At a time when the fury of the popular classes has manifested such actions as the daring execution of Brian Thompson, it is curious that the many leaders of the two hospitals have not considered what is happening right now in homes across Connecticut. Parents are being told that their children are likely to suffer, perhaps even kill themselves in the coming years. There are names and faces associated with this suffering, and they aren’t some distant faceless bureaucrats in Washington, protected by the many miles and layers of red tape.

Oh, yes, the executive order that set this tragedy in motion came from Washington. It was drafted by some staffer in some back room. It was signed by the inhuman flesh-puppet Donald Trump. The blame for his election can be equally shared between GOP members and Democrats. So yes, there is plenty of blame to go around.

But gunmen and bombmakers aren’t likely to be interested in them. At least, not for now. The untold legions of parents that found out on July 24 that their children have been sentenced to suffer and perhaps to die aren’t likely to be hunting for figures in Washington to punish.

They will be looking for the people in their community that caused this tragedy. And they will find them.

Curious that these people haven’t built bunkers, hired private security, and gone off the grid.

Because they should.

1. CEO: Christopher O’Connor. ︎
2. CEO: James E. Shmerling. ︎
3. YNHH Board Members: Thomas Balcezak, William J. Aseltyne, Gail W. Kosoyla, Pamela Sutton-Wallace, Alan Friedman, Anne Diamond, Frank Ciminiello, LIsa Stump, Michael Angelini and Pam Scagliarini; CT Children’s Board Members: Bill Agostinucci, Jonathan M. Carroll, Bob Duncan, Paul Dworkin, Matthew Farr, Bridgett Feagin, Christine Finck, Paulanne Jushkevich, Sarah Matney, Lawrence Milan, James E. Moore, Deb Pappas, Lori R. Pelletier, Juan C. Salazar, and R. Moses Vargas. ︎

NIGHT-VISION – Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, by Butch Lee and Red Rover first circulated in the activist underground thirty years ago. Despite presenting a scathing premonition of how capitalism and neo-colonialism would function in the 21st century — a vision that has only become more accurate since its publication — it remains obscure. The text has been relegated to a peculiar limbo. Its content is much harsher and more discomforting than the cultural criticism that resonates in liberal-academic circles, yet NIGHT-VISION also seems fairly unknown among its intended audience of queer-feminist Marxists, Maoists, and anarchists. In the only other review this author could easily locate, one written 13 years ago, J. Moufawad Paul argues that Marxists may disparage the text’s deviations from orthodox Marxism — for instance, its authors ascribe rationality to the anarchy of production and have an anarchistic enthusiasm for “autonomous struggles in the midst of chaos.” But while the text contains some un-Marxist conclusions and unwieldy notions, these are reasons to read NIGHT-VISION, rather than dismiss it. After all, for the immortal science to deserve its status, it should endure this kind of cage rattling.

NIGHT-VISION contains compelling analyses of gender, nationality, and race, and how these have created different classes and new class struggles beyond those typically described in Marxist texts. Even if some of what Lee and Rover have concocted is dubious, it remains worthy of interrogation. Their perspective, and fiery rhetoric, are a welcome change from the mire of discourse on these subjects found both online and in physical organizing spaces. 

Lee and Rover bake race, gender, nationality, etc. into a modern class structure, developing the idea that oppression forges only discrete classes, and that other identities are “class in drag.” For example, instead of using the standard historical phrasing, in which colonization created Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity as races, the authors argue they were created as classes. They argue for a deeper reading of how race, gender, and nationality alter relationships to production. For instance, they expand upon the Sakaist notion that the white proletariat constitutes a separate class from the Black, Indigenous, and Third World proletariat. They depict how the common exploitation of previously distinct African and Indigenous peoples, who had been of separate races and nations, homogenized them into the monolithic oppressed classes of the Black Slave and the Native. Black peoples’ shared experiences as slaves and the imposition of common languages like English or French created the nation-class identity of “New Afrikan.” Similarly, the experience of being marked for extermination through genocide, the cultural genocide against their languages and customs, and the enclosure on “the res” created the Indigenous nation-class, whose role in production, according to the settlers, is to go extinct.

This is a riff, or a logical extension to what Marx and Engels describe when they articulate how economic crises in capitalism are crises of overproduction — it is no longer just commodities, productive forces, or capital itself that are overproduced, and need to be disposed of, but entire societies and classes. This is worth pondering, even if it’s counterintuitive to scientifically break down how dying out is distinct from not owning the means of production.

NIGHT-VISION draws from an extensive theoretical basis. It cites heavily from the expected canon like Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney, but also draws on criminally under-read revolutionaries and theoreticians such as Amilcar Cabral and Samir Amin. The influence of J. Sakai’s Settlers upon the text is abundantly clear. But what Lee and Rover do with these texts is extend their analysis to the furthest peripheries of society — arenas of oppression that frequently go unacknowledged, even by the strata of would-be revolutionaries, communists, etc. The authors apply the traditional Marxist lens of historical materialism to neo-colonial circumstances such as the narcotics economy, the textile sweatshops of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the semi-slave operated semiconductor factories of Hong Kong. They emphasize, through visceral descriptions and first person accounts, the abhorrent conditions that make the Western standard of living possible. Again, their critique invokes Marx himself, in that it is, “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” 

Lee and Rover’s portrayal culminates with the assertion that neocolonialism consists of the squalorous 19th century conditions Marx described in the mines and factories of his time, magnified and permeating to the furthest corners of society, on a world scale. This sounds obvious, but they argue that some Marxists have benefited from their class position to the extent they now misunderstand key Marxist concepts, such as primitive accumulation and the basic definition of certain classes. In Capital Vol.1, Marx defined primitive accumulation as “the expropriation of immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner” that creates the first capital, and makes capitalist relations possible.  In NIGHT-VISION, Lee and Rover contend that most readers of Marx only understand the surface equation of what Marx meant — different Europeans conquering and enslaving first each other, and then broadening their conquest “outward in ever-widening circles of colonialism, in particular to Indian and Afrikan slavery” (185) — but NIGHT-VISION’s most compelling thesis is that primitive accumulation actually began as witch hunts in the 13th century. 

