Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  observatory, an electricity station and four public bathhouses. The theatre is so named because it incorporated a casino, ballroom, restaurant and barber shop – all run to raise funds for the local poor. Most of those were black and, until 1894, not permitted to share the whites’ promenade around the square’s periphery where stout railings enforced the colour bar.

  Nowadays the park has good vibes. Adults saunter or sit, enjoying it; children romp with dogs and balls and are treated to goat-cart rides; teenagers gather after dark to make music, dance, sing guajiras (topical lyrics, often with a sharp edge). Their elders applaud them and sometimes display their own dancing skills. Only the goat-carts bothered me – drawn by three grievously over-worked billies, twelve or fourteen children being crammed into each cart as though in training for truck-bus rides. When given a rare break, the billies lie on the tarmac looking done in. But then, their owners have children to feed …

  Sitting on an elaborately wrought iron bench (very 1920s) I took out my tattered paperback copy of Ché’s Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and re-read the last few pages:

  Santa Clara is the hub of the central plain of Cuba. It is a railroad centre and possesses an important communication network. It is surrounded by low, bare hills, which the enemy troops had already occupied … We had a bazooka but no rockets, and we were fighting against ten or more tanks. We realised that the best way of combating them was to go deep into the densely populated neighbourhoods where tank effectiveness is considerably diminished … On December 29 the battle began … The police station fell, along with the tanks that had defended it. The prison, the courthouse, and the provincial government headquarters fell to us, as well as the Grand Hotel [now the Hotel Libre] where the besieged men continued their fire from the tenth floor almost until the cessation of hostilities … We succeeded in taking the electric power station and the entire northwestern section of the city. We went on the air to announce that virtually all Santa Clara was in the hands of the Revolution. During the morning of January 1st we sent Captain Nunez Jiminez and Rodriguez de la Vega to negotiate the surrender of the Leoncio Vidal Barracks, the largest fortress of Central Cuba. The news was astonishing; Batista had just fled … We immediately contacted Fidel, told him what was happening … The rest is well known. Several days later came the installation of Fidel Castro as Prime Minister of the Provisional Government.

  Pre-Revolution, rich people lived in the streets around the park, their substantial homes not in the palatial league but quite imposing, with graceful arched doorways and decorative stonework. Most have been converted to flats, some shelter very extended families, the majority are reasonably well maintained.

  On one such street I paused outside a smallish, half-restored Protestant church, built in 1923, abandoned in 1960, recently reopened. It had neither windows nor doors and a stage instead of an altar. Seeing rows of empty chairs at the back I slipped in, unnoticed by the congregation of one hundred and fifty or so – mostly whites, from babes-in-arms to great grannies. All the women wore hats and everybody was more expensively dressed than average (even allowing for ‘Sunday best’). From a distance rousing hymn tunes had been audible and a four-man band sat behind the handsome mulatto preacher who wore a thick red sweater and neatly creased black trousers. For some ten minutes he spoke slowly and clearly before suddenly speeding up to reach the climax of a homophobic sermon; one didn’t need fluent Spanish to get the message. Repeatedly he struck his left palm with his right fist and his eyes glistened strangely. I wondered – ‘Is this fear or hate or both?’

  As the congregation left, each being greeted at the exit by the pastor, I lingered; with luck I might meet an English-speaker who could fill in the details I’d missed. In fact the pastor himself spoke English and beamed down at the foreigner while vigorously shaking my hand. Had I understood his message from God? No? Quickly he stepped on to the pavement and shouted after a departing parishioner. This stocky young man, unusually attired in a pin-striped suit, was introduced as Luis, an apprentice pastor always happy to translate God’s message.

  We strolled along Independencia, the main commercial street, where on this Sunday forenoon several tiendas displaying new imports were attracting excited throngs – the majority window-shoppers. At each exit purchasers had their bags emptied, and the contents checked against receipts, by SECSA men whose body language was aggressive. ‘You see?’ said Luis. ‘We have a police state!’

