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| Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal, front)
and Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) see the countryside
from 1951-1952 in ‘The Motorcycle Diaries,’ an entertaining film that
doesn’t touch on the revolutionary’s legacy of homophobia in Cuba.
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HOME > ENTERTAINMENT > FILM
By: DREW HIMMELSTEIN COMMENTS
 
continued...
was known
as the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), and its purpose was to fill
a gap in the system by creating a program for men who were deemed unfit for
the army.
According to Lumsden, although the camps ended up targeting gay people more
than most, “there is no evidence that [they] were created with homosexuals
exclusively in mind.”
Indeed, the camps also confined people from minority religious groups, conscientious
objectors to military service, as well as people who did not agree with the
revolutionary agenda.
The bitter pill that caused gay people to be targeted at a greater rate than
other groups was the revolutionary belief, adopted from the Soviets, that homosexuality
was a phenomenon of indulgent bourgeois society that would not exist in a pure
communist state, the book states.
Barbara Weinstein, professor of Latin American history at the University of
Maryland and co-editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review, says, “People
who were gay were not defined as weak or sick but deviant and decadent.”
Weinstein says that the way that the revolution came to power gave it a stronger
sense of masculinity than other revolutions. The guerrilla experience pervaded
the political structure and the guerrilla army itself became the nucleus of
a new society.
Lumsden points out in his book that “the reinforced ‘masculinization’
of public life was furthered by the fact that, unlike the Sandinistas in Nicaragua,
the vast majority of those directly involved in Cuba’s guerrilla struggle
had been male.”
The process through which the revolution took control — guerrilla fighting
— had a tremendous effect, at least during the early years, on the culture
of civil administration.
THE 1970s WERE marked by forms of official discrimination against gays, especially
prominent artists and intellectuals, and the 1980s saw a mandatory quarantine
of people with AIDS. But the labor camps were closed in 1968, and in recent
years, some observers say life for gays and lesbians in Cuba has improved.
“Forty-five years has created a new society — they’re hungry,
they’re under the gun by the U.S., but they’re evolving,”
Gutierrez says.
She also says that, unlike the United States, Cuba has a universal health care
system available to treat all people with HIV/AIDS. It also has one of the lowest
HIV and AIDS rates in the world, according to the BBC, which is probably due
at least in part to the early quarantine, as well as HIV-prevention programs.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, editors of CounterPunch, a bi-weekly
“muckraking newsletter” online, note that, “There is significant
research and development resources
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