This claim is a bit of a historical oddity, as the historical consensus is that witch hunts didn’t begin until early modernity, i.e. the 16th century. The discrepancy is due to the authors’ conferral of witchlike qualities to the semi-monastic Beguine and Beghard communities that existed in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Though similar to convents, Beguine communes were not formally part of the Church. The authors denote efforts by the Church to expropriate Beguine property and persecution of Beguine women, such as Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1310, as the first witch hunts. 

Lee and Rover further describe how the witch hunts took on institutional form from the 15th century onward, and were social camouflage for the genocide, economic dispossession, and proletarianization of women. Due to the decimation of available labor from centuries of war and the Black Death, European countries and churches had an economic imperative to expropriate widows and any women who resisted their own commodification and their enclosure as the primary inner labor colony.

If you think this sounds exactly like Silvia Federici’s seminal 2004 text, Caliban and The Witch, you’d be right. But while Federici’s text received academic plaudits, was widely translated, and is taught in universities, scarcely anyone’s read 1993’s NIGHT-VISION, regardless of the texts’ sameness. Now, I’m not an intellectual property respecter, or someone who thinks plagiarism is necessarily wrong — in fact, different analysts using the same scientific tools should replicate the same conclusions about history. Still, the variegated treatment of Federici and her works, compared to Lee and Rover and their works, does speak to another of NIGHT-VISION’s conclusions — that the bourgeois classes are intellectually and materially parasitic upon the proletarian classes.

This seems like an obvious and redundant observation, but Lee and Rover use the framework they establish throughout the text to distinguish different class boundaries than those identified by orthodox Marxists. They take Marx’s observation that the first proletarians in England were women, children, and alien labor from England’s first colonies in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and carry it forward to the present. English men from every social strata resisted becoming proletarian for as long as they could, and constituted the first parasitic class. Today’s proletariat are the women, children, and alien labor of the Third World. It also includes the labor of the colonized and dispossessed who live in First World countries, who are collectively called the “Fourth World.” As capitalism expanded, first through colonialism and then neo-colonialism, access to membership in the parasitic classes also expanded, first to other “white” men, then to “white” women, and so on. With time, even formerly proletarian classes, such as the white working class, acquired the capacity for parasitism. After all, although the euro-American auto worker and the South African child semi-slave who mines Vanadium for pennies a day have the same relation to production, they clearly experience different degrees of exploitation. NIGHT-VISION claims that the gulf between these workers places them in different classes. It questions what meaningful solidarity western workers can possibly extend to the practically invisible and oppressed classes of the marginalized world, when their way of life is wholly dependent upon continued exploitation.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” For these reasons, capitalism always contains the conditions for class struggle and its own inevitable demise at the hands of the oppressed. What NIGHT-VISION does best is describe the “disturbances of social conditions,” that it defines as new classes and class struggles. Its study of historic and modern conditions is riveting. It creates a compelling parallel between capitalist crises of overproduction and the capitalist overproduction of class parasites, both of which act in concert to foment capitalism’s destruction. Ironically, the fate of capitalist parasites is the same fate that colonialism and then neo-colonialism attempt to impose upon their subjects — namely, extinction.

Where the text is weakest, unfortunately, is “what is to be done” with the information it presents. Its advocacy for disunity with parasites is only decorative, evocative language for what in practice is a call for unity between oppressed peoples. A communist movement will obviously isolate and repress class parasites. Its construal of uncounted numbers of national, racial, and gendered classes, some oppressed, some parasitic, in a web of struggle, is ultimately facile. After all, “socialism means the abolition of class” — for that to be possible, oppressed classes must align along their common oppressions, and not exacerbate struggles between themselves.

Overall, NIGHT-VISION is a double-edged sword. Its depiction and indictment of neo-colonial realities, “the terrain upon which we’re fighting” is stark, necessary and unforgiving, but it doesn’t offer compelling tactics for fighting on that terrain. Its construction of class creates new questions and as many semantic obstacles as it seeks to overcome. The authors’ tendency to excerpt at length from other works — there’s a thirteen page excerpt from another Butch Lee work, The Military Strategy of Women and Children, for example — may be helpful to a reader who’s new to theory or is unfamiliar with the source material. Lee and Rover may have intended NIGHT-VISION as an accessible compendium of thought for their movement. However, I found the quotations excessive in both length and quantity. Still, NIGHT-VISION’s fiery rhetoric and observations will appeal to readers interested in decolonization and land back, queer liberation, and feminism. At the end I couldn’t help but feel reaffirmed and encouraged to re-read Marx and Fanon, whose indelible presence permeates the work, even if the authors achieved this in an unorthodox manner. Ironically, the white working class — and chauvinists like those at Midwestern Marx, who have recently been attacking the NIGHT-VISION’s theoretical tradition — would benefit immensely from reading it, but they are also the most likely to dismiss it outright.   

Conservative men on social media are even posting photos of themselves in drag as a sort of “gotcha” to trans women — and perhaps inadvertently learning something about their own relationships to masculinity in the process. Others are sharing their discontent with childish displays of hyper-masculinity, by, for instance, uploading videos of themselves shooting Bud Light beer cans.

Caitlyn Jenner’s complaint that Bud Light is “going woke” might appear self-contradictory. After all, isn’t Jenner herself a trans woman? What would motivate one rich trans woman (a member of the Kardashian Dynasty) to publicly slam another, less rich trans woman for taking on a superficially pro-LGBT, and altogether inoffensive, corporate sponsorship? Exactly the fact that she’s rich!  Jenner, like all capitalists, is, before all else, a profiteer and an aspiring monopolist. She is a capitalist first, second, and third; any “solidarity” she might feel for other trans women is nothing compared with her wealth, which in turn is dependent on maintaining her public image as a conservative Republican. A bourgeois trans woman like Jenner would have no problem throwing another trans woman under her Cadillac Escalade if she stood to gain from it.

