No es Fácil
Reflections on Cuba’s new family code
Francisco J. González 
The national referendum that took place on September 25, 2022, in Cuba was—by most queer measures at least—a happy step in a good direction. The new Código de las Familias (Family Code) passed solidly, with a vote of 67 percent in favor, and guaranteed the right to marriage equity, in effect legalizing same-sex marriage with adoption rights, more protections for children (like a ban on corporal punishment), and language supporting equal share of housework in heterosexual couples. Around the world, headlines touted the passage of the Family Code as historic, sweeping, and progressive. Who could argue? The Código made Cuba the thirty-fourth country in the world to give same-sex couples the right to marriage, and the ninth in Latin America. Soon Instagram photos were popping up celebrating gay nuptials on the island, rainbow flags framing guys in pressed white guayaberas.
Rainbows imply rain, however, and the happy pictures of progress and celebration shine in contrast to, and in part because of, more turbulent skies. To be sure, the reforms were a long time coming. Securing marriage equality has been the result of steadfast struggle (as has been true anywhere in the world where this has come to pass), but in Cuba, a country with a formidable history of homophobia intimately linked to classic machismo, the achievement was especially notable, and to many perhaps even a little surprising.
No es fácil, as Cubans like to say—it’s not easy. The phrase rolls off the tongue easily in its Cuban pronunciation, the aspirated s mostly swallowed, a one-word exhaled legato: no-eh-fa-seal. Cubans are famous for their relajo—not exactly a relaxed state (though relajar means “to relax”), but more of a relaxation of decorum, a joking demeanor that lubricates social relations. And in the constant relajo that makes life a little more livable in a country facing devastating shortages of food, electricity, and patience, no es fácil has become a ubiquitous refrain, useful for all manner of ironic punctuation, a knowing shrug veiling resignation, bitterness wrapped in a smile. As a Latin-with-an-x on the Left, born in Havana in the early days of Castro’s triumph, but with a childhood spent in Chicano San Antonio, U.S. citizenship since I was a teenager, and good gay credentials, I was both moved and unsettled by the passage of the new Family Code. Over social media and dinner tables, I witnessed various wings of my extended family take their sides: some on religious grounds, all on political ones.
Indeed, the final passage of marriage equity was anything but fácil. The referendum was not only the final turn in what had been an arduous and meandering political struggle toward same-sex marriage, it was also a convulsive element in a broader process of Cuba’s political evolution, one entangled in yet another revision of the national constitution.
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As early as 2017, and in anticipation of an impending constitutional reform process, non-governmental LGBT groups began agitating for specific changes to the Constitution of 1992, which had defined marriage as a “voluntarily established union between a man and a woman.” Once again, the fiat of compulsory heterosexuality outlawed same-sex marriage by rendering it legally unthinkable. Introduced shortly after the inauguration of the first non-Castro president of the revolutionary government, a newly drafted constitution redefined marriage in gender-neutral terms, as between “two people” with “absolutely equal rights and obligations.” A radical move befitting a country that anchors its national identity on revolution. But during the public consultation stage of the constitutional reform process, evangelical churches quickly mounted a fierce opposition campaign, touting a heterosexist doctrine of divine “original design.”[1] Some religious leaders went even further, arguing that marriage equity was a travesty of revolutionary principles and had no place in communist countries—which was ironic, given the general antipathy between churches and the Cuban state. By 2018, the National Assembly subsequently retracted the progressive gender-neutral language, prompting some writers to predict that there would never be a guarantee of same-sex marriage in Cuba, and laying the blame at the feet of what was seen as a manipulative government.
