LavenderRed_Cubabook

Seeking scientific understanding
Researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich made an important analytical contribution
in the mid-1980s to understanding why many Cuban homosexuals left after
the revolution—and why many stayed.
The two researchers took a scientific approach, accruing data through historical analysis,
survey, field and experiential methods. They interpreted the results “within a theoretical
framework drawn from lesbian-feminist and critical gay scholarship and the politicoeconomic
and phenomenological study of Cuban social life.”
Between 1979 and 1984 Arguelles and Rich interviewed Cubans on the island and
émigrés in the United States, Spain, Mexico and Puerto Rico. The report on the research,
titled “Homos exuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes Toward an Under standing
of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience,” was first published in the summer of
1984 in “Signs, A Journal of Women in Culture and Society.”
The two researchers said their goals were to reveal the nature and dynamics of the
Cuban homosexual experience in order to put the questions of same-sex love in Cuba,
migration and resettlement in context.
They also sought to develop greater understanding of same-sex love in what were at
that time referred to as Third World countries and communities, and to further develop
theory “on the nature of the relationships between the structures of sexuality and the
corresponding structures of socialist organization.”
This is what they found.
Attempt to discredit the revolution
The role of economic incentive and individual ambition—powerful stimulants for all
migration from poorer to wealthier countries—was seldom considered when it came to
Cuban homosexual émigrés.
Arguelles and Rich wrote, “The more structuralist explanations for international
population movements, which stress the role of capital and of capitalist states in organizing
migratory flows from less developed to more developed economies, have yet to be
invoked in the interpretation of gay migration from Cuba.”
Washington had passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1952, which
specifically mandated blocking entry of/or expelling “sexually deviant” immigrants. But
when it came to Cuban homosexuals, Arguelles and Rich noted, “Then, as now, anticommunism
won out.”
Wealthy homosexual male Cubans, who before the revolution had spent extensive periods
abroad, left the island for good. “Emigration began immediately. The promoters and
overlords of the Havana underworld along with large numbers of their displaced workers
(many of them homosexuals) headed for Miami. Many lesbians who had liaisons with
members of the bourgeoisie followed their male protectorate to Miami, as did gay men
who had worked for U.S. firms or had done domestic work for the native bourgeoisie.”
12 Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba