Cuba, Love Revolution

In 2013, María Caridad Jorge wrote something in her autobiography that would have been almost unthinkable during much of the history of the Cuban Revolution: she was a lesbian, she was religious and she wanted to become a member of the Communist Party of Cuba.

For María Caridad, these three identities contained no contradiction. She had always considered herself a revolutionary. She came from a family committed to the Revolution; her mother had participated in clandestine activities against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and had been with Che Guevara during the revolutionary struggle. But for much of her life, María Caridad knew that two fundamental parts of her identity placed her outside the political institution to which she wanted to belong. She was homosexual and she was religious, and she was unwilling to renounce either.

On 23 August 2013, at the age of fifty-one, she finally received her Communist Party membership card.

When I met her in Santa Clara, María Caridad wore on her body a synthesis of the different worlds that defined her. Tattooed on her skin, the faces of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ merged into one. Around her neck she carried the symbols of Ogun, the warrior orisha of the Yoruba religion whose presence survived slavery and became deeply rooted in Afro-Cuban culture. Revolution, Christianity, homosexuality and Afro-Cuban spirituality coexisted in the same person. Identities that official Cuba had once struggled to reconcile were no longer necessarily incompatible.

Her story offered a way into one of the most complex transformations produced inside Cuban society since 1959. In little more than half a century, homosexuality had travelled from being treated as an ideological and social deviation to becoming part of an institutional discourse on equality. It was not a linear transformation, nor did it erase the violence that preceded it. It emerged instead from decades of repression, resistance, cultural change, activism and gradual reform within a political system that continued to define itself through the Revolution.

The contradiction goes back to the origins of revolutionary Cuba. When Fidel Castro’s guerrillas entered Havana in January 1959, they inherited a country marked by profound inequality, racial divisions, poverty and the authoritarian legacy of Batista. The new government transformed Cuban society with extraordinary speed. It nationalised industries, redistributed land, expanded access to education and healthcare and aligned itself politically with the Soviet Union. At the same time, it constructed an increasingly centralised state in which political loyalty and revolutionary morality became fundamental measures of belonging.

Within that vision of the hombre nuevo, the new socialist man imagined by revolutionary ideology, homosexuality was often regarded as incompatible with the masculinity, discipline and sacrifice expected of the revolutionary citizen. This prejudice was not uniquely Cuban. Homophobia was deeply embedded in much of Latin American society and homosexuality was criminalised or pathologised in many countries around the world. But in Cuba those prejudices acquired the power of the revolutionary state.

During the 1960s, homosexual men were among those sent to the Military Units to Aid Production, known by their Spanish acronym UMAP. These labour camps operated between 1965 and 1968 and confined people considered unsuitable for conventional military service or ideologically problematic, including religious believers, conscientious objectors and homosexual men. The camps became one of the most enduring symbols of the persecution experienced by gay Cubans during the early decades of the Revolution.

Repression extended beyond them. Homosexuality could affect access to employment, education, cultural institutions and membership of the Communist Party. During the following decade, cultural policy and political orthodoxy further marginalised artists and intellectuals considered ideologically or morally unsuitable. For many gay and lesbian Cubans, hiding one’s sexual identity was not simply a response to social prejudice but a strategy for professional and sometimes personal survival.

That history makes María Caridad’s Communist Party card much more than an administrative document. It represents the distance travelled by a state that had once treated people like her as incompatible with its revolutionary project.

The transformation did not happen suddenly. Attitudes began changing gradually, influenced by cultural resistance inside Cuba, international debates about sexuality, the evolution of medical understanding and the work of Cubans who refused to disappear from public life. In 1979, consensual same-sex relations were decriminalised. Later reforms removed other provisions that had enabled persecution on the basis of sexual orientation. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Cuban state was moving towards a position radically different from the one it had defended during the Revolution’s first decades.

One of the places where that transformation can be understood is Santa Clara. In the geographical centre of Cuba, the city occupies a special position in revolutionary mythology. Che Guevara’s forces captured Santa Clara in December 1958 in one of the decisive battles against Batista, and his remains would eventually be placed there in a monumental mausoleum. But another, much less official history of the Revolution also developed in the city.

