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.

On September 15, the calculating Biden White House delayed the hour of the forthcoming strike of U.S. railway unions. While the desiccated puppet Biden himself pays lip-service to the unions, his regime systematically undermines them. The latest outrage forces a 30-day “cooling down” period on the unions ready to strike by requiring them to consider an offer from Biden’s handlers that doesn’t come close to meeting even a single one of the rail workers demands.

One-hundred forty-five years ago, in July of 1877, the city of St. Louis was held by the authority of a revolutionary commune. The Commune of St. Louis began with a rail strike like the one Biden’s masters are afraid of tonight.

It began, as revolutions often do, with a depression.

In 1873 the world-capitalist economy was struck with stagnation and contraction. This depression was kicked off by the Panic of ’73. A series of bank failures in Austria soon spread to the rest of the economy. Credit sharply contracted. Loans defaulted. Banks closed.

Industrial production in the U.S., which had been previously growing at a rate of three times each year, slowed to 1.7 times yearly during the period of 1873-1890. There was a 10% decline in total manufacturing output from the U.S., most of the sectors affected being consumer goods, iron, and construction.

On July 14, 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages for its workers for the third time that year. The railroad workers had no unions, but they spontaneously broke out into strike.

The strike started that day, with B&O railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia. They blockaded the town, a critical rail juncture, and prevented all rail traffic from rolling through, demanding that the wage cut be revoked.

The governor of West Virginia dispatched the National Guard to clear the lines and resume rail service, but the guardsmen refused to fire on the strikers. At the same time, the B&O workers in Maryland took up the strike and closed the railroad center at Cumberland.

Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo New York, all major railyards, closed. The strike spread from the B&O to other lines. In Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania railroad baron Thomas Alexander Scott recommended the strikers be given a “rifle diet.”

On July 21, the Pennsylvania National Guard bayonetted strikers and then opened fire, killing 20 railroad workers. The strikers did not disperse; rather, they retaliated, trapping the guardsmen in a roundhouse and razing 39 buildings.

Striking railroad workers in Pennsylvania burned 104 locomotives and 1,245 freight and passenger cars. The Pennsylvania National Guard fought their way out of the roundhouse, shooting and killing over 20 people as they cut their way out of the railyard.

This was the background of the strike action in St. Louis. As the country seized in strikes and transport actions, the Workingman’s Party (the first Marxist party in the U.S.) and the Knights of Labor gathered in St. Louis. On July 22, one day after the massacre in the Pennsylvania railyards, train workers held a secret meeting to call for an increase in wages and determined to strike, their numbers stiffened by members of the Workingmen’s Party. They then held a public outdoor meeting, which was steered by that 200 members of that party.

That night, they held a third meeting, and the rail workers adopted a resolution (written by the Workingmen’s Party representatives) that read:

WHEREAS, the United States government has allied itself on the side of capital and against labor; therefore,

RESOLVED, That we, the workingmen’s party of the United States, heartily sympathize with the employees of all the railroads in the country who are attempting to secure just and equitable reward for their labor.

RESOLVED, That we will stand by them in this most righteous struggle of labor against robbery and oppression, through good and evil report, to the end of the struggle.

The demand was put to the bosses, who rejected it immediately.

The strike began at midnight in East St. Louis. Within hours of the announcement, the strikers controlled the city uncontested. They formed an executive committee, comprised of at least 47 people, although all their identities are not recorded and therefore not known. The committee, which met in Turner’s Hall, was elected by the striking workers.

St. Louis was the home of many radical Germans, who had been fleeing from the newly-constituted Germany for years to avoid the compulsory military service instituted under Prussian authority. Roughly 600 of the Workingmen’s Party’s 1,000 members in St. Louis were German socialists.

Missouri was also a former slave state. Two-thirds of Black persons in the state lived in St. Louis (26,387) in 1870, most of whom were either employed as domestic servants or as laborers, with a heavy influence along the levees and among the steamships. By 1877, the Ku Klux Klan had begun a campaign of lynch-terror in the state, and racism was stoked among the workers because the Black laborers were often used as strikebreakers.

In the morning of July 23, having more or less complete control of East St. Louis and with no police on the street to oppose them, the Executive Committee elected by the strikers issued General Order No. 1: no railroad traffic other than passenger trains and mail would be permitted to pass. The committee then appointed the mayor of East St. Louis, John Bowman, arbitrator of the labor dispute. He helped the committee select special constables to guard the property of the railroads from damage. Already, even in its nascent stage, we can see the Executive Committee’s unfortunate attention to the needs and wants of the capitalists.

The Chicago & Alton company tried to start a freight train that morning, but it was stopped and turned back to the yard. The Union Railway & Transit Company removed their wage decrease, but the Transit workers continued to strike in solidarity with their brothers, stiffened by the militants in their ranks.

City officials wired frightened messages. Some warned that this was a repetition of the Paris Commune of ’71.

On the second day of the strike, July 24, the strikers expanded their blockade to include passenger trains. A train was decoupled from its passenger cars and only permitted transit when the locomotive was bare.

At 11:00 AM that morning, twenty-five strikers led by an Ohio and Mississippi Railway engineer seized two Missouri Pacific Railroad locomotives, took Missouri and Pacific engine shops, and tried to persuade the workers there to cease work. They refused.

As unrest increased, 3,000-4,000 people gathered at the depot. It was announced by the city authorities that six companies of infantry were marching to put an end to the blockade and clear the rail lines. For the first time since the strike began, police went out onto the streets and tried to disperse the crowd.

At 4:00 PM that afternoon, flatcars from other striking yards near the city arrived, loaded with more strikers. The word had gotten out that St. Louis was the hub of a powerful solidarity movement across all railway lines.

At 6:00 PM, six companies arrived from Fort Leavenworth. Their commander stated that he had “been ordered here with general instructions to protect the property of the United States,” but he declined to take any action other than to hole up in the army barracks and wait.

That night, Communist leaders held meetings throughout the city. Processions marched through the streets. The city government, paralyzed by the fear that they were not heavily armed enough to act, did nothing. The police remained “inert.”

On July 25, 1877, at 9 AM, the Communists gathered a crowd in a downtown marketplace. There, they convinced wire manufacturers to join the strike. At 10 AM they marched to Turner Hall where the Executive Committee was meeting. At a meeting that morning, a Black worker is said to have asked, “Will you stand with us, regardless of our color?” The crowd shouted back at him “We will!”

Across the river, the Workingmen’s delegates anticipated violence, though the strike remained peaceful in East St. Louis. One speaker across the river in downtown St. Louis said, “The workingmen now intend to assert their rights, even if the result is the shedding of blood…. They are ready to take up arms at any moment.” But the party did not arm the laborers. They were never given the weapons they needed to defend their gains.

An air of solidarity prevailed throughout East St. Louis. The Workingman’s Party declared that all work within the city would soon come to a halt. All would join the strike.

On the morning of July 26, a mass meeting of coopers agreed to cease work. Smelter and clay workers joined the strike. 35% of the striking workers were U.S. born; 29% were German; 18% were Irish; 12% were English or Welsh. A full 12% of the striking workers were Black.

The strike was controlled by its Executive Committee — it issued orders, demands, and instructions. The most prominent members of the committee were not themselves workers but were clerks, a student organizer, a doctor, a drug and bleach maker, a newspaper seller, and a boot fitter. There were many petit-bourgeois men on the committee, which perhaps accounts for its sensitivity to protecting small businesses and private property.

On the evening of Wednesday, July 26, in Carondelet, six miles south of the city center, iron workers arrived at the Martindale Zinc Works to call on its workers to join the strike. The foreman of the works struck a striker with a crowbar. When the police tried to intervene, the strikers drove them off with rocks.

The ironworkers took control of the zinc works and there they unfurled the red flag of the International. By the end of the day, there was not a single manufactory in operation. The strike had shut down the entire city. It was all in the hands of the Workingmen’s Party.

