On Sunday, September 25, 2022, in a nationwide popular referendum, a two-thirds majority of Cuba’s electorate ratified a set of sweeping, radical changes to the country’s legal code concerning families, known as the Family Code. Cuba’s new Family Code is the most progressive, comprehensive legislation of its kind in history, anywhere in the world, and is a cause for celebration not only in Cuba, but worldwide. The Cuban Revolution shines as a brilliant light of revolutionary optimism and inspiration to the world’s oppressed masses, for it has proven that, under a victorious socialist revolution, the true emancipation from all special legal and cultural modes of oppression is not only possible, but inevitable. In this long-form article, we explore the origins of patriarchal oppression in Cuba, the long struggle for de-patriarchalization under the revolution, the fundamental transformation of Cuban law and culture, and the “revolution within the revolution” that has placed socialist Cuba at the forefront of the global struggle for the emancipation of women, children, the elderly, LGBT people, and disabled people. We also summarize the major progressive provisions of Cuba’s new Family Code.

The colonial origins of anti-LGBT oppression in Cuba

Cuba inherited its legal system and culture from its colonial past. Its longstanding anti-LGBT and otherwise patriarchal legal system originated in the Spanish conquest and colonization of the island.

When the first Spaniard conquistadors and Catholic missionaries landed in Cuba, beginning with Columbus in 1492, they found an Indigenous society in which patriarchal oppression had no existence or precedent in history. Colonial officials reported with disgust that homosexual activities and partnerships, as well as “men dressing as women” — i.e., persons embodying any of a variety of Indigenous non-binaristic gender identities, some of which are included under the “Two-Spirit” umbrella, which we might today understand as transgender identities — were commonplace and perfectly normalized among a great diversity of Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. These and other traditional cultural aspects of Indigenous societies were anathema to the Western Catholicism of the invaders.

After conquering Cuba and the other lands that became “New Spain,” the Spaniards sought to enforce their empire’s colonial rule by systematically destroying and replacing the cultures of conquered Indigenous peoples. This program of colonial genocide and assimilation against the Indigenous population was carried forward first and foremost by converting the colonized natives en masse to Christianity, while systematically torturing and murdering those who refused to abandon their traditions in the Inquisition.

To this end, the Spaniards introduced colonial legal systems that criminalized homosexuality and other activities, relationships, expressions, and gender identities deemed “sexually immoral,” “satanic,” “unnatural,” and otherwise antithetical to Christianity. Persons found guilty committing “sodomy” (generally referring to sexual intercourse between gay men) were subjected to unimaginably cruel punishments: They could be burned to death at the stake, or thrown into a pit of rabid dogs to be mauled to death and devoured, or have body parts — often the victim’s ears, nose, and limbs — sliced and chopped off.

The Taíno and other Indigenous peoples suffered these extreme cruelties while enslaved under the Spanish Empire’s encomienda system, an adaptation of southwestern European feudalism that was instituted across the territories of New Spain. The Indigenous peoples of Cuba were rapidly driven to extinction by the genocidal Spaniard regime, and within a few decades, merchants began to import Black African slaves to replenish the colony’s labor force. Extracted from ports all along the western and southern African coasts, the newly arriving slaves also came from a great diversity of peoples, many of which had cultures that traditionally accepted and honored a wide spectrum of sexual expression and gender variance. As the Black population in Cuba and elsewhere in New Spain grew, their diverse cultures were similarly subjected to persecution by the colonial authorities, missionaries, and slaveholders, and they, like the Taíno before them, were forcibly converted en masse to Christianity.

The Spanish obsession with late-medieval, Western Catholic notions of sexual morality was, needless to say, deeply hypocritical. Punishment for “deviation” from these norms were enacted almost entirely against the Indigenous and enslaved subjects of the colony, and sometimes against Europeans languishing in indentured servitude, but rarely, if ever, against the slaveholding planters, merchants, colonial governors and administrators, and missionary priests who ruled colonial Cuba. Indeed, men of the ruling classes of colonial Cuba, as with other colonies, regularly committed sexual crimes against enslaved persons, and as early as the mid-16th Century, Spanish-Cuban slaveholders were widely reported to prostitute enslaved women to merchants and sailors docking at the island-colony’s ports.

Slavery was not abolished in Cuba until 1875 — and was still not totally eradicated until 1886 or later — after more than 350 years.

The features of patriarchal oppression in the Spanish colonial legal system were never truly abolished. Instead, as the Spanish Empire began to collapse and lose its colonies during the 18th and 19th Centuries, the newly independent states in the Americas and elsewhere generally maintained the anti-LGBT, misogynistic, and otherwise patriarchal laws imposed by the Spanish Empire. Cuba was no exception.

Cuba and other Spanish colonies were transferred to the U.S. at the conclusion of the 1898 Spanish–American War. Cuba then endured four years of direct U.S. military occupation, after which, in 1902, the island finally gained its formal independence. However, from the outset, the “independent” Cuban government was effectively controlled by a series of U.S.-backed puppet dictators, serving, at the behest of American capitalist-imperialist interests, to keep the Cuban economy reliant on sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations, large-scale illicit drug manufacture and smuggling, and tourism from wealthy U.S. citizens. The Cuban economy was especially transformed to accommodate American tourism — especially gambling and sex tourism — after 1924. The control exercised over Cuba’s government by U.S. crime syndicates, which carried on with the tacit assent of the U.S. State Department, even had a name: gangsterismo. The transgender Communist scholar Leslie Feinberg aptly termed this opening-up of the Cuban economy to sex tourism “imperialist sexploitatation,” a system through which “U.S. big business, including crime syndicates, organized urban Cuba into a giant brothel, super-exploiting” the marginalized poor for sexual labor. The imperialist-controlled Cuban sex trade especially preyed upon Afro-Cuban women and LGBT people, which worsened existing antiblack stereotypes, rooted in centuries of antiblack oppression. As Feinberg explained it,

U.S. crime bosses ran the lucrative large-scale sex industry and interconnected casinos and drug distribution. Tens of thousands of Cuban women, men and children of all sexualities served the desires of wealthy and powerful tourists from the U.S.

Cold War anti-gay and anti-trans purges and persecution in the U.S. created the demand for an offshore prostitution network in Havana that exploited large numbers of men and boys, many of them feminine, for profit, as well as women.

During this period of colonial modernization, the Cuban comprador regime introduced liberalizing reforms to some aspects of patriarchal oppression, but the basic framework imposed by the Spaniards remained in place. LGBT people were no longer burned at the stake for our “abominable” orientations, identities, and self-expressions — an almost impossibly low bar — but LGBT life remained thoroughly criminalized, and LGBT people were forced to live false lives or to hide underground. For instance, in 1938, the Cuban comprador regime passed the infamous Public Ostentation Law, under which openly identifying as gay and engaging in homosexual activity, among other proscriptions, were “crimes” punishable by fines and prison sentences of six months.

