In Cuba: Youth, Love and Sex

 

 From his lips come the words love and sex, by simple skin contact. Everything depends on the individual and the moment. Unlike previous generations, large sectors of Cuban youth naturally resolve the eternal conflict between feeling and carnal pleasure.

With a candid gesture, Laura Torres confesses to IPS that "one does not have to love everyone." "Now you can choose more than before and do better in relationships," says the working of a glass shop of 20 years.

Since the 90's, research on this population group revealed new values \u200b\u200babout love and sexuality. Depending on the volume entitled "Cuba: youth in the 90", Center for Youth Studies (CESJ), Union of Young Communists were behind the myth of virginity and sex only within marriage.

As elsewhere in the world, is accelerating the pace of life and, therefore, that of sexual and emotional ties. "A relationship can start faster and finish quicker, but there is still love in a more rapid," he told IPS Alejandro Menendez, a university student of 23 years.

Without thinking twice, Matamoros Denis Ray says he is in love. At 26 years, this feeling has only once professed to someone who was well worth the risk of circumventing the routine of everyday life. This employee of a store thinks that "most young people did not love."

Speaking to IPS, Natividad Guerrero, director of CESJ, reveals that young people often refer to "the other who does not love", although much of this age sector itself falls. "The diversity of values \u200b\u200bis such diversity of people acting and moving in terms of sexuality is such that there is everything," he said.

However, a 2009 survey by the National Statistics Office (NSO) to a sample of people between 12 and 49 years showed that most respondents preferred partner, both men and women as among men who have sex with men (MSM).

Unlike men, they prefer more lasting and committed relationships. That survey, which included more than 28,000 people around the country, said that 67.5 percent of women aged 20 to 24 surveyed said they prefer to share long periods with the same partner, while 73 gave the same answer , 8 percent of those between 25 and 29.

According to the NSO, the average age of onset of sexual relations in Cuba is 16. Males start at 15, while girls and MSM at 16. This development is in line with global data, which indicate an average of between 10 and 14 years, according to expert sources.

Protected by sexual prejudices broken by their parents and together with the increase in marriages among teenagers is increasingly comes close in age to sex to children, from an average of between 14 and 16 years of the late twentieth century, according to the Population Fund United Nations.

Since the 60's, this island was expanded opportunities for women, a process that eventually became known as the "revolution within the Revolution." The youth of this stage was marked by relations "more open and participatory," according to sociologist Maria Isabel Dominguez.

Still, after more than 40 years, while choosing a partner university for the intelligence and values, the men of the same means in the first place are still looking feminine beauty, told IPS Dominguez, director of the State Research Center Psychological and Sociological.

The most recent change went into production in the 90's with the start of the opening of public debate the issues of homophobia, a trend that was consolidated in the past decade with a wide public campaign for respect for freedom of sexual orientation and the emergence of informal groups meeting over the issue.

"Diversity, luckily, is much discussed in public places, but still abused at the level of general comments," said Guerrero, who found that "young people today are more open" in the subject than previous generations. A survival despite the stigma to the "different", the biologist Isbel Diaz estimates now assume more daylight and in early ages the condition of lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans. Right after 20 years amid of his college career, he took the step that is commonly known as "coming out."

But "not because there is increased respect, not tolerance in Cuban society, especially for a further discussion of the topic in the media," he ponders. For Diaz, this refers to the sexual freedom advocated by the youth regardless of their orientation.

Ana Lorena Bermudez tested for the first time in its 22 years of living together under one roof with Alejandro Menéndez. Both study in college and joins similar thoughts about human relationships. For her, "partner does not necessarily have to be two people, can be three because they feel and work."

In another era, flush appear on the face of a young man like Menendez or never mention possible links, beyond convention. With genuine peace, said, "can get another man, another woman, as far as something definite and thought within the family ... if the couple wants to put limits"

 

Ivet González
IPS
http://www.actup.org/