Feminism, Gender & LGBTI Spaces
The Marginalization and Invisibility of Queer Cuban Women
By: Emily Cromell
On my second-to-last day in Havana, I thought I saw two women holding hands as they walked down the street, and I almost jumped in surprise and excitement. While some of the researchers we met with at ICIC Juan Marinello at the beginning of our program in Havana mentioned queer women and talked about the struggles Cuban women face in claiming their sexualities and rights as their own, I was still surprised at the limited representations of queer women. As a queer woman myself, I was looking forward to seeing Cuban lesbian and bisexual women and to interact with them; instead, I was shocked at the invisibility of queer women. My research has lead me to conclude that much of the invisibility of queer Cuban women is tied to racial and national identities, which include understandings of legality, morality, and citizenship.
In the context of the Cuban Revolution, a woman’s claim to citizenship is tied directly to reproductive capacity (Saunders). For Cuban women, to be a mother is to be the ideal “Revolutionary Cuban citizen,” one who rears children while men hold the role of thinking and action. As Saunders points out, this is even seen in the logo of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which shows a woman holding a child in one hand and a gun in the other. This over reliance on motherhood as the greatest virtue for a Cuban woman does help women have access to health care, especially reproductive care, which is safe, easy to find, and free or very inexpensive. According to Dr. Miguel Paneque, a doctor who works in the Havana area, the availability of abortions is actually so high that women often chose abortions as their primary form of contraception, even though they have access to several forms of contraceptives, including birth control pills. Interestingly, social stigmas around unwanted pregnancy do not exist in the same way that they do in the United States.
Within the LGBTQ Community in Cuba, Black and Afro-Cuban lesbians are further marginalized. The intersection of race and sexuality is interesting because for one of Saunders closest friends, named Marta, “[her] blackness indicated a major flaw in her ability to be feminine” (Saunders). Despite being femme-presenting and considered attractive, she was often assumed to be masculine just because she had dark skin. This made it difficult for her to find potential partners, especially because she was often one of the few Black women in the queer spaces she went to, which made her a target for rude and demeaning comments from other queer women (Saunders). Saunders also highlights the hip-hop group Las Krudas for the lack of social inclusion they receive. Las Krudas are not visited in their apartment by neighbors, and the children of their street are told to stay away from them (Saunders). Cuban culture largely promotes interaction between neighbors, but for an Afro-Cuban lesbian group, they are shunned from participation in their neighborhood’s social circle.
Despite the struggles queer Cuban women face both in mainstream Cuban society and within their own communities, there is evidence of change. When we visited the Editorial de la mujer, or Women’s Publishing House, two videos stood out as promising examples of the inclusion of queer women in visual media. The first is a music video by artist Rochy. Her song is called “Quisiera” and is a non-heteronormative love song that features a straight couple and two queer couples. The inclusion on a lesbian couple is important because it shows that a lesbian relationship is on the same level of legitimacy and acceptability as the other two relationships. The other video we watched at the Women’s Publishing House highlighted the legal difficulties faced by lesbian couples who must identify themselves as “single” despite being in a relationship. The video’s depiction of their sexuality was also largely positive, especially because it was about two older women, dressed in bathing suits, no less. However, depictions of the women’s affection for each other were indirect; the last shot of the film showed them standing in the water, about to kiss. Instead of showing their faces as they embrace, the camera pans down so that the only part of their bodies the viewer can see are underwater, that they kiss at all is only implied.
From what I experienced in Cuba and from the research I have done, one of the most important steps for the inclusion of queer Cuban women is for people to talk about it. Discussion that is uncensored and conducted with the goals of understanding and expressing differences is something many groups, like CENESEX and the community project Espiral, have already embraced. Sexuality should be celebrated and given its own space, but as sexuality in Cuba is tied to other forms of identity, national, racial and cultural, the discussion cannot be limited to talking about queer women’s problem. Queer women in Cuba will not be fully appreciated members of Cuban society until they are seen as worthy of citizenship. The question of legality, of their status as “single” within relationships and their conduct in public, also needs to be given more consideration, and more visibility. Groups with publishing power, like CENESEX and the FMC should continue to push for queer women’s visibility, so that the rest of Cuba can see them for what they really are: people.
