"Trials of visibility": homosexuality, gender variance and 1960's/70's Cuba

The persecution of homosexuals as official State policy and practice, especially in the two decades following Cuba’s 1959 revolution, is now a generally accepted and well-documented fact (see Leiner, Lumsden, Young et al). The most salient features of this policy are evident in the testimony of homosexual men rounded up and sent to agricultural work camps set up in 1965, the ominous UMAP (Unidades Militares para la Ayuda de Producción), which were a species of concentration camps where forced labour was the order of the day. International protest and internal pressures led to the closure of these camps by 1969, but imprisonment of homosexuals for offending ‘good custom’ and ‘moral decency’ continued into the seventies. These two decades saw the institutionalisation of homophobia in Cuba; the anti-gay sentiment that existed before the revolution became part of the political program. Homosexuals could not be part of the revolution because they were considered by nature anti-productive and symbolic of the capitalist excess and corruption that had existed on the island under the Batista regime before Castro came to power . They became enemies of the state, as Marvin Leiner points out, in the nationalistic drive toward the defence of the revolution since “they could not fit into this ideological social unity” (28) spearheaded by the vision of the New Man and New Woman working in tandem for the good of society, both morally and materially. In the 1970s, legislation in the arena of the arts and education brought about the officially-sanctioned discrimination and exclusion of gays from employment and cultural circles. If state discourse of the 1960s proscribes homosexuality as a form of anti-social and counterrevolutionary criminality, by the 1970s this evolves into a definition of homosexuality as a medical and psychological problem, a social ill and pathology needing treatment and containment in order to protect the general population, especially children. Homosexuals as educators were thus considered far from suitable. Whilst the image of the New Man was not strictly a macho one, it still implied elements of gender normativity and heterosexism that precluded the most visible homosexuals, whose ‘extravagance’ in dress and fashion were viewed as signs of bourgeois decadence, from national life. The New Man displayed a serious attitude to work, not frivolity. Locas were perceived as morally deviant and anti-work. The UMAP camps were an “educational form of aversion therapy” (34) whose objective was to instil the revolutionary ideals of hard work and masculinity in anyone who displayed such tendencies. Several sources (interviewees in Conducta Impropia for example) mention the ironic parallel to Nazi camps by noting that the gates of the UMAP camps also had their own plaque which read ‘Work will make you men’, a clear allusion to ‘Work will make you free’ sighted by prisoners of Auschwitz and other camps in 1940s fascist occupied Europe.

Importantly, those homosexuals who did manage to work within the revolution were more successful if they remained guarded about their preferences and did not ‘assume’ their sexuality publicly. Assuming one’s sexuality publicly for Castro’s Cuba meant being effeminate or showy. Gender subversion, then, was the outer sign of a stigmatised inner nature: homosexuality. A homosexuality which declared itself was contrary to the idea of how men – part of a brotherhood, a solidarity – should act, and how they should relate to each other. As Leiner states, this relied on a ‘prevailing sentiment that male homosexuals are effeminate and that being feminine means to lack courage and valor’ (25-26). Leiner goes on to say:Even during this period of the camps and public arrests, the major concern, as it had always been, was with the public display of homosexuality… Raids or public sweeps … especially in the 1960s, were a common police method of rounding up “anti-social” elements who congregated in certain areas such as La Rampa in Havana. Those whose dress and hair styles were deemed inappropriate, or whose mannerisms were effeminate, were the victims of these raids (31)Often left out of the documentation of the persecution of homosexuals in this period is the fact that such policies and practices were attacks more on effeminate people and anyone who exhibited forms of gender deviance or transgression. Many of the programs (including UMAP) could be seen as efforts to make such individuals conform to their gender role. The Yellow Brigades tackled this ‘problem’ at an even earlier stage. The evolving discourse of homosexuality in the 1970s, influenced by sexology from the Soviet Union, constructed an aetiology of the homosexual which posited childhood effeminacy as an early symptom of potentially homosexual inclination and deviance that needed to be nipped in the bud. At public schools, effeminate boys were weeded out early ‘to prevent homosexuality’ (33) Long hair in males was also deemed a form of gender subversion. Those young men picked up in raids had their heads shorn to the quick in an attempt to masculinise their gender presentation. Thus the Cuban Revolution’s moral agenda was not simply an assault on homosexuality as understood in Anglo-American terms, but rather, gender variance, which was the outward sign of sexual deviance and perversion, and a potential contamination of the body politic. As Brad Epps argues convincingly, this involved a politics of appearance. According to Epps, homosexuality was seen in Cuba (both before and after the revolution) ‘as a mere matter of appearance’ (232). As Epps argues in two parts of a highly elucidatory article:

Designating less a libidinal relationship between individuals of the same gender than a particular role, position, or style of behaviour, homosexuality, male homosexuality that is, primarily designates those men who exhibit “feminine” traits or otherwise show that they assume so-called passive or receptive positions in sexual intercourse’ (232)… homosexuality is largely a matter of appearance, a problem of public visibility, a highly politicized question of style. The way we walk, the way we talk, the way we gesture, the way we stand; our hair, our clothing, our complexion; the music we listen to, the books we read… all this and more… the revolution becomes a struggle over signs, and against a codification whereby any play of difference, any arbitrariness, ambivalence, or ambiguity must be rigorously reworked: a man is a man is a man. There is not, or at least there should not be, any confusing play between or across or through surface and depth, content and form’ (242-243)

Paul Julian Smith suggests the same, but names the official crackdowns on gender variant behaviour and persons as part of the regime’s ‘trial of visibility’ (77). Locas, pájaras and travestis were those principally in the firing line, precisely because of their visibility. Such a moral agenda developed in a climate of incredibly narrow definitions of gender roles for men and women. The pseudo scientific discourse of the effeminate homosexual was thus coded in terms of betrayal and subversion – of national interests and of gender itself.