Anti-LGBT attitudes also remained deeply embedded within the fabric of Cuban culture. Especially in rural areas, persons who were exposed as gay or trans would be ostracized by their families and communities. This led many rural LGBT Cubans to flock from the countryside to the capital, Havana, where many entered the white-collar urban workforce, while many others were folded into the sex trade.

Anti-LGBT oppression continues during the early decades of the Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution began on 26 July 1953. The revolutionary vanguard, known as the 26th of July Movement, took up the mission of overthrowing the U.S.-backed comprador military dictatorship, then led by Fulgencio Batista. After years of intense guerrilla warfare, on 31 December 1958, the 26th of July Movement revolutionaries victoriously overthrew the Batista regime, ushering in a new Cuba — democratic, pluralistic, anti-racist, and independent of Yankee imperialism. Following the victory of the anti-colonial liberation struggle, the 26th of July Movement went through a period of internal ideological and political struggle; through this process, the Movement adopted Marxism-Leninism as its guiding ideology, and was transformed into the Communist Party of Cuba. Thus, the Cuban Revolution became a socialist revolution.

Although, as Communists, we will always extend solidarity to the Cuban Revolution, we must not mince words concerning its failures.

During its first few decades, the revolutionary government was overtly and violently hostile toward LGBT people. Rather than abolishing every last element of patriarchal oppression in the colonial legal system it inherited, and rather than initiating a program to transform Cuba’s deeply homophobic, transphobic, and hyper-masculine (in Spanish, machismo) culture, the revolution instead “grandfathered in” the preceding centuries of anti-LGBT legal and cultural oppression. For example, the revolutionary government inherited and maintained the earlier-mentioned Public Ostentation Law, which, despite not being enforced since the late-1960s, was not formally repealed until 1988. Furthermore, openly gay men were systematically excluded from membership in the Communist Party and restricted against military service in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.

The revolution’s political leaders shamefully encouraged these policies. Fidel Castro, for instance, was quoted in 1965 as claiming that homosexuals are deviants who could never be considered true revolutionaries.

One of the worst injustices against gay men in the early years of the revolution was the so-called Units to Aid Military Production (UMAP), established in 1965.

In concept, UMAP was not inherently homophobic. During the first few decades of the revolution, the U.S. launched wave after wave of military operations against Cuba — some overt, like the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion, a resounding failure that brought the U.S. international condemnation and shame, but many more covert. To defend the revolution, the entire country needed to be mobilized, and every able-bodied adult man was drafted into the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. However, thousands of Cubans, such as those belonging to various pacifistic Christian sects, were conscientious objectors. Many Cubans also lacked the education necessary to become soldiers. UMAP was thus designed to accommodate these sections of the population as an alternative means of contributing to the defense of the revolution, without taking up arms.

But there was a more sinister aspect to UMAP — homophobia. Openly gay men who were willing and able to serve in the armed forces were instead assigned to UMAP.

At that time, the deeply rooted and widespread homophobia within Cuban society led to the opinion that gay men were unfit to serve in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. Furthermore, some in the government feared that anti-gay violence would run rampant within the armed forces. But the government’s misguided approach of separation only made the situation worse. Decades later, in an interview with journalist and biographer Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel explained, “Homosexuals were not drafted at first, but then all that became a sort of irritation factor, an argument some people used to lash out at homosexuals even more.” The absence of gay men in the Cuban armed forces led to the widespread public belief that gay Cubans lacked patriotism.

UMAP was not designed as a punitive institution — its facilities were not prisons or internment camps — but conditions in UMAP facilities were nonetheless appalling, and abuse against the workers was widespread. Reports of these conditions soon reached the Communist Party.

In response, the Communist Party organized a full-scale investigation of UMAP facilities, carried out in a massive secret operation. One-hundred young men in the Communist Party were sent to UMAP facilities, assigned to be regular workers, to pose as gay men, and to then report back on the treatment they experienced. Fidel himself participated in the operation: He snuck into one of the facilities at night, laid down in a hammock, and waited for a guard to walk by. Guards would often harass the workers at night by cutting the support cords of their hammocks with their sabers. But when this guard walked by, intending to do just that, he instead came face to face with Fidel — the leader of the Cuban Revolution — and was frozen with shock and embarrassment. The results of the investigation were indisputable, and after experiencing first-hand the abuses committed in the UMAP system, in 1968, the Communist Party shut it down.

Yankee imperialism exploits homophobia for Cold War aims

Following the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, many Cubans belonging to the former ruling classes — the Cuban comprador bourgeoisie, the old colonial plantation aristocracy, and the U.S.-based crime bosses — left the island for the U.S., taking as much stolen wealth as they could carry with them on their private yachts. Thousands of the war-criminal functionaries who served the overthrown military dictatorship also fled the country, rather than face the people’s justice for their atrocities. Finally, in 1980, 120,000 Cubans — out of a total population of 11 million, or about 1% — left Cuba for Miami, Florida in an event known as the Mariel Boatlift.

The U.S., desperate to reconquer its liberated colony, welcomed these defectors of the overthrown comprador regime with open arms, treating them as “political refugees,” and set them to work as agents of Cold War propaganda against the Cuban Revolution.

Among these thousands were, naturally, many gays and lesbians, whose reports of institutional homophobia the U.S. opportunistically used in the domestic media and the international stage to vilify revolutionary Cuba — nevermind that the U.S.-backed comprador regime was responsible for modernizing Cuba’s old anti-LGBT legal system, and that the revolutionary government had merely inherited this system. In fact, in the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act, the U.S. Federal Government passed legislation officially banning homosexuals from immigrating and mandating deportations of gay migrants. But American imperialism made an exception in the case of Cuban “refugees,” because they served such an important propagandistic function.

Hollywood, a premier institution of the U.S. Empire’s propaganda machine, staffed by faithful servants of American imperialism, took a leading role in the production of anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War. As the U.S. stepped up its militarist aggression against revolutionary Cuba, Hollywood dutifully produced film after film vilifying the revolution and romanticizing the military dictatorships and chattel-slavery plantations that characterized Cuba’s pre-revolutionary past. In particular, Hollywood propaganda films rewrote Cuban history, painting pre-revolutionary Cuba as a liberal haven for gay people — a utopia destroyed by the Cuban Revolution. 

