Friday, May 17, 2019

CUBA PLANS GAY COMMUNIST MARCH AFTER CRACKDOWN IN HAVANA


Cuba Plans Gay Communist March in Remote Province After Crackdown on Havana Rally



YAMIL LAGE/AFP/Getty Images
YAMIL LAGE/AFP/Getty Images
FRANCES MARTEL
26
5:12

The communist regime controlling Cuba announced a “rally for inclusion and respect for diversity” Monday after near-universal condemnation of the use of state violence to shut down an LGBT pride parade in Havana.

The Castro regime, which famously imprisoned and tortured openly and suspected gay Cubans in labor camps and prisons for decades, has hosted twelve “congas against homophobia” organized by dictator Raúl Castro’s daughter, Mariela. This year, Mariela canceled the conga over fears that the United States would somehow use the event against the regime. Dissident gay Cubans and allies organized a pride march in Havana, anyway, attracting an estimated 300 people and resulting in public beatings, arrests, and shocking videos of dissidents being hauled away into cars by plain-clothes state security officers.
The crackdown triggered international criticism but also upset prominent communists like singer-songwriters Silvio Rodríguez and Vicente Feliú. In an attempt to silence the near-universal condemnation of the regime’s actions, Cuba has now announced a new event to take place in remote Camagüey, 340 miles and abut a six and a half hour drive from the capital.
Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, announced Monday that an allegedly pro-LGBT festival would take place from May 15-17 in Camagüey city, publishing a photo of a past regime-sponsored event featuring a sign with a rainbow, the international symbol of alternate sexual and gender identities, with the slogan “I am also Fidel.” Cuba’s “National Center for Sex Education” (Cenesex), led by Mariela Castro, will host the events allegedly aimed at promoting “social justice.” Castro will lead an academic discussion with regime-approved professors on how best to reconcile queer identities with the Cuban Revolution, a violently anti-gay movement that imprisoned anyone suspected of homosexuality in forced labor camps.
Camagüey is typically home to a companion event to Havana’s “conga against homophobia,” more easily accessible to western Cubans. This year, however, it will host the only government-sponsored queer event and follow a likely much more well-attended event in Havana, a gay pride rally organized “illegally” after Cenesex canceled the original conga.
Cenesex announced last week that it could not host the communist conga because of “the new tensions in the international and regional context,” implying that the United States would use the event to condemn Cuba’s abhorrent record of human rights violations against LGBT Cubans. The agency warned Cubans not to independently participate in displays of gay pride that did not also feature the mandatory worship of Fidel Castro prominent in every regime event.
The Castro regime then announced the opening of a new LGBT-friendly luxury hotel in Havana, accessible only to foreigners and regime lackeys with the money to afford it. Gay activists denounced the regime for threatening them to keep them from rallying.
“A few minutes ago, a State Security agent called me without identifying himself. With an aggressive voice, he told me repeatedly that I would be imprisoned if I continued to call for an LGBTI+ march on May 11,” Zekie Fuentes, one of the event’s organizers, revealed on Facebook. Agents also reportedly stationed themselves outside the homes of some activists on Saturday in an attempt to prevent them from participating in the event once they failed to stop it from occurring.
Independent Cuban LGBT activists ignored the order not to engage in gay pride activities without government approval and staged a march on Saturday, believed to be the largest unauthorized assembly in the country since at least 1994. Those participating chanting slogans like “diverse Cuba” and “yes we could,” not explicitly anti-communist mantras but threatening to the regime as they implied that the Castro family was not necessary to organize a successful public event. The regime responded to the march with violence, sending state police to beat and haul away some of the march’s most prominent participants. Communist police also arrested independent activist Daniel Llorente, who calls himself “the flag man” for his love of the American flag, just in case he decided to join the march. Llorente does not identify as LGBT and said following his release he had no plans to go to the event.
Mariela Castro initially dismissed the illegal rally as a “show” orchestrated by unspecified actors in Miami. On Monday, she published a rant on Facebook condemning the LGBT participants as “mercenary activism lackeys” and claimed that “many people who did not know what was going on” were somehow tricked into joining the event.
“We will keep struggling within the Revolution to strengthen it, because against the Revolution, nothing,” Castro wrote, paraphrasing a slogan popularized by her uncle Fidel Castro: “with the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.”
“We will not cede to imperialism or its lackeys,” she continued. “Freedom is a great responsibility.”
Castro also accused counter-revolutionaries of “assailing mercilessly the sacred memory of my mother,” Raúl Castro’s wife Vilma Espín, the head of the communist “Federation of Cuban women” and an accomplice in the internment of tens of thousands in labor camps, including anyone suspected of being gay or lesbian. Mariela Castro made her mother the face of the nation’s first postage stamp “against homophobia” despite her record of persecution against LGBT people.
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump condemned the repression.
“We are closely observing that the Alternative March began peacefully, but there were later aggressive detentions,” the U.S. Embassy in Cuba said in a statement. “The regime denies the Cuban people its fundamental rights. We are with the people of Cuba.”
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

Cuba Violently Shuts Down ‘Illegal’ Gay Pride Parade


YAMIL LAGE/AFP/Getty Images
YAMIL LAGE/AFP/Getty Images
FRANCES MARTEL
1,654
5:26

Cuba’s communist regime sent police to beat and violently haul away some of the estimated 300 people congregating in Havana Saturday for an “illegal” gay pride march, organized after the regime canceled the annual Castro-led “conga against homophobia.”

