Mariela Castro and Cuba’s LGBT revolution

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... Which way for women in 2017?

“Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution,” directed by Jon Albert and Sual Landau. Cuban producer Roberto Chile. An HBO Documentary Production.

This just released film follows Mari­ ela Castro and Cuban LGBT activists as they travel through rural towns to en­ gage with Cubans about the upcoming International Day Against Homophobia on May 17, 1990.

They travel to the region of Matanzas, the small towns of San Pablo de Yao and Ciego de Avila, and a farm in the Si­ erra Maestra mountains. There are also more recent interviews with lesbians, gay men, and transgender Cubans and their families throughout the island.

The film begins and ends with the 2013 Day Against Homophobia marches, which illustrates how far the move­ ment has come.

In the beginning, the film explains that Mariela Castro is the daughter of Raul Castro and the niece of Fidel Cas­ tro. But it fails to mention the more im­ portant fact that she is very much the daughter of Vilma Espin, who was a Cu­ ban revolutionary, feminist, and presi­ dent of the Federation of Cuban Wom­ en from 1960 until her death in 2007.

Mariela likes to say that she is a Castro by accident of birth. When she is asked about marriage equality for Cuba, she says that when her father tells her she is going too fast, she reminds him that her mother supported gay marriage in the 1980s.

Mariela is the director of CENESEX (Cuban Center For Sex Education), which she describes as “running out­ reach programs to the community to change minds and fight prejudice. We (continued from page 12: “Which way forward for women in 2017?”) vious orientation of backers of the march to encourage women to see their future tied to the victory of Demo­ cratic Party candidates in the 2017 mid-term elections is, by any historical measure, an unreliable path forward. Changing course and learning from history If we cannot rely on the anti-Trump Democratic Party to mount an uncompromising defense and expansion of women’s rights, what hope can we have? In truth, the political situation for women and the prospects for change was much more dire when the first major abor­ tion victories were won almost a half-century ago.

The efforts to legalize abortion in the United States took off in the mid-1960s in a country that was deeply conservative on gender and everything else. The po­ litical climate had been darkened by the McCarthyite witchhunt of the 1950s. Yet, public opinion was shifted and mass pressure was built for a radical overturn of the existing restrictions on abortion. This was not ac­ (continued from page 6: “Can capitalism liberate women?”)

tion. Education, for example, was the private respon­ sibility of families. Once, cooking and cleaning were assigned to children. But whatever the setup, under capitalism, women have remained subordinate.

The shift of some necessary labor from inside the home to outside has not produced women’s libera­ tion. Rather than women performing all the neces­ sary labor at home, working women pay a substantial amount of their wages to privatized firms. In these firms, because of their seemingly “natural” place in the home, women can be paid deliberately meager wages. Because the economy is set up so that all fam­ ily members need to work, women are forced to be­ come part of a low-wage workforce that the employ­ ers can use to drive down the wages of all.

Because capitalism cannot allow for women to be completely liberated from the necessary labor of so­ cial reproduction, they continue to maintain a dis­ criminatory wage system. Overall, women function as what socialists call a “reserve army of labor,” buffeted also offer classes and health services.”

The film does not pull any punches about the shameful history of Cuba’s revolutionary government’s treatment of LGBT persons. “Public displays of homosexuality, performance of homo­ sexual acts, association with homo­ sexuals” were forbidden for decades. In addition, thousands of gay men were sent to forced labor camps, which were euphemistically called “Military Units To Aid Production” (UMAP).

The film interviews one gay man who describes his experience and films a support group of survivors of the camps who talk about their encoun­ ters with Mariela Castro and say they deserve an apology. She apologizes and says, “We must remember so that it will never happen again.”

A lot of the stories are universal expe­ riences of family rejection, acceptance, and mere tolerance. What makes the film compelling is the Cuban context.

The factory workers who accept their co-worker, the factory manager who discriminates against a lesbian worker, the first Cuban to experience female to male sex reassignment surgery with Mariela Castro at his bedside, LGBT baseball games, and lesbian farmers liv­ ing openly in the Sierra Maestra moun­ tains, where the revolution began.