Additionally, the CIA extensively operated within the pre-revolutionary underground subcultures of Havana. One study estimates that, under Cuba’s comprador regime, there were around 200,000 gay people in Havana, largely working in the illicit drug industry and sex trade. Thus, by worming its way into Havana nightlife, including gay clubs, the CIA managed to recruit a number of disaffected gay men as counter-revolutionary assets. In fact, one of the CIA’s over-600 failed assassination attempts on Fidel Castro was carried out by a gay university student leader.

This is not to say that “refugee” reports of institutionalized homophobia in revolutionary Cuba were false. On the contrary, such reports were often true.Instead, what must be understood is this: Any contingent of the oppressed masses that has been failed by a revolution is likely to be weaponized by the imperialists and their lackeys for their own counter-revolutionary ends. Every time Communists fail to uphold the progressive struggles of some sections of the oppressed masses, we jeopardize the progress of all struggles, in all their diversity, sow disunity among the oppressed masses, and diminish the revolution as a whole.

The tide turns toward progress: 1970s–1990s

Prevailing attitudes within the Communist Party of Cuba toward LGBT people finally began to change — radically, and for the better — beginning in the 1970s.

In 1971, Cuba held its first Congress on Education and Culture, at which speakers presented conflicting declarations on homosexuality. Some abandoned the view that homosexuality was a problem of decadance, and insisted that it was instead a legitimate form of sexual behavior, worth studying along the same lines as heterosexuality. Some promoted public education to normalize to normalize homosexuality, as part of the government’s broader public education on issues of sexuality, women’s rights, and reproductive health. However, other declarations called for gay people to be barred from employment as educators. Reactionary views were still out in force, but the tide was clearly turning toward progress.

In 1975, the People’s Supreme Court of Cuba ruled that gay people could not be discriminated against in employment or education on the basis of their sexuality, and ruled that gay persons who had been fired or expelled were entitled to restitution from the government and reinstatement in their former positions.

That same year, the new Ministry of Culture was established, alongside a commission to study homosexuality, leading to the full decriminalization of homosexuality in Cuba in 1979. By comparison, homosexuality was still criminalized throughout much of the U.S. under so-called “sodomy laws” until 2003.

Following these measures, LGBT life in Cuba rapidly emerged from the underground it had been confined to since the pre-revolutionary period, under the comprador regime, and stepped into the light of social visibility. The existence of gay people was becoming accepted and normalized in Cuban society. For the first time in Cuba’s long colonial history, gay people were living openly, and integrating into every sphere of public life — cultural, economic, political, and so on. Some gay Cubans who had left the island for the U.S. in previous years even decided to return. Furthermore, within the Communist Party, the reactionary view of homosexuality as a “decadent” feature of capitalism, incompatible with socialism, was soundly defeated and replaced with tolerance. Soon, thousands of gay men and lesbians were welcomed into the Communist Party, at last free to take an active role in building socialism.

In 1988, the antiquated Public Ostentation Law was formally repealed. The law was changed to make sexual harassment illegal in Cuba, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.

In an interview that year, Fidel Castro condemned the homophobic attitudes that had prevailed in Cuban society and in the Communist Party of Cuba in previous decades, and self-criticized for his own failures. In a 1992 interview, Fidel stated, “We inherited male chauvinism and many other bad habits from the conquistadors. That was a historical inheritance. In some countries more than in others, but in none was there more struggle than in ours and I believe that in none have there been more tangible and practical successes.” In his 2006 interview with Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel said, “Concerning women, there was a strong prejudice, as strong as in the case of homosexuals. I’m not going to come up with excuses now, for I assume my share of the responsibility. I truly had other concepts regarding that issue.” Fidel also accepted personal responsibility in his 2007 autobiography, My Life, for failing to struggle against widespread anti-LGBT sentiments and machismo, including his own, in his role as leader of the Communist Party.

In 1993, military service in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces was opened to all LGBT people, and protections were put in place to end discrimination within the armed forces on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Today, thousands of gay and transgender Cubans serve openly in the armed forces. 

Progress toward LGBT emancipation in Cuba has been imperfect and far too slow, but once it began, it became an unstoppable force. The popular base of the Cuban Revolution is the oppressed masses of Cuba; under the revolution’s socialist democracy, the masses have become the makers of their own collective destiny. It is thanks to this fact that social progress in Cuba is not only possible, but inevitable.

CENESEX – the “revolution within the revolution”

Every inch of real social progress is a result of social struggle, and progress under socialist revolutions is no exception to this rule. All the progress made toward the emancipation of women and LGBT people in Cuba since the revolution began has been the result of a long struggle, led by revolutionary women and LGBT people, both among the people generally and within the Communist Party itself. Communists in Cuba, including Fidel Castro, as well as Communists elsewhere in the world, have described this as “the revolution within the revolution.” 

In 1972, the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) founded the National Working Group on Sexual Education, which in 1989 became Cuba’s celebrated Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX). The FMC took a leading role in advancing the total emancipation of women under the Cuban Revolution, and CENESEX in particular was tasked with educating the public on sexual and reproductive health and women’s rights.

Additionally, CENESEX took a leading role in promoting public awareness of HIV/AIDS. CENESEX approached AIDS as a public health crisis, which could be ended through education, healthcare — which, thanks to the revolution, was and remains a universal right in Cuba — and social support. Toward this goal, the Cuban state provided, and still provides, an immense social safety net, in spite of the unilateral U.S.-imposed economic blockade on Cuba, enforced by the U.S. military, that remains in place to this day, in violation of international law. Furthermore, in Cuba, the AIDS epidemic was never blamed on gay people, but was instead understood scientifically, as a disease that can be transmitted through sexual intercourse (regardless of gender), use of dirty needles and contaminaition of open wounds, pregnancy and breast feeding, and other modes; the epidemic was and is understood in Cuba to be a matter of public health, which, through careful planning and campaigning, could be prevented and ultimately eliminated.

By contrast, in the U.S., across the West, and in most Latin American countries, public health officials and politicians blamed the AIDS crisis on LGBT people and Black people — the most acutely devastated sections of the population. The U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, refused to even publicly acknowledge the AIDS crisis for years, even as tens of thousands of people protested in the streets in cities across the U.S. Empire against the government’s inaction. With a privatized healthcare system and little to no medical infrastructure serving poor and colonized communities, millions of HIV/AIDS patients living within the U.S. Empire have been abandoned by the state. During the 1980s, the U.S. Empire manufactured the AIDS crisis in order to commit a systematic social mass murder of over 700,000 people — mainly LGBT people and Black people. The epidemic still kills over 10,000 people every year in the U.S. Empire alone.

