Governing the Terrain Called Beauty: LGBTQ Law in Cuba and the Queerness of Political Economies

Join Libby Adler (Professor of Law and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Northeastern University) for her talk on LGBTQ law in Cuba on April 16 at 4:30PM.
How did Cuba, a country with no tradition of liberal legal rights, minimal grassroots organizing, and a weak private sector, progress from imprisoning homosexual men in forced labor camps in 1965 to legalizing same-sex marriage in 2022? Are there specifically socialist ways of advancing the legal interests of LGBTQ people? This talk traces law and sexual identity in Cuba over the course of decades and explains how Cold War and post-Cold War political-economics shaped not only attitudes toward, but also conceptions of, sexual identity in Cuba. Before the 1959 Revolution, US presence in Cuba was profoundly exploitative. Cubans and others from around the Caribbean labored in slave-like conditions for the benefit of US-based companies in rural areas while women, girls, men, and boys provided sexual services in the city to tourists and military and corporate personnel. The US mafia ran Havana as a playground for Americans who were flush with cash in the aftermath of WWII, paying off corrupt Cuban officials and circumventing the authority of the FBI and IRS. When Fidel Castro came to power, the degradations inflicted on the Cuban people manifested as extreme homophobia against effeminate gay men, who presented a constant reminder of national humiliation. The 1960s were a period of exclusion, raids, and abuse for homosexuals at the hands of Cuban authorities. Beginning in the mid-1970s, East Germans authored progressive texts that, translated into Spanish and sold throughout Cuba, enabled some initial steps forward — strictly on socialist terms such as public health and sex education. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba — which had been dependent on Soviet oil, consumer goods, export sugar markets, and subsidies — was forced to open itself to international tourism and foreign capital investment, effectively permitting external discourses of sexual identity to seep into urban social life. Over the last 35 years, Cuba has inhabited a tense space between its socialist ideology and the dire necessity of opening itself to global markets. Adaptations to political-economic pressures have continually reshaped Cuban sexual identities, from the old homosexual—that reminder of imperialist exploitation—to the new gay citizen.