Mariela Castro could not help but be a prominent figure in this political fray. A longtime promoter of LGBT concerns, she directs the Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual, or CENESEX, whose transgender and HIV/AIDS advocacy has been internationally recognized. Being Raul’s daughter and Fidel’s niece, the name-of-the-father here comes bearing considerable political heft, and the weight of more than a little revolutionary responsibility. But in May 2019, CENESEX canceled their annual Conga Cubana, a march against homo- and transphobia. The reason—some speculated—was to avoid clashes between gays and evangelicals that could sully the government’s progressive initiative. Gay-rights activists countered with an unauthorized pride march and were met with police arrests. To be sure, the marriage provision had quickly become the most hotly discussed item of the new constitution (even overshadowing the imposition of term limits for the presidency). The final decision was then left in the hands of the people, by way of the 2022 referendum on the Family Code. Some LGBT activists were dismayed, feeling that the government was betraying its revolutionary duty to protect the dignity of all by leaving the fate of queer people to a notoriously homophobic society.
The sense of betrayal that queer supporters of the revolution felt was not new. Indeed, the wounds ran deep. Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich offer a nuanced picture of the sad plethora of homophobic attitudes and policies that have subtended Cuban society, a tenacious through line from prerevolutionary machismo to the exigencies of “revolutionary puritanism”—and of how those struggles have been used to galvanize right-wing anti-Castro agendas in the United States. The systemic and shameful nadir came in 1965 with the establishment of the UMAP camps (Military Units to Aid Production), where forced labor was deployed as a supposed corrective to counterrevolutionary homosexuality.[2] Fidel took full responsibility for the camps in a 2010 interview, the journalist pressing the point of the considerable damage done to salutary views of the revolution by the state’s systemic persecution of homosexuals. But the UMAP camps were more than a brutal manifestation of state-sponsored homophobia; they left a traumatic injury and cast an anxious shadow. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve worked with some of the gay men who passed through those camps at a clinic in San Francisco; most of them left the country during the Mariel boatlift of 1980. In April of that year, a complex confluence of domestic and international pressures led Castro to open the border at the port of Mariel: anyone wishing to leave the island could do so, they just needed someone to pick them up at the port. These men, “Marielietos”—I know of no lesbians who were sent to the camps—felt shamefully marked by their experiences in the UMAP, but their experiences of alienation there were only part of a bigger story of deprecations and exclusions. And what they encountered on arrival to the U.S. was no rainbow paradise: refugee detention centers, homelessness, and often a less-than-welcoming American gay scene. No es fácil.
One queer’s radical liberation is another queer’s capitulating conformity
But things changed in Cuba, as they have in the U.S., and no one story captures these realities. As is true anywhere, the “gay community” in Cuba is hardly monolithic. Some joined the pioneering work of Mariela Castro and became staunch supporters of the revolutionary government (photos on social media of a Fidelista in a Lenin-red tee surrounded by cute boys camping it up in front of the American embassy in Havana); some joined dissident movements and eventually emigrated. One queer’s radical liberation is another queer’s capitulating conformity.
In the struggle over the Family Code, then, a contentious and somewhat confusing space opened up. The players are the state, a loose confederacy of evangelical churches, multiple (and at times painfully fractured) LGBT communities, and dissident art collectives (activist artists or artivistas). Tensions develop along several axes.
As regards the actual content of the code, the state and LGBT activists joined forces to promote a progressive, modernist agenda railing against an old-world conservatism backed by a loose confederation of churches, presumably aligned with cultural norms steeped in machismo and conservative “family values.” On this axis, we won. In the eyes of some, radically even. As journalist Sophie K. Rosa provocatively asks, “Did Cuba just abolish the family?” Because the Código definitely goes beyond merely a ratification of same-sex marriage and rights of adoption; it can be read as offering a fundamental redefinition of what a family is, one fully liberated from strict biological ties and now based wholly on affective bonds of mutual respect and solidarity. Article 2 of the code reads: “The different forms of organization of families, based on affective relationships, are created between kin, whatever the nature of that kinship might be, and between spouses or partners based on affective realities.”[3]
But as regards the axis of political and civic process, a more complicated picture emerges. Independent political campaigns are outlawed in Cuba, but on state-controlled media outlets, an enormous wave of propaganda pushed the Sí vote in favor of the referendum. President Díaz-Canel had certainly been supportive of same-sex marriage as early as the consultation phase, but by explicitly backing a yes vote on the referendum he took a step further, linking the policy change to support for the government, essentially saying that a Sí vote was a vote for the revolution. This created a strategic position for dissidents who, even if they favored Western modernist values that include same-sex marriage equity, saw in the plebiscite a tactical opportunity to discredit the state. Cuban dissident Hilda Landrove tweeted on September 22, 2022, the day of the referendum: “The discussion over how to vote, including whether to vote or not, is legitimate as a matter of civics and citizenship, but the context in which it occurs has made it necessary to think about how to escape the internal logics that reinforce the narratives of power. One possible way is to elude binary logic.” Eschewing the logic of Sí and No, the “nonbinary” option was abstention.
