Cuba has legalized same-sex marriage after Cubans voted in favor of a family code that increased protections for minorities on the island, according to the country’s National Electoral Council on Monday.
The Electoral Council reported that 74.1 percent of eligible voters participated in Sunday’s national referendum.
As of Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. ET, 94% of the votes had been counted, and 3,936,790 people had voted in favor of the new law compared to 1,950,010 against it, indicating overwhelming support.
The new family code grants LGBTQ couples the ability to marry and adopt children, as well as increases protections for women, children, and the elderly. Additionally, the code allows couples to adopt children.
On the communist-run island of Cuba, LGBTQ people have faced official discrimination for decades. After Fidel Castro’s rise to power in the early 1960s, many homosexuals were sent to government work camps alongside political dissidents. Despite the fact that homosexuality was legalized in Cuba in 1979, many homosexual men and women reported facing open discrimination.
Mariela Castro, daughter of former Cuban president Raul Castro, has openly advocated for improved rights for gays, lesbians, and transgender people through a government-funded center.
The push for greater equality, however, was met with opposition from both within and outside the Cuban government.
In 2018, Cuban legislators abandoned provisions that would have legalized same-sex marriage out of concern that a homophobic backlash would have reduced voter participation in a referendum on a new constitution.
The following year, Cuban police disrupted a peaceful LGBTQ rights parade on the grounds that the marchers lacked permission to hold the event.
The expanding evangelical community in Cuba had openly opposed the adoption of the family code.
In the weeks preceding the referendum, however, the Cuban government made a concerted effort to promote the new family code through state-run media, arguing that the new code demonstrates the island’s more than six-decade-old revolution’s ability to adapt to the times.
Fidel Castro was a revolutionary, a communist, and a rambling speaker. It should never be forgotten that he was an oppressor, torturer, and murderer of gay people, despite the fawning eulogies released upon his long-overdue death at the age of 90.
In the eyes of Fidel Castro and his revolutionary comrade Che Guevara, who frequently referred to gay men as maricones, or “faggots,” homosexuality was inherently counterrevolutionary and bourgeois. To the traditional Latin American machismo, which viewed homosexuality negatively, they wed an ideology that viewed it as politically undesirable.
Putting homosexuals in concentration camps was not the only Nazi practice Castro adopted. According to recently declassified German intelligence files, this so-called anti-fascist attempted to hire former SS officers to train his army during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In spite of closing the UMAPs in the late 1960s, the Cuban government continued to repress homosexuals as ideologically subversive elements.
People who openly identified as homosexual were barred from joining the Communist Party and fired from their jobs.
