While First Daughter Mariela Castro Espin says Cuba may soon begin debating whether or not to recognize same-sex unions, it appears others in authority in the island nation are less compassionate toward the LGBT community: Cubanet is reporting that an 18-year-old trans woman was beaten to death after being taken into police custody earlier this month.
An inmate in the jail where the woman, known as Jessica, was held says at least four police officers—including sector chief Boris Luis Caballero—beat her savagely and left her limp body in her cell.
When Jessica was discovered dead in the middle of the night, her corpse was taken to an unknown location.
LGBT Asylum News reports that numerous incidents of harassment, arrests, raids and violence by police have been cited by Cuban bloggers recently.
Dissident Roberto de Jesús Guerra, who was released from prison after two years in 2007, said last year that raids by police on LGBT meeting at several sites in the Cuban capital have been stepped up.
According to Imbert Leannes Acosta, director of El Observatorio Cubano de los Derechos de la Comunidad LGBT (Cuban Observatory of the Rights of the LGBT Community), repression of LGBT in Cuba is increasing, not only in Havana but “we have documented Matanzas [North Cuba] and Guantanamo [East Cuba] cases.”
They may get some help from an unexpected source: A U.S. State Department document released by Wikileaks suggests that independent LGBT groups in Cuba are receiving funding from American sources.
Cubanet via LGBT Asylum News. Photo: Natalie Mainor
Triple S
There needs to be something to stop or otherwise hinder the progress of things like this happening. Talking can only accomplish so much. I’m not saying we need to formulate a world police or anything, but surely, there’s something. It’s just not fair or right for these poor people to go through this and the rest of the world sit back and say that we’re sorry. There has to be more.
Well, I have no suggestions and I suppose that there are none, but it doesn’t make any easier to stomach.
Kylew
Receiving funding from “American sources”. Sounds like the government meddling in other county’s affairs again. I’m not saying helping out the LGBT community in Cuba is a bad thing, but if it IS the US government working to promote dissident groups, destabilise the regime, or promote their peculiarly miopic brand of democracy, they really need to turn to the plank in their own eye vis a vis LGBT treatment, before reaching out to other countries. Otherwise they simply look like hypocrites. Again.
Kev C
Just bomb Cuba’s government already. Fascists dressed up as Marxists.
Kylew
@Kev C: Yeah, cause the US government has the moral high ground when it comes to human rights huh?
Shannon1981
The U.S. is the last nation to tell people how to treat the LGBT community, when there are states making laws that pretty much advocate for the ability of religious nuts to bullyLGBT kids to death. This is just awful, that things like this are being done by the authorities, and it is admirable that there are people here who wish to help, but I think we need to clean up our own house first.
Kev C
@Kylew The US has the moral high ground when compared to Cuba, that’s for sure. Homosexuality was considered a sign of western decadence and imperialism. Gays were put into labor camps and forcibly converted and frequently disappeared. This was an attempted disappearance of an lgbt person. Something that still happens in latin american and african countries.
Kylew
@Kev C: I realise that it’s all relative, and you don’t have to wait until you are perfect until you reach out a hand to help others up – or a fist to knock oppressors don – but the US has had such a long and turbulent history with Cuba, much of which has, and still does, cause considerable suffering to the average man in the street, that it is hypocritical in the exteme to be funding the LGBT resistance, whilst still maintaining a stranglehold on the country’s ability to trade that reduces it to poverty. It’s doubly hypocritical when legislators in state after US state, are still finding ways to deny gay couples and teens rights and protections under the law that would raise the quality of their lives and decrease the number of younth suicides.
Kev C
@Kylew: It’s the same friggin government then as today. The same dictatorship. Do you think maybe they should be held accountable? Someone should hold them accountable. Stand up against police states who offer no freedom and no choices.
pedro
Wow what an ignorant group of commentators…The U.S. in unequivocably better on gay rights and general human rights than Cuba…Please read Antes Que Anochezca by Reinaldo Arenas…There is an English version…a very depressing, but telling book!
Lefty
@pedro: Isn’t that book about 30+ years old? The Washington Post article posted above suggests things have improved considerably since then?
Kylew
@Kev C: I believe that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. You talk about police states who offer no freedom – what about huantanamo, what about extra-ordinary rendition, what about PIPA ad SOPA,what about the new detention without trial? The US has ZERO moral authority to be telling other countries how to run a democracy.
@pedro: The US may well be better on gay rights, subjective though that term is, but whilst the US’s own current behaviour on civil rights in general is so very bad and getting worse by the week I might add, I re-iterate, it has no right to tell others how to live.
Jeez, Pol Pot was better than Hitler, but no-one would want to be ruled by him.
Queer Supremacist
@Kylew: I believe that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. You talk about police states who offer no freedom – what about huantanamo, what about extra-ordinary rendition, what about PIPA ad SOPA,what about the new detention without trial? The US has ZERO moral authority to be telling other countries how to run a democracy.
But Obama is The Most Pro-LGBT President Ever™. Who cares about all our other rights?
/sarc