That evening, there was another mass meeting at Lucas Market of over 10,000 people. Peter Lofgreen, a Workingmen’s delegate, harangued the crowd and told them that if the managers could not restore their pay, it was time for the management of the railroads to be in the hands of the workers. Full nationalization would be one of the demands made by the Executive Committee.

Thomas Curtis declared that the demands of St. Louis must go all the way to the president of the United States. This, he said, was “not a strike – but a social revolution!”

On Thursday, barbers, wagon-makers, painters, blacksmiths, and mills closed, with only a few remaining open by order of the Executive Committee to make bread to feed the city. The National Stockyards were permitted to slaughter some few animals to keep the people fed. The mayor met with the Executive Committee repeatedly, begging for more shops to be opened, and the committee haltingly tried to oblige the business interests.

In Carondelet, 18 metal workers were organized into a makeshift police force that patrolled the streets. In East St. Louis, the railway workers had a parade with a brass band and banners that said “We Want a Peaceful Revolution” and “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

That’s when the Executive Committee made its worst decision. At the dawn of the 27th, they caved to pressure by the petit-bourgeoisie and the mayor, who feared the Black labor solidarity and the marches, the mass meetings, the red flag of the International. They issued an order to calm the wealthy. This order stated that “in order to avoid riot, we have determined no large procession will take place until our organization is so complete as to positively assure the citizens of St. Louis a perfect maintenance of order.”

When a group of Black workers asked to join the party, the Executive Committee replied that “we want nothing to do with them.”

While shop-owners were begging the committee to stop the marches, reaction was not asleep. Merchants were raising $20,000 (close to $1 million today) behind closed doors to arm the militia that would eventually attack and destroy the Commune. The St. Louis Gun Club supplied shotguns. 1,500 rifles and 2 cannon were sent by the governor from the state armory. 11,000 volunteers were mustered into service.

On July 27, the governor sent a missive demanding the disbandment of the Executive Committee and all its strike committees. The Workingmen’s Party replied, “Nothing short of compliance to the [just demand for wages] will arrest this tidal wave of revolution.”

The papers were now referring to St. Louis as the “St. Louis Commune.”

At 3:00 PM on Friday July 27, municipal and federal forces arrived downtown. Police cavalry led the way, riding abreast to cover the entire width of the street. They were soon followed by foot police with rifles, the militia that had been arranged by the petit-bourgeois shop owners, and two cannon from the armory. The Workingmen’s Party, having failed to provide the strikers with weapons, had no way to resist them.

Half a block behind the city police came federal U.S. troops, marching with fixed bayonets. The cavalry plunged into the crowd outside Turner’s Hall where the Executive Committee met. One of the officers shouted, “Ride ’em down! Ride ’em down! They have no business here!”

The committee tried to broker an agreement with the city fathers. Those delegates they sent to the meeting were arrested. Within hours, several others had been taken from their hiding places and joined the detainees. 73 rank-and-file workers were arrested during the police surge.

The Executive Committee had failed to protect the revolution from counter-revolution. It had rejected the all-important aid of Black workers that made the seizure of the city possible, spat on the right of self-determination for the former slaves. The remaining members of the committee were now isolated. The strikers were at the mercy of the police.

From July 22 until August 1, the strike committee had controlled the city. It had failed, utterly, to establish the necessary self-defense required for the revolution. It had dealt with the mayor and business interests as allies – cold allies, but allies none-the-less. When the time came, those “allies” turned on the committee and the strike; every request from the businesses and the city fathers was little more than a delaying tactic.

The committee failed to expropriate the property of the dangerous and deadly foes of the revolution: because to them, they were not foes. Indeed, in the face of Black labor solidarity, the committee preferred its white shopkeepers to Black laborers.

What if they had not suspended the mass meetings? What if they had armed the workers? What if they had not broken up the solidarity of Black, white, and immigrant labor and instead expanded their demands to include those of the Black toilers? What if indeed. We cannot know what if, merely study their failings at a moment when power was in the hands of the people and their leaders refused to act.

We must learn the lessons taught by history, and overcome them. We must stand for the freedom of all, not the wages of a few. We must be prepared when the conditions for the next St. Louis commune arrive.

“I, [patroller’s name], do swear, that I will, as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district, faithfully, and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me, God.”

—Slave Patroller’s Oath, North Carolina, 1828

The epidemic of mass killings continues to worsen across the U.S. Empire. For several years, since 2013, the rate of mass shootings in the U.S. has markedly and steadily climbed, increasing from 272 incidents in 2014 to 336, 382, 348, 336, 417, and 610 in the successive years, culminating in a staggering 692 mass shootings in 2021, according to the Gun Violence Archive. In 2022, as of June 21, there have already been 278 mass shooting incidents — 46.33 mass shootings per month. The GVA and other research centers and media outlets define a mass shooting as one in which “four or more people are shot or killed in a single incident, not including the shooter.”

Data taken from the Gun Violence Archive, the Washington Post, and Mapping Police Violence. Years with no entries are years where no data was available. Data from 2022 has been extrapolated from data available on 8/18/2022.

During that same period, police officers in the United States have shot about 2,000 people per year, killing over 1,000 per year: 1,850 in 2014, killing 1,049 people; 2,048 in 2015, killing 1,103 people; 2,017 in 2016, killing 1,070 people; 2,147 in 2017, killing 1,094 people; 2,189 in 2018, killing 1,145 people; 2,082 in 2019, killing 1,096 people; 2,224 in 2020, killing 1,132 people; and 2,222 in 2021, killing 1,145 people. So far, in the first six months of 2022, police have shot 1,180 people, killing over 500. This suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has had no significant effect on the rates of police violence; not even a mass quarantine situation, in which most people remain self-isolated in their homes, leaving only for essential services (grocery shopping, medical emergencies, etc.), can deter the police from shooting and murdering people. Meanwhile, on the other hand, the rate of mass shootings has exploded by over 50% annually since the COVID-19 pandemic began. 

Mass shootings have increased about 250% since 2014; police shootings have increased by 120%. Although there is not a one-to-one causal connection, there is a link between these numbers. They are connected through the increasing militarization of white militias and the spread of white terror groups like the Oathkeepers, Patriot Front, and NSC-131. All of these organizations serve the same purpose as the police: they are all active elements of a reactionary garrison that suppress class struggle through racialized violence.

Every established capitalist media outlet, whether it brands itself “liberal”, “conservative”, or “non-partisan”, profoundly misunderstands and mystifies the problem of “gun violence.” On the one hand, mass shootings are portrayed as isolated crimes committed by lone, “deranged” individuals — usually middle-class white men. On the other hand, only the most surface-level connection is drawn between each of these thousands of purportedly isolated tragedies, namely the tool — the gun — common to them all.

This leads to the same exhausting debate, down to exactly the same talking points, repeated in the aftermath of every press-covered mass shooting. It goes like this: On the one hand, the “liberals” point to firearms as the obvious common denominator, and point to the high levels of gun ownership and the ease with which guns, and particularly military-grade weapons (e.g., AR-15s), are purchased in the U.S. as the single factor that sets this country apart from all similarly developed countries (Britain, Japan, Denmark, Canada, and so on), where epidemics of “gun violence” are unheard of. Thus, they propose “gun control” regulation. On the other hand, the “conservatives”, unwilling to concede even the obvious point that guns might have something to do with mass shootings, instead shift focus to the individual shooter, blaming “mental illness”, and to a supposed “moral decline” in the U.S. Empire’s culture, blaming a societal departure from conservative Christian “values” and any number of cultural boogeymen — atheism, evolutionary biology, video games, hip-hop music, abortion rights, absentee fathers, and so on.

These positions are restated endlessly in soundbites, op-eds, Internet memes, and comment sections.

