Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part I

Abstract

In Part I of this report (Signs 9, no. 4 [Summer 1984]: 683-99), we outlined the history and dynamics of prerevolutionary Cuban homosexuality and examined the parameters of daily life for lesbians and gay men in Cuba today. We paid particular attention to post-1959 homosexual migration from the island and the implicitly anticommunist rhetoric of liberation that accompanied it-rhetoric that depicted the United States as a utopian alternative to Cuban sexual restrictions. In Part II we inquire into the equally complex and less-liberatory-than-expected outcome of homosexual resettlement and the everyday life of lesbians and gays in the Cuban emigre enclaves. We examine as well the United States' political manipulation of the gay experience in Cuba. This treatment of a particular emigre experience we feel can advance the discussion of sexuality within immigrant, minority, and emigre communities in general; at the same time, however, it must be emphasized from the outset that the Cuban experience is marked by specific factors of race, class, and ideology, in historical conjunction, that set it apart from many other U.S. ethno-national experiences.