Castro Not Homophobic, He Just Thought Forced Labour Was Perfectly Okay
September 1, 2010 No Comments
In Cuba in the 1960s they had forced labour camps for gay people.
Fidel Castro has just given an interview after several years of being off the map and seriously ill and this is one of the problems he wants to take responsibility for.
He says it was a “great injustice” and that he was too busy worrying about other problems at that time to deal with it.
Good for him for saying, “if anyone is responsible, it’s me. I’m not going to place the blame on others.”
But that in no way excuses his allowing it to continue (let alone happen in the first place).
If Hitler had later apologized for killing gay people in World War Two would we have forgiven him or said, “it’s okay, he was just busy fighting the war and didn’t have time to fix the problem?”
No way.
The persecution of gay people continued in Cuba until the 1970s and in 1979 gay sex was decriminalized. Now they’re even going so far the other way on the scale of equality and access to health care as to provide free sex-change operations.
Looks like maybe they have managed to make some positive changes after all but chances are they are superficial. I can’t imagine Cuba is a good place to live if you are gay. Ideas like that are deeply entrenched in culture and it takes a lot to make a real change.