Politicians then react to “public opinion” accordingly: The left wing of fascism, represented by a “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, makes half-hearted attempts to introduce “gun control” regulations, such as increased restrictions on gun sales, harsher sentencing laws, and, in some cases, outright bans on civilian firearm ownership. All such legislation is inevitably defeated in the U.S. Federal Government, as well as in most state governments. The right wing of fascism, represented by the Republic Party and “moderate” Democrats, pass legislation on everything except for guns. Both wings of the U.S. Empire’s fascist government make mealy-mouthed statements about “mental illness,” despite the fact that persons who suffer from psychiatric disorders are far more likely to be the victims of gun violence — to succumb to suicide or to be murdered, most often by a family member, an intimate partner, or the police — than to be the perpetrators, and despite the fact that most mass shooting perpetrators are not driven by psychiatric illnesses, but by misogyny, racism, homophobia, and other basic features of fascist ideology. It is no wonder, then, that both factions of fascism in the U.S. government, left and right, Democrat and Republican, perversely take advantage of the terror instilled in the populace by continual mass shootings to continually expand police and “counter-terrorism” forces, jails and prisons, and restrictions on the rights of disabled people, especially those with psychiatric illnesses. Meanwhile, elementary schools are forced to carry out absurd duck-and-cover drills to “prepare” children for mass-shooting situations, which has the effect of repeatedly traumatizing them.

The debate dies down and the energy behind reform efforts fizzles out as one news cycle passes into the next, only to be reenacted the next time a mass shooting captures international attention.

Both of these positions, the “liberal” and the “conversative”, contain kernels of truth, but both profoundly and fundamentally confuse and mystify the problem of mass shootings in particular and “gun violence” in general. On the one hand, it is true that, in order to kill people using guns, it is first necessary to acquire guns. This is easily done in the U.S.: Rates of civilian-owned firearms per person are higher in this country, where there are approximately 6 civilian-owned guns for every 5 civilians, than in any other country in the world; firearms are purchased and carried in this country with remarkable ease, are stocked ubiquitously in stores, and are available in more powerful, ergo more deadly, varieties in this country than in any other. The “liberals” are “correct” insofar as they’ve stated the obvious, but rattling off data cannot alone explain why certain individuals commit murder, let alone why many individuals commit mass murder in one specific country. On the other hand, the “conservatives” have it “right” when they say that something is “wrong” with a person who commits a mass shooting, and that something is “wrong” with a society in which mass shootings are commonplace; it is true that a form of social sickness, which might be called a “cultural” sickness, particularly among white men, that lies at the root of our “gun violence” epidemic. But this sickness can’t be diagnosed by pointing to various countercultural boogeymen, or by appealing to moral panic. The real “cultural sickness” lies much deeper in the fabric of American society, and lingers much closer to home than any WASP would comfortably admit.

These two factors, a deeply-rooted “cultural” sickness and an abundance of guns in the hands of civilians, are, in fact, inextricably connected. What connects the murderous attitudes of certain white men and the prevalence of weapons of war in their civilian-fascist hands is their role in the continued subjugation of the many colonially oppressed peoples and nationalities within the U.S. Empire. Gun “culture” and violence in the U.S. was originally created, and is daily recreated, by the realities of this oppression, namely by the armament and recruitment of property-owning settlers as fascist stormtroopers. This facet of U.S. settler “culture” is an institutional pillar of the settler-colonial regime.

The Historical Basis of U.S. Gun Culture

To get to the historical roots of this institution, we must get to the historical roots of the modern colonial order itself.

As firearm technology spread through Europe, every European state placed restrictions on their use and availability. Henry VII and Henry VIII of England both outlawed wheelock guns in the 15th and 16th century because they gave equity to the poor in combat. In 1541, English Parliament limited the ownership of handguns to nobility and freeholders who earned more than £100 a year from property holdings alone — at a time when the requirements for voting, considered restrictive, were a mere forty shillings a year.

During the early stages of Europe’s colonization of North America, the European powers constructed forts wherever they went; behind these defensive walls, they could safely reload their flintlocks and rain fire onto the Indigenous resistance fighters, who were struggling desperately to defend their territories, homes, and ways of life. This stamped the pattern of settlement with a martial character.

The European powers also used guns for diplomacy and economic warfare. They were also a valuable trade item, which the Europeans could sell to Indigenous hunters and warriors in exchange for resources, including assistance navigating the North American geography, that were vital to the settlers’ survival. Further, European settlers and merchants strategically sold guns to certain Indigenous communities and not others, in order to exploit existing social contradictions. By marking certain communities as conditional allies and selecting them for arms sales the colonizers could provide those communities with a military edge over their traditional rivals. This provoked asymmetric warfare among the Indigenous peoples of a given region, allowing the European colonizers to indirectly weaken the overall position of the Indigenous population of that region, and to preemptively nullify future Indigenous resistance. Such temporary alliances between the colonizers and Indigenous communities were also used to tie some societies to new settlements and trading outposts, effectively rendering those communities dependent on the nascent trans-Atlantic trade network.

Part of this strategy relied upon never sharing the technological forces involved in manufacturing firearms — ironworking and gunpowder, for example. As a result, once an Inidgenous people or community began to rely on European guns, they were compelled to continue trading with the colonizers to keep their weapons in working order and to maintain a supply of ammunition. This state of dependency was a key factor in the early colonization of the Americas.

On June 8, 1610, after a devastating war with the Powhatan, the besieged and starving Jamestown colony was rescued by the fleet of Lord De La Warr (he gives his title to Delaware). De La Warr subsequently transformed the colony into a military bastion. Every weapon became part of the general arsenal; every free man was inducted into the colonial militia. From then on, the policy of the Jamestown settlement changed, from one of fragile coexistence between the colonists and the Indigenous population, to one of indiscriminate extirpation. 

The colonists launched genocidal raids against isolated communities, destroying them one by one. For this task, they adopted a barbaric tactic: The colonial militia would approach a village or encampment, often by night, fire a volley of muskets, and then rush in with sword, halberds, and torches drawn, murdering anyone they could reach and burning the settlement to the ground. Similar tactics were employed by the English settlers in Connecticut. By way of justifying their own brutality, the town of Milford, Connecticut passed a resolution stating: “Voted, that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to Saints; voted, that we are the Saints.” In other words, the English settlers appointed themselves divine crusaders and committed genocide in the name of Christ. The Jamestown colony’s campaign against their Indigenous neighbors persisted until May 24, 1624, when the English Crown dissolved the Virginia Company and converted Virginia into a directly-ruled royal colony. The new colonial authorities were willing to make “peace” with select Indigenous communities along previously established lines.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony, through its General Court, declared in the preamble to their 1643 militia law that “as piety cannot bee maintained without church ordinances and officers, nor justice without laws & magistracy, no more can our safety & peace be preserved without military orders & officers.” Provisions were thus once again enacted to induct every free man in the colony into its militia. “Bring every man a musket or fowling piece,” wrote Edward Winslow of Plymouth, “Let your piece be long in the barrel; and fear not the weight of it, for most of our shooting is from stands.” The New England colonies sent commissioners in 1653 back to England in part to ask for even more guns and ammunition.

Firearms were not the singularly decisive factor in every invasion, occupation, and genocidal campaign launched by the European colonial empires; for example, the Spanish were repeatedly repulsed from southern Florida, despite their superior weaponry, due to their failure to missionize among the Indigenous peoples there. Even so, in the English psyche, firearms became the quintessential tool of conquest. Thomas Harriot, in his Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), proclaimed that settlers had “advantages against them [in] so many maner of waies, as by our discipline, our strange weapons, and devises else” and that, for the natives, “running away was their best defense.”

