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‘Before Night Falls’
Hollywood projected Cuba as 'police state' for gays
Lavender & red, part 93
By
Leslie Feinberg
Published Mar 18, 2007 10:08 PM
Hollywood turned up the volume on charges that Cuba was a “penal
colony” for homosexual males with its release of “Before Night
Falls” in August 2000.
The movie was based on a memoir by the late anti-communist Cuban homosexual
writer Reinaldo Arenas, who emigrated to the United States in 1980. A decade
later Arenas committed suicide in a dilapidated Hells Kitchen apartment in
Manhattan, the capital of capital. Impoverished and dying as a result of AIDS,
he had no health insurance and could not afford high medical costs of
care—rights enjoyed by every Cuban under the Revolution in his
homeland.
Since the early days of the 1959 Revolution, the CIA had trolled for grievances
about the Revolution—real, manufactured or exaggerated.
“Before Night Falls” is the pinnacle of this propaganda campaign,
by virtue of having the most capital invested in its production, its cast and
distribution network; the publicity generated for its release; and the
accolades and awards that gave it the imprimatur of “truth.”
Interspersed snippets of actual archival footage from the early days of the
Revolution and snippets of newsreel of Fidel Castro’s speeches aim to
lend the film the appearance of historical authenticity.
As the movie begins, the cameras pan across what is actually rural Mexico, the
backdrop for Arenas’ childhood in Cuba. The reality of agricultural
plantation enslavement is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the voiceover narrates
that the author’s childhood was “splendor,” adding that
“it was absolute poverty but also absolute freedom ... .”
Projected onto movie screens, “Before Night Falls” becomes an
imperialist-era sequel to “Gone with the Wind.”
In both reactionary propaganda films, bygone epochs of white-supremacist
plantation slavery—which shackled African and Indigenous
peoples—are nostalgically revived, revised and romanticized. In both
films, the armies that break the manacles of slavery for profit are cast as the
bad guys.
Pre-Revolution:
exploitation, not freedom
Viewers of “Before Night Falls” are left with the overall
impression that the U.S.-backed Batista regime actually offered greater
“freedom.”
In an October 2001 movie review about “Before Night Falls,”
entitled “Gays in Cuba, from the Hollywood School of
Falsification,” Leonardo Hechavarría and Marcel Hatch took on this
fiction. (www.walterlippman.com)
Hechavarría’s biography describes him as a Cuban citizen, a
translator and interpreter, and states that “he is a passionate advocate
of the Revolution and works for increased acceptance of lesbians and gays in
his homeland.” Marcel Hatch is identified as a typographer, “a
veteran gay rights activist and Cuba defender.”
In their review, Hechavarría and Hatch wrote: “Before the 1959
Revolution, life for lesbians and gays was one of extreme isolation and
repression, enforced by civil law, augmented by Catholic dogma. Patriarchal
attitudes made lesbians invisible. If discovered, they’d often suffer
sexual abuse, disgrace in the community and job loss.
“Havana’s gay male underground—some 200,000—was a
purgatory of prostitution to American tourists, domestic servitude and constant
threats of violence and blackmail. The closet was the operative image. Survival
often meant engaging in fake heterosexual marriage, or banishment to the gay
slum.”
For more analysis of “Before Night Falls,” also see “The
Sexual Politics of Reinaldo Arenas: Fact, Fiction and the Real Record of the
Cuban Revolution,” by Jon Hillson, at www.blythe.org.
Researchers Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich concluded about life for the
homosexual/transgender urban work force in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, “If
legal sanctions and official harassment were rare, this tolerance was due less
to social acceptance than to overriding considerations of profit and the
economic interests of the underworld that dominated the Cuban political
apparatus.”
But the misery of urban sexual enslavement in brothels, casinos, domestic work
and drug networking is nowhere to be seen in “Before Night Falls.”
Neither is the apparatus of the Batista dictatorship’s police, secret
agents and army.
Workers’ state, not bosses’ state
“Before Night Falls” is the blockbuster of the propagandistic
charges that the Cuban Revolution ushered in a “police state,”
similar to fascist Nazi Germany and the bloody 1973 counter-revolution in
Chile.
These vilifications purposely confused the difference between a workers’
state and a bosses’ state. Understanding the class character of the Cuban
workers’ state is very important for those who seek their own liberation
today.
Cuba was a newly developing workers’ state—which had to literally
battle overt and covert military onslaught and economic strangulation by U.S.
imperialism. At the same time the Revolution had to fight the legacy of racist,
sexist and anti-homosexual/transgender indoctrination by patriarchal
colonialism, capitalism and imperialism.
In contrast, the state machineries of the exploiting classes—and the
church hierarchies that serve them—have always relied on repressive
terror, and deepening and strengthening homophobia and transphobia, in order to
conquer and rule.
For example, the Spanish colonial state in Cuba enslaved the Indigenous
population on the island, castrated those it considered
“sodomites,” and forced them to eat their own testicles coated with
dirt. (“Los Negros Curros,” 1986)
In order to save German capitalism, a wing of industrialists and bankers
bankrolled the fascists who forced tens of thousands of gays and lesbians to
wear the pink triangle in slave labor and extermination camps.