Mariela Castro is an elected member of Cuba’s Parliament (Asamblea del Poder Popular). There is interesting footage of her testifying for the inclu­ sion of transgender rights in Cuba’s complished by barely perceptible incremental change inside the Democratic Party, but by radical and militant propaganda events, well-publicized tribunals in which working women told their stories and publicly identi­ fied with the movement, and repeated mass actions of thousands of mostly young women whose politics were, in the majority, far to the left of the electoral machines.

These activities were, at their most effective, decided upon and implemented out of mass meetings and large, democratic conferences that were independent of the Democratic Party. Women could join a local group, set their political agenda, decide the actions needed, and collaborate in large national gatherings to call national demonstrations without having their agenda limited by the pragmatism and cynicism of parliamentarianism.

Within a few years, this activity created a massive groundswell of support for women’s right to control their own bodies and a Supreme Court decision that amounted to legalization. In the 1980s, women of the left organized a broad, independent, and effective physi­ to and fro as the capitalists negotiate competition and the swings of the business cycle.

As long as society is organized to maximize the pro­ duction of profit rather than to fulfill human needs, full women’s liberation and an end to gender discrim­ ination are impossible. To end this kind of oppression once and for all, we must base the organization of hu­ man society on the needs of the majority and make all the elements of social reproduction—nurturing, education, health, child care, elder care, and all that is needed for a satisfying life—the responsibility of soci­ ety as a whole. This kind of system is called socialism. How do we get there?

Overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a so­ cialist system that puts human needs before profits is a gigantic task that can only be accomplished when the majority of the working people in the country are convinced of its necessity. That majority will have tremendous power at its disposal, and if unified and politically engaged, can use its position in production, transportation, and communications to put them­ Labor Code. When it was not included, she votes “no.” She says, “I cannot sup­ port humiliation and suffering and the denial of human rights.”

The film ends at the Karl Marx Theatre in Havana, where the first Gala Against Homophobia and Transphobia is be­ ing televised. Mariela says with a smile, “This is the first year that the festivities are being televised. Change takes time.

We will continue fighting.”

This documentary is definitely worth seeing for LGBT people, but also any­ one interested in the changes happen­ ing in Cuba. While the focus is on the LGBT experience in Cuba, it also gives us a close look at a Cuban leader and activist whom U.S. officials have rarely allowed to visit the United States. n cal and political defense of clinics targeted by the right.

These are the kind of movements we need to build coming out of the March on Washington. They need to be movements that we control from the bottom and whose parameters are set by what the majority of work­ ing women need, not by a strategy for the mid-terms in which are needs are secondary.

Women of the socialist movement were some of the anchors of those movements then, and they will be the first today to devote themselves to building a movement independent of the big business parties and focused on moving towards mobilizing the vast majority of working women around all the things that we really need: full re­ productive justice, affordable 24-7 child care, universal health care, a dismantling of the racist criminal justice system and ICE, and union-scale wages on which one can support a family with dignity.

Throughout the building of such an independent movement, we must also construct a socialist political party. Without the fundamental change to a socialist so­ ciety based on human needs, instead of one based on the misery and inequality of the profit system, our full liberation will always be out of reach. n selves at the head of a government capable of reorga­ nizing everything.

History (i.e., the 1917 Russian Revolution) tells us that this kind of reorganization can provide the mate­ rial basis for a radical transformation of the status of women. Once they have freed themselves of the bur­ den of filling the coffers of Wall Street, Exxon, and the Pentagon, working people could immediately use the surplus from production to provide each other 24-7 child care and elder care, universal health care, full reproductive justice, enriching public education, food sovereignty, mitigation of environmental threats, and housing and mass transportation for all.

A new women’s movement, visible through massive marches like the one on Jan. 21, independent of the corporate parties, and committed to strengthening and interacting with the movements of labor, immi­ grant rights, and for Black Lives, must shape the agen­ da of that majority so that the material potential will become social reality. The most direct way to become part of the process is to join a socialist group. Socialist Action welcomes your participation. n SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2017 7

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Veterans live day in and day out in a society that does