  In Parque Vidal we sat on a bench munching roasted peanuts bought from an obese black abuela who made some teasing remark that annoyed Luis. (In this city one senses that many inhabitants have a village-like awareness of each other.) My companion took his task seriously, having established that my soul was not saved. Here was a precious opportunity to rescue an old woman (just in time!) from a painful eternity. Listening to him, I was reminded of my one exposure, many years ago, to a famous (subsequently infamous) US televangelist.

  Luis’s homophobia was nonetheless chilling for being utterly banal, not to say illogical. He believed that God sent AIDS to punish homosexuals who are somehow responsible for the deaths of millions of heterosexuals all over the world. The Vatican imposes celibacy because most RC priests are perverts who wouldn’t want to marry anyway and the celibacy façade conceals their vice. All homosexuals molest little boys. When communities ignore the scum in their midst, they’re tolerating sin. God wants the scum identified, shamed, excluded even from peripheral jobs in education, health care, tourism, sports clubs – anywhere they can deprave others. In the past Cuba had ways of controlling homosexuals, now the police have gone soft on them. Even in Santa Clara, in the El Mejunje community centre, they feel free to run their own discos!

  While transmitting this message from the sort of god one can do without, Luis stared into my eyes as though attempting hypnotism. ‘You understand how it’s dangerous? Some governments now let them marry! It’s bad for women’s rights, having men replacing them! And money wasted on AIDS treatments leaves less for good patients!’

  It was time for me to show my hand. I asked, ‘Why should Cuba’s government continue to discriminate against homosexuals when such relationships, between consenting adults, have been legal here since 1979?’

  Luis looked aghast. My tone must have conveyed more hostility and contempt than was intended. Abruptly he stood up, muttered something about my being blind to God’s design and hurried away.

  Cuba’s homophobia served (and in some circles still serves) as a big stick with which to beat the Revolution. People forget that in 1959 Britain had not yet had its Wolfenden Report, New York had not yet had its Stonewall riots and in numerous countries homosexual acts were serious crimes. Cuba’s 1938 Social Defence Code, based on Spanish law, imposed a six-months sentence, or an equivalent fine, for ‘habitually engaging in homosexual acts’ or ‘creating a public scandal by flaunting homosexuality’. (That last prohibition I can sympathise with, recalling the uses to which, for example, some of San Francisco’s public spaces are put; most citizens of any country don’t wish to observe either homosexuals or heterosexuals in action.) The deviant sons of Havana’s rich were often exiled to some distant land by parents intent on protecting family honour. Other parents less rich but similarly driven, maintained the fiction, between themselves and with the neighbours, that their sons and their partners were ‘just good friends’.

  Under Batista, ordinary decent Cubans felt humiliated by their country’s status as a ‘paradise’ for grossly affluent tourists and celebrities and as a secure base for US gangsters. In the 1950s at least ten thousand women (some estimated fifteen thousand) staffed the ‘paradise’s’ brothels and escort agencies and an early Revolutionary project was to turn them into seamstresses. Given training for alternative employment they could (as indeed many did) become ‘respectable’. Then lines got crossed. Why not do a similar job on homosexuals? Rescue them from decadence, enable them to become ‘real’ men … But this project proved less successful than seamstress-
training.

  In 1961 a fanatical determination to clean up Havana inspired Operation Three Ps – pederasts, prostitutes and pimps. (Not all prostitutes had by then gratefully embraced their sewing machines.) This campaign promoted an ominous shift of the bureaucratic mind-set. Homosexuals, always regarded with contempt, now came to be seen as enemies of the state – dangerous bits of nonconformist grit in the sensitive Revolutionary mechanism. In Cuba, as elsewhere, such men and women were prominent on the academic, literary and artistic scenes and could have contributed much to the New Cuba. But most were rejected. Their thoughtful input would have complicated things and Fidel et al., intent on immediately improving daily life for the masses, had no time to spare for long-term analyses of where the Revolution might be going. Yet Fidel himself felt no personal aversion to ‘deviants’. One of his closest friends (they met at university) was Alfredo Guevara, generally known to be a (discreet) homosexual, who went on to become a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and head of the internationally acclaimed Cuban Film Institute.