English colonial authorities viewed the defense of their outposts, settlements, and strongholds and the conquest of new territories as a collective duty, to be borne by all free white settlers. The English authorities passed laws requiring armament and participation in militias, so that bearing firearms shifted from a privilege enjoyed by the landed aristocracy and select professional soldiers to a general obligation of free men in the colonies. These laws, however expansionary, were still careful about circumscribing who could own firearms. Broadly, only white, Protestant, adult male property-holders could own guns. In 1637, Massachusetts disarmed the Antinomians, an unorthodox Puritan sect. Maryland disarmed its Catholics in 1670 and mandated prison terms for Catholics concealing arms in 1756; indentured servants and slaves could neither bear arms, nor serve in Maryland’s militia. Generally speaking, English colonial legislatures barred slaves and indentured servants, free Black people, non-assimilated natives, propertyless whites, most non-Protestant and heterodox Protestant Christians, and most non-Christians from owning firearms. Despite these restrictions on armament, the English colonial authorities encouraged and sometimes begged merchants to continue importing firearms. Liberal historians see this as a contradiction: Didn’t the colonial authorities know that, by their policy of maintaining settler militias, and thus by their enormous demand for arms imports, they would, sooner or later, allow some of those firearms to fall into the hands of the very same people — slaves, natives, indentured servants, and others — the settler militias were established to repress, terrorize, and extirpate? Perhaps the colonial authorities did know this, and perhaps they accepted it. As early as 1632, for instance, Virginia recognized that they faced a danger from their own indentured servants, and the House of Burgesses passed legislation to restrict their movements, as well as to ensure their masters went armed.

In 1676-77, Nathaniel Bacon of Jamestown disturbed the crown policy toward Indigenous peoples and led a rebellion against Royal Governor William Berkeley. The dispute centered on this very policy of forming strategic alliances with select Indigenous peoples and communities. Bacon and his co-conspirators harbored bloodthirsty ambitions of expanding into new territory by extirpating the Indigenous peoples, but were prevented by the English colonial authorities, who disallowed colonists from raiding and settling in the territories of their Indigenous allies. After a series of raids by the Doeg people, in retaliation for expansion into their territory, the governor organized militias to carry out massacres against the Doeg and other previously uninvolved communities, killing hundreds. But this didn’t appease Bacon, who mobilized a few hundred men from the Virginia colony, among them planters, indentured servants (white and Black), and slaves, into a militia that would carry out a genocidal campaign on multiple fronts in the region surrounding the colony. Berkeley wrote, “I would have preserved those Indians that I knew were houerly at our mercy to have beene our spies and intelligence.” By contrast, Bacon’s credo: “Our Design [is]… to ruin and extirpate all Indians in General.” Following the governor’s victory over Bacon’s rebellion, the English Crown implemented a more direct rule over its colonies and, in order to prevent future alliances between white indentured servants and Black slaves, hardened the legal demarcations of race in the regime of chattel slavery.

By the middle of the 18th century, the New England states were chronically short of arms and ammunition for their campaigns. In 1756, during the Seven Years War, the Connecticut General Court reported its militia was dangerously under-armed. New England was constantly requesting firearms from the Crown to replace those that degraded in the colonies where there were no gunsmiths to repair them. In 1758, Connecticut bought and impressed every gun it could find to supplement the eighteen hundred guns they had stored on hand. The General Court offered extra pay to those militia members who came with their own guns. By 1762, Prime Minister Pitt promised the governors of the North American colonies “Arms, Ammunitions, and Tents, . . . in the same Proportion and Manner as is done to the rest of the King’s Forces.” In the colonies, the citizen-militias were to be provisioned like royal soldiers.

Thousands of guns poured into the colonies to fight the French. As a result of this war, the North American colonies were suddenly very heavily armed. Thanks to the restrictions placed on gun ownership, the white Protestant population received them all. In the 1760s, the colonies took this newly armed, newly trained, battle-tested force of militiamen to fight against the Indigenous peoples all along the frontier. These were men who had trained with the Brown Bess and its bayonet; the old tactic of massed fire and charging had been updated. Now, the settler need not even discard his firearm during the charge, but could use the bayonet for close quarters fighting.

The Police Power

Following the American War of Independence, late-18th century reliance on the colonial (now state) militias was challenged by changing property relations in the new country. The war ended in 1783 and almost at once businesses in Europe ended their lines of credit with colonial merchants and demanded payment in currency. This vastly increased commodity prices in the new United States settler-republic, which the impoverished rural population was unable to meet. Class divisions opened in the North between urban merchant capital and rural smallholders. Those smallholders who were unable to pay their debts or meet their tax obligations had their plots and property seized by the courts, which were then purchased by the wealthy at foreclosure auctions.

On August 29 of 1786, a smallholder protest in Northampton Massachusetts prevented the state court from being held. When the court moved along its circuit to Worcester on September 5, more protesters arrived, complaining about the court’s seizures of their property. When the court called the militia to muster and disperse the protests, the militia refused. Daniel Shays, a poor farmhand, led another march to shut down the court at Springfield on September 26. If the court couldn’t open, it could not foreclose on anyone’s property.

In Springfield, the militia did muster, but Shays called up around 300 men to combat it, and the court refused to sit. In September and October, further protests shut down courts in Great Barrington, Concord, and Taunton. Shays organized 3,000 or so men and attempted to seize a federal armory. The governor of Massachusetts was forced to outfit a privately funded army to combat Shays and his men. The rebels were defeated, in part due to their disorganization in battle.

Shays and his followers, who had been acting in the tradition of the English leveling movements that periodically sprung up in Great Britain, had been attempting to establish a communal equality amongst all English settlers. After their defeat, eighteen of these rebels were hanged. Reliance on the settler-militia decayed as a result: in Worcester, the militia had not mustered. In Springfield, the militia had been ineffective. Worse, men who should have been part of the militia had gone over to join Shays, and only through hired mercenaries had they been stopped from taking control of the state.

The war of 1812 revealed the deficiency of the settler-militia for defense, during which the militias proved just as poor at repelling the English crown as they had at stopping Daniel Shays. A stronger Federal army was the solution and by 1830, the militias were essentially defunct. In their wake, and as the contradiction between the slave power of the south and the wage labor of the north intensified, vigilantes began to appear throughout the settler-republic.

Vigilantism, the self-arming of private individuals, took over where the militia failed. The vigilantes were nearly always middle-class men. They formed gangs like the Alabama Slicks, roaming the countryside, protecting petit-bourgeois and bourgeois white property. In 1835, a vigilante gang in Vicksburg hanged five gamblers. The Slicks and other gangs enforced the law when they felt the government wasn’t taking a firm enough hand. “Slick law” in Alabama included beating free Blacks and terrorizing anyone who they felt were impeding their “rights in life and property” as one newspaper put it.

The purest incarnation of the vigilante gang was the slave patrol. In the years leading up to the civil war, vigilantism and slave patrols increased in frequency, in violence, and in arms.

Southern violence accelerated from 1835, the year that abolitionists launched a major pamphlet campaign and sparked a slave-insurrection hysteria. Southern mobs beat and burned their abolitionist opponents, with the direct support of the authorities. At the slightest whiff of slave insurrection, local whites requested (and were delivered) guns from their local government. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave these slave patrols and vigilantes the authority to take into their custody “runaways,” even in free states, and often subjected even those who were “free” Black persons to their violence and intimidation.
The 19th century marked the emergence of the institution of the police in response to the intensifying class struggle and the sharpening contradictions between the planter-aristocrats, who relied on slave power, and merchants and industrialists and their workers, who relied on wage labor. In 1838, the city of Boston established the first U.S. police force; New York established one in 1845. Albany and Chicago established theirs in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, Philadelphia in 1855, Newark and Baltimore in 1857. It is no coincidence that the settler-republic was rocked by its civil war in 1861-65, and then the Long Depression of 1873-1896, just after the founding of a new form of settler civil order. The one did not prefigure the other, but rather the growing class conflict first necessitated the formation of the police to reign it in, and then broke out in the U.S. Civil War, the St. Louis Commune, and mounting strikes, riots, and rebellions of the late 19th and early 20th century.

