Hit drama forces Cubans to confront homophobia

Sunday Herald - 14 May 2006
Hit drama forces Cubans to confront homophobia
From Ronald Buchanan in Havana

NOBODY is suggesting – not yet, anyway – that Fidel Castro and Che
Guevara were anything more than the best of revolutionary friends, but a
new TV soap opera has blown wide open Cuba’s macho myth and polarised
the population.

The series, called La Cara Oculta De La Luna (Dark Side Of The Moon), is
nothing short of sensational in Cuba’s closed, frequently homophobic
society.

This is no light romance or morally uplifting tale of revolutionary
justice, but a sympathetic, if occasionally sensationalised, account of
the lives of people with HIV and Aids.

By Caribbean standards, a relatively modest total of some 5400 Cubans
are HIV-infected or have Aids, and more than three quarters of them are
gay men. These are figures that most of the communist faithful would
rather have swept under the carpet. Not so the makers of Dark Side Of
The Moon, who must have received clearance, insiders say, from Cuba’s
President Castro.

The first episode went off smoothly, with the storyline of a 14-year-old
girl contracting HIV from her first sexual encounter. This is relatively
tame stuff in a country where sex is almost routine for teenagers
scarcely out of childhood.

But then came episode two. “I am what you’re thinking. I’m gay,” said
one of the characters at the height of the drama. The acting fell well
short of Gielgud’s Hamlet, but the impact could hardly have been
greater. Nobody before had said anything remotely similar on Cuban TV.
Previous references to homosexuality had been restricted to the
occasional stereotypical limp-wristed figures of fun.

Cubans love to discuss TV soap operas. Once an episode is over they are
capable of arguing for hours over whether the heroine should marry the
weedy but hard-working bloke or the handsome one with the roving eye.

Dark Side Of The Moon was altogether different, however. The newspapers,
which are predominantly loyal to the government, were deluged with
readers’ letters and packed with interviews and commentaries about the
series.

Infomed, the health ministry’s website, opened a readers’ blog;
participants in the regular internet forum run by the National Centre
for Sexual Education (Cenesex) spoke of nothing else for days; and
Jiribilla, an electronic magazine, dedicated a whole issue to the programme.

“Our society’s hidden face is just beginning to be revealed,” TV
producer Vicente Gonzalez wrote in Jiribilla.

That’s not quite true. A homosexual was sympathetically portrayed in the
1993 movie Fresa Y Chocolate (Strawberry And Chocolate), an
international arthouse success. Since then, tolerance towards gays has
made inroads, sometimes almost imperceptibly, in the arts, public health
and education.

What makes Dark Side different is that nothing that has gone before has
been nearly as upfront on the issue. Unusually in Cuba, where views on
most issues are eerily consistent, at least in public, Dark Side has
provoked a variety of opinions.

Most took the view that it was high time for Cuba to admit to having a
gay community, and the series could only be a help in curbing the spread
of Aids.

Some critics, however, were frankly homophobic, while others said the
series would promote homophobia. One of the principal characters, a gay
lawyer, falls in love with a building worker – till then an exemplary
husband and father – with whom he elopes.

In the Cenesex forum, prize-winning writer Reynaldo Gonzalez objected to
what he saw as the stereotype of the “gay family-wrecker”. But, he
added, that wasn’t all that was wrong with the series: “The hysterical
atmosphere in which it’s all played out is worse,” he said. “It strips
out whatever prophylactic content there might have been in the drama and
leaves it as a straight forward, vulgar shocker.”

Gonzalez won backing, in the same forum, from Demetrio Gonzalez, a lab
technician from the nation’s cigar capital, Pinar del Rio. “It’s no
secret that we gays have been victims of homophobic abuse for years, and
all that this soap opera’s done is convince people that we’re the lowest
of the low.”

Angel Padron, from the province of Camaguey, agreed. “In the corner
store, one of the local women was saying: ‘You’ve got to watch out for
the gays. These days the men don’t run off with a girlfriend, it’s the
boyfriend they’re after’.”

Joel del Rio, the cinema critic of the Young Communist League daily,
Juventud Rebelde, reported that passers-by have shouted abuse at the
actors who play the gay couple when they have seen them in the street.
Del Rio criticised Dark Side for “making an equivalence between
homosexuality and all the vicious and antisocial tendencies of humankind”.

In the same paper, columnist Ricardo Ronquillo wrote that “a
distinguished colleague” had maintained that the soap opera was part of
a plan “to homosexualise the whole of Cuban society”.

But while millions of Cubans scratched their heads wondering who the
“distinguished colleague” might be, Ronquillo added: “A discussion about
this had to begin somewhere.

“What would have been a lot more worrying would have been to believe
that we’re a society in which everyone agrees on absolutely everything,
without counterpoints of opposing views on what are the most intimate of
conflicts.”

He added: “Worst of all would have been nothing but silence.”

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