Since the AIDS crisis began, Cuba has sent thousands of doctors across the world to aid underdeveloped countries, particularly in Africa and other Caribbean countries. This is only one of Cuba’s many internationalist medical programs.

With regard to homsexuality, CENESEX especially took guidance from advancements in social science concerning LGBT people taking place in the socialist German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where homosexuality had been decriminalized in 1968, and gay people were already socially accepted and highly integrated. In 1979, CENESEX published the first of many educational materials concerning LGBT people and our struggle for emancipation: a translation of the East-German sexologist and psychotherapist Sigfried Schnabl’s The Intimate Life of Males and Females, in which the author argued that “homosexuals should be granted equal rights, respect, and recognition,” and denounced all forms of social discrimination on the basis of sexual orientaiton. A 1981 CENESEX publication, In Defense of Love, described homsexuality as a normal form of human sexuality, and argued that anti-LGBT oppression, having been inherited from colonialism, would need to be overcome by the socialist revolution.

In the 1990s, and even more so in the 2000s, CENESEX began making use of public television for the purpose of educating the public on the AIDS epidemic and other matters of sexual and reproductive health and rights. At the same time, LGBT representation in Cuban television programs, featuring sympathetic, honestly portrayed, openly gay characters, among broader LGBT positive representation, has helped to dramatically change public opinion regarding LGBT people and issues.

Progress for trans rights in Cuba

Leading elements within the Communist Party of Cuba, mainly the National Working Group on Sexual Education (the predecessor of CENESEX), alongside the Federation of Cuban Women, first took up the struggle for the rights of transgender people in Cuba more than four decades ago, in the 1970s. At first, progress was slow.

The first major victory for transgender people in Cuba came in the form of legal recognition. In 1979, a transgender man, wishing to have his legal identity papers changed to reflect his true gender identity, appealed to the Federation of Cuban Women for help. The FMC set up a special committee, to be coordinated by the National Working Group on Sexual Education. The committee’s investigations and advocacy in the case culminated in an agreement with Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Justice on issuing new identity papers to transgender people.

The FMC and the National Working Group on Sexual Education continued collaborating with transgender civil rights activists in Cuba, and the next major victory came in 1988, when doctors performed the first sex reassignment surgery (SRS) in Cuba. The surgery was a success, and no complications were reported.

This was a groundbreaking achievement for transgender healthcare in Cuba. However, transphobic attitudes still prevailed among the Cuban public, and the event garnered considerable media backlash. Public outrage was particularly focused on the fact that Cuba’s socialized, universal healthcare automatically extended to transgender healthcare. In the U.S., which has privatized healthcare and virtually no social safety net, thousands of transgender people who are too poor to afford the healthcare we need — amounting to tens of thousands of dollars — are simply forced to go without; this private-healthcare extortion leads to a lower quality of life and higher suicide rates, among other adverse personal and social consequences. Meanwhile, in Cuba, rather than being forced to seek out vital gender-affirming healthcare, including surgeries, in the extortionist private sector, transgender Cubans are automatically covered by Cuba’s national healthcare system. But to ensure that Cuba’s national health system would cover transgender healthcare, the Cuban public needed to be won over — educated to see that healthcare for transgender people was not “optional,” but vital, and that transgender people should not be “left behind” by the revolution. An internal struggle on the issue of trans rights was also carried out within the Communist Party.

Mariela Castro Espín, the current director of CENESEX, and the daughter of former President Raúl Castro and the late FMC leader Vilma Espín, later explained, “We were unable to convince the people of the need to carry out these operations. This reluctance also came from professionals in the Ministry of Public Health, who were not experts on the subject.”

The result was a considerable setback. While transgender Cubans continued to receive cost-free psychotherapeutic care, in the aftermath of the media and public backlash, access to gender-affirming surgeries was rolled back. Although CENESEX continued to carry out public education on transgender issues, the following decade represented a slump in the progress of trans rights in Cuba.

Finally, in 2004, under a new national strategy, CENESEX launched a public campaign to expand trans rights in Cuba via the National Assembly of Popular Power. CENESEX prepared by expanding and diversifying its staff, welcoming aboard transgender revolutionaries and experts on transgender issues. In 2005, CENESEX formulated a definite plan and began lobbying committees of the Cuban National Assembly. The CENESEX plan proposed expansions to Cuba’s national healthcare system to cover all transgender healthcare, including gender-affirming surgeries and hormone replacement therapy (HRT), and also sought to streamline the process for transgender people wishing to change their legal identity documents to reflect their true gender identities. The latter part of the CENESEX proposal was met with immediate approval by the Courts of Justice, and new passports were issued in 2006. Debates were held in the National Assembly on the expansion of transgender healthcare in 2007, and in 2008, Cuba’s Minister of Public Health, Jose Ramon Balaguer Cabrera, signed legislation that assured cost-free access to gender-affirming surgeries, including SRS, as well as HRT, for all transgender Cubans under Cuba’s national healthcare system. To ensure this right, the Ministry of Public Health established the National Commission for Comprehensive Attention to Transsexual Persons, under the direction of CENESEX.

This was the first law of its kind in the Americas, and one of the first in the world. By contrast, “liberal” Canada, which has a national health insurance system of universal healthcare, only extended coverage to transgender healthcare, inlcuding most, but not all, surgeries, in 2016. A key difference is that Canada, as a settler-colonial empire and a capitalist-imperialist country, funds its national health insurance through the continued dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of Canada and the super-exploitation of the Third World, whereas Cuba has managed to build one of the world’s most impressive universal healthcare systems, despite suffering under a decades-long U.S. blockade, without exploiting poorer countries. On the contrary, Cuba has achieved global renown for its medical internationalism, in which it sends thousands of doctors across the world to assist countries in need.

Since the victories of the 2004–08 campaign, the FMC and CENESEX have continued their advocacy work on behalf of transgender people in Cuba. In the years that followed, CENESEX became a bastion of legal redress for transgender persons who had been harrassed, discriminated against by employers and institutions, or mistreated by the police. Based on consultations with transgender people, activists, and experts, CENESEX has launched multiple public education campaigns and expanded anti-discrimination laws that protect transgender workers. In 2013, Mariela Castro cast the first dissenting vote against a law banning anti-gay discrimination in the workplace — because the law wasn’t progressive enough: It included no provisions extending the same legal protections to transgender people.

Although the struggle of revolutionaries has transformed Cuba into one of the safest and most welcoming societies for transgender people in the world, the march of progress for trans rights still has a considerable way to go.