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El Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, better known as INSTAR, was established on May 20, 2015. A year earlier, the artist Tania Bruguera had provoked the authorities by installing a microphone at the Plaza de la Revolución where the public could express longings for a Cuban future. The government censured her on charges of promoting an unauthorized public art project. She responded by hosting a public reading of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, broadcast by loudspeaker, from the privacy of her apartment in Central Havana while under state surveillance: INSTAR was born. An artist collective of dissident activists (artivistas), INSTAR’s digital presence is all sleek intelligentsia: bold political graphics on Instagram and a hip website.
The explicit goal of disruption is evident in their installation at documenta 15, Factografía Operativa, based on the work of the Russian constructivist Sergei Tretyakov. The artist statement aims to “question the logic of cultural legitimization” and “its use as a political instrument … to reward obedience and the complicity of intellectuals with those governing.” Seeking to trouble the illusory coherence of communal life, it strives “to demonstrate that cultural life in Cuba can never be something other than an image, partial and incomplete.”
INSTAR regularly posts on social media sites, promoting artistic freedoms and dissident political positions. A typical campaign, using striking graphics reminiscent of the Polish School, ran for weeks on social media, encouraging an abstinence vote on the ratification of the new constitution. At their best, the disruptions of art and of queer sexuality serve to perturb the calcifications of the social order. But in the lead-up to the referendum on the Family Code, INSTAR was radio silent. What took place instead was an animated discussion group the day after the referendum—entitled “¿Qué Pasó Ayer?” (What Happened Yesterday?)—as part of their regular interview talk show series, El Desvelo.[4] I first found the link preserved in an encrypted enclave of the internet (though it’s readily available on the INSTAR website), and I was thrilled by my “discovery.” Listening in on the conversation in the unmistakable Cuban Spanish of my family, but all high theory and radiating fierce intelligence, is like listening in on a life that might have been, or one as yet unborn. An imagined life, distant, an echo without origin.
The discussion focused on the abstinence vote: over a quarter of those on the official voting rolls abstained, a number made more significant in the context of the overall trend (over 10 percent abstention for the 2017 nation-wide municipal elections, and over 30 percent in the municipal elections following the referendum in 2022). Johanna Cilano Pelaez—a political historian with degrees from the University of Havana and Veracruz, Mexico—concluded that what the referendum most clearly revealed was a process marked with a degree of uncertainty previously unseen in the sixty years of the revolutionary government: the abstinence vote, she concludes, is a clear marker of discontent. The government dominated state-run media outlets with a forceful Sí campaign (private electoral campaigns are prohibited in Cuba) and equated a yes vote with an affirmation of the state. Abstention joins the no vote against the government.
The pressing question pursued in the subsequent interviews (and betraying the cultural stamp of Marxist-Leninist discourse even among artivistas in dissident) is this: Were homophobia and the LGBT community instrumentalized by the government? The question is made with some care and respect by the host, acknowledging its potential to offend the next guests, activist members of the LGBT community. Everyone seems to be doing a precarious dance: How to be in favor of queer rights and against the government enshrining them? The argument against the state invokes pinkwashing. (Funnily enough, if in the United States pink is a way to deceptively darken white, in Cuba it becomes a way to deceptively lighten red.) Things are tough in Cuba: the economy is in tatters and people are leaving.[5] The referendum, concludes the panel, is a lot of rainbow-flag waving meant to distract.