This is not to say that Anheuser-Busch is at all brave or a progressive champion of social justice and trans rights, merely for partnering with Mulvaney on an advertisement. Quite the opposite, in fact! The capitalists are featuring queer people and people of color in their media, advertisements, and marketing campaigns because they see a potential for profits. Although reactionary and chauvinist ideas, such as transphobia, are still widespread in the U.S., it appears that public opinion is becoming steadily more tolerant — toward LGBT people and other oppressed sections of the population — over time. Corporations have long-since taken the hint: in most cases, tolerance sells, and bigotry doesn’t. If the opposite were true, the capitalists would shift gears, and LGBT people would again be purged from representation in big corporate media. It’s really that simple. The “inclusivity” of the capitalists — their so-called “wokeness” — is nothing more or less than opportunistic profit seeking! 

But should we care? We should certainly be concerned about the proliferation of transphobia.  The latest barrage of fascist Republican attacks on the transgender community represents a last-ditch effort to reverse the tide of progress, to revive anti-LGBT bigotry in the U.S. public, to halt and roll back recent expansions of transgender civil rights. We must not wait for our rulers to “graciously” hand down pitiful reforms. Now is the time to stand up and fight back — to fight for our rights and the rights of our transgender family, friends, and neighbors. Our enemies seek to distract us — keeping us fixated on the latest social media frenzy, the latest colorful advertisement, the latest manufactured outrage — all the while Democrats and Republicans work hand in hand to make our mere existence even harder. 

 We must be steadfast in our position: that any and all instances of transphobia are intolerable. Transphobic vitriol and violence will continue under capitalism, even as the capitalists monetize “tolerance” of our identities. The “representation” politics the oppressed people are given is shallow and empty, because it does nothing to challenge, let alone abolish, the structures that oppress us: the rule of Capital, the white supremacist, settler-colonial order this empire was built on, and patriarchy. Socialism is the only path to the abolition of our oppressions, to the overthrow of our oppressors — the reactionaries who want to kill us and the capitalists who exploit and attempt to dupe us — and to the liberty and equality of all. We will remain principled and consistent in our efforts as we build a new world, one where “the last shall be first.” 

While Title IX, which built upon and extended protections in the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964, represented a progressive step toward the legal equality and political freedom of women, its sex-based language has allowed for legal ambiguity with regard to its amendment’s application to the rights of transgender people in education.

Namely, some elected officials and judges interpret “on the basis of sex” to refer to some concept of “biological sex” — and more narrowly to the “female” or “male” marker on an individual’s birth certificate. In other words, this interpretation holds that only “sex assigned at birth” is protected under Title IX. The problem with this interpretation is that how “biological sex” is defined in law is at odds with advancements in science: It has long been accepted by experts that a “biological sex” concept of humans’ bodies that reduces to a simple male–female dichotomy oversimplifies the matter and fails to encapsulate a diversity of experiences.

Put another way, human gametes (eggs and sperm) are indeed binary, but human bodies, and human experiences, are much more complex. Sexual development is now understood as an extremely complex “dance” of genetic, environmental, social, and psychological factors that does not fall into a strict binary. Outdated legal definitions of sex (and thus also gender) in the U.S., and in most countries, fail to reflect this.

On the other hand, some elected officials and judges interpret “sex” in Title IX and other laws to be interchangeable with the related concept “gender,” and therefore also “gender identity,” a legal category that depends not on one’s “sex assigned at birth,” but the way an individual self-identifies, and the way an individual really lives their life.

In 2010, the Obama administration’s Department of Education, in response to growing popular support for the rising transgender rights movement, became the first to adopt the latter interpretation of Title IX’s “on the basis of sex” clause. The department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued non-binding guidelines to Federally-funded institutions, including colleges and universities, with regard to single-sex classes, and who is eligible to participate in single-sex spaces. The Obama administration’s OCR held that “All students, including transgender students and students who do not conform to sex stereotypes, are protected from sex-based discrimination under Title IX,” and that schools “generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity in all aspects of the planning, implementation, enrollment, operation, and evaluation of single-sex classes.”

For a few years, between 2010 and 2017, transgender students, particularly in public colleges and universities, enjoyed a modicum — but only a modicum — of non-binding legal protection in education. Transgender students would at last be institutionally recognized as their self-identified gender, and thus afforded protection against sex-based discrimination — a long-awaited and long-fought-for reprieve. 

But the reprieve was never consolidated or expanded, and was not to last. Democrats in Congress never passed an amendment to Title IX, clarifying its protected categories in line with the Obama administration’s interpretation, during Obama’s presidency. Thus, when Obama’s second term as president ended and Trump entered office, the new extreme-right Department of Education eliminated the modicum of protection afforded by the previous administration’s guidelines. In 2020, the Trump administration’s Department of Education began to withhold Federal funding from colleges and universities that upheld the Obama administration’s guidelines, or which otherwise protected the rights of transgender students.

Internal documents leaked to The New York Times in 2018 showed that the Trump administration was preparing to “define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with,” and planned to institute rules whereby “Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.”

Again, it should be noted that genetic testing alone is wholly inaccurate in determining sex. As with previous and existing pseudoscientific policies, such as phrenology and blood quantum, the point is not to make “scientific sense” of social phenomena and their legal aspects, but to systematize bigotry and codify it in law.

Parallel battles over Title IX have been fought through the U.S. judiciary.

In the notable recent case Adams ex rel. Kasper v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida, the plaintiff, a mother of a transgender boy, sued the county school board, which had prohibited her son from using the boys’ bathroom; he was instead forced to use either the girls’ or gender-neutral bathrooms. The plaintiff argued that this constituted sex-based discrimination as prohibited under Title IX. A district court judge ruled in favor of Adams, finding that his right to be protected from discrimination, under Title IX and under the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, had been violated by the school board. The ruling represented a small, fleeting win for transgender rights. But the St. Johns County school board appealed, and in 2022, the 11th Circuit Court overruled the district court. The court’s 7–4 majority held that transgender students are protected neither by Title IX nor by the Fourteenth Amendment, and may be legally discriminated against by schools and other institutions.