In the domain of healthcare, although the specific needs of transgender people are now fully covered by Cuba’s socialist health system, there are considerable delays in healthcare access. Cuba’s healthcare system has been severely affected by the U.S. blockade, which prevents the country from obtaining medical technology and supplies, and especially harms Cubans who rely on highly specialized areas of medicine, including transgender people. While the U.S. Empire denies the basic human right to healthcare to its own citizens, the Yankee imperialists, in their efforts to recolonize Cuba, also seek to strangle the Cuban Revolution by blockading the island-nation and condemning thousands of ill and disabled Cubans to needless suffering. Moreover, due to Cuba’s diminished resources, gender-affirming surgeries, HRT, and other more specialized aspects of transgender healthcare are generally only available in Havana. Transgender Cubans living outside the capital, and especially for those residing in the Cuban countryside, have consequently reported hardships in accessing adequate healthcare.

In the domain of culture, although Cuban society has radically changed in the last few decades, far from everyone is accepting of transgender people. But Cuban society is moving forward: Like the other avenues of struggle for sexual liberation, trans rights are accumulating cultural cache, and the Communist Party is working to change cultural attitudes and overcome the colonial artifact of machismo.

LGBT culture in Cuba

Gay and trans social life has long since emerged from hiding in the shadowy underground that once existed in pre-revolutionary Havana. Since the 1980s, and especially since the late 1990s, LGBT culture has become a celebrated part of Cuban society. Today, gay clubs are found in Cuban cities and towns, and LGBT nightlife is especially vibrant in the capital. Although Cuba is still in the process of systematically throwing off the chains of imperialism, the Havana of today is a far cry from the hub of gangsterism and “imperialist sexploitation” it was before the Cuban Revolution.

In 1993, a film sponsored by the Cuban government, Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate), was the first in Cuban history to feature a gay main character. The plot, set in Havana, centers on a conflicted friendship between two young men: a gay artist and a straight member of the Cuban Union of Young Communists. The film explors themes of tolerance, the plight of gay men in revolutionary Cuba, and the way gay people related to the revolution, and was openly critical of the Communist Party’s previous, longstanding errors with regard to LGBT rights. The film broke box office records in Cuba and provoked controversy and discussion among the Cuban public, paving the way for further LGBT representation in Cuban cinema.

Since the early 2000s, it has been very common for Cuban films to feature openly LGBT characters and LGBT themes. A “Sexual Diversity Cinema Week” has been held in the country since 2005. LGBT themes have also become common in television and live theater in Cuba.

Since the 1990s, drag shows have entered mainstream culture in Cuba. A major contribution to the widespread interest in drag came in the form of a 1995 documentary, Mariposas en el Andamio (Butterflies on the Scaffold), which presented a positive view of solidarity between working-class women and the gay community in Havana during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Since the 2000s, local drag shows in many Cuban cities and towns have become sponsored by the Communist Party’s local Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

In 2008, Cuba planned its first pride parade, which was held in Havana. Since then, the Havana pride parade has been held every year in mid-May, usually coinciding with the  grassroots-organized International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia; the parade has grown in size each successive year since it began. This year, in 2022, Cuba became the first Latin American country to observe an LGBT History Month.

Cuba’s participatory democracy and the popular struggle for a new, progressive Constitution and Family Code

A revitalized campaign to legalize same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples, among other LGBT rights, was launched in late 2017, following over a year of campaigning championed by CENESEX. Growing activity around the issue of marriage equality, coupled with the struggles for the emancipation of children, the elderly, and disabled people, led Cuba’s National Assembly of Popular Power to begin drafting an amended version of the Constitution during its 2018 session.

The National Assembly’s drafted new Constitution included an article — Article 68 — that explicitly legalized same-sex marriage. In the former Constitution, ratified in 1976, marriage was defined specifically as “the voluntary union established between one man and one woman.” In other words, the 1976 Constitution only recognized heterosexual marriages, and stood in the way of marriage equality. The new Constitution, in Article 68, would have redefined marriage, in neutral terms, as a union between two people, having “absolutely equal rights and obligations.”

The National Assembly approved the draft of the new Constitution in a vote on July 22, 2018, and a nationwide public referendum was scheduled for 2019, so that the new Constitution would be ratified on a participatory democratic basis by the whole nation. In the meantime, a public consultation on the draft was opened, lasting from August 13 to November 15, 2018, during which mass meetings would be held at the local level to collect input, including suggested changes to the draft, from the public.

Problems arose immediately after the National Assembly vote. The new Constitution proposed by the government, and Article 68 in particular, received significant backlash from a well-organized, well-prepared, and well-funded coalition of Evangelical Chistian organizations — reportedly representing 21 denominations, including Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches. The anti-LGBT Evangelical coalition mobilized a massive petition against Article 68 of the new Constitution, which gathered 178,000 signatures, and threatened to sabotage the upcoming Constitutional referendum by turning public opinion against the expansion of LGBT rights. Missionaries organized rallies in their churches and went door-to-door flyering and putting up posters against marriage equality. Preachers united behind the slogan that heterosexual marriage is “the original design — the family as God created it.” Some anti-LGBT activists also claimed that marriage equality was incompatible with Communism, despite the Communist Party of Cuba’s longstanding endorsement of marriage equality. During the public consultation period, the Evangelical camp turned out in force to local mass meetings. By the end of the consultation period, Article 68 had become the most-discussed article, with a majority of attendees requesting its elimination.

The Communist Party and mass LGBT rights organizers were thrown off-guard, and the government was forced to adapt its strategy to combat the anti-LGBT coalition.

Only a few decades ago, Evangelicals had little organized presence, let alone power, in Cuba, as the state was officially atheistic in ideology and imposed very strict regulations on religious institutions. However, in the 1990s, Cuba transitioned from state atheism to state secularism, meaning that the state took no official position whatsoever on religion, and began to allow religious institutions greater privileges. Since then, U.S.-based Evangelical Christian organizations have funneled millions of dollars into Cuba, aiding reactionary churches and missionizing outfits active on the island. These millions represent just a drop in the bucket: American Evangelical Christians have spent untold billions of dollars proselytizing in colonially oppressed and underdeveloped countries, especially since the 1960s, when the Evangelical movement gained mainstream political traction in the U.S. Empire. In the process, the American Evangelical movement has spread the most virulent homophobia and transphobia across the Third World, intentionally exacerbating existing anti-LGBT cultural attitudes and legal codes inherited from the colonial era. LGBT people in countries across Africa and Latin America have suffered extreme forms of renewed state repression, institutional violence, and lynch-mob terror as a result of this U.S.-based colonial missionizing.

The American Evangelical movement is one of the most powerful, pervasive, and pernicious cultural institutions associated with American imperialism, and its influence presented a major, then-unanticipated challenge to the struggle for LGBT emancipation in Cuba. 

