Cuba's new Family Code won't pink wash away the communist regime's ideological aversion to homosexuality

“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
 

The Castro regime held a "referendum" on September 25, 2022 to pass a government-backed “family code" that would allow same-sex couples to marry and adopt. It also outlined the rights of children and grandparents. The new "family law" contains over 400 articles. Critics view it as an exercise in pink washing.

First, this is not a free and fair referendum. There have not been free elections in Cuba for 72 years. Last ones were in 1950. Batista's 1952 coup ended regular free and fair elections. The Castros promised to restore them in 1959, but no free or fair elections were held over the next 63 years. Opposition political parties, and independent civil society were and continue to be outlawed.

Proof of life: Raul Castro featured in official media going to vote.

What the Castro dictatorship calls a "referendum" has some peculiar characteristics.  Can't campaign for the position opposed by the government. No equal time in the public airwaves. This is a "vote" where a single option, the one advocated by the government, is permitted. Efforts to independently monitor voting at precincts to verify the official tally will get you harassed and shutdown by secret police. 

Pinkwashing is "the practice of presenting something, particularly a state, as gay-friendly in order to soften or downplay aspects of its reputation considered negative."

This is particularly ironic in the Cuban context with the current communist dictatorship.

The Cuban government’s leadership, who remain in power today, carried out anti-Gay draconian policies in the past, and they are the same ones now advocating for the change on gay marriage in the new family code.

There is a deep-seated homophobia at the heart of communist ideology that viewed homosexuality as a symptom of bourgeois or capitalist contamination. This resulted in the systematic repression of homosexuals in communist regimes such as China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union.

In the Soviet Union homosexuality was criminalized in 1933, "punishable by prison and hard labor, and Stalinist anti-gay policies persisted throughout the 1960s and 1970s." 

In 1949 upon taking power in Mainland China the communists declared homosexuality a symptom of "bourgeois decadence" and set out to eliminate it.

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.”

It didn't take long for the crackdown.

Gays and Lesbians were gathered up and placed in forced labor camps beginning in 1964 in what they called 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. 

On March 21, 1984 the film "Mauvaise Conduite" was released in France. The film was directed by  Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal.  The title of the film in English is Improper Conduct. It examines the "moral purges" of the Castro regime that began in 1964 with  the UMAPs.

Twenty years later with the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in Cuba the regime rounded up all who were HIV positive. Cuba is the only nation in the world that mandated universal HIV testing and enforced isolation of all virus carriers in detention facilities from 1986 to 1994. 

Mariela Castro, General Raul Castro's daughter, has 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.

Gay Pride ended violently by Castro regime in 2019.

The reality that all human rights are nonexistent in Cuba was underscored once more on May 11, 2019 when the hollowness of the Pinkwashing  was revealed with images of gay rights activists beaten down, arrested and taken away for carrying out their annual Gay Pride march in Havana. The Castro regime had arbitrarily decided there would not be one in 2019.

The hatred for Gay dissidents in Cuba by the dictatorship has been documented in the case of Cuban biologist and environmentalist Dr. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola. On November 27, 2019 in a conference hosted by the International Society for Human Rights Dr. Ruiz Urquiola publicly accused the Cuban government of purposely inoculating him with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). He addressed the UN Human Rights Council on July 3, 2020 and denounced this cruel and unusual treatment by the Cuban government. On July 12, 2022 a video was released with Professor Ruiz Urquiola demonstrating the evidence that he was injected with HIV by agents of the Cuban government.

Cuba's new Family Code is an attempt to recover on the propaganda front what was lost in 2019, but the underlying nature of the dictatorship remains the same.