Cuban Church Condemns Gay Rights Day March

There is no officially recognized gay organization in Cuba except the Catholic Church, and its leaders, most of whom are closet cases, are no friends of extending homosexual rights beyond their clique. When any soul, regardless of extraneous factors, raises his voice in demand of his human rights in Communist Cuba, he becomes a pariah and a target. The Church, if it will not plead for his rights, should at least refrain from joining the lynch mob gathering around him. But the hierarchs of the Cuban Church, who have witnessed passively and sometimes complicitly the destruction of civil society in Cuba, have raised their voices for the first time in 50 years in condemnation of a group of Cubans who desired nothing more and nothing less than to assert the right to be themselves in a public forum. A Church which has never condemned the regime's intolerance beckons it now to be more not less intolerant!

It is not the homosexual lifestyle that is the issue, but the reaction of the island's henchmen to that lifestyle. The Church's appeal to the Communist authorities to stop the peaceful protest provided them with the necessary cover to do so. Apologists for the regime will no doubt claim that in cancelling the march the regime succumbed to pressure from the Church, which in this respect, at least -- to frame the argument for them -- represents the reactionary thought and tendencies in Cuban society which the Revolution has fought but not entirely defeated since they are so ingrained in the Cuban character. Hence they will contend that it is not Castro who is principally to blame for the suppression of the Gay Rights March but the intolerant and homophobic Cuban people.

If the Gay Rights Day March had been allowed to proceed it would have been a great propaganda coup for the regime and its defiance of the Church's appeal to stop it would have been cited as proof of its greater openness and tolerance. But, of course, the regime could not allow such a public demonstration even if doing so rebounded to its favor as yet another instance of Raúl's so-called "reforms."

Why?

Because it would have constituted an actual reform as opposed to a sham one.

Had the gays been allowed to march theirs would have been the first non-official public demonstration in Cuba since the statue of Our Lady of Charity was carried in procession from one end of the island to the other in January 1960, the first and last gasp of the church militant in Cuba before submitting to the new Communist order. Perhaps church officials did not wish to be reminded of the role that the church forfeited in the life of the nation to preserve their isolated privileges and prerogatives, including their right to practice sodomy without retribution.