But as I listen, a certain poignancy emerges, a sadness seeping up from my experience, my own mythology. Early childhood is a country from which we all emigrate, a distant and half-forgotten land haloed in nostalgia. (My immediate association was to Gutiérrez Alea’s film about those who stayed in Cuba, Memorias de Subdesarrollo [Memories of Underdevelopment], the words of the title might describe childhood as much as geopolitics.) The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, our narrative efflorescences, are rooted in this childhood soil with its vast expanses of wordlessness. Mine was island-bound. And so: the passed-down stories of being born in the dazzling glare of el triunfo de la revolución, the passed-down stories of what was left behind, of heroisms and family ruptures, of escape, of the naive optimism of new beginnings in America, the newfound land. And the bifurcations: queerness, profession, an intellectual life in English; family, early loves, heartbreak in Spanish. My personal triste tropique.
On El Desvelo—now veiling and unveiling, in parallel, something more interior than the politics of the island—Felipe Galli, an Argentinian political scientist, speaks next. He describes the tension: the younger people are the most anti-government and the most tuned in to the digital sphere; they are more socially progressive, supportive of LGBT causes, alternative families, and gender and trans rights, while also being the most dissident. By contrast, the older generation is more in line with the established revolutionary government policies, more conservative socially, and less attuned to the digital sphere. This was a tricky matter for the government since the question of homosexuality had been so internally divisive to state elites for so long. The great mistake, Galli felt, was the partisan position the government ended up taking in campaigning for the Sí vote, which denied it the legitimacy of claiming a true democratic process. As an LGBT person himself, he could not fault the queer voter for any of the possible votes: yes, as an alignment of self-interest and the law in support of its affirmation of same-sex unions and the legitimization of all kinds of new families; no, as a protest vote against the government; abstention, as a way of denying the government legitimacy. Further, he averred, rather than guaranteeing such fundamental minority rights through judicial or legislative means, putting them to a plebiscite exposed the LGBT community to enormous stress.[6]
The referendum process was indeed agonizing and desgastante (exhausting, weary-making) for at least some sectors of the LGBT communities in Cuba. This is the view of Adiel, a gay activist, who feels the struggle came at a high cost. Adiel—despite replaying the audio, and searching the internet, I cannot get his last name or credentials, which makes him feel both more intimate to me and partially erased (intimate because partially erased?).[7] It was not our responsibility, he says, it was the responsibility of the government to ensure these rights. He feels this was a way to divide the LGBT community and progressive dissident voices. (Indeed, artists, LGBT communities, and the church have been some of the strongest organized counters to the hegemonic narrative). What the referendum showed is the complexity of LGBT collectives in Cuba, their multiplicity. They were indeed instrumentalized, but among those who voted in favor of the referendum, Adiel feels that there were those who were not aware of being instrumentalized, those who knew they were but nonetheless made a strategic choice to vote Sí opportunistically, and finally those who were favorable to the government process, and thereby in favor of the tactic of instrumentalization. And this could also be said of those who were opposed to the referendum. He does not elaborate this further, but I will: there were those who were not aware of the instrumentalization of the issue by the government and would vote no on the basis of the content (like the evangelicals), and those who were aware and supportive of the content of the referendum and chose to abstain, and finally those who were simply opposed to the government (as a cousin of mine said “I am against anything the government is for”). This “negative” of instrumentalization was evident in INSTAR’s response to the referendum. Never do they use their prodigious intellectual capital (perhaps a woefully inappropriate phrase in the current context) to mount a nuanced campaign. Do they not also instrumentalize the LGBT sector, remaining silent on the question in order to vex the government? Perhaps there was no tactical purchase: they could hardly propose voting abstinence and be seen as queer allies. But isn’t silence on these matters a tacit condemnation?
