HAVANA, Cuba.- Participate or not in the referendum of the next september 25to which the Family Code will be submitted after it was approved by the National Assembly, has become a dilemma for the anti-Castro opposition.
I suppose that it happens to many opponents –I mean those who are not too conservative– as it happens to me, that it would bother me to play along with the dictatorship by serving as a sidekick in this opportunist farce of “democratic exercise” that is the referendum. But it would hurt me even more with my abstention or with a No, to oppose that absolutely all people enjoy rights that until now have been denied them.
But it is that the rights of the people are embodied in laws, they are not submitted to a referendum so that their approval depends on the vote of a majority, or as in the case of the referendum that concerns us, of 50% of the voters. And the other 50% doesn’t count?
If it weren’t for the fact that in Cuba, since 1959, there has been a dictatorship that turned civil society into a group of satellite organizations at the service of the State-Government-Communist Party, the movements of LGBTIQ people, as happens in countries democratically, they would have advocated in court and in all other instances necessary for laws that outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and same-sex marriage.
In Cuba, the rights of the LGBTIQ community are subject to a referendum called by the continuators of the same regime that created the Military Units for Production Assistance (UMAP) and made homophobia a state policy for decades.
The leaders of this regime, who are now so interested in granting rights to the LGBTIQ community, should first apologize for the UMAP, the police raids against homosexuals, the expulsions from universities and workplaces, and the so-called parameterization of the Decade Grey, who did so much damage to the national culture, among many other things.
There will be those who argue that decades ago homosexuals were discriminated against to a greater or lesser extent throughout the world, even in First World countries, and that homosexuality was considered a disease by the World Health Organization. But it was in Fidel Castro’s Cuba that it went so far as to create forced labor camps for the “rehabilitation” of homosexuals, and more than twenty years later, in the first half of the 1980s, the forced internment of people with homosexuality. HIV AIDS.
In the sinister UMAP camps They also locked up religious: Jehovah’s Witnesses, evangelists and Catholics.
Paradoxically, today the regime has achieved that the two sectors that have historically been most discriminated against and marginalized in Cuba in the last 63 years are irreconcilably opposed, regarding the Family Code: homosexuals and Christians, both Catholics and Evangelicals.
The regime, which is posing as modern, inclusive and democratic, will come out on top whether one side prevails or the other. If the Christian fundamentalists, added to the sexist and prejudiced ones, and to the opponents who refuse to participate in the referendum because they consider it a Castroist move, manage to make the NO triumph, the bosses, sorry, will lament that this society continues to be patriarchal and but they will make it clear that it was not for them… And if the YES wins and the Family Code is approved, they will present it as another victory of the Revolution and another sign of the majority support of Cubans for the current leadership, “despite the famine, blackouts and all the other calamities caused by the ‘blockade’”.
For now, the regime is once again managing to divide the opposition. The referendum is the new reason for the disagreement. Opponents who oppose participating in the referendum, for whatever reason, are presented as retrograde, homophobic and question their respect for human rights. And some LGBTIQ activists see those opponents as enemies of their rights and the dictatorship as their ally.
If I focus on the rights of LGBTIQ people, it is precisely because same-sex marriage is what has generated the most controversy among Cubans.
The problem is not the Code itself, with which we can agree on many points. It must be recognized that it is inclusive and advanced. It is positive in recognizing the rights of children and adolescents, the elderly and members of the LGBTIQ community. The problem is in the state interference in family life.
One cannot avoid feeling apprehensive knowing that the Family Code gives the State the power to, “in special circumstances”, intervene and separate children from their parents“in the best interests of the child”.
And that is where we remember that this Family Code, so advanced, so inclusive, that it seems more typical of a First World country than one of the Third World, overwhelmed by the most basic material needs, is the work of a dictatorship. A State-Unique Party-Government that assumes the power to graciously grant rights, as if they were a gift.
Can there be rights where the rule of law does not exist? In Cuba, the rule of law only exists in the dead letter of a spurious constitution that is violated at convenience whenever the bosses deem it convenient. And it is that in that constitution they hung the surname “socialist” to what the bosses understand as the rule of law.
Since the constituents of Castro’s continuity are so interested in the will of Cubans and have lately taken to holding plebiscites, why didn’t they also submit the Penal Code and the social communication law to a referendum, or whatever that law is called? double gag?
No, not that, but they give us, they who are reluctant to give rights, one that does not belong to us: the right to vote on the private life of others.
In my case, I haven’t quite decided what to do on September 25. Most likely, as I do in all the mock voting called by the dictatorship, I will abstain. For not playing along with the regime and because rights are not plebiscited. But it would hurt me, and a lot, if someone interpreted that I postpone or oppose the rights of the LGBTIQ community.
OPINION ARTICLE
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