But what do these police have to do with guns?

The Continuing Basis of U.S. Gun Culture

“[C]olonization work to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.”

—Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, 1955

The United States police force is funded to the tune of $276 billion from state and local governments. This is over a quarter of the U.S. federal defense budget — $773 billion — and for good reason. As we have seen, control over the ownership of guns, not precisely what liberals mean when they say “gun control,” has been impressed into the legal structure (what Marxists sometimes call the “superstructure”) since the first English colonies erected their fortress walls on North American soil. Fortress America, the fortified, white (formerly white Protestant, although the religious restrictions have been eased throughout the 20th century to accommodate a larger demographic of Europeans and expand the ruling class in the face of major demographic changes in the country), settler-stronghold exists first and foremost as an economic reality and, secondarily, as a social idea, a thing which a sufficient number of people believe in to give it real social force. 

The white population of the U.S. Empire feels the need for armament very strongly. Their list of fears and needs is astounding: the ongoing settler extermination of Indigenous peoples (the U.S. Supreme Court just held that the doctrine of tribal sovereignty need no longer be recognized by the states in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta); the continued presence of slave patrols and searchers for guns in the New Afrikan communities of the Black Belt and the Federally-created ghettos; and the fear marketed and sold to white families that the lawless, the anarchistic, the “thugs,” namely social revolutionaries, Indigenous peoples, and New Afrika will seek to overturn the unjust social order by force (for this is the underlying message of every gun advertisement and of every “good guy with a gun” trumpetd by the National Rifle Association). The market of gun making and gun ownership has become a substantial driver in the expansion of firearm ownership in the U.S.

There is another source of this commodity fetishism, this drive to own guns as symbols of “freedom,” “manhood” (white manhood in particular), and “liberty.” This derives from the real economic exploitation of the periphery by the U.S. Empire. From its early days as a settler-republic, the U.S. has now expanded to incorporate into its territories most of the earth. Alexander Hamilton’s drive to expand weapons manufactories has found its final expression in the firms that drive U.S. imperialist war: Colt, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Sig Sauer, Alliant Technosystems, Beretta, Raytheon, and all the other large- and small-arms manufacturers that hold contracts with the federal government and the police. In order to maintain a sufficient number of arms to supply the U.S. imperialist armies and the police — the garrison-militias that maintain property relations in the U.S. — these manufacturers must constantly expand their production according to the laws of capitalist accumulation.

50% of white households report owning one gun, as compared to 30% of Black households and 21% of Latinx households. 70% of all gun owners report that they own the gun for protection rather than for hunting, sport shooting, or for a job. Police in the U.S. are responsible for the vast majority of gun deaths in the country each year.

The twin prongs of colonialist imperialism abroad and at home, the relation of imperialist dominance (the 750 foreign military bases maintained by the U.S. empire), the more than 800,000 police officers for a population of 300 million, some 350 “peace” officers per 100,000 people in the United States, make the United States even more heavily policed than some of the countries of the colonized periphery, including its subject state, Israel. The upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in the increasing militarization of the domestic police, the infiltration into the “civilian” population of military-grade surplus equipment from the imperialist armed forces.

The United States relies on armed violence to control both its colonized and semi-colonized subjects within its territorial borders, and potential class-enemies during times when class warfare reaches its highest pitch.

Gun violence in the United States represents the expression of fundamental contradictions; this is the explosive valve through which white terrorists exert energy downward to “control” the Black, Chicanx, and Inidgenous nations in the U.S., to reinforce the economic domination of the white ruling class. Yet, it is not only that; it is also the expression of the ideological forces unleashed when this relation is made fundamental to the “defense” of the country — to the basic policy choice of “arms independence” and imperialist domination of nearly the entire earth. It is the expression of the brutality learned by the burgeoning white fascists abroad when they serve in the imperialist military and dehumanize themselves, it is the ideology of the young white man who watches wars on T.V. and acts them out in Call of Duty, the vile and poisonous overspill of settler-patriotism.

As the economic situation deteriorates within the U.S., certain segments of the ruling class have begun encouraging the reactionary tendency that naturally emerges among fractions of the white working classes: the reversion from the police-form to the militia-form. The intensification of the class struggle threatens the ruling class with the ghost of a unified working class movement. To prevent this movement from emerging, the right-fascist elements in the ruling class have funded, platformed, and supported the most reactionary groups among the white population.

In this case, they ask class-collaborationists to take up arms in defense of whiteness. This is a “wage” or a property relation based on the imagined militia-form of the early U.S. slave-republic. Just as the fascist movements of Europe reimagined the medieval past as a period of class collaboration between peasant and lord focused around an imagined Volkskörper, an “ethnic body” or nationalism that certainly did not actually exist in the middle ages, so too do the right fascists of the U.S. Empire project this militia-form onto a völkischer past in which white men (neglecting to mention that the 18th century construction of whiteness only included English Protestants) were universally armed against Indigenous and slave violence.

The development of this movement pushes the social illness behind gun violence to ever more intense expressions; it acts as a catalyst and a driver at the same time, drawing on the internal contradictions of U.S. settler society and the property relations of nationality that underlie the more broadly understood racism, to bring about heightened violence, heightened national (völkisch) pride among the white settlers, and help fuse together an alliance of white class collaborators. 

To end the plague of gun violence, the problem must be addressed at its evil root: the fundamental economic relations of the United States Empire.

“PEOPLE HERE ARE DRUNK WITH LIBERTY…. The peril is great and it is imminent…. ARREST SUSPICIOUS PERSONS. SEIZE WRITINGS IN WHICH EVEN THE WORD FREEDOM APPEARS. Redouble your guard over your plantations, towns, and villages. Everywhere win over the free people of color. BE SUSPICIOUS OF THOSE WHO ARRIVE FROM EUROPE.”

—Letter of 12 August 1789 from Paris, by Saint-Domingue’s deputies

“[T]hey are inexcusable in my eyes for having wanted to set themselves up as despotic masters of the mulattoes, and as tyrannical masters of the blacks…. To shake off the cruel and shameful yoke under which they groan, they are authorized to employ all possible means, even death, even if they are reduced to slaughtering their oppressors to the last.”

—Jean-Paul Marat, L’Amis du peuple, No. 624 (12 Dec. 1791)

On the 22 of August in 1791, after months of planning and secret Sunday meetings, a slave named Boukman led a revolt through the North Province of Saint-Domingue. The rebels, armed with torches, guns, sabers, and makeshift weapons, set fire to the plantations and burned the fields. They freed slaves as they marched. Their army grew with ready-made revolutionaries. Black slaves flocked to their cause. Although Boukman would not survive the revolution, what he and others had begun would be the first and only successful slave-revolution of the new world.

“Your houses, Monsieur le Marquis, are nothing but ashes, your belongings have disappeared, your administrator is no more. The insurrection has spread its devastation and carnage onto your properties,” wrote the plantation owner Millot in a letter to his neighbor, the absentee landlord the marquis de Gallifet.

The bourgeoisie of newly-revolutionary France had won political rights from the ancien regime. The free colored men of the French colony tried to enforce a law passed in France that would grant them the same. Despite the fact that the National Assembly of France had issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789—and despite powerful progressive forces in France who championed them—the rights it guaranteed were not extended to women or free Black men. The Declaration of the Rights of Women was stillborn in the National Assembly and a 1790 uprising of “free colored persons” (gens de couleur) to secure their rights  in the French colony of Saint-Domingue had been crushed. Its leader, Vincent Ogé, executed by the Colonial Assembly of Saint-Domingue.