If in the United States pink is a way to deceptively darken white, in Cuba it becomes a way to deceptively lighten red
What these fracture lines point to is the reality of all group life: no community is fully in common, none is unitary. In the current moment and perhaps especially here in U.S., the multiplicity of social group membership is typically obscured by an engulfing and facile identity politics. Perhaps instrumentalization depends on such homogenization, the flattening out of the multiplicity of any given social position. Reductionism is a mechanism for retaining power, the weapon of hegemony.
But neither is hegemony ever completely total, whether in the Cuban state or in the United States—there are always cracks in the firmament, and no one is a unitary subject, no one the subject of just one unitary group. There are Cuban gay dissidents who immigrated to the U.S. and stoked conservative forces to clamp down on the island. Right-wing forces in the U.S. instrumentalized homosexuality and gay rights when it was convenient for them to do so in the long hangover of the Cold War with Cuba, as Arguelles and Rich show, in the case of gay novelist and Marielito Reinaldo Arenas. But I remember the thrill of reading the opening pages of his memoir Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls) and discovering in his depictions of the early erotic life of a gay boy in Oriente a part of myself I didn’t know I had lost. Or rather, finding an absence in myself through that reading, a reconstruction of a past I had only yet been able to do in English, because I had not found a place for it: Oriente, where my mother’s family hails from, already a rich imaginal landscape of my early years, thick with personal stories and mythologies, but where I had not been able to cast back a gaze from a queer present, to remake it queerly. Reinaldo Arenas’s writing gave me a fictional place from which to cast that gaze.
Fracture lines open new spaces in time.
Ironically, a campaign that undoubtedly served the state according to many dissidents not only opened the field of queerness to greater legitimization, but also may have had the effect of creating more zones of contestation, widening existing cracks in the totalitarian edifice.[8] The atmosphere of uncertainty surrounding the referendum, Johanna Cilano contends, may have helped establish “precarious forms of citizenship.” Along with the abstention vote, the tensions surrounding the referendum apparently also increased its scrutiny, as both gays and evangelicals came out to surveil the process. And, of course, the campaign itself may have done a great deal to open the visibility of queer life and challenge homophobic and machismo-laden attitudes on the island. Queerness itself now spans the political binaries: no longer the explicit enemy of the revolution, but neither entirely its friend.
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It’s hard to put your faith in revolutions anymore. Revolutions are inherently in motion, a turning over of the established order. They cannot last. The radical upending wrought by a group of drag queens throwing bricks at police at the Stonewall Inn ends in the suit-and-tie respectability and ruthlessness of the venture capitalist. The barbudos of the Sierra Maestra who, in the name of the people, overturned a brutal dictatorship and finally put an end to the long reign of intrusive, violent Yanqui meddling, could not in sixty years establish a democracy and end up trying to silence artists.
At its revolutionary best, psychoanalysis alerts us to the human tendency toward closure. The ego, it teaches, is a conservative structure seeking to replicate the patterns that promise the (illusory) sense of sovereignty. But something else—disruptive, anarchic, polymorphous, and amoral—pulsates in the substratum of its very foundation. Perhaps it is little different for the collectives we invent in the name of civilization. And it is in the eruption of these pent-up forces, always threatening at the gates, and in the liminal spaces they sometimes open—precarious, desgastantes—that the frayed edges of the old become marked, allowing the emergent glimmer of something new, fragile, and uncertain as it necessarily must be.
I have found the binary is almost impossible to eschew when it comes to Cuban politics. When I lived in Texas, the Cuban community I knew there (largely comprising professionals who fled shortly after the revolution) were embittered about the communist turn the revolution had taken, a revolution most of them had ardently supported. The first thing my grandmother taught childhood friends when they came over to visit (under the thin disguise of a preliminary Spanish lesson) was the phrase Fidel Castro es un hombre muy malo. For this community, the long history of outrageous colonialist intrusions by the United States in Cuba had all but disappeared from view. It was impossible to speak about improvements wrought by the revolution: universal health care, the impressive advances in literacy, or the construction of the mountain highway that finally linked the eastern province of Oriente to the rest of the island. (When my mother was attending the University of Havana, she had to fly or a take a boat.) Any mention of revolutionary gains in that community of heartbroken exiles was met with loud indignation and silencing outrage. Moving to California shot me to the other pole. Here, when some Lefties spoke of Cuba, it was in rosy terms about the wonders of the revolution, with faraway looks, seemingly peering into a glorious future they had been denied. No mention of the lack of freedom of the press, the lack of medical supplies, hunger. There was an obliviousness to how painful a revolution can actually be, to the magnitude of the losses and the ruptures, and also a subtle condescension, a quality of what they have is good enough for them. I knew none of them would trade what they had here for what they spoke so highly of there.