The U.S. judicial system has become increasingly reactionary in recent years, stacked both with Trump-appointed extreme-right fascists and with Obama- and Biden-appointed “law and order” “moderate” fascists. A diminishing number of liberal judges, and vanishingly few “progressives,” are issuing a proportionately smaller number of legal “wins” for LGBT and women’s rights. In the meantime, the extreme-right conservative crusade, waged by the Trumpite faction of the Republican Party against LGBT people and women, especially in the domains of marriage equality, reproductive healthcare, transgender legal recognition, and care for transgender youth, is gaining traction in state legislatures and Federal courts.

What are the purportedly pro-LGBT, “progressive” Democrats doing to counteract and fight back against this extreme-right fascist Republican crusade? Unfortunately for us, next to nothing. At most, the Democrats are using their one-seat majority in the Senate and their hold on the presidency to block the Republicans from instituting a regime of wholesale elimination against LGBT people, and a regime of absolute repression against women. But the Democratic Party is far beneath the task of fighting for our civil rights and liberties, and that is proven by the fact that, during the two years it maintained majorities in both houses of Congress, and the presidency, from 2021–23, it did next to nothing to convert popular will into law.

The Democratic Party, by and large, represents not progress, not advancements to civil rights and liberties, but merely the “left-wing” of U.S. fascism. It functions as a weight on one “side of the aisle,” that “balances out” the “right-wing” of U.S. fascism, represented by the Republican Party. In the aftermath of every Republican expansion of fascism — take the many extreme-right laws and policies introduced under the Trump administration, for instance — the Democrats assume control of the sinking ship, stabilize the wreckage, and, most importantly, consolidate the expansion. The Democrats do not fight the fascism of the Republican Party; they enable it.

Now, in line with this purpose, the Biden administration’s Department of Education has proposed a new interpretation of Title IX with regard to transgender students. One might expect the outwardly pro-LGBT administration to propose an expansion of Title IX to unequivocally and fully protect transgender students at every level of the U.S. education system.

Unfortunately not. The Biden administration instead proposes a compromise with the fascist Republicans on the “question” of transgender rights.

A document published by the Department of Education on April 6, 2023, titled “FACT SHEET: U.S. Department of Education’s Proposed Change to its Title IX Regulations on Students’ Eligibility for Athletic Teams,” states the following:

The [Biden administration’s] proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.

So far, so good. Except,

The proposed rule also recognizes that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation. The proposed rule would … [give] schools the flexibility to develop their own participation policies.

This is a highly euphemistic, weasley way to say that, under the Biden administration’s proposed Title IX rules, “in some instances,” schools will be allowed to discriminate against transgender students. The proposed regulation reads:

If a [Federal Government-funded school] adopts or applies sex-related criteria that would limit or deny a student’s eligibility to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity [i.e., more correctly, “that would discriminate against transgender students”], such criteria must, for each sport, level of competition, and grade or education level: (i) be substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective, and (ii) minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied.

What this complicated jumble of words means, what the Biden administration is really proposing, practically and bluntly speaking, is this: Discrimination against transgender students in schools is permitted, so long as the school officials are nice about it.

So much for the “most pro-LGBT presidential administration in U.S. history” — as some gullible liberals have lauded Biden. So much for the “party of LGBT rights.”

What we really have is the party of “compromise” — compromise with fascism. What we really have, in the Democratic Party, is the left-wing of U.S. fascism — a left-wing that continually makes overtures to the extreme-right, that routinely sells out the most oppressed for momentary bumps in opinion polls, and that, in the long-run, serves only to consolidate the rise of U.S. fascism in its most brutal, militaristic, terroristic form.

Our only response to the Biden administration’s half-measured, two-faced, compromised “protections” of transgender rights must be an emphatic “Not good enough!”

We must always demand more. We must demand full equality before the law, full and unequivocal legal protections for transgender people, absolute guarantees for our civil liberties. We must demand no compromises with fascism.

And we must not ask nicely. We must rid ourselves of the illusion that we can “vote in” the change we need; we must dispense with the idea that “our” representatives will listen to us, if only we call their offices and write them “firm, but polite” letters.

Comrade Assata Shakur rightly said, “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

No, we must win our demands from our oppressors. We must force them to concede to popular will. Pleading will accomplish nothing. We must speak with the force of the only language our oppressors understand — the language of the unheard oppressed, of mass demonstrations, boycotts, occupations, and more. We must speak the language of organized mass political struggle, and we must not relent until our popular demands are met in full.

Only then will the civil rights and liberties of transgender people be converted from a political ideal to a political reality. Only then will we win the justice we seek.

The Republican bill, should it become law, would bar transgender girls from participating in gender-divided sports in public schools, and bar transgender women from participating in gender-divided sports in public colleges and universities.

The Republicans passed their bill in the House with a narrow 219–203 majority; the vote split exactly on party lines, with all House Republicans voting for it, and all Democrats voting against. It will now be sent to the Democratic-majority Senate, where it will almost certainly be defeated, again along party lines. If the bill does pass in both houses of Congress, President Biden has promised in a recent “Statement of Administration Policy” document that he would veto it, which would kill it.

However, in the same document, and in other statements, the Biden administration has conceded that it considers some discrimination against transgender students in sports “fair.” Biden’s only problem with the Republican approach is that “one-size-fits-all” discrimination would be a step too far, and that a more “nuanced” regime of discrimination against transgender children would be preferable — such is the “left-wing” of U.S. fascism.

But discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg; what lies beneath the waves is the means by which the Republicans intend to enforce their discriminatory regime.

The Republican bill uses a scientifically outdated, oversimplified, and incoherent definition of “biological sex” as the basis of its anti-trans measures: It defines “females” and “males” according to “reproductive anatomy” as noted by a doctor at the moment of an individual’s birth, and recorded on that individual’s birth certificate. The bill stipulates that “inspection” of “reproductive anatomy” would be legally required to determine whether some children and some college students have the right to participate in sports in their respective public schools and universities.

