It may perhaps come as a surprise to many that one of the most vocal voices coming out of Latin America in support of LGBT rights is that of a straight woman named Mariela Castro Espín. Yes, as in that Castro. Daughter of current Cuban president Raúl Castro and niece of Fidel Castro, Mariela is a force of nature in her own right. A member of Cuban parliament, she is also the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX)-and so, so much more.
We caught up with Mariela ahead of her lecture at the University of Toronto yesterday evening. We talked LGBT activism, U.S. interventionism, media misinformation and more. Political junkies: read on.
Photo Credit: YAMIL LAGE/AFP/Getty Images
AfterEllen.com: So, who or what inspired you to work towards promoting the civil rights of LGBT people in Cuba?
Mariela Castro Espín: Ever since I was a little girl I heard that there were people who suffered these problems and that a lot of people rejected them. I always wanted this to be resolved, but I didn’t know how. I saw it as a big challenge. I didn’t think I was going to be the one to tackle it, but it made me uncomfortable and I thought, “Somebody has to fix this problem.”
And then being the director of CENESEX I was dealing with a bunch of child and adolescent issues. It was my mother, who was working on these issues. When she got sick, I realized that she wasn’t going to be able to take on these issues. That’s when I started to get more involved.
I realized that this was going to take some study and that I needed some theoretical tools. I really needed some serious studying to know how to deal with it in the best way possible. I knew that things had to change and I wanted them to change, but I really didn’t know how to approach it.
AE: As an ally but not a queer woman yourself, when you began your work with the LGBT community, did you ever feel a sense of resistance? Particularly because you come from a bit of a privileged background and people might have thought, “How can she understand us?”
MCE: First of all, I don’t believe I do have a privileged background. I went to the same schools as every other kid. I took the same bus. I guess there would always be some things that might be different, but I was always living among other people and I think there were no doors closed to me. Growing up with people opened doors. And having been a social activist really all my life, and my links with communist youth and all kinds of student activism, I’ve always been involved. This also opened doors. It put me in contact with people. It gave me social relationships.
I never felt any rejection from LGBT people because I tried to help them. The opposite—I think I was really welcomed and I feel the support of a lot of these people. When I started this work through CENESEX there was really no activist program. There were individual actions that people did. Institutionally there was no forum. I started organizing this work through a state institution, which involves civil society groups that I was a part of and other civil society groups that I wasn’t a part of. This started to encourage activism. We trained people to be activists for sexual rights, and that opened many doors.
Really, the people who didn’t like me were the homophobes. And I think they’re still bothered by me.
AE: I think so too. Cuba—it has a well-known isolationist history. I’ve read accounts of LGBT Cubans saying that they didn’t even know that people lived openly elsewhere in the world or that they felt safe being out. With that being said, when you first started your work with the LGBT community, did you find some were reluctant to join you in a public fight?
MCE: Yes, and I think it’s exactly because of this that this kind of activity didn’t spontaneously start from within the LGBT community. That’s why I got involved with a state institution that is making all this happen. I make it easier for these people to feel safer to come out of the closet.
We have a lot of activities to discuss this process. “How do you feel about coming out of the closet? What are the difficulties you face in coming out of the closet?” And then, “How do you feel after you’ve overcome that?” All of a sudden it’s in fashion to say, “Come out of the closet!” I say, “Leave people alone and let them take their time and have their process.” Because they have to process it with their family, their friends, at their place of work—that takes time.
AE: You just mentioned that your organization is state-sponsored. People will probably feel more comfortable joining you in your efforts because it’s state-sponsored and so they aren’t scared of potential penalties. But I believe that the last time Cuba had a citizen-led gay rights group of any sort was around 1995. Is it your hope that your work will lead to citizens feeling comfortable forming their own groups?
MCE: No, that didn’t exist.
AE: There was nothing?
MCE: No, no. I recall there was a group from the United States that was giving money to try to create civil society groups because the type of politics that the U.S. had during several years was against the Cuban revolution—to destabilize the government and political system.They put in a lot of money to create opposition groups within society to destabilize. We call it a “soft coup.” It’s similar to what they’re doing now in North Africa, Syria and various other places. They tried to create LGBT groups. But they didn’t create them. They could not create them because Cuban society rejected that interventionism from the United States.