With time, I have fewer and fewer relatives on the island. More and more keep immigrating here: one during the Balsero Crisis of 1994, pushing out on a homemade raft and ending up living in a refugee camp in Guantanamo for eleven months; others more gently, by marriage to an Americano, by legal exchanges under benevolent U.S. presidents, or by state-sponsored lotteries in Cuba; yet others with coyotes crossing illegally on the southern border; and most recently by petition and sponsorship. Just weeks ago, I provided a raft of financial documents to a lawyer in Florida to support the emigration application of distant cousins who want to leave the island, and who I am sure voted no in the referendum on religious grounds. I’m pretty sure they don’t know I’m gay. Somehow it doesn’t matter that much to me. It’s not sentimentality as much as the fabric of psyche: of course I would help, they are family. It kind of goes against every queer bone in my body, against my intellectual stances and my politics, but it’s true. Somehow it doesn’t matter that they believe in original design when it comes to this question. This doesn’t all square up with who I think myself to be; it unsettles me. But it keeps something open. I don’t know what my relationship to Cuba will be as more biological family leaves it, what it might become with time. For my entire childhood and much of my early adulthood, it was a place barred: the possibility of traveling there was literally unthinkable. Slowly, it came into view, hazily at first and then in greater focus, and when I went, it was in the context of biological family, to visit family. Later, in the context of queer friends, queer family, it began to change, some of the narratives ruptured, others started to emerge in the spaces.
Perhaps now, not exactly outside of the politics but more precisely through this unnamable strangeness that is my relation to this island, Cuba will become something different for me than what I have known before. Neither Sí nor No, and not quite abstinent either, something emerging in the cracks of what I can’t quite put together. Though, you know… no es fácil.
[1] While the No campaign was waged by a coalition of evangelical churches, Cuban Catholic bishops issued their own declaration affirming marriage as categorically heterosexual, less than two weeks before the referendum vote, urging citizens to vote their conscience with the future of the nation in mind. It is also important to note that, in contrast to the Family Code, there was no such consultation or referendum for the new Penal Code.
[2] It was not just homosexuals (gay men really — there is not a record of lesbians being sent) who were sent to the camps: anyone labeled as counterrevolutionary was targeted, including many religious leaders.
[3] All translations in the text are mine.
[4] Desvelo means insomnia, vigilance, or effort—an apt moniker for a dissident program. (It can be found on the INSTAR website.)
[5] Since October 2021, as many as 399,000 Cubans have left the island (according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data (cbp.gov). This staggering number overshadows previous immigration waves; it’s greater than the number of Cubans who emigrated immediately post-revolution (about 248,000), and more than double the number of those who emigrated during the Mariel boatlift (almost 125,000) and the 1994 Balsero Crisis (about 35,000) combined.
[6] Cuba is the first country in the continent to put LGBT rights to a plebiscite, he notes; other Latin American countries have guaranteed marriage rights through executive decree, judicial ruling, or legislation.
[7] I strongly suspect now that the Adiel in question was Adiel González, a theologian and gay activist who, with partner Lázaro González, became among the very first gay married couple celebrated on the island.
[8] The cracks are growing. The year 2018 saw the birth of the Movimiento San Isidro, a group of artists, academics, and intellectuals in protest against government censorship of art. On July 11, 2021, thousands of Cubans around the country spontaneously took to the streets to protest shortages of food, medicine, and electricity, and repressive measures inaugurated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hundreds were detained or imprisoned, which resulted in the birth of the 11J movement.