“We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant.” ... A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.” - Fidel Castro, 1965
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| Film poster for the 1984 film Improper Conduct |
Forty years ago on March 21, 1984 in France the film "Mauvaise Conduite" was released. The film was made by Néstor Almendros (1930-1992) and Orlando Jiménez Leal. The title of the film in English is Improper Conduct and it examines the "moral purges" of the Cuban Revolution that began in 1964 with the creation of Military Units to Aid Production or UMAPs (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción).
These forced labor camps were for those suspected of or found guilty of "improper conduct." Persons with effeminate mannerisms: what the Cuban government called "extravagant behavior" were taken to these camps.
This systematic repression of homosexuals had an ideological component that first impacted policies in Communist China and the Soviet Union.
In the USSR homosexuality was criminalized on March 7, 1934, "punishable by prison and hard labor, and Stalinist anti-gay policies persisted throughout the 1960s and 1970s." The Soviet anti-homosexual laws were on the books until 1993, two years after its dissolution.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia which claimed to be "the first Marxist–Leninist general-purpose encyclopedia" offered the following information on homosexuality in 1930.
"Soviet legislation does not recognize so-called crimes against morality. Our laws proceed from the principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest ... while recognizing the incorrectness of homosexual development ... our society combines prophylactic and other therapeutic measures with all the necessary conditions for making the conflicts that afflict homosexuals as painless as possible and for resolving their typical estrangement from society within the collective."
Ekaterina Mishina in her November 10, 2014 article "Who is Troubled by Gay Propaganda?" reports on how a prominent Soviet intellectual responded to the criminalization of homosexuality.
"In March 1934, a new article criminalizing homosexuality was introduced to the 1926 Criminal Code of the RSFSR. Two months later, the USSR’s most celebrated writer at the time, Maxim Gorky, ardently supported the innovation with a slogan published in Izvestia newspaper: “Destroy homosexuality, and fascism will disappear!” Article 121 of the 1960 Criminal Code of the RSFSR also upheld criminal liability for homosexuality, and remained in effect until 1993."
In 1949 upon taking power in Mainland China the communists declared homosexuality a symptom of "bourgeois decadence" and set out to eliminate it.
Amy Villarejo in her book, Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire in the notes section on page 222 provided the following excerpt on how Beijing solved their "homosexual problem."
"In Improper Conduct, the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante tells an apocryphal story linking post-revolution Cuba to Shanghai: [Cuban leaders] were all obsessed with homosexuality when visiting Communist bloc countries. Ramiro Valdes, Minister of the Interior, went to China and asked to meet the Mayor of Shanghai. Why did Valdes want to meet him? Shanghai had always had a large homosexual population, dating back to Imperial China. It had very few morals, it was the capital of Westernized China, as opposed to Peking, the cloistered capital. So he met the Mayor of Shanghai and asked how they had solved their homosexual problem. The mayor replied through an interpreter, 'There are no homosexuals here.' 'You no longer have a homosexual problem here?' 'No, we took advantage of a traditional holiday where homosexuals gathered in a park in Shanghai on the banks of a river. Party officials went there carrying clubs to eliminate the problem once and for all.' They clubbed them and threw them in the water. The bodies were carried downstream as a grim warning! It was the end of homosexuality in Shanghai."
On March 13, 1963 Fidel Castro gave a speech were he openly attacked “long-haired layabouts, the children of bourgeois families,” roaming the streets wearing “trousers that are too tight,” carrying guitars to look like Elvis Presley, who took “their licentious behavior to the extreme” of organizing “effeminate shows” in public places. The Cuban dictator warned: “They should not confuse the Revolution’s serenity and tranquility with weaknesses in the Revolution. Our society cannot accept these degeneracies.”
Fidel Castro went further in 1965 declaring: “We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the
conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider
him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant.” ... A deviation of
that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant
communist should be.
In 1964 the Castro regime began rounding up Gays and sending them to Military Units to Aid
Production or UMAPs (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción). These
forced labor camps were for those suspected of or found guilty of
"improper conduct." Persons with "effeminate mannerisms",
what the Cuban government called "extravagant behavior" were taken to
these camps.
This history should be taken into account when considering other policies that negatively impacted members of the LGBTQI community in Cuba.
For example the quarantine of HIV positive Cubans from 1986 to 1997 through mandatory testing, and isolation. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic it was associated with the Gay community.
After a staged assault of two policemen Ariel Ruiz Urquiola was arrested on May 3rd, 2018 and sentenced to prison for twelve months by a kangaroo tribunal. He was remanded in jail on May 8th, 2018 and protested from June 16th to July 2nd with a successful hunger strike which led to an early release from prison on July 3rd, 2018. On June 16th, 2019 he got informed that he is HIV positive. He eliminates a natural infection strictly. He believes that he had been infected with the HI virus on purpose in prison.
According to a statement of Dr. Ruiz Urquiola the doctor’s reports show that he got infected during his imprisonment. The lab results also confirm an infection on purpose. That’s how the short time between hospitalization and illness with a high inoculum (infective material or one as an antigen acting part of a germ), e.g. from a lab virus, can be explained.
On Saturday, May 11, 2019 gay rights activists were beaten down, arrested and taken away for attempting to carry out a Gay Pride march in Havana.
Mariela Castro, General Raul Castro's daughter, led efforts to Pinkwash the Castro dictatorship. Saul Landau, a Castro apologist who passed away in 2013, worked on a project that highlighted her efforts, Mariela Castro's March: Cuba's LGBT Revolution. In light of what happened in 2019, the documentary screened by HBO in 2016 has aged badly. Bottom line what Mariela Castro, the dictator's daughter says goes, but if she decides there will not be a Gay Pride march there will not be one. At least not one without government repression.
Gay rights activists condemned the cancellation and then organized their own demonstration. More than 100 demonstrators took to the streets of Havana. After setting out on Havana's Paseo del Prado, the marchers came up against a large number of police and state security forces. Beatings, detentions and several arrests ensued.
This assault by Cuban government authorities against Cuba's LGBTQI community took place on the 35th anniversary of the release of Improper Conduct, the film that revealed how Gays and Lesbians are treated in Cuba, and documents what happened during the first 30 years of the Castro regime.
In a 2019 interview published in the Spanish publication, Faro y Vigo Jiménez Leal explained how a restored version for a 35th anniversary screening at that time came to be:
It was restructured, the titles were changed, the colors were fixed; It is a shorter version now because they were edited out about twenty minutes. We left it at an hour and a half but it is still a feature film, "said Jiménez Leal in an interview with Efe. "A filmmaker friend, Eliecer Jiménez, and I discovered a master that was here in my office in good condition; We saw that (the discovery) coincided with the 35th anniversary and decided to make a restored version of the film," details the Cuban filmmaker of 77 years, of which, he said, he has spent 57 exiled."
Orlando Jiménez Leal explained the continuing importance of this documentary, "It's a film against intolerance. Intolerance will always exist, and therefore, Improper Conduct will always be relevant."
This documentary came into being out of an event that first inspired the filmmakers to make a fictional comedy. Ten dancers of the National Ballet of Cuba defected in 1966 during a tour stop in Paris. The filmmakers started to interview the ballet dancers, and the people who had helped them to develop the script. The interviews were so powerful that they decided to make this documentary instead.
Below is the original full version of the documentary. There is a better viewing quality version for the 35th anniversary out there.
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