Granma international english edition lgbtq
Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX) was founded on December 28, 1988, to support formal, popular, and collective education processes regarding, sexuality, gender persona, health and sexual rights, and akin issues.
The specialized institution is attached to the Ministry of Public Health, and since 2006 is an accredited postgraduate study center, attached to the University of Havana’s University of Medical Sciences. It is a member organization of the Cuban Together Nations Association, the World Association for Sexual Health, Latin American Federation of Sexology and Sex Education Societies, the International Lesbian, Lgbtq+, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, and its regional corporation for Latin America and the Caribbean.
CENESEX promotes sex learning based on a socialist, emancipatory paradigm. This means recognition of the right to sexuality as an inalienable human right in any society, as MSc Manuel Vázquez Seijido, assistant director of CENESEX, told Granma International.
To ensure respect for this right, and combat prejudice and discrimination, CENESEX makes use of three areas of scientific work: medical assistance related to teaching and researc
A range of activities are being undertaken May 4 through 18, as part of the 11th Cuban Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (Cuba’s event to mark IDAHO - International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia).
Under the motto of “Me incluyo” (I include myself), this year’s activities have been focused on raising awareness in schools and educational institutions regarding discrimination against the LGBTI community, working both with teachers and students.
On May 11, a cultural Gala was held in Havana’s Karl Marx Theater, with performances by Cuban and international artists, who came to together to celebrate diversity and promote respect for different sexual and gender identities.
The Director of the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), Mariela Castro, presented an award to the British LGBT activist, Mike Jackson, who was portrayed in the multi-award winning clip Pride, based on the true story of the beginnings of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), set up by activists who raised funds to help families affected by the British miners’ strike in 1984.
Also awarded was Spanish actress Carla Antonelli, noted LGBT rights activist and the
Image edited by Kevin Rothrock.
Alberto Roque, a prominent Cuban activist for sexual diversity, posted on his blog Homo Sapiens an open letter to five members of the Cuban Parliament, in which he warns about the traditional, conservative and heteronormative treatment that the Cuban press has given to the topic of the family, precisely on February 14, the “Day of Love,” and also St. Valentine's Day in some countries.
Roque, a member of the Cuban Society for the Multidisciplinary Study of Sexuality (SOCUMES), takes as starting aim an article by journalist Lisandra Fariñas, “A Love Code for the Family,” published in the country's largest circulation newspaper, the state-sponsored Granma. In the article, the correspondent says:
Asimismo, el texto persigue el fortalecimiento del matrimonio legalmente formalizado o judicialmente reconocido, fundado en la absoluta igualdad de derechos de hombre y mujer; el más eficaz cumplimiento por los padres de sus obligaciones con respecto a la protección, formación moral y educación de los hijos para que se desarrollen plenamente en todos los aspectos y como dignos ciudadanos de la sociedad socialista y la plena real
Cuba: ‘for families free of homophobia’
An interview with Mariela Castro
The following interview by Dalia González Delgado originally appeared in Granma Internacional.
Director of the National Sex Education Center (CENESEX) and editor of the Sexology and Society magazine, a graduate in Education, specializing in Educational Psychology and with a Masters’ in Sexuality, Mariela Castro Espín was awarded the Eureka Prize for Science in 2012.
A CENESEX initiative, events and activities around May 17, International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia, possess been organized since 2008. “We are not promoting fashions but a revolutionary ideology of social equality and equity in the process of socialist transition being developed in Cuba,” Mariela Castro stated.
This year, the event is assigned to the Cuban family, under the maxim “Home is love, respect and inclusion: For families free of homophobia and transphobia.”
What innovations are contained in the 6th Cuban Conference against Homophobia?
For the first time, the National Sports, Physical Education and Recreation Institute (INDER) is honoring us with its participation. Historically, sports has been an area of exclusion in
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Adecade after the ‘fall of communism’, the universal triumph of capitalism—widely taken for granted as an accomplished fact—has yet to become a literal reality. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European regimes has so far not been followed by the sudden demise of China, Vietnam, North Korea or Cuba. The conventional view would be that this is still only a matter of time. Meanwhile, these societies have not disappeared, and their diverse experiences call for analytic attention. Among them, the record of post-revolutionary Cuba is different. Unlike the PRC, Cuba has not embraced the stock market or Titanic, or benefited, enjoy Vietnam, from Japanese loans and investment. Nor, like the DRPK till this year, has it gone into deep hibernation. The traumatic shock to its economy, with the erasure of the Soviet bloc, was greater than that to East Germany or North Korea, yet it has got through the decade without mass unemployment or famine. This is not to say that the ‘special period in time of peace’—the official euphemism for the state of life-and-death emergency declared by Fidel Castro