  Homegrown homophobia was reinforced by Soviet influences. In 1934 Stalin had recriminalised homosexuality, a decade or so after it had been decriminalised by the first Bolshevik government. When Samuel Feijoo, a notoriously homophobic intellectual, returned to Cuba from a leisurely tour of the Soviet Union he proclaimed that ‘deviance’ was no more among the Russians. By implementing ‘revolutionary social hygiene’, Communism has excised the vice. In El Mundo (15 April 1965) he wrote, ‘No homosexual can represent the Revolution, which is a matter for men, of fists and not of feathers, of courage and not of trembling’.

  That same year the dual-purpose Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP) were set up within Camaguey province where the conversion of ranches to canefields was being slowed by a dire labour shortage. UMAP’s grim second purpose, as explained by the Castroist historian, José Yglesias, was ‘to take care of young men of military age whose incorporation into the Army for military training was considered unfeasible. Young men known to avoid work and study were candidates; so were known counter-revolutionaries; and also immoralists, a category that included homosexuals’.

  These forced labour camps represented a regression to slavery. Captives received a token wage of seven pesos a month and in their limited time off could visit the nearest town only under military escort. The Nicaraguan author, Ernesto Cardenal, a former Sandanista Minister for Culture, recorded some inmates’ complaints. ‘We worked surrounded by a barbed wire fence two and a half metres high.’ A few camps, no worse than the rest, held homosexuals only. Most held a volatile mix including conscientious objectors (Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses whose homophobia is legendary) and ‘lazy’ heterosexuals, macho men temperamentally averse to Party diktats. Homosexuals were often severely ‘punished’, especially those whose behaviour was defiantly provocative, and some commentators have put them on a par with Stalin’s and Hitler’s victims – a tendentious comparison, as Ian Lumsden has emphasised in Machos, Maricones and Gays. ‘The extermination of Jews in Germany was a monstrous and unique operation that was nevertheless consistent with the Nazis’ racist ideology. In contrast, the persecution of homosexuals and other minorities in Cuba completely contradicted the humanist and liberating values that had motivated the Revolution.’

  During the late 1960s most ‘deviant’ artists, dancers and writers lost their State-funded jobs and were compelled to ‘Make a New Cuba!’ by the sweat of their brow. It didn’t count that they had been gladly contributing their talents to the Revolution’s cultural development. Observing his homeland from abroad, the novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante argued at this time that homophobia per se was not the real problem. That lay in the Ministry of Education’s compulsion to ‘contain any form of deviance among the young’ in order to preserve the population’s ‘monolithic ideological unity’ as the keystone of the revolutionary structure.

  UMAP, unlike most ‘Make a New Cuba!’ projects, was implemented as furtively as possible and lasted less than three years. Protests from the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists, backed by angry cohorts of Mexican and European intellectuals who hitherto had lauded the Revolution, hastened its end. But the decisive intervention came from Rawuel Revuelta, a leading actress who had been a Popular Socialist Party activist in the Batista era, when support for that party was hazardous. Following the banning of her own Teatro Estudio, because of its high quotient of homosexuals, she became aware of UMAP and denounced it to her close friend Comandante Rene Vallejo. As Fidel’s personal physician, he was well placed to expose the viciousness which had developed in these camps. Fidel reacted promptly, appointing Captain Quintin Pino Machado to close the camps. That procedure took a year, forced labour being so crucial to the reform of Cuba’s agriculture, but under Captain Machado conditions at once began to improve.

  In 1975, after a harsh decade which wrecked many lives and careers, Cuba’s Supreme Court was allowed to award financial compensation to those who could prove ‘wrongful dismissal’. Amando Hart then took over the Ministry of Culture and replaced the worst homophobic excesses by restraints found all over Latin America including ‘liberally democratic’ Costa Rica. However, most homosexuals had long since become emotionally (if not politically) counter-revolutionary and they eagerly joined the government-authorised 1980 exodus to Miami. Among more than a hundred thousand disillusioned and ‘maladjusted’ (to the Revolution) migrants were several thousand genuine criminals – a black practical joke on Fidel’s part. The 1979 Penal Code (facetiously misspelt by some commentators) had decriminalised homosexuality and now Granma printed a smugly unpleasant editorial: ‘Even though in our country homosexuals are not persecuted or harassed … there were quite a few of them in the Mariel boatlift, in addition to all those in gambling or drugs who find it difficult to satisfy their vices here.’