In the mid-1980s, Ramón Silverio began organising a cultural space that became known as El Mejunje. The name came from a mixture of pasta and herbs he would prepare and distribute at the end of marginal gatherings. What began as an improvised cultural experiment evolved into a refuge for rock musicians, artists, homosexuals, trans people and others who did not easily fit within conventional Cuban society.

El Mejunje survived because it was never simply a gay club. It became a cultural institution in which difference itself was normalised. In a country where both rock music and homosexuality had at different moments been treated with suspicion, a space emerged in one of the Revolution’s most symbolic cities where those identities could coexist with an explicitly Cuban and, in Silverio’s case, revolutionary identity.

When I met him, Silverio was sixty and a member of the Communist Party. He had witnessed decades in which things that had once seemed impossible gradually became possible. He did not describe that transformation as a gift from the state. Rights, he insisted, had been achieved through struggle. Nothing had simply been handed over.

That distinction is essential to understanding the evolution of LGBT rights in Cuba. The transformation was promoted partly from within the institutions of the Revolution, particularly through the National Center for Sex Education, CENESEX, and the increasingly visible role of Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of Raúl Castro. But it also grew from the experiences and pressure of gay, lesbian and transgender Cubans who had lived through discrimination and demanded a place within society.

By the time I photographed Cuba in 2015, that change had become visible in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier. The Cuban state was financing gender reassignment procedures within the public healthcare system. Legal and administrative reforms had progressively removed discriminatory provisions. In 2014, the new Labour Code prohibited discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation. CENESEX organised public campaigns against homophobia and transphobia, HIV prevention programmes and annual events in which rainbow flags appeared alongside Cuban flags.

In Las Tunas, in eastern Cuba, hundreds of people danced through the streets during the Cuban Days Against Homophobia and Transphobia. The event was known as a conga, a word deliberately rooted in Cuban culture rather than imported from the international vocabulary of Pride. Mariela Castro marched among them. Trade union representatives participated. HIV tests were available. Children danced on a stage. Political slogans, revolutionary symbols and demands for sexual diversity occupied the same public space.

“Socialism yes. Homophobia no. Long live the Cuban Revolution,” Mariela Castro declared.

The image contained the extraordinary reversal at the centre of this story. A state born from the same Revolution that had once persecuted homosexuals was now incorporating sexual diversity into its own political language.

But Cuba has always resisted simple narratives. The institutional recognition visible in official campaigns did not mean that homophobia had disappeared from Cuban society, nor that transgender people had suddenly acquired equal access to education, employment, housing or personal security. The distance between the law, institutional discourse and daily life remained considerable, particularly outside Havana.

Deinna and Gendris knew that distance well. They were twenty and nineteen and had travelled to Havana from Manzanillo, in eastern Cuba, escaping the hostility they experienced at home. They lived with other people from their town in a small house in Centro Habana, a neighbourhood that had offered refuge to transgender people since the difficult years of the 1990s.

For them, Havana offered a degree of anonymity and freedom that their hometown did not. It did not offer safety. At night the streets could become hostile. Hot water had been thrown at them as they returned from Parque Central. Another trans woman, Shanet, had had a bag of rubbish thrown at her from a building. She had completed four years of medical school but believed discrimination over her feminine appearance had eventually forced her to abandon her studies. She came to Havana looking for support from CENESEX that might allow her to return.

Their experiences exposed the limits of institutional transformation. A government could change laws, finance medical procedures and organise campaigns against homophobia, but changing the behaviour of families, neighbours, employers, teachers and police officers required something deeper and slower.

For transgender Cubans, that contradiction was particularly acute. Angeline had also come from Manzanillo. She had managed to work in a clinical laboratory dressed as the woman she knew herself to be and had obtained permission for her workplace documents to use Angeline rather than the male name assigned to her at birth. She wanted to go further. She wanted her identity documents to recognise her and hoped eventually to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

At night, however, she sold sex in Old Havana. Her life moved between two realities that existed simultaneously. In one, Cuba’s public healthcare system and emerging institutional policies were opening possibilities for transgender recognition that remained unavailable in many countries. In the other, economic exclusion and social discrimination pushed trans women towards survival sex.

This was not simply a question of sexuality. It was inseparable from the Cuban economy.

