Castro's admission with a false bottom
Castro admitted the persecution of gay men in Cuba. And in the same breath partly talked his way out of it.
On 31 August 2010, the Mexican daily "La Jornada" published the second part of a long conversation with Fidel Castro. The Cuban, then eighty-four, spoke about the persecution of homosexual men after the revolution and called it a great injustice. If anyone was responsible for it, he said, it was him.
In the sixties, gay men in Cuba were rounded up as supposed counter-revolutionaries and taken to forced labour camps. The persecution continued into the seventies.
But Castro followed his admission with two excuses. First, he said he had never personally been prejudiced. Second, he had been busy with other things: with attempts on his life, with the October Crisis, with preserving the revolution that had brought him to power in nineteen fifty-nine. The hostility itself, in his interpretation, stemmed from the island's long history of discrimination.
Neither claim stands up to scrutiny. In 1965 Castro had told the American journalist Lee Lockwood that one could never believe a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of a true revolutionary, a true communist militant. In the same conversation, he demanded that homosexuals be kept out of all posts in which they could influence young people.
The historian Samuel Farber states that the impetus and dynamic of this policy came primarily from Castro and the new leadership. The record of the first thirty years after the revolution, he argues, refutes the idea that Cuban homophobia was merely a leftover from pre-revolutionary times.
So the interview remains an ambivalent document. A head of state named the injustice done to a minority, decades too late. And in the same breath partly pushed it away from himself.