Cuba’s LGBT Dismal Treatment is being Painted Over
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| In the Playa Cayito,Cuba a young man is being arrested after getting to close to his friend, particularly wearing a bikini, Cuba |
If you’ve read Before Night Falls, the autobiography of gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, or seen Julian Schnabel’s wonderful film adaptation starring Javier Bardem, you have some notion of the dismal treatment of LGBT people in Cuba during the long reign of Fidel Castro.
Castro, the communist revolutionary turned dictator, died Friday at age 90, eight years after ceding leadership of his country to his younger brother, Raúl. This weekend, amid a slew of more conciliatory obituaries and remembrances, The Daily Beast published a piece chronicling Castro’s terrible record on gay rights. After taking power, we’re reminded, the leader treated homosexuality as an affront to the hypermasculine revolutionary ideal, going so far as to intern gay Cubans in forced labor camps, and later, during the AIDS crisis, to sequester HIV-positive citizens in sanitariums that were tantamount to prisons.
In 2010, Castro finally acknowledged in an interview with a Mexican newspaper that these programs represented “a great injustice.” That shift, perhaps, reflected an understanding of changing times and norms. In the past decade, Cuba has started to accrue a new reputation as an increasingly gay-friendly nation, likely a leader among its Caribbean neighbors. In 2008, the government health service began to offer free gender reassignment surgery to transgender Cubans who qualified.
Much credit for these developments goes to Mariela Castro, member of parliament, director of Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education, and—if the surname didn’t already tip you off—niece to Fidel and daughter to Raúl. In a coincidence of timing, tonight HBO will air Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution, a new documentary directed by Emmy winner Jon Alpert (Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq) that follows the 54-year-old activist as she travels around her island home spreading a message of tolerance.
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| Adela Hernandez(blond center)the first elected Transgender person to be elected to office in Cuba |
At just 39 minutes, the film isn’t long enough to allow for more than a quick dip into the lives of its many interviewees. Alpert introduces his audience to a number of gay and trans Cubans whose prospects have improved in an era of reform but who still face challenges living in a country with a long history of state-endorsed homophobia. We meet Juani, a sexagenarian transgender man who triumphantly brags about “Pancho,” his fully operational penis—“I can penetrate a woman,” he boasts, “the best feeling a man can have”—then remembers the trauma of growing up in the wrong body with a brother who didn’t get it. There’s Luis Perez, who spent two years in a forced labor camp and shows us the line on his ID card that denotes his internment status, a designation that kept him from getting jobs and educational opportunities long after his release. Margarita Diaz, a former Cuban tennis champion, sidelined for her butch appearance, describes the feeling of being exiled from the sport that offered refuge from a sexually abusive home life. “When they threw me off,” she recollects tearfully, “they tore my heart out.” Later, we go to a mountainous rural region and meet Yanet and Mailin, a lesbian couple who refuse to hide their relationship. They’ve assimilated into their community, but at the hospital where Yanet works, a homophobic supervisor keeps her from being promoted, and her boss won’t acknowledge the discrimination.
These interviews are fascinating. The time we spend with Mariela is less so. The film’s main subject is chipper, jocular, breezy, and less than forthcoming about why she—straight, married, and a member of the family responsible for such draconian policies—has taken on this cause as her own. How does she feel about Cuba’s ugly history? How do her relationships with her uncle and her father affect her ability to promote change? How did she come to her progressive attitudes? Alpert doesn’t ask nor does he address in any way the negative press that dogs his subject. To her critics, Mariela Castro is not only a social crusader, but also an agent of the regime, whose state-sponsored, top-down campaigns leave no room for grassroots activism; she is considered by some to be a governmental puppet, one whose work supports a publicity push to improve Cuba’s standing around the world—and perhaps its popularity with tourists.
Having lived their entire lives under a government notorious for repressing free speech and tamping down opposition, it’s not surprising that Alpert’s interview subjects would show only reverence toward a member of the Castro family (“Mariela made me the happiest man in the world,” Juani says, displaying a photo of the activist at his bedside post-surgery). But Alpert is not Cuban, and he has no excuse to be so timid. Without his skepticism, his subject is free to unleash a torrent of anodyne sound bites that tell us little about who she is or how Cuba works. Whether or not she is actually a cog in the state propaganda wheel, this hagiography makes her seem like one. Among her limp assertions: “We need to have more discussion so the people can change their minds.” Later she briefly acknowledges her ground-breaking dissenting vote against a labor bill that failed to adequately address gay rights (Cuba’s parliament generally votes unanimously), then declares that her work reminds her of John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love,” which she sings in thickly accented English. (That her uncle once famously banned the music of the Beatles, and later came around to John Lennon, gets no mention.) If we knew Mariela better, we might find this scene charming; with so little to go on, she seems flip.
Mariela Castro’s March opens with a shot of a trans woman who slowly raises her sunglasses to reveal that one of her eyes is milky and unseeing. It was mangled, we later learn, when a homophobic stranger viciously threw acid in her face. At one point the woman stares up to a night sky and an unusually bright full moon. A friend asks if she can she see the moon. “Not with my bad eye,” she replies, “but I know it’s there.”
It’s a poetic moment, a callback to an earlier scene in which Luis Perez remembers a friend from the labor camps who nearly lost his sight after being forced to stare at the sun for hours on end. But it’s also a fitting image for the problems with this film. Alpert’s documentary is a frustratingly thin gloss on an important and complex subject; with one eye shut he doesn’t expose much, but he does let in just enough light to suggest that there’s a pretty interesting story here that’s not getting told.
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