Date with the President’s Daughter

I made sure to get a good night’s sleep last Sunday night in anticipation of meeting President Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela at the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), where she is the director. We had all read an article by scholar Abel Sierra to prepare, in which he acknowledges some meritorious achievements of the organization, but is largely critical of the way in which it attempts to integrate homosexuals and transsexuals into Cuban society without giving them the space to organize independently. We woke up early, debated over breakfast, and headed over to calle 10 and 23 in Vedado where the CENESEX office is located. We were sat down in the central courtyard, and after a few seconds of anticipation told that Mariela would not be able to meet us because of prior commitments. Disappointment descended. What followed was a forty-five minute presentation by the director of scientific education at the center about the institutional history of CENESEX. As much steam as we lost from reading Sierra’s dynamic article until the end of the presentation we regained during the round of questioning. The first question dealt with a speech of Mariela’s in which she encouraged gays to integrate themselves fully into Cuban society, and pressed how that was possible when gays weren’t given the right to marry legally. Another dealt with spaces for demonstrating and organizing independently, one was about the inability to access sex toys in Cuba, another with sexual tourism, and none were answered succinctly. The same rhetoric that the Cuban government consistently uses to speak about race and the absence of an organization for Afro-Cubans was used to explain to us the reason gays and trans people were not to have their own autonomous organizations. The idea of the Revolution is unity, and creating independent organizations separates us. I left with a desire to talk to Mariela herself.