I'd recommend 'Before Night Falls', a great film about how a gay poet, Reinaldo Arenas, was imprisoned by Castro's government for being, well, gay. Oh those Stalinists are such lovely people.
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‘I don’t consider homosexuality to be a phenomenon of degeneration...[I consider] it to be one of the natural aspects and tendencies of human beings which should be respected. I am absolutely opposed to any form of repression, contempt, scorn or discrimination with regard to homosexuals.’ Fidel Castro, 1993

Homophobia exists in Cuba as it does all over the world. But those who assert that widespread repression of homosexuality exists in Cuba rely on statements made in the 1960s when homosexuality was a criminal offence (as it was at the time in Britain). While the backward ideas and prejudice still entertained by some individuals mean that there have been instances in Cuba in recent times when gays have been subjected to harassment, the idea of Cuba as a repressive regime where gays face constant persecution has no basis in reality. Nevertheless it is constantly brought up by opportunists in Britain as a with which to beat the Revolution.

Before the Revolution, when Cuba was an offshore casino and brothel for the idle rich of the US, homosexuality was officially outlawed. Repression and poverty forced many gay men into prostitution. The anti-homosexual 1930s Public Ostentation Law remained after the Revolution triumphed. Between 1965 and 1968, homosexual men were amongst those incarcerated in austere Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), labour camps set up to counter bourgeois and individualistic elements who were resisting the Revolution. The camps were closed down in 1968 following bitter protests to the government by the Cuban Writers and Artists Federation. It was a year later that in the United States, after years of persecution, homosexuals fought pitched battles with the police after a routine raid in the Stonewall bar.

In 1979 homosexual acts were decriminalised in Cuba (unlike in many capitalist countries, including the United States, where in many states sodomy remains a criminal offence). In 1987 the offence of ‘homosexual acts in public places’ was removed from Cuba’s penal code. The age of consent for homosexuals in Cuba is 16 years, the same as for heterosexuals. In 1993 sex education workshops on homosexuality were run throughout Cuba to explain that homophobia is a prejudice.

Cuba continues on a path towards equality, with gay and lesbian groups flourishing and notable for a vocal and high-profile contingent on the annual May Day march. In addition, these groups are represented in the country’s National Assembly.

‘We have to abolish any form of discrimination against those persons,’ said Ricardo Alarcon, National Assembly president, in 2007. ‘We are trying to see how to do that, whether it should be to grant them the right to marry or to have same-sex unions…Socialism should be a society that does not exclude anybody.’