fired from jobs, denied access to education, and prohibited from having contact with children and representing their country. Indeed, none of these gross violations of human rights by the Havana Stalinists were mentioned in all the usual derogatory anti-Communist bullshit spewed by Washington and the Vatican. That is until the 21st century when it became a cultural fad in bourgeois society. Castro even went as far as denouncing homosexuals as “agents of imperialism” and later saying that “we would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist must be.” Che Guevara was said to have repeatedly referred to gays as “sexual perverts.” This is rich coming from Castro who wasn’t a Communist until he came into conflict with the U.S, forcing him to overthrow capitalism for the sake pf fulfilling the most essential promises to the masses!
The Havana Stalinists under Castro only began to liberalize their anti-gay bigotry in 1979 when homosexuality was finally decriminalized. However, gay men continue to be harassed and persecuted by the authorities. The anti-gay law of 1938 was not repealed until 1988 when Castro ordered the state to cease targeting gays. It was not until 1981, that the Cuban minister of culture Armando Hart Dávalos took a bold action by declaring homosexuality was a natural phenomenon as heterosexuality and called on Castro to stop the discrimination of Cuban gays. Even though these liberalizing cracks was breaking Stalinists’ social conservatism and LGBT Cubans began coming out publicly in large numbers, throughout the 80’s and 90’s despite Castro’s public denunciations of homophobia in 1993, police persecution still continued. Nevertheless, these cracks enabled LGBT militancy that pressured the government to launch awareness programs in which Castro’s about-face concerning homosexuality gave them a voice. Perhaps Castro’s conversion can be attributed to the compassion his niece Mariela developed for LGBT Cubans after befriending them at a young age. She recalled once as a teenager arguing with her uncle and father Raúl regarding anti-gay discrimination to which they laughed and said she was “such a rebel.” To which Mariela retorted that she learned from her family.
In the mid-2000s, LGBT Cubans gained a powerful ally in Mariela Castro who used her position as director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education and her family’s status to push for LGBT rights in the Cuban constitution and leading Gay Pride marches in Havana to which her presence ensured the police would not crack down on the marchers. Mariela succeeded in passing laws beginning with the inclusion of sex change operations for transgender Cuban in the national health coverage, available free of charge. This was followed by nearly two decades of public awareness and education designed to stamp out anti-gay bigotry in Cuban society producing massive results in spite of the obstacles thrown up by the old crap within the bureaucracy. The end result was the Cuban people voting in a national referendum to full extend the gains of the Cuban Revolution and equal treatment and protection under the law to the LGBT community. Mariela’s valiant struggle for LGBT rights in the 2016 HBO documentary Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution.
In 2010, an elderly Castro took full responsibility for the persecution of gays in Cuba and apologized. Some accepted it while noting that Fidel didn’t say everything that needed to be said. While others remained skeptical of his sincerity. But these actions including the recent referendum underline the societal differences between capitalism and socialism. In Cuba, the revolutionary consciousness of the majority was jarred by the idealism of the Cuban Revolution that meant the liberation of all, including the LGBT community from homophobia. A result of decades of struggle and awareness raised that garnished support from the more leftist elements of the Havana bureaucracy that represents the absence of the class antagonism found in capitalist societies with their embrace of religious dogma that anti-gay bigotry is rooted in. By contrast, imperialist countries such as the United States has seen only gains achieved by decades of struggle to the point where gays wrested their rights from the capitalist class by using its own pretentions against it. But these gains in no way represent an enlightenment of racist and homophobic capitalist America, as the recent gay nightclub shooting by a red-blooded American patriot in Colorado Springs who murdered five people on the night of 19 November. None of the “LGBT friendly” Democrats such as Hillary Clinton ever recanted or apologized for their anti-gay deeds like backing her husband’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 that prohibited gay marriage.
At the same time Cuba remains under constant threat from U.S imperialism, their starvation embargo, and the Miami gusano exile community that would like nothing more than to see the Cuban Revolution reversed. The Havana Stalinists remain an obstacle to the defense of the Cuban Revolution which ultimately can be done only by the masses. They are perfectly capable of opening the door to counter-revolution and have it executed by a would-be Yeltsin that could reverse the rights and gains blacks, women, and the LGBT community today enjoy for the sake of becoming the new capitalist class as neo-colonial flunkies for Washington, while they loot Cuba as a means of recompensating and maximum profits from their losses by the Cuban Revolution.
It has always been the duty of the oppressed to take a side in defense of Cuba against racist U.S imperialism. Now that LGBT rights has been ratified into the Cuban constitution, LGBT activists and allies worldwide now have a reason to defend the gains of the Cuban Revolution. The Miami gusanos whom have been silent since the Family Code referendum are linked not only to the CIA, but the Vatican, and are among some of the most right-wing filth: racist, anti-woman, and anti-gay. This means that if a counter-revolution were to happen in Cuba, women, gays, blacks, and working people would be subjected to an even more vile era of bigotry sponsored by the Catholic Church, gusano gangsters, and capitalist shock treatment by Washington and the other imperialist states resulting in the knifing of Cuba’s healthcare system, along with jobs, housing, and education. Meaning evictions and layoffs. For women it means outlawing of abortion, being purged from the workforce, and an end to state-funded childcare centers. The LGBT community would be subjected to police harassment and fascistic vigilantes like the ones synonymous with places like Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. Republicans and Democrats will stop at nothing to restore U.S hegemony over a colony they lost in a most embarrassing fashion.
Red October Goth 