  Post-Mariel, Amando Hart’s reforms quickened the pace of change. Yet a rocky and disputatious road stretched from 1979 to the Penal Code’s 1989 revisions, then on to Santa Clara’s El Mejunje disco – and the screening of Fresa y Chocolate in April 2007 by Cuba’s Permanent Mission to the UN. My invitation listed the ‘awards won’ and gave a synopsis:

  Diego, a cultivated, homosexual and skeptical young man, falls in love with a young heterosexual communist full of prejudices and doctrinary ideas. First come rejection and suspicion, but also fascination. Fresa y Chocolate is the story of a great friendship, that is, a great love between two men, which overcomes incomprehension and intolerance.

  In June 2007 I remembered Luis when Mariela Castro, Raul’s daughter and Director of the National Centre for Sex Education, proposed to the fifth International Congress on Culture and Development a reform of the Family Code to grant to gays and lesbians the same housing, patrimonial inheritance, civil and adoption rights as heterosexual couples.

  Said Mariela Castro, ‘I can’t guarantee it will reach parliament this year. That’s our hope but it doesn’t depend on us and of course is facing a great deal of resistance. The clause on adoption meets the heaviest opposition. We have inherited a model of a patriarchal family, and are unable to break with that model, but we have to. The political will exists to eliminate all forms of discrimination in our laws.’

  It must be admitted that I, if Cuban, would oppose the adoption clause. Growing up in the twenty-first century will be confusing enough without having unisex parents.

  Cuba’s reputation for homophobia exacerbated the international controversy surrounding Castroism’s rapid reaction to the AIDS threat. Using the quarantine regulations which had already enabled the eradication of several diseases, the Health Ministry promptly locked up all who tested positive. To me the logic of AIDS prevention justified this; while isolating many as yet in perfect health, it also provided them with the most favourable environment for maintaining good health while protecting their fellow-citizens from infection. The original sanatorium/jail, some twenty miles from Havana, was a fine old hacienda in spacious groun
ds surrounded by high concrete walls. Santiago de las Vegas (‘Los Cocos’ for short) had been in military hands since 1959 and was chosen as the national AIDS quarantine centre in 1985 because almost all Cuba’s first batch of seropositives were young soldiers just back from serving as internacionalistas in Africa. Initially the isolation programme was run as a military operation and Fidel’s critics abroad lamented this ‘totalitarianism’. Yet most Cubans readily accepted the quarantine centre; they had every reason to trust their Ministry of Public Health. In 1983, when AIDS was little understood in any country but blood-borne infection was suspected, that Ministry banned the importing of factor VIII and, as a precaution, destroyed twenty-thousand units of blood products. Had the French, Chinese, US and various other governments been equally alert, thousands of haemophiliacs’ lives would have been saved.

  By the late 1980s US newspaper headlines had become hoarsely condemnatory: ‘Cuba’s AIDS Centre Resembles Prison’ – ‘Cuba’s Callous War on AIDS’ – ‘Cuba AIDS Quarantine Center called “Frightening”’– and so on and on. As the AIDS virus is not air-borne, the more pedantic Cuban officials objected to Los Cocos being described as a ‘quarantine’ centre. It was, they explained, a sanatorium for the close epidemiological surveillance of the inmates who received rigorously supervised medical treatment. It was also a research centre where new drugs were being developed and tested.

  Within less than a year the original score or so of infected soldiers had been joined by a similar number of civilians, mostly homosexuals whose seropositive status had been discovered in their local clinics. The army doctors, already stressed by their soldier patients’ increasingly perplexing symptoms, now had to cope with their homophobia. Segregation was called for, including restricted access to recreational facilities for the civilians – men not readily amenable to military discipline. They continued to complain about the soldiers’ (never the staff’s) nastiness and in 1988 the Ministry of Defence begged the Ministry of Public Health to carry this can of intractable worms.