This is what Cuban leader Fidel Castro had to say regarding persecution of homosexuals in Cuba in the 1960s to 1980s, in an in-depth interview he recently had with the Mexican paper La Jornada. Castro has seen the errors of the past and is very much seeking to amend them. Cuba, like in many other social aspects, is a champion of gay rights in Latin America. Thanks to the revolutionary work of Fidel Castro's niece and daughter of current Cuban leader Raul Castro, Mariela Castro, homosexuals in Cuba are now enjoying greater rights and greater government assistance in areas of concern such as health and HIV than many gay people in other Western Hemisphere countries. Bravo Fidel!Castro said homosexuals had traditionally been discriminated in Cuba, just as black people and women. In 1979 homosexuality in Cuba was decriminalised (earlier than many parts of the USA and Australia!) and, more recently, there have been efforts to legalise same-sex unions.
Many in the West are unaware that despite the fact that most Eastern bloc countries were very anti-gay and dismissed homosexuality as a 'bourgeois disease', there were times and individual countries where this was not the case. The early years of the Russian Revolution saw groundbreaking changes in gay rights, only for Stalin to repeal them, as remained as such until past the fall of the USSR.
The German Democratic Republic was a firm supporter of gay rights, especially towards the end of its existence in the 1980s. The GDR even decriminalised homosexuality and brought age of consent laws in line before West Germany! Gay groups under the auspices of the FDJ, the Young Communist League, were set up that organised gay nights and awareness, and even a gay rights film called 'Coming Out' was released in late 1989 just as the Berlin Wall was about to fall. Czechoslovakia (with the Czech Republic in particular) was also very gay-friendly as a society.
It's great to see that Castro is able to make amends for the errors of the past, and I would like to see his counterparts in Western countries to do the same.
More insightful and balanced writing Nick, and on a topic close to our hearts - forgive me a minor correction - the world premiere of Coming Out (love the English title) in Kino International natürlich took place on the evening of 9 November 1989, the very night that Schabowski's blunder opened the Wall, so you could in fact accurately say that it was released on the night the Wall came down - I learnt this, as well as much more fascinating trivia, from all of the German documentaries about DDR times and the Wall that I've subtitled at Titelbild for TV channel RBB... According to mein hübsches deutsches Sahneschnittchen Sebastian the film's not great, but I'd still like to see it for the period charm - we recently saw Taxi zum Klo, a fascinating (and horny) 1980 film about the life of a handsome beardy gay teacher in West Berlin in the late '70s - well worth downloading, and surely the first example of a golden shower (including into mouth and then kissing) in a film on general cinema release...!
ReplyDeleteTalking about popular Western misrepresentations of unfriendly states as backward and unremittingly grim (actually, this relates mostly to the DPRK story above), I've just read the first part of the report on gay Baghdad on Gay City News - you should definitely read it if you haven't already:
http://www.gaycitynews.com/gay_city_news/front/
Keep up the good work Nick, see you in October, h. x