The country I photographed in 2015 was living through another moment of expectation. Barack Obama and Raúl Castro had announced the restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba in December 2014, beginning the most significant thaw between the two countries in more than half a century. Travel restrictions were being eased, American visitors were arriving in increasing numbers and Havana was filled with speculation about what rapprochement might mean.

The city itself seemed suspended between different historical periods. The Havana Biennial filled the Malecón and Old Havana with installations and performances while buildings crumbled only streets away. Tourists travelled through the city in restored American cars from the 1950s. Pedicabs compensated for weaknesses in public transport. Informal vendors sold fruit and peanuts. Shortages forced Cubans into a constant search for basic goods.

Behind this daily economy stood the much larger history of Cuba’s isolation. The United States embargo had shaped the island for decades, restricting trade and financial relations and becoming inseparable from both Cuba’s economic reality and the political narrative of the Revolution. The Cuban government attributed many of the country’s hardships to the blockade; its critics pointed simultaneously to the inefficiencies and restrictions of the centralised economic system. Both forces formed part of the reality in which ordinary Cubans lived.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had already demonstrated how vulnerable that system could be. During the Special Period of the 1990s, Cuba lost the economic support and preferential trade on which much of its economy had depended. Fuel, food and basic goods became desperately scarce. Blackouts shaped everyday life. Transportation collapsed. For many Cubans, survival required improvisation.

For LGBT Cubans, the Special Period was also a paradoxical moment. Economic catastrophe weakened some of the mechanisms of social control while tourism and new informal economies created other possibilities and other forms of exploitation. Transformist performances that had once existed clandestinely began slowly moving into more visible cultural spaces.

Sissy lived through both worlds. She was fifty when I met her and had first been imprisoned at fifteen after being stopped while wearing makeup in public. She remembered police officers checking people’s faces for cosmetics. In prison, homosexual inmates created femininity from whatever materials they could find: mechanical grease, cigarette ash, deodorant and carpenters’ pencils became mascara, eye shadow and eyeliner.

Years later, during the Special Period, Sissy began performing as Lola Flores in transformist shows held in private houses. Police raids could still bring the night to an abrupt end. By 2015, that world had moved from clandestine houses to a state-managed cultural venue.

At the Las Vegas cabaret in Havana’s Vedado district, transformist artists performed before audiences that included Cubans and tourists from Canada, China, the United States, Spain and Brazil. HIV prevention messages appeared between performances. What had once been pushed underground had become part of Havana’s official nightlife.

On stage, Estrellita could move from Verónica Castro to Liza Minnelli beneath the lights of a Cuban cabaret. Offstage, the performer was also a recognised actor within the Cuban cultural world. That night, dressed in pale green and silver lamé, Estrellita began singing in English about waking up in a city that never sleeps. It was Havana in 2015, fifty-six years after the triumph of the Revolution and only months after Cuba and the United States had announced that they would attempt to rebuild diplomatic relations.

At the time, much remained unresolved. Mariela Castro told me that same-sex marriage would require broader legal change and that Cuban society still needed time to debate, understand and accept it. During one of the events in Havana, twenty same-sex couples symbolically exchanged rings. Their ceremonies had no legal recognition, but they anticipated a question Cuba would eventually have to answer.

We now know the answer.

The transformation continued after these photographs were made. Cuba’s 2019 Constitution explicitly prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The first attempt to define marriage in gender-neutral terms encountered opposition and was removed from the constitutional draft, demonstrating that the institutional campaign for LGBT equality did not necessarily reflect a unanimous society.

Three years later, in September 2022, Cubans approved a new Family Code by referendum. It recognised marriage between people of the same sex and expanded the legal definition of the family. The symbolic unions I had witnessed in Havana seven years earlier could now become civil marriages recognised by the Cuban state.

The historical distance travelled was extraordinary. Within the lifespan of one generation, Cuba had moved from imprisoning people in an environment of institutionalised homophobia to legally recognising same-sex marriage.

Yet that transformation did not erase the contradictions that had always accompanied it. LGBT Cubans continued to report discrimination and violence, particularly away from the capital. Independent activism remained constrained by a political system that tolerated institutional advocacy far more readily than autonomous organisation. In 2019, after the official conga against homophobia was cancelled, an independently organised LGBT march in Havana was broken up by security forces and several participants were detained. The episode revealed an important boundary within the Cuban model: the state could promote sexual diversity while continuing to insist on controlling the political space in which citizens organised around it.

