The lack of political will of the Cuban State to implement strategies that pave the way towards gender equality is one of the difficulties faced by lesbians living in Cuba, according to a investigation recently published.
“Laws by themselves do not change a society. For society to change, public policies or other types of actions are required and, in fact, we do not even have comprehensive sexuality education in schools. In reality, I do not believe that there is a political will to change certain things beyond political discourse and political discourse is one thing and political will is another,” Yennys Hernández Molina, an LGBTQ+ activist and collaborator of the study, told Martí Noticias. “If They Don’t Mention Us, We Don’t Exist: Lesbophobia in Cuba,” sponsored by the International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights (Race and Equality), based in Washington, DC.
The research shows that Cuban institutions still slow down the issue of lesbianism, and “projects” are maintained that, far from contributing to the comprehensive scope of diversity, establish relationships of dependency.
“There is an invisibility regarding the laws that, supposedly, have been open to the LGTBIQ+ community such as the Family Code, the Assisted Reproduction Regulation, which changes its name from time to time, but continues to be the one that determines who has, or does not have , access to assisted reproduction, and lesbian women, are not mentioned in these documents,” said María Matienzo, the main author of the research.
“There are many laws that, supposedly, are designed to favor the LGTBQ+ community, but they do not mention the word lesbian, as if saying lesbian was a stigma. And that makes us invisible within these laws because we fall into a legal vacuum in which anyone can occupy our space or we cannot occupy some spaces, simply because we are not mentioned within the laws,” Matienzo noted.
The Race and Equality report, in which Annery Rivera, Lisy Romero and Zuleika Rivera also participated, adds that “history shows that lesbians in Cuba went from the ridicule of garzonism to pathologization and social, political and institutional nullity. There is no openly lesbian woman who has a significant voice in the Cuban parliament. “Doing activism or opposition in Cuba while being openly lesbian means redoubling the effort to be taken into account.”
The study analyzes to what extent lesbians in Cuba are marginalized from the LGBTIQ+ community itself. This exclusion is not only linked to the laws enacted by the regime, but also to “certain LGBTIQ+ spaces and groups,” in which the problems of this gender group do not receive the attention they deserve.
“We discovered it when we started doing our surveys. We applied focus groups and an alarming number of women, she said, did not see themselves represented in these spaces. 69.1% of the lesbian or sapphic women interviewed said that they had felt homophobia throughout their lives. 16% identified that they did not know and 14% said they did not, but when asked other specific questions – how does lesbophobia manifest itself in public spaces or in spaces such as medicine or education; or like work centers? – They did identify with having been attacked, however, they were not aware because sometimes violence tends to be normalized,” said the researcher.
Lesbians suffer various incidences of violence. The most frequent are rejection, discrimination and, therefore, loneliness. According to other specialists, violence starts from within themselves, when they do not accept themselves as they are.
“There are all forms of lesbophobia in Cuba. Perhaps the least known are the most extreme, which are lesbicides, which recently gained some international notoriety as a result of the cases in Argentina,” explained Hernández Molina, a resident of the Cuban capital.
On the night of May 5, Justo Fernando Barrientos, in a boarding house south of Buenos Aires, opened the door of the room next to his, where four women were sleeping, and threw a homemade explosive at them. When they ran into the fire, he hit them and pushed them into the fire.
The Chilean psychologist Zicri Orellana Rojas classified the forms of lesbophobia as explicit, covert and internalized and cover types of violence such as beatings, expulsion, stigmatization, misogyny, censorship and silence, among others.
“From here we have news this year of at least one [lesbicidio]maybe two, but lesbophobia ranges from criticizing yourself for being unfeminine or having short hair or wearing more masculine clothes to this extreme form of hatred towards lesbian women that is murder,” added Hernández Molina.
“I know people who have been raped and sexually abused for being lesbians. A lot of street harassment for being a lesbian, a lot. When she lived in Santiago de Cuba, she suffered much more harassment than in Havana. There are cases of people who have practically been kicked out of work. It is very subtle because it does not happen openly, it is not that they are going to throw you out because you are a lesbian, but it does make it difficult for you at work, horribly,” she said.
On March 13, 1963, Fidel Castro declared in a speech at the University of Havana, in relation to gender-diverse people: “Our society cannot accommodate these degenerations.”
“In fact, there is a relatively famous ‘Socialist Moral Manual’ from the 60s, which said that homosexual people were not sick, but social deviants. And, for many decades, homosexuality was treated as a legacy of the bourgeoisie, as a social scourge and that, indisputably, leaves a mark,” Hernández Molina recalled.
The activist noted that, although the Cuban government tries to give an image of inclusion, the reality is different: “The way in which statistics are collected in Cuba is very binary and stereotyped in terms of sex-gender categories, and this “affects what is related to sexual dissidence.”
“A national survey on trans people was conducted in 2018, but it has never been published. That’s how everything is handled here. Therefore, I do not think that we are going to have, nor have we so far, a report on sexual dissidence, and even less so on discriminatory issues such as lesbophobia.”
“If we do not know what problems we are facing and there is no data about it, policies cannot be developed to try to change this situation,” Hernández Medina stressed.
Another of the goals proposed by the research was to “identify who are the main perpetrators of violence against lesbian women within Cuban society and make intergender violence among lesbian women visible,” María Matienzo stressed.
“We realized, for example, that feminist platforms when they talk about gender violence do not have a methodology to safeguard life or to denounce the violence that occurs in relationships between sapphic women,” said the writer.
“We decided to do a complete historical reconstruction, going through the UMAP [Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción], all the sanitation of society; in which Fidel Castro was at the head, although we can mention some figures, such as [el escritor y artista] Samuel Feijóo, who, with very radical speeches regarding diversity; “They were at the head of this sanitation,” Matienzo explained and insisted that, in the first decades of Castro’s power, gender diversity was hidden within Cuban society as in all “patriarchal societies.”
“In the case of the Cuban woman, the patriarchy fostered and entrenched much more by the dictatorship that we have had for 64 years,” he emphasized.
“Currently we encounter some biases that we have been carrying, such as the low representation of black lesbian women in the surveys we apply. Only 3% Why? There are also, of course, levels of poverty, those who are interested, or not, in being identified as lesbian women. In general, there is more stigma regarding black women, that is, related to raciality, to sexual orientation, and that, of course, is a gap that we have as civil society,” Matienzo emphasized.
The text reaffirms that “there is a pact of silence between Cuban civil society and lesbians; between the State and its government institutions and the lesbians who seem to say: “don’t make too much noise and we will tolerate you.”