Mariela Castro, the head of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (Cenesex) that organizes the annual conga, disparaged the privately organized peaceful march this weekend as a “show” somehow orchestrated by anti-communists in Havana. While the Castro regime has brutally repressed LGBT people, placing them in labor camps along with Christians and other “counterrevolutionaries” in the 1960s, dictator Raúl Castro has allowed daughter Mariela to claim leadership of the government’s nonexistent gay rights agenda as a pet project.
Cuba’s political police arrested at least eight people – one of which was merely suspected of walking over to join the protest – and beat and hauled away some of the more defiant people in the crowd. Among those arrested were Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, an environmental scientist who went on hunger strike last year after being arrested for revealing Castro regime damage to the local ecosystem, and Daniel Llorente, the activist arrested for being wrongly presumed to be on his way to the march because he was clad in his signature American flag.
Urquiola appeared in photos taken at the event being hauled off by his feet by Cuban government agents, shouting while wearing a red, white, and blue lei around his neck.
The independent Cuban publication 14 y medio reported that the “Alternative LGBTI March” attracted about 300 people to Havana’s Central Park, the largest number for an illegal assembly since at least 1994. Those congregated waved rainbow flags and chanted slogans like “diverse Cuba” and “yes, we could.”
The situation rapidly became violent when plain-clothed officers began attacking the assembled, physically hauling away some of the most prominent dissidents in attendance. In addition to Urquiola, local reporters identified Iliana Hernández, Oscar Casanella, Juana Mora, Yasmany Sánchez Pupo, Yennia del Risco, and Boris González Arenas among the detained. Another two activists, Isbel Díaz Torres and Jimmy Martínez, were identified as “missing” after their arrests. The Miami-based outlet Martí identified Hernández and Arenas as journalists present to document the event. Those known to have been arrested were kept in confinement until midnight, reports state.
Casanella posted photos of himself on Facebook sporting a bandage around his forehead and accusing the police of beating him and leaving him to bleed in a prison cell for hours.
“They took me to Calixto García Hospital and after some x-rays … they took me to the [police station] straight to the cells … of course, in the cell there wasn’t even water to wash off the blood I shed,” he said.
Reuters journalist Sarah Marsh posted a video of Casanella’s arrest on Twitter. In the video, the activist can be heard calling the officers “abusers” and stating simply, “I am going to walk, I am going to continue the march, I am walking … why? what have I done? I just wanted to keep marching.”
Casanella said he met Daniel Llorente in prison while being detained. Llorente is not an LGBT activist but an independent dissident whose sole act of protest is to display the American flag. He became world-famous in 2017 for waving the flag while running in front of that year’s May Day parade, an annual celebration of Marxism, and thus triggering a violent beating caught on camera. Llorente spent a year in prison and a mental ward, identified as mentally ill for stating that he believed in God, he later said.
“Yesterday around 3:30 p.m. State Security arrested me in front of the Capital, thinking I was going to participate in the Gay march,” Llorente wrote on Facebook on Sunday. “They noticed me carrying a towel with the U.S. flag on it around my shoulder …  I was detained until nearly 11 a.m. In my cell were also Sandalio “El Guerrero” and Oscar Casanella.”
Llorente also posted an image of how he was dressed when arrested, crediting the Cuban dance music star Chocolate MC for sending him the U.S. flag towel.
The march occurred on Saturday to substitute the canceled “conga against homophobia” led by the dictator’s daughter. Cenesex, which Mariela Castro runs, issued a statement announcing that it was impossible to host such an event because “the new tensions in the international and regional context directly and indirectly affect our country, and have tangible and intangible impacts in the normal course of our quotidian lives and in the implementation of the policies of the Cuban state. The agency urged Cubans not to participate in any gay rights event not controlled by the Castro regime.
Mariela Castro dismissed the large gathering Saturday and did not address the violence by the Cuban regime against it, quoting a leftist thinker who condemned the rally and herself calling it “a show organized in Miami and Matanzas, backed by U.S. embassy officials and covered by foreign press.”
An activist speaking to 14 y medio, Yasmany Sánchez Pupo, before being arrested, described the purpose of the rally to 14 y medio as a reminder to Cubans to “not fear doing something for themselves without needing anybody else,” a dangerous idea in a communist state.
Contrary to attempts by Cenesex to marry the Castro agenda to false LGBT activism, the Castro regime has been notoriously repressive to queer Cubans, while the Cuban exile community became home to many fleeing the Castro regime. One of Cuba’s most celebrated writers, Reinaldo Arenas, wrote about his arrest before he left Cuba in 1980 in his memoir, Before Night Falls, describing brutal beatings and torture in Cuban prisons against gay and transgender Cubans arrested for their identity. He also noted that, in the 1970s, the Castro regime publicized the notion of “homosexuality as a pathological issue” and ordered gay communists “immediately removed from their place of work” because they “did not meet the political and moral standards to execute the office they held and, therefore, were unemployed or offered a position at a labor camp.”
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

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