How the Work of Reinaldo Arenas and Mariela Castro Espín Impacted Modern Conceptions of Sexuality
by Peter Wetherbee
This article is part of the Gender, Sexuality, and Decolonization Resource Page blog.
In recent years, activism combatting discrimination and the unequal standing of LGBTQ Cubans has increased dramatically, culminating in the largest provision of LGBTQ rights in the region on 26 September 2022. At this moment when Cubans voted 67% in favor of a referendum codifying marriage equality and the right to adoption for same-sex couples, they voted to strengthen rights for women, children, and the elderly, to provide measures against gender violence, and to encourage the equal distribution of domestic labor.[1] Originally part of the new constitution ratified in 2019 but quickly taken out due to vast protests coordinated by the Roman Catholic Church (evidence of a growing evangelical movement and an entrenched tradition of machoism), the “Family Code” was openly endorsed by the Cuban government and serves as a stark departure from the old Cuban government led by Fidel Castro. Historically, the Castro regime was well known to place gay men in labor camps alongside traitors due to their transgressions against a hyper-masculine society attempting to nation-build.[2] However, many decades later, the pro-LGBTQ legislation could not have passed on governmental support alone, with decades of activism by dozens of Cuban activists paving the way and leading the necessary political and societal shifts towards an environment in which such a progressive referendum could ultimately pass. Looking at the stories of Reinaldo Arenas and Mariela Castro Espín and the ways in which their differing societal and political contexts shaped their activism allows us to understand their resistance to 20th century Cuban conceptions of LGBTQ people and how these conceptions morphed from being contrary to the communist vision of the country to part of the national dialogue.
Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990) was a Cuban writer and poet born in 1943 in Holguín, Cuba. A prominent figure in Cuban literature and well known for his controversial and often political works, Arenas was a vocal advocate for gay rights and the fair treatment of LGBTQ people in Cuba. While living and working in Cuba, Arenas faced discrimination and persecution because of his sexuality, being arrested and imprisoned several times for his homosexuality and political activism. Despite these challenges, Arenas continued to write and publish his work, often using his writing as a means of protesting the oppressive regime in Cuba.
In the 1980s, Arenas became a leading figure in the movement for gay rights in Cuba, acting as an outspoken critic of the Cuban government's treatment of homosexuals and the homophobia that had become institutionalized in the two decades after the 1959 Revolution, including the sending of gay men to labor camps as criminals.[3] The 1959 Cuban Revolution, based in Marxist-Leninist ideas of classless unity and equality, economic development, and Cuban political sovereignty from the United States, clashed heavily with the cultural and political realities in the country. Within the revolutionary regime, the idea that homosexuality was a disease had become part of the unofficial policy by the beginning of the 1980s.[4] Even more, Arenas was an overt critic of Fidel Castro, personally blaming him for the poverty and displacement that defined much of Arenas’ life in his suicide note.[5] In his novella “The Brightest Star,” Arenas calls out the government’s use of “certain clothes, traits, and mannerisms” related to gender performance to “deprive people of their liberty,” but always amorphous enough to be left undefined, like in the arrest of several men, where “one young man’s hair was too long, or that another wore clothes of a certain cut or (most fatal) exhibited certain telling traits, had certain mannerisms.”[6]
Arenas’ legacy not only lies in his written activism, but also his direct rejection of the cultural changes that had taken place in Cuba during his lifetime. As many scholars have noted, the gravest crimes were not necessarily private relations between gay men, which were technically decriminalized in 1979, but the transgressing of gender norms and possessing the courage to appear visibly or obviously gay.[7] Many were considered by governmental institutions to be “maricón,” a term from the Cuban dictionary of police legislation that classifies effeminate men who do women’s work, imitate women in their mannerisms, and take the place of women in the “most shameful” of acts.[8]
Gay men, and effeminacy more broadly, had nationalist meanings superimposed onto their existences by the masculine nation-building narratives that drove the Cuban Revolution, making them a direct threat to the supposed stability, economic viability, and continued existence of the new Cuban Communist state.[9] Specifically, the Cuban state’s progression from a democratic to authoritarian movement and its attempts to control morality displayed overt consolidations of power and an intentional obscuring of the grand narrative behind the Revolution, which in theory would have provided true equality for all Cubans.[10] During the decades following the Revolution, the regime regularly “intervened in citizens’ sexual lives in myriad ways,” including through policy, mass education programs, and incentives for reproductive forms of sexual unions, making Arenas’ and other activists’ boldness to transgress even that more admirable.[11] Yet to this day, his legacy has been repeatedly denied by Cuban officials, with much of his grassroots-inspired and community-based work still being censored in the country despite being constantly referenced by modern day activists.
