HAVANA, Cuba – In its early years, Castroism, by advocating the elimination of what it considered “bourgeois morality,” caused a relaxation of customs in Cuban society. And one of its consequences, as had happened in Russia after the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, was sexual debauchery among the youngest.
Freed by state atheism from the taboos and inhibitions of religion and social conventions, separated from their families in carrying out the tasks of the Revolution, young people and adolescents made love, or something that resembled it, without much commitment. , in a more than free, very free way, both in the promiscuity of scholarships and agricultural camps, and hidden in air raid shelters, banana plantations and tobacco fields.
Sex was a fun antidote to the boredom caused by so many impositions and prohibitionsmobilizations, voluntary work, socialist emulation and indoctrinating teques.
Unlike the sexual revolution of feminism, birth control pills, miniskirts and hippies that took place elsewhere in those same years, free love in socialist Cuba was regulated by the sexist and sexist morality of the Castro bosses, who boasted of their flirtations and conquests while demanding discretion in the recholatas from their subordinates.
The writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante referred to, in his book “Map drawn by a spy”, where he reflected the atmosphere he found in Havana in 1965 when he returned from Belgium to attend his mother’s funeral: “The wives of the leaders of the Revolution They formed a kind of entity with a view to maintaining the most bourgeois values of the sanctity of marriage, the union of the family and the sacrosanct duty towards children. All these axioms applied, of course, to everyone, except Fidel Castro, who could have as many mistresses as he wanted and maintain a set of apartments and houses in which to sleep, a different one every night.
The Women of the Revolution, as they were called, were not a state body but were as influential as if they were. Faced with their very fiery spouses, with testosterone stimulated by absolute power, and the courtesans who swarmed around them to take advantage of their privileges, the Women of the Revolution constituted a committee for the defense of husbands that was more reminiscent of a association of Catholic ladies for decency and good morals that to the emancipated Soviet comrades of the Bolshevik era who were supposed to be their example of proletarian morality for the construction of communist society.
They were supportive of each other, always vigilant and relentless with everything that had to do with slips and adulteries. Their husbands, their courtesans and those who served as their accomplices had to beware of their complaints and snitches at all levels of the government and the Communist Party, which forced the bosses to intervene and scold so that the relaxation was orderly.
The Castros acquired the habit of monitoring the sexual lives of others. And not just homosexuals, who were considered “social scourges” and persecuted as such.
The grassroots committees of the UJC warned their members of the serious consequences of associating, and even worse, dating people with “ideological deviations.”
Between 1975 and 1989, to which They fought in Angola or Ethiopia, in case they were cheated on by their wives, they sent them the famous “yellow card”, giving them the choice, if they were members of the Communist Party, between the red card or the adulteress.
Quite a few tragedies – even suicides and murders – caused that rude interference in people’s private lives. The worst thing is that sometimes the accusations of marital infidelity were based only on gossip and quarrels from CDR supporters or co-workers motivated by envy, quarrels or personal animosity.
For decades, through recordings or filming, people’s sexual behaviors have been used by State Security to discredit and blackmail. They have done it not only with opponents of the regime, but also with diplomats and foreign artists and intellectuals.
