HAVANA -- Is a regime with a reputation for fierce homophobia surging ahead of the United States on LGBT rights?  Recent developments suggest that this is indeed the case in the Republic of Cuba.

       First, in the mid-1990s, the Cuban government allowed the production and viewing of the gay-themed film Strawberry and Chocolate, though it has never been shown on Cuban television.  According to a February 27 USA Today column by Dwayne Wickham, Cuba held its first gay film festival in 2005; also, recently a homosexual romance plot has emerged in a popular soap opera.

      Moreover, the Communist state is moving toward far more substantive changes regarding not only gay men and lesbians, but also transgendered people.   The Cuban National Assembly recently extended free health care coverage to sex reassignment surgery, a move that President Fidel Castro endorsed.   The NA also recently passed the Identity Law, which permits transgendered citizens to change their names and genders in official document.   The legislature is also considering legislation to legalize same-sex unions and, eventually, marriages.

       "We have to abolish any form of discrimination against those persons," NA President Ricardo Alarcon said recently, referring to homosexuals.  "We are trying to see how to do that, whether it should be to grant them the right to marry or have same-sex unions.

         Adding that he hoped that the NA would move quickly in this direction, Alarcon concluded, "We have to redefine our concept of marriage.  Socialism should be a society that does not exclude anybody."
        
      These unions appear to be comparable to the civil unions permitted in four US states, including New Jersey.  Only one state, Massachusetts, has legally sanctioned same-sex marriages.   Much of the impetus for these changes has come from Mariela Castro, president of the Center for Sex Education and daughter of Fidel Castro's younger brother, Acting President Raul Castro.

      All this is a far cry from the Cuba of the 1960s, when Fidel and others in the regime sought to rid Cuban society of supposedly decadent bourgeois ills of capitalism, including homosexuality.  Also at this time, gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was denounced and expelled from Cuba, which he had been visiting, in part because he had remarked that Fidel's then right-hand man, the iconic revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, was "cute."   In the 1980s, the regime quarantined HIV-positive individuals, a practice that seems to have ended.

       "Because of our historical heritage, Cuban society has been intolerant of homosexuals," said Ruben Remigio Ferro, president of Cuba's Supreme Court.  "But that there has been a change in thinking.  We are developing a program to educate people about sexual orientation.  But it is not a problem that has been solved."

      Cuba still lacks gay bars and publications, and very few of its artists have been willing to come out of the closet.   The issue of gay rights on this island 90 miles from Florida has divided leftists in the United States.  Related controversy has attached itself to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), a.k.a. North Korea, which has maintained a much more traditional stance on homosexuality.  Officially, the DPRK regime accepts homosexual persons, but criticizes aspects of the so-called Western gay lifestyle, which it associates with consumerism, promiscuity, and similar bourgeois decadence.  Recently, a pro-DPRK US activist challenged the country's stance by appealing to the principles of Juche, the nation's official ideology.  Juche, which basically means national self-reliance, is a development or supplanting of traditional Marxism-Leninism that holds that humanity is the master of the world and of the revolution.

      "As I understand Juche, it puts forth strongly the necessity of study, research, and integrating science and logical discovery," said Martin Droll, a member of the Young Communist League, the Communist Party USA, and the Korean Friendship Association.  "In a Juche sense, we must continue studying homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and the like...The Republic of Cuba, another Socialist nation, and close friend and ally of the DPRK, has displayed impressive leaps and bounds in the development of new understandings of sexual orientation...As a note, President Fidel Castro has been a recipient of the Hero of the DPRK award in 1986 from [President] Kim Il Sung and Labor Hero of the DPRK last December from [current leader] Kim Jong Il.  In Fidel's words, homosexuality is a 'natural human tendency that must simply be respected.'"

      "While Cuba and President Castro may not be adherents of the advanced view that is Juche," Droll added, "it is nonetheless notable that such advancements have been made, and that Cuba has, as a result, quickly become a much more vibrant and tolerant society...The DPRK, representing Juche, the most advanced ideology in the present state of humanity, should spearhead homosexual legal and social reforms and become a truly sexually progressive model for the world.  This isn't a 'typical leftist' viewpoint; it's a rational, scientific, and human viewpoint."

      Nevertheless, other supporters of the DPRK regime continue to condemn homosexuality as an unhealthy relic of capitalism that threatens to foment social disorder and undermine the family-oriented policies of Juche.   In addition, members of the (North) Korean Association of Social Scientists (KASS) continue to characterize homosexuality as an illness.  Thus, LGBT rights have emerged as a striking ideological divergence between Cuba and the DPRK, the only two of the five remaining officially Communist countries that still closely adhere to "classical" Communist ideals.  The other Communist states are the People's Republic of China, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the Lao People's Democratic Republic, a.k.a. Laos, all of which have embraced elements of capitalism.