Revolutionary and Lesbian: Negotiating Sexual Citizenship in Cuba 385
96 in front of a whole crowd they accused us of being Lesbians.
97 Which we weren’t.
98 Or rather, I knew I was but she didn’t know that I was,
99 I never let her know or show it.
100 My caring for her was healthy.
101 They accused us of being Lesbians and took away our scholarships.
102 This hurt me a lot and I suffered a lot for her and for me.
103 Because they ruined this girl’s life
104 I had gone to study just for the excitement of it,
105 but she had come to study because the only thing she wanted was
to study that career
106 because she loved it so much.
107 Where was this?
108 In Leningrad
109 They put an end to me,
110 they put an end to her.
111 They treated us like terrorists.
112 In that meeting everyone voted to take away our scholarships
113 and to kick us out of the USSR
114 and that they cut off our careers
115 and that was that.
116 That’s what they did
117 and we were victims of that.
118 And that’s what they did
119 and over the years it has hurt me a lot,
120 because if it had been true that would have been one thing,
121 but it wasn’t even true.
122 In the first place,
123 nobody has the right to judge anybody else for their sexual orien-
tation
124 but even if we were,
125 but without it even being true they did away with both of us...Rather than frame this story as relevant because it is an example of
discrimination in access to education, the speaker sees what happened
as an unfair infringement on her ability to be responsible citizen (by
responding to the nation's need for students to study technical careers
in the Soviet Union) that would have allowed her to be integrated into
society and contribute to the implementation of the revolutionary
social project. This orientation to the event illustrates the Cuban ori-