LavenderRed_Cubabook

The most common slur hurled at male homosexuals, which has endured from the
medieval Inquisition in Europe, translates into English as “stick of wood.” It refers to
the feudal European punishment of burning alive at the stake males who had sex with
other males, or those deemed inappropriately gendered. Colonialism brought the fire
of the Inquisition with its armadas. In the mid-1600s, for example, the Spanish captain
general who ruled over the rural and urban enslaved population of Cuba sentenced 20
“effeminate sodomites” to be burned alive.
The anti-gay epithet—hurled at those not considered “manly” enough—has another
meaning: coward. It’s an accusation faced by those who fled Cuba in the Mariel boatlift.
However, the idea that femininity is “weak” or “cowardly” is a gender prejudice that all
feminine people—male-bodied, female-bodied or intersexual—have a common interest
in debunking. Feminine Cuban women, for example, have played a heroic role in the
revolution—militarily as well as politically
Cuban community defense and military ranks, however, were organizing and mobilizing
the entire population as a popular army to defend the collective gains of the Cuban
Revolution, not inculcating the kind of Rambo-masculinity indoctrination that the Pentagon
drills into its ranks of the foot soldiers of an imperialist empire. Cuba’s foreign
policy, by contrast, was the export of revolutionary solidarity.
‘A visible feature of Cuban society’ 39