The government, in turn, quickly adapted its strategy — first, by withdrawing Article 68 from the new Constitution, and removing from the redrafted Constitution any language relating to marriage equality. Instead, in the second draft, the article concerning marriage, Article 82, reads as follows:

Marriage is a social and legal institution. It is one of the organizational structures of families. It is based on free consent and on the equality of rights, obligations, and legal capacity of spouses.

The amended article still defines marriage in neutral language, rather than along strictly heterosexual lines, but without explicitly legalizing marriage equality.

This second draft of the new Constitution was unanimously passed by a vote of the National Assembly on December 22, 2018. It was then put to a public referendum, held on February 24, 2019. The new Constitution was ratified by the Cuban electorate with 90.61% voting “Yes” (with a voter turnout of 90.15%).

Having withdrawn marriage equality from the newly ratified Constitution, the Cuban government instead planned to include it, along with a wide array of progressive reforms regarding the civil rights of LGBT people, women, and children, in a public referendum to amend the country’s Family Code.

To many pro-LGBT activists and intellectuals, the government appeared to be bending to conservative Christian interests and abandoning its professed commitment to marriage equality. For example, one Cuban professor, widely-quoted in the international English press, condemned the government’s decision, complaining that, “Equal rights to marriage in Cuba should be a presidential decree, not a referendum that exonerates the state from responsibility and opens the door to conservative homophobia.”

This is a perfectly understandable and empathetic sentiment. The Cuban government does hold the power to unilaterally institute marriage equality, and could have done so at any time, without consulting the Cuban public. (Additionally, the Cuban government has the authority to ban the reactionary Evangelical institutions for promoting anti-LGBT discrimination.) A referendum, on the other hand, is a much slower process, and its result is not assured from the outset.

But although it’s true that the government’s most “efficient” course of action would have been to simply decree marriage equality and simply ban anti-LGBT religious institutions, such an approach would have failed to carry forward the revolution’s vital task: the task of revolutionizing the masses. Revolutions cannot stand without a deeply rooted mass base of support, and revolutionaries can only plant such roots by continually proving, with real results, the righteousness of our vision. Revolutions cannot be sustained by enlightened commands, and revolutionaries must work, arduously and humbly, to continually earn the trust of the masses. Revolutions are not events, but long, historical processes, which, after all is said, can only be carried forward by continual mass struggle. It is only by involving the masses in the great historical struggle against the old, oppressive order — against the modern-colonial, capitalist, and in some places medieval order that we’ve inherited — and in the great historical struggle to build socialism, that the revolution can stand. The Cuban Revolution, like all successful revolutions, has been built on a robust participatory democracy, so that the people continue to become fully integrated with the revolution and its ultimate historical aim: the realization of a communist society.

What does this mean for the LGBT emancipation struggle in Cuba?

Cuba, like all countries, is a complex and diverse social web, and there are many contradictions among the people. For example, while the Cuban people overwhelmingly support the revolution’s aim of building socialism, many also hold conservative cultural views. Furthermore, 65% of Cubans are Christians by faith, which means that a majority of the population are at least somewhat influenced by the anti-LGBT teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and some Protestant sects. Still, even though large sections of the Cuban masses that have been misled by the reactionary Evangelical movement, polls suggest that a near-majority of Cubans have been sympathetic to expanding LGBT rights for at least the last decade; for instance, a poll conducted in 2016 found that 49% of the Cuban public were in favor of marriage equality specifically. But cultural attitudes are never set in stone, no matter how forward-thinking a society may be.

The current president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has stated unequivocally that he supports marriage equality, an end to all discrimination, and the full emancipation of LGBT people. But if he followed the advice of some activists, and simply decreed marriage equality into law, without honoring the Cuban Revolution’s participatory democratic process, then the Communist Party would risk alienating the Cuban masses and hardening public opinion against the LGBT struggle.

This is more or less how marriage equality became law in the U.S. Empire — by a decree of the Supreme Court. In the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution, a 250-year-old document written by slaveholding plantation-owners and slave-trading merchants, enshrines marriage equality. While the decision and the changes that came with it were of course welcome, and many thousands of gay couples in America have finally married as a result, we must acknowledge that this is a very flimsy legal basis for what should be considered a fundamental civil right. A fairly “moderate” Supreme Court “gave” us marriage equality — but that very same institution can take our rights away at any moment; all it needs to do is take the very same argument made by the previous Court (i.e., an appeal to the U.S. Constitution), and flip it on its head. And this isn’t a hypothetical fear: In his opinion on this year’s Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade — repealing the previously “constitutional” right to abortions and other forms of reproductive healthcare — the extreme-right fascist Justice Clarence Thomas argued that other Supreme Court decisions that have granted civil rights protections based on esoteric and inscrutible readings of the U.S. Constitution, including the 2015 Obergefell ruling, should also be overturned. The current far-right Supreme Court is already prepared to strip us of every last “constitutional” civil right; they’re just waiting for the right cases to present themselves. Meanwhile, the Democrats, representing the left-wing of fascism in the U.S. Empire, have shown that they have no interest in passing even the most basic civil rights legislation, despite their current majorities in Congress — not least because perpetually holding oppressed sectors of the public hostage is the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s elections strategy. The result is that there is nothing in the way of today’s far-right Supreme Court, dominated by the recent wave of Trump-appointees, from repealing every last one of our “constitutional” civil rights, no matter how long those rights have been on the books as guarantees of the U.S. Empire’s “fundamental” law. 

By contrast, the goal of the Communist Party of Cuba was not to decree enlightened laws from above, but to build toward LGBT emancipation, as well as women’s and children’s emancipation, on an unshakable foundation: the will of the people. The Communist Party of Cuba clearly recognizes the need to build the revolution, and all the social progress it achieves, on this popular democratic foundation, and so it sought to win over the masses, not by decree, but through conversation and struggle, community by community, until the whole nation decreed, collectively and democratically, that emancipation would be law. Cuba’s participatory democracy was put into action in the form of a year-long public consultation process, centered on mass meetings, held at the community level, and mass educational campaigns, followed by a nationwide public referendum. By organizing local mass meetings across the country, the Communist Party encouraged the Cuban masses — of all sexual orientations and gender identities — to directly participate in the nation’s march toward LGBT emancipation.

The first draft of the new Family Code was published on September 15, 2021, and later that year, in December, a special Drafting Commission was established to organize a massive, nationwide public consultation, leading up to the popular referendum.

