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Mar 25, 2010
Mariela Castro, Cuba’s leading LGBT civil rights advocate – Photo: Courtesy of GLHRC
Looking in the mirror used to make Yiliam Gonzalez sick to her stomach.
“I would see myself, and my body didn’t match who I was,” said the 28-year-old wedding pianist, who went by William before undergoing a sex change under Cuba’s universal health care system.
Gonzalez is proof of a small but remarkable transformation for the rugged revolution of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and a band of ever-macho, bearded rebels, who long punished LGBT Cubans. Now they are paying for sex changes.
The operations have begun anew under President Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela, Cuba’s top gay rights activist, and 22 more transgender people are waiting to have the surgery.
Mariela Castro says the government is moving cautiously, doing only a few per year.
“There has been a lot of resistance because homophobia remains strong in our culture,” she said at a recent conference on sexuality.
In the 1960s, Cuba was ferociously anti-gay, firing gays from state jobs, imprisoning them or sending them to work camps. Many fled into exile. Transsexuals, though not gay, were considered the same.
While gay jokes remain as common as shots of strong espresso in Cuba, government media campaigns now discourage homophobia. Hundreds of gay Cubans marched down Havana’s spiffy “La Rampa” boulevard last spring, just a year after authorities had forbidden a gay Pride parade.
“I’d like to think that discrimination against homosexuals is a problem that is being overcome,” former President Fidel Castro said during a series of interviews with French journalist Ignacio Ramonet between 2003 and 2005. “Old prejudices and narrow-mindedness will increasingly be things of the past.”
Mariela Castro has seen to it that the state formally recognizes transsexuals. A state-trained kindergarten teacher with a degree in sexuality, she runs the National Sexual Education Center. It spent years lobbying communist officials, who finally agreed to lift bans on sex changes in 2008 – though the resolution was never made public to avoid unwanted attention.
from AP and WiG reports
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