At the beginning of the French Revolution, the planters of Saint-Domingue allied with their one-time foes, the merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux in France. Though the planters typically found themselves at the mercy of the merchants (due to the royal licenses, called the exclusif, which gave the merchants and merchant-houses monopolies on the importation of goods from the French colonies), they suddenly shared a common interest: the protection of the slave trade. The colonial production of coffee, indigo, and above all else sugar was reliant on the importation of Afrikan slaves. Slaves were worked to death on Saint-Domingue, and they made both planters and merchants rich. With the outbreak of the Revolution, that trade was suddenly threatened by French “radical Republicanism” which promised freedom and equality for all men. The planters and merchants formed the Club Massaic, a political club with the express purpose of  maintaining the racialized class system of Saint-Domingue.

Opposing the Club Massaic in France was the Société de amis des Noirs, a group of radical abolitionists, who demanded the immediate freedom of all the kingdom’s slaves. Radical republicanism was the enemy of the King, of the nobility, of the colonial planters, and of the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochelle.

In August of 1791, Black slaves held secret meetings near Gallifet plantation and swore to fight “a war to the death against the whites.” On August 22nd, rumors of a revolution terrorized the planters. They summoned a judge from the biggest city on the island, Le Cap Française, and when he arrived, the slaves rose up. Boukman, one of the early leaders of the rebellion, led nearly 2,000 slaves across the province.

On one plantation the rebels took “the refiner’s apprentice, dragged him to the front of the dwelling-house, and there hewed him into pieces with their cutlasses: his screams brought out the overseer, whom they instantly shot. The rebels now found their way to the apartment of the refiner and massacred him in his bed.” They then began attacking surrounding plantations. 

The slaves burned the hated cane fields. They torched the despised refineries and the sugar machinery that often crushed, mutilated, and mangled their arms. The conspiracy of revolt stretched across the entire northern plain of Saint-Domingue. Once the revolt was underway, the rebels destroyed “not only the cane fields, but also the manufacturing installations, sugar mills, tools and other farm equipment, storage bins, and slave quarters; in short, every material manifestation of their existence under slavery and its means of exploitation.”

By August 27, the insurgents were “reckoned 10,000 strong, divided into 3 armies, of whom 700 or 800 are on horseback, and tolerably well armed.” As in France, Saint-Domingue burned in the fire of revolution.

Class Composition of Saint-Domingue

Saint-Domingue had few members of the noble class; the French colonial nobility were absentee landlords who relied on agents and managers. Standing above the pre-revolutionary class hierarchy were the colonial secretaries, governors who were appointed by the king himself to oversee the island. The colonial secretaries had their seat in Le Cap Française, at Le Gouvernement, the house of the administration. Behind this was the military barracks, housing a thousand or more soldiers. The city was home to a large prison and several hospitals, twenty-five bakeries, and a slaughterhouse. It had its own municipal water system, fountains, and public squares. Le Cap’s 1,400 houses were built of stone and some had gardens. The city was called “the Paris of our island.”

The highest-ranked class on Saint-Domingue was that of the “grand blancs,” the big French planters who owned the majority of the land and the plantations. In 1700 there were 18 plantations in the whole colony, but by 1790 there were about 8,000 and Saint-Domingue produced roughly one half of all sugar consumed in Europe. Most of these plantations had been started by Frenchmen who took out loans from one of the merchant houses back in France. Those planters who prospered became members of the wealthy planter class, the grand blancs; those who failed turned over their plantations to the merchant houses in Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochell.

The plantation system was developed primarily for the export of sugar. Sugar production is labor-intensive. The mills were expensive and often deadly to their operators. When Saint-Domingue came into French hands in the 17th century, the plantations were worked by Afrikan slaves alongside white indentured laborers. In 1687, whites outnumbered Afrikan slaves on the island, 4,411 to 3,358. By 1700, the slave population was 9,082 and the white population had decreased by a few hundred. By the middle of the 18th century there were 150,000 slaves and fewer than 14,000 whites. In 1789 the official figures counted 465,000 slaves, 31,000 whites, and 28,000 free colored persons. At the end of the 18th century, more than 35,000 Afrikan slaves were brought to the island each year on the Middle Passage.

Later, the French built plantations for both indigo and coffee. Three-quarters of sugar and coffee sent to France was re-exported to other countries in Europe, with the difference in the price as it came into Bordeaux and Nantes and the price sold to Europe pocketed by the great merchant concerns in those cities. As many as 25 million French people depended on the Saint-Domingue trade. Nantes and Bordeaux flourished off of this trade. They became important centers of revolutionary activity and many of the bourgeoisie who fought for greater freedom for their class, for a political voice in the Kingdom of France, were only able to do so because they had grown fat on the trade of sugar and coffee.

On plantations with absentee landlords like those held by nobles or the merchant-houses, the chief agent was the procureur, who had power of attorney. These agents hired gérants, managers, but rarely visited the plantations themselves. The managers often exploited the slaves for their own gain, skimming commodities or money for themselves. The biggest plantations had économes, overseers, hired by managers and owners, who monitored the slaves in the fields and tracked the plantation’s slave population. These were all white or free colored men.

There was also a population of white urban craftsmen, and, increasingly as the 18th century went on, a growing class of poor or unemployed white persons who migrated into the colony with the hope that they might make themselves wealthy planters and plantation owners. Poor whites (petit blancs) were directed by the white planter class to vent much of their class-anger at the free colored people, many of whom were moderately wealthy or who owned slaves and small plantations of their own. This helped alleviate generalized class struggle in the colony.

Free colored persons (gens de couleur), were a legally recognized racial caste. Membership in this caste was initially small; in the early 18th century, many people of mixed Afrikan descent were legally classified as white, By the 1760s, new racial laws and measurements recategorized many of these persons and determined them to be “colored” — by blood quantum. In 1764, a royal decree forbade persons categorized in this fashion from practicing medicine, surgery, or pharmacy. The next year, another decree excluded them from working as lawyers or in the offices of notaries. A 1773 law made it illegal for them to take the names of their masters or white relatives. A 1779 regulation made it illegal for free people of color to “affect the dress, hairstyles, styles, or bearing of whites.” By the time of the Revolution, free colored people were subject to many laws discriminating against them on the basis of “race.” (There were many legal categories of “color” based on blood quantum.)

Still, wealthy free colored persons sent their children to be educated in France. White men married free colored women — however, in the 1750s and ‘60s some of those who had done so were removed as administrators and military officers. Poor whites or those arriving in the colony seeking to make their fortune were confronted with well-established free colored persons; in a naked maneuver designed to secure a cross-class alliance, the wealthy white planters assisted these poor whites by agitating for that legislation which deprived free colored persons of political, social, and economic rights.

Below the free colored people were the ranks of the Black slaves. The top of the slave hierarchy was marked by the slave driver. Drivers (or overseers) were in charge of the field slaves and often tasked with whipping those who where chosen for punishment. They had better food, clothes, and housing than field hands, and sometimes acted as collaborators with the masters and managers. Yet, a French manual for plantation masters advised them to watch their drivers carefully, as they were the most rebellious slaves on the plantation — and not without good reason. They had the most freedom out of all the slaves, and often gathered on Sundays to discuss matters with drivers from neighboring plantations. These men were the organizers of the revolt in 1791, doing most of the planning work at these Sunday meetings.

The horrors of the middle passage are well-documented. Over 100,000 slaves died during transport. 685,000 slaves were brought into Saint-Domingue from 1700-1793. Saint-Domingue accounted for between 8 and 11 million slaves overall, perhaps 10 percent of the entire Atlantic slave trade. Each year, 5 to 6 percent of the slaves died, an enormous fatality rate. Without a constant stream of new slaves from Afrika, the colony would exhaust its exploited Black workforce by literally working them to death in a matter of years.

