The Collective Will: Gay Liberation and Cubaphilia

Abstract

During the winter of 1970–1971, a letter from an anonymous group of gay Cubans arrived in Liberation News Service’s (LNS’s) Claremont Avenue mailbox via a group of New York gay liberationists. Such an occurrence was not unusual. The collective received correspondence from radical groups all around the world on a daily basis. But the letter’s explicit criticism of Cuba’s Communist leadership set this document apart from the vast majority of LNS correspondence. Whereas New Leftists typically praised Castro’s Cuba, the letter from gay Cubans denounced Cuban homophobia: “Since its beginning—first in veiled ways, later without scruples or rationalizations—the Cuban revolutionary government has persecuted homosexuals. The methods range from the most common sort of physical attack to attempts to impose psychic and moral disintegration upon gay people. In theory, at least, the Cuban revolution holds that homosexuality is not compatible with the development of a society whose goal is communism.”¹ The authors went on to describe the specifics of their oppression: abuses in state concentration camps; false arrests and detainments; ghettoization. The details were grisly and offered a gritty critique of the Western Hemisphere’s Communist icon. They also raised a series of thorny questions for LNS. What would the collective do with the letter? Print it? Destroy it? That decision forced LNS to publicly establish a hierarchy of political values. Was gay liberation or Third World Marxism preeminent in LNS’s political worldview?