In a statement, House Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a Democrat who aligns with her party’s “progressive” wing, and whose daughter is transgender, protested against the bill, and focused on this aspect in particular. “How do you verify a girl’s ‘reproductive anatomy’?” asked Jayapal, rhetorically, referring to language in the Republican bill, “If a young girl, if your daughter, doesn’t look ‘feminine’ enough, is she subject to examination? This is absolutely absurd.”

The answer to Rep. Jayapal’s second question is a horrifying affirmative.

The Republican bill would not only discriminate against transgender youth; it would accomplish this by instituting a regime of child sexual abuse in public schools. Transgender girls, as well as cisgender girls who do not appear sufficiently “female,” would be subject to inspections of their genitalia by school officials. In no uncertain terms, and with zero exaggeration, if this bill became law, children in public schools would be required by law to expose their private parts to adult public school staff, merely to participate in school sports and other phys. ed. activities.

At first glance, it may seem self-contradictory of the Republican Party, which presents itself as the party of “common sense” and “family values,” to have also made itself the party of institutional child sexual abuse — the party of pedophilia. But that’s the thing about fascism — it doesn’t have to make sense. Fascism outwardly embraces irrationality, for the sake of justifying its inward-facing logic: cruelty, and cruelty for its own sake. Critical scholars of (and against) fascism have long recognized that there is no coherent, integral “theory of fascism,” nor can there be. For instance, the British Communist leader Rajani Palme Dutt wrote:

The reality of Fascism is the violent attempt of decaying capitalism to defeat the proletarian revolution and forcibly arrest the growing contradictions of its whole development. All the rest is decoration and stage-play, whether conscious or unconscious, to cover and make presentable or attractive this basic reactionary aim, which cannot be openly stated without defeating its purpose. 

In other words, fascists will always hide their programs of reactionary violence — their state repression of the oppressed masses and our struggles for freedom — their real, fascist aims, behind palatable marketing: behind “family values” and similar slogans. Fascists will always lie, and have long-since proven themselves very skillful liars, from Mussolini and Hitler to “our” American Trumpites. That’s why what a fascist tells you he wants is irrelevant; what matters is what he really intends to do. 

It is therefore no surprise that the Republican Party fascists present themselves as defending the rights of “biologically female” girls and women, even when, with the very next breath, they pass a bill to institute a regime of child sexual abuse against girls — cisgender and transgender alike — in public schools, and a regime of invasive “medical” inspections of women athletes’ bodies — again, cisgender and transgender alike — at public colleges and universities. The goal of this horrific legislation is not to “save women’s sports,” as some of the sex-criminal fascist Republicans claim, but to invade women’s bodies, and for that reason it presents a danger not only to transgender women, but also to our cisgender sisters.

Rajani Palme Dutt wrote that “Fascism has produced nothing, and can produce nothing. For Fascism is the expression only of disease and death.”

The fascism of the Republican Party is nothing but the agonized howling of the declining and decaying U.S. Empire, and the Republican pedophile fascists are nothing but the representatives of the extreme-right faction of this empire’s ailing monopoly-capitalist dictatorship. For as long as this settler-colonial, white supremacist, capitalist empire lingers and staggers on through the march of history, as long as it continues to prolong its inevitable demise, the fascist Republican Party will produce nothing but misery for and terror against the dispossessed, the poor and exploited, the marginalized and vulnerable, the wretched of the Earth.

American fascism will produce this misery because the Republicans and Democrats alike already know what growing numbers of the oppressed masses are every day coming to realize: Only the wretched of the Earth, conscious of the need to organize ourselves as a political force, willing to stand and fight, and no longer paralyzed reactionary terror, have the power to overthrow our oppressors. Only the wretched of the Earth can bring her, and ourselves, salvation.

Since the tragic Covenant School shooting in Nashville on March 27th, the capitalist media and fascist reactionaries have begun a campaign of defamation on several trans women. Kayla Denker, a trans communist and armed community defense advocate, as well as Alana McLaughlin, a trans MMA fighter of similar political background, have been continuously slandered as terrorists, antifa thugs, extremists, and supporters of Audrey Hale, the perpetrator of the Covenant School shooting. In typical fashion, the capitalist promise of free speech and free press seems to only mean the right of the ruling class to lie with impunity while silencing and drowning out the truth. It would seem ruining the life of upstanding citizens is of no consequence to the fearmongering corporate media when profit can be made from inciting outrage!

Two particularly harmful lies have been boosted by the mainstream press. On March 5th, Ms. Denker posted a video on TikTok and Twitter posing with a rifle and a caption supporting armed self defense:

However, after the Nashville shooting, right-wing trolls sent her video viral, insinuating that it was published after the shooting and in solidarity with Audrey Hale. This blatant lie was then picked up on by the Daily Mail, who not only repeated the lie — and as of writing this article, the lie remains published — but the article as originally published called her an Antifa member and implied a connection between her and a “Trans Day of Vengeance” march — which had also been scheduled prior to the shooting. Ms. Denker has made clear she has no affiliation with any organizations and was not involved with organizing any march. In a follow-up video responding to the press coverage, she resolutely refuted any connection with or sympathy for Audrey Hale, condemning his actions. Similar coverage was made by Newsweek, though the story has since been edited to reflect proper chronology.

Even with a late (and partial) correction to the record, it’s clear that the damage of the inflammatory rhetoric and defamation has already been done, as Ms. Denker privately expressed fears that she may lose her Archeology job over the overwhelming onslaught of character assassination from the press and social media.

It seems that Ms. Denker’s fears were well founded. After two weeks of probation — enough time for the media to move on — she was indeed fired from her job as an archeologist. Where are the crusaders against cancel-culture who will defend a trans woman wrongfully terminated over pressure from social media? Where are our valiant defenders of free speech? Apparently nowhere to be found! And as if potentially ruining a woman’s career were not enough, Ms. Denker has also been the victim of an onslaught of personal hate, harassment, and even death threats. Apparently the volume of death threats reached such an unprecedented degree that the FBI contacted her to warn her about them and even encouraged her to remain armed.

