Mariela castro biography of michael jackson
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After decades of homophobia, Cuba closer to allowing same-sex marriage
Cuba’s National Assembly has agreed to constitutional reform that would allow same-sex marriage on the island. The draft reform was approved on Sunday and will be put to a popular vote later this year. If approved, marriage would be redefined as a “union between two people” instead of a union between a man and a woman.
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LGTBQ activist Isbel Torres
“With this proposal for constitutional regulation, Cuba puts itself among the world’s leading countries in terms of recognizing and guaranteeing human rights,” said deputy Mariela Castro, the daughter of former president Raúl Castro and an active spokesperson for LGTBQ rights. Castro, who heads Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education, said the changes could also lay the foundation to ultimately allow same-sex couples to adopt children. “The state must guarantee all families this right and the
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If you’ve read Before Night Falls, the autobiography of gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, or seen Julian Schnabel’s wonderful film adaptation starring Javier Bardem, you have some notion of the dismal treatment of LGBT people in Cuba during the long reign of Fidel Castro.
Castro, the communist revolutionary turned dictator, died Friday at age 90, eight years after ceding leadership of his country to his younger brother, Raúl. This weekend, amid a slew of more conciliatory obituaries and remembrances, The Daily Beast published a piece chronicling Castro’s terrible record on gay rights. After taking power, we’re reminded, the leader treated homosexuality as an affront to the hypermasculine revolutionary ideal, going so far as to intern gay Cubans in forced labor camps, and later, during the AIDS crisis, to sequester HIV-positive citizens in sanitariums that were tantamount to prisons.
In 2010, Castro finally acknowledged in an interview with a Mexican newspaper that these progra
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