The public consultation lasted from February 15 to June 6, 2022. Organizers with the Federation of Cuban Women and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution went canvassing door-to-door, inviting the public to attend community meetings where they could discuss and debate the drafted Family Code, offer comments and suggestions, and participate in the drafting process. During the public consultation, the government held an astounding 79,192 community meetings across Cuba (including 1,159 among Cubans living abroad), attended by a total of over 6.5 million Cubans (75.93% of the electorate), resulting in 434,860 proposals from the public. The Drafting Commission revised and redrafted the Family Code at frequent intervals throughout the project’s run, in accordance with the public’s contributions, resulting in 25 versions of the Family Code draft. Each new version would be considered by the public, subjected to scrutiny, and returned to the Drafting Commission to be modified and refined. The huge outpouring of mass participation is illustrated by the fact that, just between versions 24 and 25 of the Family Code draft, the Drafting Commission modified nearly 50% of the draft’s 471 articles, and added 3 new articles, in accordance with the public’s contributions. The public consultation was, in and of itself, a historic success for Cuba’s participatory democracy, and, consequently, the new Family Code represented the collective political will of the entire nation.

The final version of the Family Code draft (version 25) was presented to the National Assembly and passed in July. Finally, the Family Code would be subjected to a popular referendum, held on September 25, 2022 (although polling stations opened a week earlier for Cubans living abroad).

Finally, on Sunday, September 25, 2022, the Cuban electorate voted in the popular referendum on the new Family Code. The referendum was a resounding success, with a clear, two-thirds majority of 66.85% voting “Yes” (with a voter turnout of 74.22%).

The day of the referendum, President Miguel Díaz-Canel expressed that Cuba “grew up” in the process — the educational campaigns, the mass community meetings of the public consultation process, and the mass participation in drafting and redrafting the proposed law — generated by the new Family Code.

A summary of the new Family Code

The editors have appended this mechanical translation of the new Family Code for the interested reader to browse. The translation was performed using Google translate, so is likely to contain errors and mis-translations.

Cuba’s new Family Code has been oversimplified by the capitalist press in the United States and the broader West as being something akin to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which tenuously “legalized” marriage equality in all 50 states. The Family Code is being “explained” more or less as the “legalization of gay marriage” — with little more said. 

Cuba’s new Family Code does, in fact, enshrine marriage equality as law — but it does so much more than that.

The Family Code is a comprehensive law, laying out the legal dimensions of families, children and the elderly, women, LGBT people, and disabled people. And the new Family Code is, in no uncertain terms, the most progressive and comprehensive law in history, anywhere on Earth, with regard to the emancipation of women, LGBT people, children, the elderly, and disabled people.

Moreover, Cuba’s new Family Code recognizes the fundamental, radically progressive ways that Cuba’s culture has changed regarding the place of women, LGBT people, and children in society under the socialist revolution, and aims to integrate these cultural changes with the people’s government by enshrining these ethical values as law. To this effect, President Miguel Diaz-Canal Bermudez, president of Cuba, stated the following:

This code … has developed something extraordinarily exceptional: affection as a legal value. This is why it has been called the “code of affection,” which is not a slogan; it is an essence. This norm has an undisputed ethical value; it teaches us to think [ethically] and gives us the tools to educate future generations.

The following is a comprehensive summary of Cuba’s new Family Code, as it was ratified by the Cuban electorate on September 25, 2022.

Title I lays out the law’s basic definitions. It defines the family as follows:

The State recognizes in families the fundamental cell of society… The different forms of family organization, based on relationships of affection, are created between family members, whatever the nature of the kinship, and between spouses or domestic partners.  Family members are obliged to fulfill family and social duties on the basis of love, affection, consideration, solidarity, fraternity, sharing, cooperation, protection, responsibility and mutual respect. The relationships that develop in the family environment are based on dignity and humanism as supreme values.

The Code then sets forth the guarantees that will underpin law-making, rules-making, and legal decisions in the future: It guarantees the right for all people to establish families, to enjoy family life, to have full equality in filiation (parent–child relationships), and to freely develop their personalities, intimacy, and family life. It guarantees children the right to “grow up in a happy family environment.” It extends the guarantee of full equality between women and men to the home, laying out the right of family members to expect an egalitarian distribution of time spent on domestic and care work, according to the ability of each family member. It protects the right of couples to determine whether they wish to have children, and to decide when to become parents. It reaffirms the right of women to control their bodies, and further protects “the full development of sexual and reproductive rights … regardless of sex, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, disability status or any other personal circumstance.” It guarantees a “harmonious and close family communication between grandmothers, grandfathers, and other relatives,” and standardizes the rights to “self-determination, wishes, desires, preferences, independence and equal opportunities in family life for older adults and those with disabilities.”

It replaces the legal principle of patria potestas (meaning, “authority of the father”), a reactionary, antiquated, male-chauvinist notion originating in the Roman Republic, and replaces it with the “system of parental responsibility,” which focuses on child-rearing not as an act of possession or a violent exercise of power, but as a mutual process, shared by the parent and child, based on mutual respect, conversation, and kindness. The Code treats teenagers as rights-bearing citizens, requires their thoughts and feelings to be respected by their families, and requires the recognition by family-members of the teenager’s growing and progressive autonomy. It grants all children the explicit right to be heard according to their capacity.

Title II addresses domestic violence, discrimination, and child care. The Family Code defines family violence as “hierarchical inequality within the family” and recognizes that “its main victims are women and others due to their gender, children and adolescents, the elderly, and people with disabilities.” In other words, the Code recognizes that abuse and exploitation within the family reflect social disparities in power.

In this regard, Cuba’s new Family Code stands in sharp contrast to the incoherent “domestic violence” legal regime of the U.S. Empire, in which, more often than not, no distinction is made between abusive and defensive violence. The result is that the victims of domestic violence are criminalized for acting in self-defense, while the abusers carry on with impunity. Under the U.S. regime, in recent years, we have watched in horror as child victims of sex-trafficking have been sentenced to life-terms in prison for the “crime” of killing the monsters who’ve sexually abused and exploited them.

Title II also guarantees protections against discrimination and neglect of family members on the basis of sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, disability, and so on. In other words, under the Code, all family members have a legal right to not be ostracized by their families on the basis of protected identity categories; conversely, families have a collective legal obligation to accept and include family members who are LGBT, disabled, of a different race, and so on. Furthermore, all victims of domestic violence and discrimination have the right to protection from a social safety net and the right to legal recourse, while all citizens have the obligation to report instances of domestic violence and discrimination. It goes so far as to stipulate that domestic violence is never justified, regardless of how the victim was exposed to it, thereby protecting victims of domestic violence from having their grievances dismissed by victim-blaming.