Then there is the coverage of Alana McLaughlin — or rather, a right-wing sock puppet account posing as Alana:

This is not Ms. McLaughlin’s account, nor her words. Any child could easily recognize this cartoonishly villainous monologue as bait intended to incite feelings of victimhood in Christian nationalists. And yet the excellent journalists of the Daily Mail, with all the integrity of a used condom, uncritically shared the post without investigation, going so far as to label the troll as an “activist.” Such malpractice! Such apathy to truth! It’s truly unforgivable. Furthermore, as a trans woman in sports, Ms. McLaughlin is certainly no stranger to controversy; commenting on the disinformation, she simply expressed intentions to sue the Daily Mail:

This is not simply the honest failure of the journalism industry, nor even simply the opportunism of individual actors in the market. Ms Denker and McLaughlin are simply casualties amid a coordinated push to target the rights of all trans people, who are being held collectively responsible for the actions of Mr. Hale. Take, for example, Benny Johnson, production chief at Turning Point USA, who tweeted to an audience of over a million people that: “One thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists.” Former president Donald Trump, as well as representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, both publicly speculated about the role of hormones in Mr. Hale’s actions, despite no evidence that he was even on hormone replacement therapy — let alone in lieu of any evidence that masculinizing HRT causes violent aggression in trans men. Donald Trump Jr. similarly expressed that “there’s a clear epidemic of trans/non-binary mass shooters.” Ben Shapiro, infamous fascist pundit and media personality, went so far as to advocate banning trans people from owning firearms. These sentiments are a clear pattern of escalating fascist rhetoric from the far-right demagogues in media and politics.

As the American Empire loses its grasp on its position in the current imperialist order, as conditions within the empire continue to deteriorate and destabilize, it is increasingly imperative for fascists to manufacture a scapegoat responsible for all the woes of society — lest people develop class consciousness and turn against the capitalist system. Between the necessity to create such a bogeyman, and between the financial imperatives of profit-driven and advertisement funded “news” networks to prioritize clicks and views beyond all else, this hate mongering is the inevitable result. Capitalism, decaying empires, they breed hate and fear to sow division among the ranks of the working class, to prevent unity and solidarity, to prevent revolution. Only once political and economic power has been seized and nationalized by the working class can this crisis of disinformation be resolved! Only then can fascism be vanquished for good! Only then can transmisogyny be destroyed!

As for Ms. Denker, like all the other casualties of the capitalist press, she is now left to fend for herself. Please consider contributing to her gofundme campaign to cover legal and survival funds.

Mifepristone, one of the most common abortifacients in the country, and one accepted as safe and effective not only by the FDA but by a consensus of experts and doctors, was first approved for use over twenty years ago, in 2000. As right-fascist reaction against women’s and LGBT civil rights surges through the country, old political “gentlemen’s agreements” between the right and left wing of U.S. fascism, represented by the decaying Republican and Democratic parties, have begun to collapse. The long-standing agreement between the left and right wings of fascism concerning mifepristone is the latest victim of the growing disharmony within the U.S. ruling class and among its lackeys.

The pendulum of U.S. fascism has never been stable. Since this country’s founding, the balance between the more and less reactionary ruling classes has been achieved through civil wars, terror campaigns against the colonized peoples, periodic economic crises, and occasional concessions to the struggling masses. Ours is a reactionary period. Over the last few decades, the pendulum has been spinning increasingly off-balance. Since the rise of the neoliberal reaction (the so-called “third way”) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the actual effect of the Democratic Party’s policies has been to act as a stabilizer, allowing the increasingly vicious agenda of the GOP and the right wing of reaction to progress in four- and eight-year strides, broken by four- and eight-year Democratic “reprieves.” One administration at a time, the GOP has been steadily chopping away at the progress made by the working classes and their allies over the course of the 20th century. The Trump presidency, rather than an aberration, was a normal continuation of this process, and the wave of Trumpite reaction that followed in his wake has thrown this teetering system into ever-greater disarray as the right becomes increasingly hostile to the old left-fascist consensus.

In the debate over abortion there are two major camps within the ruling class. On one side stand the left fascists, who are joined by ruling class interests like drug giant Pfizer. They currently hold tenuous control over the U.S. Empire’s government apparatus. On the other side are open social reactionaries, the most vicious of capitalism’s domestic faces, who have been planting ever-broader roots among the most violently reactionary segments of the population. The right-fascist crusade against women’s and LGBT civil rights is a positional war against rival factions of the U.S. ruling classes — the monopoly capitalists. This latest play over mifepristone is yet another step in the right-fascists’ Napoleonic conquest of this country’s halls of power — the courts, the legislatures, and the executives — from the state to the federal level. This vile strain of U.S. fascism will not stop until it has reshaped this settler-colonial empire in its own white supremacist image. 

The mifepristone ruling itself and the legal doctrine behind it are little more than arcane legal trickery — a game for the capitalists’ competing teams of lawyers. Going back to the year 2000, before the 2008 crisis and the accelerating decomposition of the capitalist world-system that we see today, there was substantially more agreement between the political wings of the ruling-class duopoly. The initial approval of mifepristone was made by the FDA using a subsection of its regulatory powers, “Subpart H,” reserved for the speedy approval of drugs designed to treat “serious or life-threatening illnesses.” In other words, Subpart H was essentially designed for the rapid approval and deployment of drugs that had undergone extensive testing, were proven safe and accepted as such by an expert consensus, and were urgently needed to mitigate public health emergencies.

No one cared, in 2000, that the FDA used this particular subsection to approve mifepristone, as it’s done with thousands of other safe and effective medicines. Like every legal controversy that arises within the U.S. legal system, this didn’t matter until someone with capital and political influence decided to make it matter. Twenty-three years later, the breakdown of this tacit compact leaves the right of millions of people to access yet another means of safe abortion, yet another basic and essential reproductive medicine, at the mercy of one unelected judge in Texas. 

