LavenderRed_Cubabook

Sonja de Vries
Cuban youth of all sexualities from Federation
of University Students (FEU), Havana, March
1993. Still photo from the ground-breaking
documentary ‘Gay Cuba.’
‘Break the blockade!’
The political views towards the revolution of those who spoke on camera in “Gay
Cuba” largely could only be gleaned through their anecdotes. The individual experiences
narrated in this documentary were positive and negative, in varying degrees.
Progress in Cuba is the measurable difference between the two.
It is painful to hear Llane Alexis Dominguez say onscreen that when his father found
out he was homosexual, “He actually said he’d like to beat me to death!” In Cuba, however,
men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women are not being
tortured and lashed to fences to die, beaten to death, stabbed or shot or strangled, decapitated
and dismembered—all too frequent occurrences in the U.S.
A gay male Cuban worker sums up that in Cuba in 1994 what was largely left to deal
with were individual attitudes. “I don’t think that Cuba’s situation is as critical for gay
people as it is in other countries,” he explained. “I have the opportunity to study and to
work here and no one can stop me. They might try to, but it’s that individual, not the
system itself.”
He called on the gay community in the U.S. to help break the blockade, which, de
Vries pointed out in her 1994 documentary commentary, “has cost the Cuban economy
over $40 billion since 1960; the resulting fuel shortages and scarcity of food and medicine
have impacted all Cubans.”
‘Gay Cuba’ 71