374 Chapter 16
established in the education and culture sector “quickly became
national policy adhered to by all governmental agencies,” leading to
discrimination in employment (Bejel, 2001:105). By the late 1970s, the
state gradually began to take a more liberal approach towards homo-
sexuality (and difference more generally). In 1975, the Cuban
Supreme Court overturned Resolution Number Three, the law which
codified the homophobic recommendations of the 1971 Congress. In
1977, the National Workgroup on Sexual Education was formed, and
in 1979, the Penal Code was reformed to decriminalize private homo-
sexual behavior (although public displays of homosexual behavior
remained illegal)(Bejel, 2001). By the end of the 1970s, the Cuban
Communist Party “no longer considered homosexual behavior to be
in fundamental contradiction with the revolutionary process”(Bejel,
2001). In 1979, the Cuban National Workgroup on Sexual Education
published an East German sex education book which marked a turn-
ing point in the state’s position towards homosexuality. The book,
which came from another socialist country, said that homosexuality is
not a disease and that “homosexuals do not ‘suffer’ from homosexual-
ity; they suffer from the difficulties that their condition causes them in
society...Aside from their sexual orientation, homosexuals differed
very little, if at all, from persons who are considered normal”
(Schnabl, 1980). In 1980, the Mariel boatlift led to a second moment
of state-sponsored homophobia in the midst of major moral panic.
Those who choose to leave in 1980 were portrayed as criminals, unde-
sirables, traitors, ideological enemies, and antisocial scum. Leaving the
country was conflated with being anti-revolutionary, and “the dis-
course of Cuban officialdom at that time tried to associate gays and
other ‘undesirable’ groups with the corruption and negative attitudes
that the Cuban people supposedly rejected” (Bejel , 2001).
It is important to point out that the Cuban government’s treatment
of LGBT people in this period was not that different from what was
going on in other parts of the world. Structural homophobia and
intolerance was not exclusively a Cuban or a revolutionary phenome-
non, but it is as a result of this history that LGBT subjects have histor-