The Cuba of 2015 has also changed in ways that go far beyond LGBT rights. The optimism surrounding rapprochement with the United States did not develop into the transformation many anticipated. Relations deteriorated again, while the Cuban economy entered an increasingly severe crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic devastated tourism, shortages intensified and the country experienced growing difficulties obtaining food, medicine and fuel. On 11 July 2021, demonstrations spread through cities and towns across the island as Cubans protested shortages, deteriorating living conditions and restrictions on political freedoms. The authorities responded with arrests and prosecutions, and many demonstrators received prison sentences.

Blackouts and shortages continued, while Cuba simultaneously entered one of the largest migratory crises in its modern history. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans left the country during the following years. The island that had witnessed successive waves of emigration throughout the Revolution was watching another generation conclude that its future might exist somewhere else.

This broader crisis matters to the story of Cuba, Love Revolution because rights do not exist separately from the conditions in which people attempt to exercise them. A transgender woman may have greater legal recognition than she did a generation ago while still confronting poverty, discrimination or the need to emigrate. A same-sex couple can now marry legally while living inside a society facing profound economic scarcity and severe restrictions on political dissent. Progress in one dimension does not automatically resolve injustice in another.

This is perhaps the central contradiction running through these photographs.

The history of LGBT people in revolutionary Cuba cannot be reduced either to persecution or to progress. Both are true. The same political system that marginalised homosexuals during the first decades of the Revolution later created institutions that actively campaigned against homophobia. The state that once considered homosexuality incompatible with revolutionary morality eventually placed rainbow flags alongside Cuban flags and legalised same-sex marriage. People who once hid their identities could later enter the Communist Party without formally renouncing them.

But none of those changes can retroactively erase what came before them, just as legal equality cannot by itself eliminate prejudice.

When María Caridad received her Communist Party membership card in 2013, she did not stop being the woman she had always been. What had changed was the political institution deciding whether someone like her could belong. Her tattoo still brought together Che Guevara and Jesus Christ. Ogun’s tools still hung around her neck. She remained lesbian, religious and revolutionary.

In that sense, her story contains something larger than the history of LGBT rights in Cuba. It speaks about the capacity of political systems to transform themselves, but also about the people who force those transformations simply by refusing to choose between the different parts of who they are.

The Revolution once demanded that people conform to its definition of the revolutionary citizen. María Caridad’s generation had lived long enough to see part of that relationship reversed. Cuba itself was being forced to expand its definition of who could belong to the Revolution.

More than a decade after these photographs were made, that process remains unfinished. Cuba has travelled an enormous distance from the institutional homophobia of the 1960s to the legal recognition of same-sex marriage and greater recognition of transgender identities. Yet discrimination persists, independent political space remains severely restricted and the economic crisis has driven a vast number of Cubans to seek their futures beyond the island.

That tension is what Cuba, Love Revolution ultimately documents. Not a simple transition from repression to freedom, nor a celebration of a state correcting its own past, but something more complicated: the lives of people who existed before the laws recognised them, who found spaces in which to survive when those spaces were forbidden, and who gradually forced Cuban society to confront a contradiction within its own revolutionary promise of equality.

In 2015, inside a cabaret in Havana, Estrellita sang New York, New York to an audience of Cubans and foreigners while Cuba and the United States were attempting to imagine a different relationship after more than half a century of hostility. Outside, Havana remained beautiful and exhausted, revolutionary and unequal, opening and resisting at the same time.

The future everyone was trying to anticipate that year did not arrive in the way many expected. Another future did. Same-sex couples can now marry in Cuba. The Constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The legal and institutional recognition of sexual diversity has continued to expand. At the same time, many of the island’s old political and economic contradictions remain, joined by new ones.

Perhaps that is why these photographs belong neither entirely to Cuba’s past nor to its present. They document a moment when a door had opened but nobody yet knew where it would lead. Behind it stood the memory of persecution; ahead were rights that still seemed uncertain. Between the two were María Caridad, Silverio, Deinna, Gendris, Shanet, Angeline, Sissy and Estrellita, living inside the contradictions of a country that had spent more than half a century defining what it meant to be revolutionary and was beginning, finally, to accept that there might be many different answers.