Víctor Hugo Robles wrote of Chile—where the mass of workers and
peasants were not armed against the 1973 CIA-backed
counter-revolutionary—that, “Perhaps the most forgotten are the
many transvestites who were executed during the days immediately following the
coup.” (“History in the Making: The Homosexual Liberation Movement
in Chile”)
In the imperialist United States, homosexuality and sex/gender variance were so
viciously criminalized and punished by state repression that a mass political
movement arose to resist it. Despite widespread struggle, same-sex love
remained illegal in the United States until 2003. Currently, at least 65
percent of transwomen and 29 percent of transmen are estimated to have been
imprisoned at some point in their life in the United States. (Critical
Resistance)
And today it is U.S. imperialism that has set up concentration camps—from
Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo—where anti-gay and anti-trans rape and
humiliation are incorporated into the science of torture.
The state of former slaves
The Cuban workers’ state, like the armies of Bolívar and Toussaint
L’Overture, is an armed liberation struggle of the oppressed up against
the Goliath force of the oppressor state.
An estimated 20,000 Cubans died in two years of battling the U.S.-backed
Batista dictatorship—up against bombs, aircraft and artillery. The
Revolution disarmed the Batista regime’s army and secret police
networks.
However, simply dismantling the bosses’ apparatus of dictatorship did not
create a new mechanism to defend the island from counter-revolution and
invasion. Imperialism soon cinched an economic noose around the island, its
Pentagon a constant threat.
A new state had to be built, from the ground up. It took a mass mobilization of
the population to defend the gains of the Revolution. The National
Revolutionary Militia and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution
organized the entire population into a network against CIA-organized subterfuge
and sabotage.
This block-by-block watchfulness, combined with old, deep prejudice against
same-sex liaisons, made life uncomfortable for some Cuban male homosexuals.
While they had experienced extreme isolation and alienation in the sexual
exploitation industry, they had also found refuge in urban anonymity and
privately-owned casinos, bars and other meeting places.
However, unlike its portrayal in “Before Night Falls,” the Cuban
workers’ state was not a repressive apparatus. Rather, it had the task of
defending 11 million Cubans from re-enslavement by U.S. finance capital. The
Cuban Revolution could not have survived a day, let alone a half century,
without organizing and mobilizing the population to defend its independence
from imperialism.
The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and the Cuban popular
militias—which armed millions of women as well as men—are the
protective might of a formerly enslaved population against enraged former
plantation owners, bankers, industrialists and syndicate bosses.
Arming the Cuban population of workers—rural and urban—made it
possible to defeat the invasion at Playa Girón (the Bay of Pigs). At the
same time, this defense allowed the Revolution to boot out the U.S. sugar
plantation owners and gave the land back to those who tilled it. It allowed the
Revolution to oust U.S. industrialists and bankers, and crime syndicate bosses
who ran the lucrative brothel, gambling and drug networks. The Revolution could
begin deconstructing the white supremacist and patriarchal systems that
hadn’t allowed Cubans of African descent to set foot on the beaches, and
had kept women in servitude.
This was a workers’ state.
‘Dispute this fable with facts’
Calling for an end to Hollywood’s blockade of Cuba, Hechavarría and
Hatch stress about “Before Night Falls”: “[I]n a queer
cinemagraphic twist, it erases the achievements of Cuban toilers, women, people
of color, and indeed gays, who’ve made stupendous advances since
1959.
“The end of hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, high infant mortality, and
foreign domination of the island are of course undeniable—all fruits of
the Revolution.”
After the Revolution, “advances for women in general were naturally
extended to lesbians, and many became among the most ardent defenders of the
Revolution. On the other hand, a significant minority of gay men left Cuba.
Some joined the counter-revolutionary expatriates in Miami or were blackmailed
into doing so. Ironically, the U.S., which was busy flushing out and jailing
its homosexuals during the McCarthy period, welcomed Cuban gays as part of its
overall campaign to destabilize the island.” (walterlippmann.com)
Hechavarría and Hatch added: “It was Clinton/Bush-inspired destiny
that a hot button pushing, gay-themed anti-Cuba melodrama would be released.
The persistent myth, promulgated chiefly by right-wing Cuban-Americans (most of
whom are hyper-homophobes), that homosexuality is illegal in Cuba, that gays
and lesbians are banned from the Communist Party, and that they are savaged and
tossed in the slammer, is pure bunk.”
Hechavarría and Hatch stated categorically: “We know of no Cuban,
for or against their government, who finds the movie credible. Nor do smart gay
activists.
“This political falsity,” they concluded, “has widespread
currency among liberal skeptics and within the queer community. It is to this
audience the film was targeted. It is necessary for friends of Cuba to dispute
this fable with facts.”
Next: Cuban Revolution: trajectory of progress for homosexual/transgender
population.
For more on homosexuality/transgender and the Cuban Revolution, see
Lavender & Red parts 86-92, at www.workers.org. Look for the lavender and
red logo.
E-mail: [email protected].
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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