Politics and Civil Society in Cuba

378 Chapter 16

Sexual Citizenship: How Is Sexual Citizenship Negotiated
Outside the Neoliberal Capitalist System?

The speaker’s life story narrative provides examples of the ways in
which the sexual citizenship of LGBT people have been circum-
scribed in Cuba's past. The narrative shows how the sexual citizenship
of LGBT subjects have been constrained by discrimination at all levels
of society: in the home/family, in the street/neighborhood, and in the
military and party, as well as the invisibility of LGBT subjects in
media, legal, and nationalist revolutionary discourses. But what is
most interesting about the narrative is what its analysis contributes to
the discussion of sexual citizenship as defined by Bell and Binnie
(2000). Since the Cuban experience is radically different from the US/
European context which gave birth to many of the theories of sexual
citizenship anthropologists work with, we must ask what sexual citi-
zenship means in the Cuban context. How is sexual citizenship nego-
tiated in a nation outside of the capitalist world of neoliberal
representative democracies? The discourse of citizenship, and subse-
quently sexual citizenship, in the capitalist neoliberal world is different
from the discourse of sexual citizenship which emerges from the
Cuban life story narrative I analyze here.

European/US Discourses of Citizenship.

lesbian voice 051

052

053

054

055

56

057

058

This doesn’t have anything to do with it,

and I think that it is really bad.

I think that if we are excluded from all of these things then

they should give us a place where we can feel good

without them accusing us or bothering us.

For those who are making trouble,

that’s what the authorities are for, to take care of them.

They should do what the situation calls for.

But they shouldn’t judge us because of a minority.

didactic anonymous

voice

059

060

Conclusion:

that in these days there is no place where people,

homosexuals, can share freely and peacefully with people who are

like them.

Table 1. The Voice System of the Text

lesbian voice 011 That’s why I hope that from this group a strong tree grows