Miguel Díaz-Canel, president of Cuba. | Photo: Wikimedia
The same-sex marriage campaign in Cuba has received one of its biggest boost as the country’s president declares his support for marriage equality.
Cuba will soon hold a referendum on whether to update the constitution to recognize marriage as between ‘two people’ rather than the current ‘voluntary union of a man and a woman’.
Miguel Díaz-Canel took over the presidency from Raul Castro in April this year.
Speaking in a television interview on TeleSur he said, t’he approach of recognizing marriage between two people, without limitations, responds to a problem of eliminating all types of discrimination in society’.
‘We’ve been going through a massive thought evolution and many taboos have been broken,’ Diaz-Canel said,
The National Assembly approved adopting the constitution to replace the 1976 national charter. Cubans will go to the polls in February to cast their votes on the draft constitution.
Cuba’s anti-LGBTI history
Marriage equality face strong opposition from Catholic groups.
Cuba’s Catholic Church has urged the country’s citizens to reject the legalizing same-sex marriage. It said richer countries imposed ‘ideological colonialism’ on Cuba via same-sex marriage.
After Fidel Castro to power in 1959, he sent 25,000 gay men deemed unfit for military service to labor camps. He later apologized in 2010 for sending gay men to the work camps.
Until 1993, the Cuban government quarantined people with HIV and AIDS in a state-run sanitaria.
Since 2008, Cuba has offered free gender affirming surgeries. But in 2017 Castro Espin noted that fewer than 40 people have been able to receive them.