Works Cited
Tanya L. Saunders. “Black Lesbians and Racial Identity in Contemporary Cuba.” Black Women, Gender Families 4.1 (2010): 9-36. Web.
Queer women are harshly vilified for not participating in family roles, including motherhood, because by not participating, they also reject a fundamental aspect of Cuban national identity, which is commitment to family structure. The 1975 Family Code, has been beneficial for women in heterosexual relationships as it split household work and family care between husband and wife, emphasized monogamous, heterosexual relationships as the ideal. Thus, it is not surprising that change has been slower for queer Cuban women whose reality has not been validated within this Code. Without their participation in a heterosexual relationship, their very existence can be framed as anti-Revolutionary, and therefore, anti-Cuban. Even more damaging was the initial refusal of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) to accept known lesbians into their organization (Saunders). It was only in the 1980s that the FMC relaxed its ban on lesbian members (Saunders).
While homosexuality is no longer legally viewed as a form of perversion, Cuban law still enforces penal codes that criminalize queer Cubans who are accused of “offending good customs through improper exhibitions or obscene acts” (Saunders). Police are able to fine queer couples for public displays of affection as mild as holding hands in public, which certainly explains why I did not see couples out in public being affectionate towards one another. Once again, sexuality is policed, rather literally, because it is needed to reinforce the family structure so integral to “decent” Cuban life. Cubans, according to Saunders, understand that they have a “national and collective social obligation that is based on the supposedly moral duty of maintaining a stable heterosexual family” (Saunders). This concept of duty is also often tied to the concept of morality, which further polarizes sexuality and aligns homosexuality with the immoral.
Queer women have been marginalized within mainstream Cuban society for so long because negative attitudes towards them are hard to change. In 2003, in the Sixteenth World Congress on Sexology, researchers Dalia Acosta, Sara Más, Dixie Edith, and Mariana Ramírez Corría reviewed two national studies that have been conducted on homosexuality in Cuba, one compiled in 1994 and the other in 2002. Their presentation was called “Qué Pensamos Sobre la Homosexualidad?” (“What Do We Know about Homosexuality?”), and much of the presentation was concerned with how attitudes about queer Cubans has changed over time (Saunders). The researchers shared that while social treatment and acceptance of gay men has improved, social treatment of lesbians has remained stagnant and acceptance for lesbians decreased slightly. There does not seem to be any data on attitudes towards bisexual women, and I wonder if their unique situation was discussed at all. As a population attracted to both men and women, I wonder how their sexuality is being policed and if they face even more harassment than lesbians do since there is a challenge to “cure” them of homosexual desire.
The HIV/AIDS crisis ultimately improved attitudes towards men who have sex with men in Cuba, thanks in large part to the anti-homophobia campaigns of the 1980s. The main goal of the campaign was to reduce the spread of HIV by promoting education of proper condom use and hygiene among gay men, but it also served as a campaign against homophobic attitudes. Because the population most at risk for HIV/AIDS was gay men, queer women were excluded from benefitting from an effort to change attitudes. Today, campaigns against homophobia and transphobia are not solely focused on disease prevention, and an effort is made to be more inclusive of lesbians and the challenges they face. CENESEX, the National Centre for Sex Education in Cuba, is a government funded body which is headed by Mariela Castro, strives to include education that will reach all queer Cubans, and improve their visibility and livelihoods in the larger community.
The study also found that some of the harshest attitudes towards lesbian women came from heterosexual women (I specify lesbian here since the study did not address other queer women). According to Saunders, this is no coincidence, and she notes that “It is very likely that, given the narrow framework for performing acceptable femininity and the high social cost of inadequately performing femininity, heterosexual-identified women are more likely than men to police gender/sexual boundaries.” The study also shows a correlation between attitudes and visibility; the more positive attitudes are about a population, the more visible that population is. Two groups in particular are seen with relatively positive attitudes, namely gay men and transgender women (Saunders). Saunders attributes some of this positivity to the fact that both gay men and transgender women “have much more public visibility because they were born male” (Saunders). For transgender women, this “male” status explains why trans women are more visible than cisgender queer women. It also hints at another reason why queer Cuban women never gained real visibility; they were not as affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