The slaves on the sugar plantations were subject to the worst conditions on the entire island. Sugar refining was brutal and dangerous, and consumed the lives of the slaves on the plantations. Thus, the slave population was divided between the sugar slaves and the coffee and indigo slaves; these groups were further divided into drivers, artisans (barrel makers, sugarboilers, and so on), and field hands. Enslaved women were excluded from the high-status work. They worked as domestics or field-hands, and were also used as “breeding stock” — subject to rape, assault, and sexual exploitation by masters, managers, and overseers. Slaves were permitted to maintain personal garden plots, the produce of which they ate or sought permission to go to market on Sundays to sell.

Class Forces at Work

The tensions in the colony of Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Revolution ran thusly: 

1. White planters, “grand blancs”. By and large supporting the bourgeois Revolution in France, the planters generally joined with Club Massaic and the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, etc. They were opposed to the expansion of rights for free people of color, and violently opposed to any degree of liberation for the slaves. However, once the Revolution was underway, the planters would increasingly struggle against the current of radical republicanism that began to threaten the privileges of the big merchant houses.
2. White artisans and “petit blancs”. White artisans were positioned to become allies of the planters through their shared desire to maintain slavery, but they were less independence-minded and tended to be more loyal to France. Poor whites were non-revolutionary, but more or less allied with the white planters through a combined hatred of the racialized people of color, particularly those who had a higher class-status.
3. The free people of color. Opposed to the freeing of Black slaves, the free people of color also supported the Revolution in France and saw the position of Club Massaic as hypocritical while distancing themselves from the more radical abolitionist positions. Essentially, the free people of color on the island were agitating for expanded political rights and the right to assimilate into white French society. The free people of color were mostly concentrated in the west and the south; there they were armed and well-organized.
4. Black slaves. The enslaved population was divided into strata of its own: urban slaves, domestic slaves, drivers, and field slaves.
   1. Urban and domestic slaves. About 100,000 of the 500,000 slaves in Saint-Domingue were cooks, personal servants, artisans, etc. As a class, they were not inclined to join any movement, relying on the status of their masters to protect them.
   2. Drivers and field slaves. The 400,000 slaves who worked the fields or who directly administered the plantations were subject to the most brutal and inhumane treatment; these were the slaves that would become the engine of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, led by the drivers who organized the uprising.
5. The Maroons. There were a not-insignificant number of Afrikan slaves who escaped into the central mountains or the surrounding territories and became outlaws, raiders, and so forth. These so-called Maroons were often hardened warriors. There were also, among the slaves, those who had just recently been transported (stolen) from Afrika, many of whom had been taken in warfare. Regardless of their station or class as slaves, these slaves, “most of whom can barely say two words of French but in their country where accustomed to fighting wars,” taught the Saint-Domingue revolution tactics the French regulars were unable to match.

Setting the Stage for the Revolution

The initial conflict in Saint-Domingue was between the free people of color and the white population. As Revolution swept through France and the National Assembly became more radical, opening a split between the bourgeoisie and the French aristocracy, the upper strata of the free people of color in Saint-Domingue began to agitate for commensurate political rights as those that were being extended to the citizens of France.

Vincent Ogé, a free colored man who was in France when the Revolution broke out, appeared before the National Assembly with Julien Raimond to represent the free men of color on Saint-Domingue. They presented a petition which warned that “there still exists in one province of this Empire a race of men debased and degraded; a class of citizens consigned to contempt, to all the humiliation of slavery… [Though] born citizens and free” they were “slaves in the land of liberty.”

They tried to win over the planters at Club Massiac. They presented a plan for rights to be granted to “quadroons” (someone with one quarter Afrikan or Indigenous descent) born of legitimate parents with at least two generations of freedom. Ogé privately gave the club a separate plan — one which started by granting rights to free colored persons, but which would abolish slavery little by little. Club Massaic listened, but promised them nothing. As a result, they allied themselves with the Société des amis des Noirs. They presented a cahier des doléances to the National Assembly calling for “equality for all non-whites and freedom for mulatto slaves.”

Although many of the planters and merchants supported limited political rights for the free colored people, the call for full equality roused Club Massaic. The club took action against the delegates to protect the institution of slavery. The planter Tanguy de la Boissière published a pamphlet in 1789 arguing that the “pivot” of the “constitution, legislation, and regime of Saint-Domingue” must be “everything for the planter… There can be in Saint-Domingue only slaves and masters.” In March of 1790, the National Assembly proposed a law that the constitution of France would not be applied to the colonies. The law that was passed by the National Assembly stated that “all people” who were property owners over twenty-five would participate in the elections for the colonial assembly. The abolitionists in the National Assembly knew what was happening: the ambiguous language meant the French National Assembly at home was leaving the question for the colonial assembly of Saint-Domingue abroad — an assembly in which every representative was a planter and slave-owner.

That July, Ogé left France with a shipload of guns. In October of 1790, he landed in Saint-Domingue and armed hundreds of free colored men in the hope that he could enforce the law. He marched on and seized the town of Grande-Rivière, then sent letters to the Revolutionary Provincial Assembly in Le Cap demanding it apply the National Assembly decree granting all free citizens political rights. His uprising, however, was crushed by troops dispatched from Le Cap. He was tortured and executed.

By the following August, the North Province was in flames — not for the political rights of the free colored people, but for the freedom of the Black slaves. A rebel who was caught and executed was found to have “in one of his pockets pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man and the Sacred Revolution; in his vest pocket was a large packet of tinder and phosphate and lime. On his chest he had a sack full of hair, herbs, and bits of bone, which they call a fetish.” The objective and subjective conditions for revolution had combined; the Black slaves of Saint-Domingue had developed a revolutionary consciousness.

In early August of 1791, before Boukman and the revolt marched through the cane, the free colored people organized a mass political assembly at Mirebalais. They selected delegates to the National Assembly of France, but were ordered by the governor to disband when the revolt broke out in the North Province. The angry free colored people took up arms. 

In the Western Province, the free colored people sought allies and took in a contingent of rebel slaves and dubbed them the Swiss — like the Swiss mercenaries in service to the King of France. The free colored rebels promised the Swiss they would be granted freedom for their service. By September 1791, the so-called Confederation of free colored people and Black slaves burned out and destroyed a contingent of troops from Port-au-Prince. A wealthy white planter proposed a solution: make peace with the free colored people. This betrayed the white class-alliance between planters and “petits blancs,” but it brought the free colored persons within the Confederate alliance to the table.

The Black “Swiss” rebels marched with their allies into Port-au-Prince. Behind closed doors, the white planters and free colored leadership agreed to deport the slaves rather than free them. An attempt was made to sell them in Belize, but when that failed they were simply abandoned on Jamaica. The British took them back to Saint-Domingue where they were executed by the French soldiery for their loyalty.

The attempted peace treaty also broke down. When a free colored soldier was insulted by a white soldier they began to fight. An angry white crowd lynched the Confederate, Scapin, and the free-colored soldiers opened fire on the white “patriots.” The outnumbered free-colored soldiers retreated from the town, but the whites followed them, murdering free-colored citizens in their homes or the street, and inadvertently setting fire to Port-au-Prince and reducing it to ashes.

The New France

In France, the Revolution was growing more radical. The King had been forced to sign the short-lived 1791 constitution, making the National Assembly the chief legislative body of the Kingdom and transforming France, with a pen stroke, into a constitutional monarchy. Civil commissioners were dispatched from the Assembly to Saint-Domingue, where they arrived in November; they carried a decree from the National Assembly stating that the “laws concerning the state of unfree persons and the political status of men of color and free blacks” would be established by the colonial assembly, overturning their previous promise for political rights.

The National Assembly had also declared a general amnesty for “acts of revolution.” Those who “returned to order” would not be charged with crimes for the violence or sedition they had committed.