What we have done at CENESEX is train activists to promote sexual rights, including LGBT rights, throughout the whole country. This was based on the work of a women’s group in Santiago, Cuba. This was a group of women who wrote me a letter asking me—they presented themselves as a group of lesbian and bisexual women—to get services from CENESEX. So we worked with them. We gave them some courses and some materials. And they did set themselves up and called themselves the Isabella’s. We connected them to the provincial government to ensure that they would be supported. Their plan wasn’t really to transform society. They came looking to learn more about women’s health, women’s sexuality and, particularly, services for lesbians. Since we’ve trained them, they’ve really developed a very strong social function, carrying out and moving forward the programs that we’ve been proposing. And they were a group that inspired other groups.
These are groups that kind of linked up into a network very spontaneously. And we recognize them as community social networks. The funny thing is they all want to be linked to CENESEX. We look for funds for them and we give them training. We facilitate their participation in events. And they organize the anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia days with us every May.
We’re creating the conditions, and if they want at some point they can become their own legal entity. At the moment, I think they’re happy getting administrative support from us. The objective is to facilitate their activism-to give them the knowledge and the tools that they need for social transformation so that they can take on the struggle responsibly. It’s a big struggle, and they can find their place in the struggle within our country and on the world stage.
AE: The North American narrative—the framing is going to be different. I brought up the case in 1995 because that’s what the media here has informed us about. That there was a gay group, and that it ceased to be around 1995. There were reports that some of those group members, gay men in particular, were arrested. Now that’s how it’s reported here. I would think that if something of that magnitude happened, even if it was in the late ’90s, that you would be able to speak to that. Have you heard of any arrests happening like that?
MCE: This is constant, soft coup politics. The Reagan government and really the U.S. has always put a lot of money—millions and millions of dollars—into weakening the revolution. From the Bay of Pigs to terrorism organized and financed by the United States. They sent thousands of bombs. They hijacked airplanes and boats. Diplomats disappeared—they assassinated diplomats of ours. After more than 56 years of revolution, we’re still facing hostility. That includes a media campaign to discredit the Cuban reality and to generate more enemies than sympathizers. Because the Cuban revolution garnered a lot of sympathy around the world. They are dedicated to inventing stories or exaggerating other stories. The objective is to discredit the history of the revolution.
So you may hear about a project that they put a lot of money into to try to form this gay group, but it never really got off the ground. But the other question is why would the U.S. have to come to Cuba to empower any groups? That is clear interventionist politics.
In recent years we’ve seen a lot of news. There have been like four groups created in the last couple of years. I don’t even remember their names. Usually these turn out to be one person who gets paid a lot of money who says he is the spokesperson for an organization and they give that person a platform. They say, “This person from this organization says that they put hundreds of homosexuals in jail.”
AE: When was this?
MCE: In the last 10 years. So we said, “Let’s go verify this. Because if this is true, we have to confront this. Let’s go to the police.” The police said, “No, none of that had gone on.” We mentioned names and still nothing.
In Cuba, there are no laws against being gay. But there are always loopholes that make it hard on people. It’s not that everything is perfect. There are ways to punish a gay person or a trans person. Our work has been to get rid of those loopholes and make sure that everyone gets respect. But you have to keep your eye on it.
So when I saw that they were printing this news in El País from Spain—important newspapers, [a’ serious publication is publishing lies? “Okay, we have to investigate.” The Miami Herald. So I said, “Let’s see if their names are in the birth registry.” They didn’t exist. They had never been born.
AE: They had been made up?
MCE: They were made up names. So we started to publish this through our legal group. When we started doing that, we didn’t hear of any more of these cases.
Sometimes things do happen, but usually there are a lot of lies and things are blown out of proportion. We investigate that too, and publish what actually happened. The goal is just to create this cloudy image in the public opinion worldwide. Most of these people who got paid to do this are now in Miami. Those guys are gone so they’re going to have to find some other people. They already got their prize.
AE: Now if I come down to Cuba, you’ll show me what it’s really like down there?
MCE: Yes, yes. And I invite your readers to come to Cuba in May and participate in the Cuban Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.
