LavenderRed_Cubabook

For example, the Spanish colonial state in Cuba enslaved the Indigenous population
on the island, castrated those it considered “sodomites,” and forced them to eat their own
testicles coated with dirt. (Iznada)
In order to save German capitalism, a wing of industrialists and bankers bankrolled
the fascists who forced tens of thousands of gays and lesbians to wear the pink triangle in
slave labor and extermination camps.
Víctor Hugo Robles wrote of Chile—where the mass of workers and peasants were
not armed against the 1973 CIA-backed counter-revolution—that, “Perhaps the most
forgotten are the many transvestites who were executed during the days immediately
following the coup.” (“The Homosexual Liberation Movement in Chile”)
In the imperialist United States, homosexuality and sex/gender variance were so viciously
criminalized and punished by state repression that a mass political movement
arose to resist it. Despite widespread struggle, same-sex love remained illegal in the United
States until 2003. Currently, in 2007, at least 65 percent of transwomen and 29 percent of
transmen are estimated to have been imprisoned at some point in their life in the United
States. (Critical Resistance)
And today it is U.S. imperialism that has set up concentration camps—from Abu
Ghraib to Guantánamo—where anti-gay and anti-trans rape and humiliation are incorporated
into the science of torture.
The state of former slaves
The Cuban workers’ state, like the armies of Bolívar and Toussaint L’Ouverture, is an
armed liberation struggle of the oppressed against the Goliath force of the oppressor
state.
An estimated 20,000 Cubans died in two years of battling the U.S.-backed Batista
dictatorship—up against bombs, aircraft and artillery. The revolution disarmed the
Batista regime’s army and secret police networks.
However, simply dismantling the bosses’ apparatus of dictatorship did not create a
new mechanism to defend the island from counter-revolution and invasion. Imperialism
soon cinched an economic noose around the island, its Pentagon a constant threat.
A new state had to be built, from the ground up. It took a mass mobilization of the
population to defend the gains of the revolution. The National Revolutionary Militia
and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution organized the entire population
into a network against CIA-organized subterfuge and sabotage.
This block-by-block watchfulness, combined with old, deep prejudice against samesex
liaisons, made life uncomfortable for some Cuban male homosexuals. While they
had experienced extreme isolation and alienation in the sexual exploitation industry, they
had also found refuge in urban anonymity and privately-owned casinos, bars and other
meeting places.
However, unlike its portrayal in “Before Night Falls,” the Cuban workers’ state was
Hollywood projected Cuba as ‘police state’ for gays 27