Kacsmaryk’s ruling is not the last word in the matter. For one thing, it was a temporary order at an early stage in the litigation over this ludicrous technical detail in the FDA’s approval process. The final decision as to whether the FDA overstepped its bounds (and do we believe that’s the real issue the right fascists are complaining about? A minute detail about regulatory choices?) will only come at the end of lengthy and expensive litigation — terminating, in all likelihood, at the Supreme Court. Should the ominously-named Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine win its challenge, it would not only threaten the bodily autonomy of millions of people across the U.S. Empire, but would also condemn thousands, if not millions, to ineffective and dangerous “alternative medicine” treatments for unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and other gynecological problems.

Late last Wednesday night, the Federal Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit (covering the Federal Districts of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) struck down portions of Kacsmaryk’s punitive ruling. Tellingly, other portions were left standing. Although mifepristone will still be available, all expansions of the FDA’s approval — including its 2016 decision to allow non-M.D. mifepristone prescriptions and its 2021 ruling to permit mail-order prescriptions, both to ease barriers to access — were rolled back to foresee the outcome of the Texas legal battle. Last Friday, Justice Samuel Alito blocked the remainder of the ruling, preventing it from going into effect until 11:59 p.m. EST, Wednesday, April 19. This is to give the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine time to file their responses (which are due noon EST Tuesday) and for Kacsmaryk to read it before he issues yet more sweeping anti-mifepristone rulings.

This is exactly the kind of response from Democratic left fascists — our so-called “progressives” in government — that we should expect. Mifepristone will continue to be available — to bourgeois, ruling-class women. But this medicine, like so much healthcare in the U.S. Empire, will be denied to the toiling millions who cannot afford to visit the doctor, who have no insurance, who cannot go to the drug store where it is dispensed. To our capitalist rulers, these millions are merely pawns on a political chessboard.

Should we expect the Democrats to fight this latest ruling? Yes — but only because the enormous weight of the drug companies is behind them. But the fact is that the left wing of the ruling class has repeatedly exposed itself as feckless, aloof to the machinations of its right-wing rivals, and impotent. Yes, they will fight, but never to win. The tide of reaction is rising; we must prepare for its advent — not by voting for the Democrats, not by attempting to change the dictatorship of the capitalists for the better, but by building working-class power where we stand. There is no relief coming from the criminally useless left wing of Capital. If relief comes from anywhere, it will be from us, the working classes, the hundreds of millions whose labor keeps this country running, whose exploitation makes the capitalists rich, and from our organized class action.

Near midnight on Saturday, November 19, the LGBT community of Colorado Springs, CO was shaken by yet another anti-LGBT mass shooting in the U.S. Empire. The site of the shooting was Club Q, a popular nightclub and a cultural fixture and “award-winning” venue, that served as a “safe place” for the Colorado Springs LGBT community. One survivor described Club Q as “a place we love, a place of peace, a place to be ourselves.” The perpetrator, armed with an AR-15 or similar rifle and a handgun, and wearing body armor, according to a Colorado Springs PD official, opened fire, killing at least five people and injuring at least 25; as of this moment, two of the hospitalized victims reportedly remain in critical condition.

The identities of the victims have been made available to the public: Daniel Aston (he/him), 28, a transgender man who worked as a bartender at Club Q, and that night was performing at the club; Derrick Rump (he/him), a bartender at Club Q; Kelley Loving (she/her), 40, a transgender woman who was visiting Colorado Springs and was at Club Q as a patron; Raymond Green Vance (he/him), 22, a patron visiting Club Q with his girlfriend, who identified as a pro-LGBT ally; and Ashley Paugh (she/her), 35, a patron.

Critically, the shooting took place during a drag show; it was also the night before the international Transgender Day of Rememberance (TDOR), a commemoration started in 1999 and observed annually on November 20 to memorialize all transgender people who’ve been lost to murder. So far in 2022, the murders of more than 30 transgender people have been reported — but the real figures are much higher.

Club Q had publicly advertised plans to host an “all ages drag brunch” on the morning of Sunday, November 20, to celebrate Transgender Day of Rememberance.

In recent months, fascists across the U.S. Empire have focused particularly on attacking drag shows. For instance, this summer, similarly themed family-friendly drag brunches were targeted by Christian-fascist organizations in Dallas and Houston, Texas. The fascists accused the LGBT community of attempting to “indoctrinate” children. Such organized anti-LGBT actions have been promoted by fascists in the media, and their demands have received political support from some extreme-right elected officials, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has threatened to have parents who take their children to LGBT-friendly venues charged with child abuse. Meanwhile, in recent years, across the country, Republican-controlled state governments are instituting laws to criminalize the parents of transgender children, as well as pro-trans doctors and other medical professionals, by legally redefining gender-affirming healthcare as child abuse; other laws compel public schools to misgender and otherwise discriminate against transgender children. This is despite the fact that gender-affirming healthcare is safe, improves quality of life, and significantly reduces the risk of suicide in a section of the population that is particularly vulnerable. The Democrats, meanwhile, have stood idly by — as is their role in the duopoly of American fascism.

Fascists across the U.S. Empire have become increasingly emboldened to commit anti-LGBT hate crimes, especially against transgender and gender-variant people. Mass shootings and other acts of targeted anti-LGBT violence are becoming the norm, rather than the exception.

Despite this, in a truly shameful fashion, the Colorado Springs PD and the FBI have conspicuously declined to characterize the mass shooting as a hate crime; the chief of police stated to reporters that the terrorist’s motive has yet to be determined. When asked whether the terrorist attack would be investigated as a hate crime, the local district attorney said, “this will be investigated and is being investigated in that lens,” but that specific charges had not yet been determined, and whether to charge the suspect with a hate crime was still under consideration. Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers has acknowledged that the mass shooting “has all the appearances of a hate crime,” but then cautioned that the suspect’s motive was still under investigation. Other Democratic politicians, including President Biden, have characterized the mass shooting as an attack on the LGBT community.

Evidently, the terrorist, now identified as Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, was arrested in June 2021, after threatening to harm his mother, who called the police. Aldrich had threatened to make a homemade bomb, and planned to procure a stockpile of weapons. Aldrich at first barricaded himself inside his house, but police negotiators eventually managed to convince him to surrender himself, at which point he was apprehended. He was charged with multiple felonies, including kidnapping.