Title III concerns the vaunted title on kinship. It establishes kinship not merely as those who are related by blood, but also those related by adoption, and even those who become family members through “socio-affective kinship,” which is “based on the will and behavior between people linked in affection by a stable and sustained relationship over time…” The legal nature of such “affective unions” is further enumerated under Title VII.

In sum, persons who love one another, and want to be legally affiliated as family members, can be under Cuba’s new Family Code. Families, according to the new Code, are created by and based on affection, just as much as they can be created by and based on blood.

Kinship has rights and obligations associated with it under Title III: the obligation of parents and carers to provide and equally distribute food, the right of pregnant persons to be cared for by their families, the right of family members to communicate with each other, the obligation of able-bodied family members to ensure that disabled family members can freely communicate and express themselves, and any others determined by the Cuban legal system in any other law or ruling.

Title IV and V concern parent–child relationships and children’s rights. Title IV opens with the declaration that, “Daughters and sons are equal, enjoy identical rights, and have the same household duties with respect to their mothers and fathers.”

Both titles lay out in great detail the conditions for the legal recognition and termination of parent–child relationships. In this respect, Title IV also defines the conditions for “multiparentality,” in which a person is legally recognized as having more than two parents, which can occur through voluntary surrogacy agreements, adoptions, and other kinship processes.

Title IV also details the rights of surrogates, and establishes procedures for “solidarity gestation.” This forbids paid surrogacy, ensuring that surrogacies only take place for “altruistic reasons and human solidarity.” In effect, this prohibits the exploitation of poor persons, by wealthy individuals and couples, to serve the merely biological function of gestation — a common practice in the U.S. and many other capitalist countries.

The content of parental responsibility is laid out in Title V. The Code holds that parents have a responsibility to love their children, to provide their children with emotional stability, and to contribute to their childrens’ free development. Parents are responsible for educating their children in a positive, non-violent, and participatory manner, preparing them to “lead a responsible life,” while respecting each child’s growing capacity for autonomy as they develop and mature. Parents are responsible for communicating with their children, and for facilitating healthy communication between children and their grandparents and other extended family members. Parents are responsible for listening to their children and including their children in decision-making conversations. Parents are responsible for providing their children with safe living conditions and food, taking care of their personal hygiene needs, attending to their “physical and mental health,” and generally keeping their children safe, as well as providing their children with age-appropriate recreational activities. Parents are responsible for instilling in their children, “by example,” attitudes of social justice, such as respect for equality, civil rights, “human solidarity,” “protecting the environment,” “coexistence,” and so on.

The above are just some of the obligations outlined under the new paradigm of “parental responsibility.” Conversely, children have the legal right to expect that these obligations will be fulfilled by their parents. Furthermore, the Code stipulates that these rights must be shared equally by all of a child’s parents. 

Title VI concerns marriage. It opens by defining marriage:

Marriage is the voluntarily arranged union of two people with the legal capacity to do so, in order to live together, on the basis of affection, love, and mutual respect. It constitutes one of the forms of family organization and is based on free consent and the equality of rights, duties, and legal capacity of the spouses.

This intentionally gender-neutral language unambiguously establishes the legal equality of same-sex marriage. Not coincidentally, this has been the only Family Code title significantly covered in the Western capitalist press — and even then, only this small part of the title. The other titles have been ignored or falsified.

The age of consent to marry is set as eighteen; minors cannot consent to be married, nor can persons who have been coerced into accepting a marriage.

Title VI also enumerates the rights and duties between spouses. In the first place, spouses have a duty to uphold “equality” in the relationship, and to treat each other with mutual “respect, consideration, and understanding.” The Code holds that spouses must share equal responsibility for the work of parenting and family care, and must divide household work on an egalitarian basis, with respect to either spouse’s ability. Furthermore, the Code stipulates that, “In the event that there is a sexual division of roles and functions [in housework] during the cohabitation of the spouses, this cannot give rise to imbalances or economic damages for them.” Housework is considered real work, with real economic value, and spouses who take on a disproportionate share of that work are legally entitled to compensation for their otherwise unpaid labor. These provisions give unique legal weight to a basic, decades-old feminist goal: freeing women from unequal burdens in the domain of housework. This equality in the household also serves to undermine machismo in the home environment. Under the Code, marital property is divided equally when the marriage is dissolved.

Title VIII makes the Family Code, particularly its guarantees to protect the rights of children, applicable under foster family care and other non-family child-care.

Title IX protects the rights of the elderly and people with disabilities. It guarantees the right to a decent family life, to privacy, to communication, and to maintain links with other family members. Other listed rights are the right to autonomy, the right to choose the place of residence, to be free of discrimination and family violennce, the right to an accessible, safe, and healthy environment, and to inclusion in the family.

Under Title X, a family mediator is legally established to help mediate disputes in the family without involving carceral intervention. Mediations are out-of-court interventions led by “qualified professionals, without decision-making power.”

The last title, Title XI, deals with international law and its application under the Cuban Family Code. It begins by defining domicile and habitual residence — that is, the place of residence that a person intends to remain at (domicile), and the place where a person is physically established even if they have no permit and it appears in no registry (habitual residence). The initial chapter attempts to square foreign law with Cuban law where possible, except where its “effects are manifestly incompatible with public order.” Chapter II of Title XI addresses the regulatory standards of recognizing foreign marriages, giving power to the law of the place where the marriage was formalized. The same is true for the “affective de facto union.” Title XI grants spouses the right to dissolve their marriage under any various types of foreign laws if they both agree to it. It makes the obligation to give food international — that is, it establishes the obligation to be governed either by the law of the domicile of the obligor or Cuban law, whichever creates the greater obligation.

The final provisions of the Code integrate the old Family Law, establish civil legal capacity for minors, grant minors a proxy if they are too young to express themselves with a “sufficient degree of maturity,” and guarantees minors the right to be heard in “any process or matter that concerns them” as well as to “participate in their decisions about their person.” 

These provisions integrate other sections of the Civil Code, including succession and the right to patrimony and property, along with all the attendant circumstances of both transmission by will and intestate. Critically, it makes those who have denied support that is required under the Family Code ineligible to inherit. 

The remainder of the law brings the requirements for registration, paperwork, etc., into line with the new provisions of the Family Code such that old legal procedures are cleared away to make room for those that effectuate the new, progressive law.

Acknowledgement

For the first half of this article, we owe a considerable debt to the late Leslie Feinberg, a transgender Communist who, as a member of the Workers World Party, was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of transgender liberation. We encourage readers who are interested in learning more about the struggle for LGBT emancipation under the Cuban Revolution, up until the mid-2000s, to read her book, Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, which can be read and downloaded (as a PDF) for free here.