A few months ago, Sarah from Advocates for Youth sent me an email about an inspiring story and a victory for the fight for LGBTQ rights in Cuba. It was the story of Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban Head of State Raul Castro (brother of Fidel Castro), and her success in convincing the Cuban government to perform state sponsored sex reassignment surgery. These surgeries have been going on now since 2008 and they represent a dramatic shift in the treatment of the LGBTQ community. Castro has been fighting for this change for years now through her organization CENESEX that works for sex education and LGBTQ rights in Cuba.

The dark history of gays and their perscution by the state in Cuba started shortly after the revolution. University of Toronto historians chronicled the persecution that homosexuals in Cuba faced as they were arrested and put into forced labor and re-education camps. As renowned poets and activists such as famous American writer Allen Ginsburg and the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre denounced these actions, Fidel Castro responded to the allegations: 

Finally, in response to these charges, Castro took a clear position in 1965 during an interview with the U.S. journalist Lee Lockwood (quoted in Lockwood,
1967: 92):

".....And yet 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."

This was a time when Cubans were forced to act as undercover police for each other through the UMAP program which was how officials would gather information about homosexuals that would lead them to intern them in the camps. One particularly heartbreaking account was the case of Reinaldo Arenas, the famous Cuban writer who was immortalized in the film Before Night Falls based on his posthumous autobiography. His own accounting of life in the jails was:

Homosexuals were confined to the two worst wards of El Morro: these wards
were below ground at the lowest level, and water seeped into the cells at high
tide. It was a sweltering place without a bathroom. Gays were not treated like
human beings, they were treated like beasts.They were the last ones to come
out for meals, so we saw them walk by, and the most insignificant incident was
an excuse to beat them mercilessly.The soldiers guarding us, who called themselves combatientes, were army recruits sent here as a sort of punishment; they found some release for their rage by taking it out on the homosexuals. Of course, nobody called them homosexuals; they were called fairies, faggots, queers, or at best, gays.The wards for fairies were really the last circle of hell.

After being sent to the U.S. in the Mariel boats where prisoners, homosexuals and other persona non grata of the Cuban Communist party were shipped, Arenas enjoyed life as a famous and prolific Cuba author in exile. Unfortuantely he contracted HIV/AIDS and committed suicide on December 7, 1990. Now Cuba has made strides to improve the treatment of homosexuals although as Mariel Castro indicates, there is still progress to be made.