Jean-François and Georges Biassou, the two victorious generals of the slave rebellion in the North Province, demanded the inclusion of the slaves in the amnesty. The planters refused, even as the commissioners realized there was no military solution that could destroy the growing power of the slave rebellion. Louis de Tousard, a veteran of the American Revolution, and a French officer, warned Jean-François and Biassou “Do not believe that the whites, and especially the members of an assembly of representatives from the colony, would lower themselves so far as to receive conditions dictated and demanded of them by their rebel slaves.”

Jean-François and Biassou replied to the commissioners, the planters, and Tousard, that “[o]ne hundred thousand men are in arms… Eighty percent of the population” of the north was rising. The leadership of this Black revolution was “entirely dependent on the general will” of the insurgents. Still, even Jean-François and Biassou, the rebel slave-generals, did not foresee abolition, merely reformed slavery. The rebel camps made it clear in no uncertain terms that they would not disband. There was no negotiation that would bring them back to the plantation. They would have general abolition of slavery, or they would, as Marat would say in December, be reduced to “slaughtering their oppressors to the last.”

After nearly a year of open rebellion, property damage, massacres of both Black slaves and white planters, on April 4, 1792, the National Assembly of France declared that “the hommes de couleur and the nègres libres must enjoy, along with the white colons, equality of political rights.” Did this free the slaves? No. It conscripted the free persons of color to fight the slaves. It reduced the complex racial hierarchy of Saint-Domingue to a simple one: on the one hand there were the free, and on the other the enslaved, and among the free there were no racial distinctions under the law.

In October 1792, news arrived in Saint-Domingue that the king had been suspended during an August uprising in Paris. The French Revolution entered yet another phase: one of radical republicanism in which a new assembly, based on universal male suffrage, was elected: the National Convention. France was now a republic. The colonial commissioners, Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel were given extraordinary powers to suppress enemies of the republic by the National Convention.

In January of 1793, Louis XVI was executed. Spain and Britain joined Austria and declared war on France. As the other European powers threatened Saint-Domingue, the republic sent a new governor, François-Thomas Galbaud du Fort, who was a Port-au-Prince property owner. He immediately got into a dispute with the colonial commissioners; Sonthonax had him imprisoned. In response, the white sailors and French soldiers attacked Le Cap and the commissioners.

Sonthonax and Polverel issued a new decree: all “black warriors” who would “fight for the Republic” would be free. Any slave who fought in their defense would be “equal to all free men” and receive “all the rights belonging to French citizens.” But so, too, did the Spanish offer to free those who would fight on their behalf and capture the colony for the crown of Spain.

It was on August 29, 1793, that Sonthonax issued a decree abolishing slavery in the Northern Province. In the west and south, Polverel followed suit. Not only did the commissioners free them, the slaves were granted citizenship by the decrees.

From late 1793 until mid-1794, the British launched their invasion of Saint-Domingue. At the same time, the Spanish, from the Hispaniola side of the island, had recruited a number of free people of color, including the general Toussaint L’Ouverture. On 6 May 1794, after the Spanish crown refused to honor its promise to begin the abolition of slavery, L’Ouverture went over to the French and ambushed the Spanish as they emerged from attending mass at San Raphael. Toussaint’s Spanish-backed rebel army defected to Republican France and succeeded in pushing the Spanish out. The unifying colony now presented a threat to Britain in her rear: a slave revolt in Jamaica. L’Ouverture and the revolutionary general Rigaud together defeated the British and secured the island. An officer corps of free colored men was emerging, leading armies of liberated slaves.

Pan-Afrikanism and the Caribbean

The revolution flickered and was snuffed out in France, devolving in the Thermidorian Reaction, the execution of Robespierre and the radical Jacobins, the instatement of the White Terror, and ended in the creation of the Directorate, which was continually at war with all of Europe. After suffering abysmal military defeats, the Directorate was overthrown in the 18th Brumaire coup of Napoleon on 9 November 1799.

The revolutionary forces in Saint-Domingue, having secured the island and stilled the bloodletting among rival generals, declared their sovereignty from the French Consulate. In response, Napoleon dispatched an expeditionary force to Saint-Domingue to restore it to France, to profitability, and most of all, to slavery. Toussaint was defeated on 25 April 1802 and taken in chains to France. Rebel troops were executed by sulfur dioxide gas in the holds of General Rochambeau’s ships, shot en masse by firing squad, hanged, and drowned in bags.

The French troops, devastated by yellow fever and fighting, were reinforced by a Polish Legion who, seeing in the bravery of the slaves an echo of the plight of divided Poland, defected to join General Dessalines and would eventually be given citizenship and recognized as black under the Haitian constitution. The island revolted against the reimposition of slavery. The island revolts continued throughout 1802, and became a general war in October, when General Dessalines repudiated the peace and led the entire island once more against the forces of Consulate France toward independence.

Dessalines, in large part thanks to the British war on France preventing Napoleon from reinforcing the island, defeated the French armies and, on 1 January 1804, declared Saint-Domingue to be free and independent, rechristening it Haiti after its Arawak name.

In February of 1806 the young United States Congress adopted an embargo bill and continuously subject the Republic of Haiti to embargo until 1810 and did not trade with the republic until the 1820s. The U.S. did not recognize Haiti until 1862, after the southern states seceded. In 1825, the Haitian Republic was forced to pay 150 million francs to ex-slaveholders. Haiti eventually paid off its debt in 1947 — which bankrupted the country and forced it to take a loan from the imperialist French banks. In 1922, the U.S. seized all of Haiti’s customs houses, institutions, banks, and the national treasury.

This theft of wealth annihilated the productive capacity of the Haitian economy throughout the 19th and 20th century and has subjected the republic to a continuous cycle of debt, poverty, and invasion. In 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was removed in a coup d’etat that was self-admittedly orchestrated by France because he called for reparations. The coup general who replaced him, Gerard Latortue, withdrew the demand. It remains one of the poorest countries in the Americas and nearly its entire government operating budget comes from the Venezuelan oil alliance Petrocaribe.

On 7 July 2021, the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in the wake of his effort to combat U.S.-backed drug smuggling and trafficking (with roots in the 1986 Service d’Intelligence National, a CIA cutout that moved drugs through Haiti). Since that date, Haiti has had no president.

The U.S. settler-republic refused to aid Haiti because of the slaves they harbored in their own bosom. Despite the shared Enlightenment roots of the U.S. war for independence, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. sided with the Kingdom of France when it came to money and the fear of a slave uprising. The strength of the colonialist states in the west is such that if any of the imperialized nations attempts to break free from the U.S.-led capitalist world-market, if it attempts to shake the chains of imperialism and neo-colonialism, it marks itself out, just as the Republic of Haiti did, as a target.

However, each of these imperialized countries contains one or more New Afrikan nations; it is these descendents of the horrors of chattel slavery who have the power to shatter the imperialist chain. By banding together and rising all at once across the west, by threatening the monopoly capitalists not only in the peripheral colonies but also in the semi-colonies of the U.S. and Canada, the thinly-spread imperialist armies will be divided, unable to concentrate, unable to crush the rising state after state. It is through western Pan-Afrikanism that Haiti will be free of its debts and its status as a neocolony. It is through western Pan-Afrikanism that the Black Belt, the U.S. region of New Afrika, will throw off its capitalist, vampiric, rulers.

Walter Rodney wrote that, for “the vast majority of New World blacks, phrases such as ‘the reserve army of labour’, ‘labour reservoir’ and ‘last hired first fired’ adequately sum up the position. The reference to the black community in the US as an internal colony has many justifications, not least of which is the remarkable fact that black labour within America has virtually the same relation to whites in terms of skills as does continental African labour with regards to Europe and white America.”

“Imperialism,” he says, “has used racism in its own interest, but it turns out to be a double-edged blade, and that very unity that is engendered among black people — the unity of common conditions and common exploitation and oppression — is being turned around as a weapon to be used against imperialism.“

The lesson of Haiti is thus: we rise together when we rise, or we are cut down and crushed one by one, not only New Afrika, but the proletariat of the so-called New World.