Central among those activists is Mariela Castro Espín (1962 –), who has enjoyed nearly two decades of successful activism due in large part to changing societal values and her proximity to the upper echelon of Communist Party governance. She is the niece of Fidel Castro and the daughter of Raúl Castro, the current president of the Cuban Communist Party, and the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX).[12] Through CENESEX, which is part of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, she has organized pride parades, provided services to LGBTQ people in remote towns, and engaged in vast activism for the rights of women and the LGBTQ community by continuing the work started by her mother in the early 2000s.[13] Espín was the first person to ever vote “No” in the Cuban legislature in 2013, unable to support an employment bill that failed to include protections based on sexual orientation, HIV status, and gender identity.[14]
That Espín can advocate so fiercely and defiantly for an end to homophobia, as well as play a central role in the passing of the referendum on the additional pieces of the Family Code incorporating protections for LGBTQ people and women, exemplifies a broader societal shift towards greater tolerance and acceptance of the LGBTQ community. Her role in the last two decades of progressive activism, particularly in being a vocal critic of the Cuban establishment while simultaneously being a key member of its core unit, makes her voice even more unique. She has continued to build on the activism of Arenas and other activists by capitalizing on the changes in social conceptions of sexuality over the past six decades. By utilizing her proximity to key decision makers and being bold enough to harness the recent gains made by Cuban society in terms of shaking traditional hierarchies and prejudices dating from before the 1959 Revolution, Espín has managed to do what many activists aim to do: guide broad societal change towards the inclusion of historically marginalized people.[15]
The work of Reinaldo Arenas and the continuation of that work by Mariela Castro Espín have served as a method of fighting Cuba’s history of othering the LGBTQ community as unimportant, traitorous, and ultimately non-Cuban. Beyond these two people however, one cannot forget the countless activists who have left Cuba in response to a lack of progress, as well as the colonial legacies that continue to impact not only Cuba, but the Caribbean more broadly. Colonial laws on same-sex behavior, particularly in the Anglo-Caribbean, continue to maintain their status, being used by modern governments as ways of defining what it means to be a member of their nation and their nation-building process.[16] Further, legacies of subjugation at the hands of slavery, colonization, and economic frameworks reliant on tourism and debt make analyzing diverse sexualities and advocating for positive social change a significant challenge, with the “othering” of people outside the heterosexual state being projected as antithetical to the nation-building mission of post-colonial Caribbean nations.[17] The impact of external gazes, institutions, and companies from North America and Europe on the behavior of Cuba and other Caribbean nations is not to be ignored, particularly when you factor in the role of neocolonial governments on both sides of the relationship in the construction of international tourist expectations. These expectations explicitly reinforce established patterns of heteronormativity and class privilege while subjecting locals through an imperialistic tourist gaze.[18] With the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States and the reopening of the country to tourists, it will likely be the case that the sexual dynamics present on other Caribbean islands make their way to Cuba and cede themselves to the heterosexual expectations for economic gain.
This activism also starts conversations in Cuba about the balance of power and governmental structures in a largely authoritarian system, as well as the seemingly sudden progress of LGBTQ equality after many years of internal stagnation and external opposition. While referendums on marriage equality are not necessarily rare (look to Ireland, Bermuda, Taiwan, and Australia for examples with positive and negative outcomes), the referendum is a highly unusual occurrence in Cuba, which has a documented history of communism and violating the right to free and fair elections.[19] Some activists in Cuba see the government’s support as a way to show a liberal face against political and economic discontent.[20] Despite legislative progress through the Family Code, Cuba still fails to protect the daily lives of people who exist outside of the heteronormative way of living that the Cuban Revolution promoted as the ultimate construction of family life.[21] LGBTQ Cubans continue to face opposition to their existences, including growing religious intolerance and social conservatism from large sections of the country.[22] Regardless, the activism and advocacy powered by the cultural impact of Arenas’ political and literary work, matched by the leveraging of significant state power by Espín, and continued by many other unnamed activists shows how necessary each person in a movement can be. Arenas and Espín show us that resistance takes many types of people, all dedicated to a cause and situated equally within society and the state, to truly achieve long-term societal change. While the LGBTQ community in Cuba has faced many struggles and there is still much progress to be made, the passage of the 2022 referendum is a good step towards, yet not a total realization of, equality for LGBTQ people in Cuba.
[1] Eduardo Medina, “Cuba Approves Same-Sex Marriage in Historic Vote,” The New York Times, September 26, 2022; Juan Pappier & Cristian Gonzalez Cabrerz, “Political Rights for Cubans Should Not Start with a Marriage Equality Referendum,” Human Rights Watch, May 15, 2022
[2] Medina, “Cuba Approves”; Carrie Hamilton, Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
[3] Brandon O’Boyle, “Why Reinaldo Arenas still matters for Cuba’s LGBT community,” Americas Quarterly, December 7, 2016.
[4] Jafari Allen, ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba., (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 72, cited in: Rosamond King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014)
[5] O’Boyle, “Why Reinaldo Arenas”
[6] Reinaldo Arenas, “The Brightest Star,” (New York: Grove, 1994), 65, cited in: Rosamond King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014), 75.
[7] Rosamond King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014); Allen, ¡Venceremos?; Carrie Hamilton, Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012);
[8] King, Island Bodies
[9] King, Island Bodies; José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. (New York: New York University Press, 2000) cited in: King, Island Bodies
[10] Rachel Hynson, “Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959-1971” Cambridge Latin American Studies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
[11] Hamilton, Sexual Revolutions
[12] Linda Barnard, “Five questions with LGBT activist Mariela Castro Espín,” Toronto Star. 2015.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Hamilton, Sexual Revolutions
[16] King, Island Bodies, 2
[17] Ahmed Banisalamah, “Colonialism, Sexualities, and Culture: A Transnational Interrogation of Caribbean Subjectivities,” Papers on Language & Literature 56, no. 2 (2020): 167–220.
[18] Angelique Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2015).
[19] Pappier & Gonzalez Cabrerz, “Political Rights for Cubans”; Timothy Hildebrandt, “Same-Sex Marriage in China? The Strategic Promulgation of a Progressive Policy and Its Impact on LGBT Activism,” Review of International Studies 37, no. 3 (2011): 1313–33.
[20] Medina, “Cuba Approves”
[21] Evie Browne, “Lesbian and Bisexual Women in Cuba: Family, Rights, and Policy.” Gender and Development 26, no. 1 (2018): 71–87.
[22] Pappier & Gonzalez Cabrerz, “Political Rights for Cubans”