[Sandokan]

Gay activists in Cuba demand that parliament respect their rightshttp://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/28/2873429/gay-activists-in-cuba-demand-that.html

By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

Cuban gay activists held a kiss-in demonstration and presented a demand for respect to the country’s parliament on Thursday, as they prepared for the upcoming island’s second annual Gay Pride parade.

Fifty people — mostly gay rights activists but also a handful of dissidents such as Guillermo Fariñas and Martha Beatriz Roque — signed a petition calling for civil rights and handed it to the National Assembly of People’s Power, said Ignacio Estrada, a gay activist and dissident.

“Our document calls on the Cuban government to fully comply with international agreements it has signed on human rights, especially those that apply to LGBT rights,” Estrada said after delivering the petition.

The petition also calls on lawmakers to launch an investigation of the Military Units to Aid Production, or UMAPs — hard-labor camps created by Fidel Castro during the 1960s to detain homosexuals and government critics — and requests trials for government officials responsible for the camps.

Activists are also demanding that authorities stop applying the vaguely worded crime of “pre-criminal dangerousness” to gays and instead investigate complaints of those who are beaten or fired from their jobs because of their sexual orientation, Estrada said.

Estrada married Wendy Iriepa last year after she underwent transgender surgery. At the time, Iriepa claimed that Mariela Castro, Cuban President Raúl Castro’s daughter and head of the National Center for Sex Education, fired her from her job at the CENESEX for consorting with a dissident.

Estrada said three gay rights groups that are independent of the CENESEX — the Cuban League Against AIDS, the Open Door Foundation and LGBT Observatory — will stage the island’s second annual Gay Pride march on Sunday.

Before last year’s parade, Cuba didn’t allow the march, which marks the Stonewall riots against police raids in New York in 1969, saying that the demonstration wasn’t necessary on the island. Police detained a number of gay activists last year to keep them away from the march, but about 20 managed to join.

The march this Sunday will start at the Capitol Building, once home of the Cuban government, move down Paseo del Prado boulevard and end at the seaside Malecón, Estrada told El Nuevo Herald by phone from Havana.
The “Kiss-In for Diversity and Equality” at the Ramón Fonst sports arena was organized by Project Rainbow, which calls itself an “anti-capitalist and independent LGBT group,” to mark the Stonewall riots.

The group was founded last year by Yasmin Portales Machado, who is described in her blog as a mother, a feminist and a “critical Marxist.”

“With this public and affectionate action we invite you to make the LGBT community in Cuba visible,” the group said in a statement. “We are part of the nation.

Hope they will be able to accomplish their program and allow marching in front of the Capitol Building. Normally the police don’t allow their march.

[benpenguin]

Dear Sandoka,
I was wondering if you are actually a robot.
What are you trying to accomplish by crying about Cuba every few hours on pofo? Your posts are tl;dr, boring, one-sided and accomplishes nothing.

I can speak for myself, and I also think most people on this forum are armchair politicians, not revolutionaries. You might find better chance overthrowing Castro & Co and install a US puppet government on Twitter and Facebook.

Just my two cents.

[Sithsaber]

Machismo is a biG thing throughout LA, and has always been extremely prevalent amongst the Cuban islanders and émigrés. Sure homosexuals not being completely equal with everyone else is a slight contradiction when compared with what the govt there says, but we should keep in mind that until relatively recently they were seen as a western bourgeoise corruption and that Cuba is not as bad as many LA countries when it comes to repect for homosexuals.