A friend of the terrorist’s mother said in an interview, “Why is he not in jail, after that happening? After that initial day, police never reached out… [F]or him to be out there, and [to] have access to weapons after that incident, I don’t understand it.”

The Gazette, a Colorado newspaper, reported that the charges against Aldrich were ultimately dropped, and his case sealed; the reason has not been revealed. Interestingly, however, according to Heavy, Aldrich is the grandson of a Colorado state assemblyman, Randy Voepel, an extreme-right Republican who supported Trump’s January 6, 2021 coup attempt, in which hundreds of MAGA fascists stormed the U.S. Capitol. It is possible that Aldrich was freed after leveraging this political connection.

It is unsurprising that the terrorist has such a history, and it is just as unsurprising that he was ultimately set free, and allowed to continue plotting violence. This is not the first time that a fascist domestic terrorist has been known to police before committing a mass shooting; it is not the first time that police have been warned in advance, and failed to act.

If the enemy state truly wanted to stop these mass shootings, then this fascist terrorist, like so many before him, would have been apprehended by “red flag” laws. It’s no coincidence that so many mass shooters have had violent histories — in particular, histories of threatening women and LGBT people — and criminal records. Granted the most generous interpretation of the facts, we may condemn the enemy state incompetent, that is, incapable of preventing fascist violence and protecting oppressed communities. The truth, however, is that the enemy state is not incompetent, but actively malicious.

At a fundamental level, the U.S. Empire’s criminal justice system, from the police to the courts to the prisons, is not designed to prevent violence against the oppressed and marginalized masses, against women and LGBT people, against the poor — against anyone, except for the most privileged sections of the ruling classes. The U.S. criminal justice system is fundamentally designed for one, and only one, purpose: To protect the private property and the general class-interests of the ruling classes, first and foremost the monopoly-capitalists.

This mass shooting was no different. In the end, the police did not save the LGBT community gathered at Club Q — the community saved themselves.

According to reports based on statements from city officials, police, Club Q’s official social media, and survivor testimony, the shooting ended within minutes, when multiple Club Q patrons, including a transgender woman, tackled, disarmed, “beat up,” and subdued the terrorist, several minutes before police and emergency medical services arrived. While reports continue to emerge, and the facts continue to be gathered, a clear picture is developing. One survivor recounted at a vigil on Sunday that the bartender on shift at Club Q “jumped in front of the gunman,” sacrificing his life to protect the patrons. The bartender’s sacrifice allowed a patron to charge the shooter, “grab a handgun” from him, and hit him with it, knocking him down. According to the Club Q owners, who reviewed security camera footage, after the first patron subdued the shooter, a second patron then got on top of the shooter and helped the first patron hold him down, pinning him on the floor until police arrived. “He saved dozens and dozens of lives. Stopped the man cold,” said one of the owners, referring to one of the patrons. One of the persons killed in the terrorist attack, Raymond Green Vance, lost his life while assisting his girlfriend and another patron in finding a hiding place.

Club Q posted the following statement on its Facebook page:

Club Q is devastated by the senseless attack on our community. Our [prayers] and thoughts are with all the victims and their families and friends. We thank the quick reactions of heroic customers that subdued the gunman and ended this hate attack.

Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers praised the actions of the patrons, stating that “their actions clearly saved lives.” The chief of police made a similar comment.

The brave individuals who acted to defend their fellow patrons were, without a doubt, true heroes. To put one’s own body in the way of an armed fascist, intent on carrying out mass murder, would rightly be considered heroic under any circumstances. But the bravery of those patrons was not merely an isolated instance of heroism — it was an act of solidarity with their LGBT community. It was an act of community self-defense, of community self-reliance. And it is this spirit of community solidarity and community self-reliance that every conscious LGBT person must strive to embody and work to cultivate in our communities.

As the fascist garrison encircles our communities, where can we turn?

Not to elected officials, not to the police, and not to the courts — that much is clear. The police don’t keep us safe; the police keep us repressed, keep us threatened, keep us marginalized. The police aid and abet the fascists who seek to murder us and the police protect the government officials who seek to drive us back underground. Our LGBT forebears couldn’t be fooled by police-sponsored pride parades and “diversity training” copaganda. Our forebears knew what most of us still know, and what the rest of us must relearn: that the police are our enemies. The police are the front-line repressive arm of the fascist enemy state, of our oppressors.

The Democrats, the “moderate wing” of U.S. fascism, are once more calling for “gun control” — for disarming the masses. President Biden, long a supporter of banning “assault rifles,” was quoted as saying, “When will we decide we’ve had enough? We must address the public health epidemic of gun violence in all of its forms.” Meanwhile, the “liberal” side of the capitalist media is already pushing for “gun control” in the wake of this tragedy.

For many in our traumatized community, this liberal “solution” will hold considerable pathos, especially given that “gun rights” is an agenda associated with the same right-wing of fascism that continually perpetrates vigilante and state violence against us. But the truth is that, throughout the history of the U.S. Empire, gun control has only ever been used to disarm the oppressed; it has never been used to disarm the oppressor. On the other hand, we do not endorse the common right-wing slogan, “Only a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun,” which, in truth, is a call for more civilian-fascist settler militiamen to be deputized against racially oppressed people. Our slogan is that only by arming and organizing the oppressed can we disarm and overthrow our oppressors, their standing armies, and their civilian-fascist auxiliaries.

This slogan was issued by Karl Marx over 170 years ago:

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

No, LGBT communities cannot rely on help from the fascist enemy state.

LGBT communities, especially transgender people, must collectively defend ourselves. In no uncertain terms, this means that we must begin arming and organizing ourselves, and our communities, for self-defense, and in so doing build collective self-reliance.

We keep us safe — no one else will.

We know that this is a daunting task. For transgender militants and comrades who are unsure of where to begin, we encourage you to reach out to the Lavender Guard, a new revolutionary organization focused on community self-defense, community self-reliance, and mutual aid.

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.