Ian Deleón | Cinephile. Filmmaker. Performance Artist.

FAILINGS of PRE/POST REVOLUTIONARY CUBAN SOCIETY: the PROMULGATION of the (UN)WANTED OTHER

Ignacio Jacinto Villa Fernández,known by his stage name “Bola de Nieve” (Snowball), was a Cuban singer and pianist.

Bola de Nieve supported the Castro regime, even going on friendly international campaigns to other socialist countries, such as China (pictured above).

He was one of the few Cuban homosexuals not to be persecuted, perhaps for this reason. Gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, in his autobiography Antes que anochezca (Before night falls), said about him: “Era el calesero del Partido Comunista” (“He was the coachman of the Revolution”).

The openly gay, imprisoned Reinaldo Arenas was able to flee to the U.S. during the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

Cuba’s new ally, the Soviet Union, had hostile policies towards gays and lesbians, seeing homosexuality as a product of the decadent capitalist society prevailing in Cuba in the 1950s. Fidel Castro made insulting comments about homosexuality. Castro’s admiring description of rural life in Cuba (“in the country, there are no homosexuals”) reflected the idea of homosexuality as bourgeois decadence, and he denounced “maricones” as “agents of imperialism”. Castro explained his reasoning in a 1965 interview: 

[W]e would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist must be.

Fidel has since recanted such ignorant statements, and similarly to the U.S., since the mid-1980s, being openly gay in Cuba has become more accepted–but, as with the U.S., much discrimination and violence towards the LGBTQ community remains. A future post might also focus on the failings of the revolution in Cuba as it relates to attitudes towards women/addressing patriarchy.