Is Cuba becoming a haven for LGBT rights?

Cuba offers free sex change surgeries and government-sanctioned Pride

marches, but activists say more change is needed.

Yasmin Portales has been working to improve the lives of Cuba's LGBT [Creede
Newton/Al Jazeera]
by Creede Newton, August 2, 2015
Havana, Cuba - Walking down the Malecon, Havana's broad coastal esplanade that
runs past extravagant hotels built when Cuba was the playground of the United States'
upper class, one can occasionally see a same-sex couple holding hands or stealing a kiss.
Cuba, the socialist island nation and Cold War foe of the US, has made efforts to
present itself as a Latin American bastion for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transsexual (LGBT) individuals in the past decade.
Cuba's constitution bans "any form of discrimination harmful to human dignity", and
gender reassignment surgeries have been available under its national healthcare, free of
charge, since 2008.
It wasn't always this way.
At the beginning of Cuba's socialist revolution, Fidel Castro's regime actively oppressed
LGBT Cubans, even sending them to prisons and work camps.

Since 1979, however, there has been a gradual change in Cuban policy towards the
LGBT community.
In 2010, former president Fidel Castro went as far as to accept blame for the
discrimination that LGBT Cubans faced after his revolution triumphed, referring to it as
a " great injustice ".
"Things have definitely changed over the past two decades," said Yasmin Portales, the
36-year-old founder of Proyecto Arcoiris (PA), Spanish for the "Rainbow Project" - an
independent, anti-capitalist collective of LGBT activists founded in 2011.
"But there's still many changes that need to take place," Portales said.
Many credit the more sweeping changes, such as the free provision of gender
reassignment surgery, to Mariela Castro, the daughter of President Ral Castro and the
director of the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX).
Founded in 1989, the CENESEX website says it approaches issues of LGBT rights from a
health and educational standpoint.
The group organises four annual conferences concerning homophobia, sexual health,
AIDS, and women's rights.
Mariela Castro often attends seminars on LGBT rights throughout the Americas and
organises government-sanctioned Pride marches throughout the country.
She has also trained Cuban police on relations with the LGBT community, and has been
campaigning for the Cuban government to legalise same-sex marriages.
But Portales thinks CENESEX's work leaves much to be desired. She began working
with the organisation in 2009, but "quickly became disillusioned" with the limits on the
group's work, eventually leaving in 2011.
Governmental limits - specifically CENESEX's need to take a health-based approach to
LGBT issues - prohibit Mariela Castro and her colleagues from addressing the political
roots of homophobia in Cuba.
"Sometimes my father is ashamed to support me. It hurts, but that's the way it is,"
Mariela Castro told The Advocate , a US-based publication that focuses on LGBT
issues.
CENESEX declined Al Jazeera's request for comment.
It was this climate that inspired Portales to create an LGBT advocacy group operating
independently of the government.

Although she recognises the work of CENESEX, Portales believes that "the issues of
[her] community must be addressed as human rights issues, by the people".
Norge Espinosa Mendoza, an award-winning Cuban author and LGBT activist, agreed.
"People are afraid to speak openly about discrimination," Mendoza told Al Jazeera. "Not
only is marriage equality a distant dream, but there are still public places that don't
want us there."
Public discrimination has prompted members of PA to organise "public kissings" in
communal spaces across Cuba.
These demonstrations involve members of the LGBT community arriving, engaging in
tame, public displays of affection, and distributing leaflets about homophobia to
passers-by.
Espinosa hopes that groups like PA can increase a feeling of solidarity in Cuba through
events such as the public kissings.
Health still a major concern
Al Jazeera spoke with Raphael Caldas, an official with Cuba's National Center for the
Prevention of STIs and HIV (CNP-STI/HIV), who said while he understood the
criticisms levelled against CENESEX, he still believes that Mariela Castro's group is the
premier organisation for LGBT issues in Cuba.
"We work very closely with CENESEX, and our work on the issue of health is bound to
issues of sexual rights," Caldas told Al Jazeera.
For the past 15 years, Caldas' organisation has helped prevent HIV/AIDS and other
sexually transmitted infections in Cuba through an initiative known as Proyecto-HSHCuba.
The initiative has involved "over 5,000 community volunteers all over the country
helping to prevent this epidemic from spreading".
A 2014 report on the status of HIV/AIDS in Cuba prepared by UNAIDS states that
LGBT Cubans account for 73.7 percent of cases, with males making up nearly 90 percent
of these.
The results have been promising.
According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS , just 0.2 percent of
Cubans live with HIV/AIDS today, as a result of the Cuban government's response to

the epidemic, which it says is "based on the principles of socialist public health",
including recognising the right of all its citizens to have access to healthcare.
Furthermore, the report highlights the "active search for cases in high-risk
demographics", such as homosexual men, as a driving force behind success in reducing
cases of HIV/AIDS.
Proyecto-HSH-Cuba is an instrumental tool in this search.
Caldas told Al Jazeera that through the efforts of Proyecto-HSH-Cuba, many
homosexual and bisexual men in Cuba have "self-identified as members of the LGBT
community", which he views as a positive development.
Portales, the founder of PA, agreed but went further. She believes that health is a
human rights issue - but so is the ability to have a voice in whether or not you can
marry, and what public spaces you can enjoy.
"It's up to us to demand our rights," she concluded.
"We need to raise our voices. Our rights won't be handed down without speaking our
minds," Portales said.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/07/cuba-haven-lgbt-rights150727104541812.html