The American embassy in Havana applauded the communist Castro regime in Cuba for holding a sham election to legalize same-sex marriage this week, issuing a statement on Monday “celebrating the decision of the Cuban people.”
The statement noted that the alleged election – fully controlled by the Communist Party, which has spent the past year committing violent atrocities against suspected dissidents to prevent a second round of nationwide protests similar to those in July 2021 – occurred despite the “antidemocratic nature” of the Castro regime, a statement that contradicts the initial claim that the results of the “election” represent the will of the Cuban people.
The Communist Party staged an election on Sunday asking citizens if they supported amending Cuban family law to allow for same-sex marriages. The election counted on the lowest turnout in the history of the Revolution’s sham votes since 1959 despite the very real possibility of being beaten, arrested, or otherwise persecuted for not toeing the regime’s line. Cuba has not held legitimate elections since Fidel Castro’s revolution to allow the people to choose their leaders; Fidel Castro himself never won an election in his life.
The Castro regime announced on Monday that about 67 percent of participants voted to allow same-sex marriages. About 74 percent of eligible Cubans participated, regime officials said, meaning about one in four eligible Cubans refused to partake despite potentially facing state repression.
The sham election is part of a greater international campaign on the part of the Castro regime to ingratiate itself with the global, left-wing LGBT movement. Cuba under communism has been one of the world’s most repressive states against gay people historically, shepherding suspected LGBT people – along with Christians and known political dissidents – into labor camps in the 1960s and silencing and torturing some of the island’s most prominent gay figures.
More recently, Cuban state repressors violently beat, arrested, and disappeared dozens of people participating in an “illegal” gay pride parade in Havana in 2019, organized by dissident groups seeking freedom from communism and to honor the memory of persecuted gay dissidents.
Despite the context, the U.S. embassy – reopened under far-left former President Barack Obama – treated this week’s election as representative of the Cuban people’s views.
“We celebrate the decision of the Cuban people to support marriage equality and adoption privileges for all families,” the embassy said in a statement posted on Twitter. “This does not change the antidemocratic nature of the Cuban regime. The Cuban people deserve that all their human rights and capacity for democratic elections be respected in all aspects of life.”
Castro regime figurehead Miguel Díaz-Canel heavily promoted the vote throughout the past week, claiming that voting for same-sex marriage was a vote for “democracy” going so far as to declare that anyone who voted against it was doing so out of spite for the Cuban Revolution, not out of any particular disapproval of gay marriage, in response to “shortages [and] blackouts” that have become common under communism. The Spanish outlet Diario de Cuba described a “brutal propaganda” campaign in anticipation of the vote, which still failed to convince over 25 percent of eligible voters to participate.
The attempt to abruptly shift the conversation toward gay rights – and away from the incessant protests of the past year in the face of communism resulting in the aforementioned shortages and blackouts – requires the public to forget the entire history of the Cuban Revolution’s relationship with gay Cubans prior to this week. In its quest to create the “new Soviet man” in the Caribbean, Fidel Castro’s henchmen systematically targeted men suspected of being gay for punishment in labor camps known as the UMAP, or “Military Units to Aid Production,” for much of the 1960s. The UMAP were among the most dangerous communist facilities in Cuba, designed for its inmates to engage in potentially deadly, and often unnecessary, “agricultural” labor. Gay people were considered the biggest threats to communism in the island alongside avowed anti-communists and Christians, particularly Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The open persecution of gay people under Fidel Castro created a counterrevolutionary LGBT movement within the island. Among its most prominent advocates was Cuban writer and once political prisoner Reinaldo Arenas, who discussed being silenced, imprisoned, and tortured by the Castro regime in his autobiography Before Night Falls. Arenas, who committed suicide in 1990 in response to a terminal AIDS diagnosis, blamed Fidel Castro personally for his suffering in his suicide note, which famously concluded, “Cuba will be free. I already am.”
In much more recent history, the Castro regime – three years after Fidel Castro’s death – violently repressed an “unauthorized” gay pride march in Havana in May 2019. The march attracted about 300 people, most of them anti-communist LGBT people, who attempted to wave rainbow flags and march against the human rights abuses the regime inflicts on gay people. State security thugs beat the protesters publicly and hauled them away in unmarked cars.
The pride march was believed to be the largest unauthorized singular gathering in Cuba since 1959, overtaken by the national protests on July 11, 2021, that estimates suggest attracted as many as 187,000 people.
After receiving global condemnation, the Castro regime attempted to erase the memory of the “unauthorized” pride march by organizing a “rally for inclusion” in which pro-regime gay people were forced to adopt the slogan, “I am Fidel!”
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