2025 was Venceremos Brigades first Queer & Trans Brigade to Cuba https://justseeds.org/venceremos-vbs-first-queer-trans-brigade-to-cuba/ SEARCH female revolutionaries in Cuba; Venceremos Brigades, how many prostitutes in Cuba before revolution and now, is brigadista male or female, were gay men allowed in Batista’s Cuba Nothing can ever be truly objective. Writers’ biases inevitably appear in their work. Dr. Tice is obviously a woman and a feminist. The majority of combatants in the Cuban Revolution were male, but women held key leadership roles, participated in armed struggle, and played crucial roles in organizing, logistics, and as combatants. In Batista's Cuba, there were up to 135,000 prostitutes. In 1961, during the transition period, there were 150,000. Currently, there are 6,714 but 190 pimps. She writes about US ‘radical feminists’. Really? When were they active? Are they active today? As radical as it got in my time, feminism meant burning your brassiere in the street. Those were the days before slogans and advertising appeared on t-shirts to give us an excuse to check out women’s tits! As a VB participant, I disagree with a great deal of what Dr. Tice has to say. I can, of course, only compare my own experience and she did not interview me nor was she a brigadista herself. In fact, this paper seems to be the result of a single trip to Cuba. I can’t speak for others but my Brigade was not organised by SDS. In fact, the Brigades were started by Quakers (I’m still a birthright member) and organised by the pacifist War Resisters’ League. I had a giant laugh over the groups Tice considers “radical”; she includes the Quakers. Of course, I had contact with many of them. I’m sorry you didn’t like my “ode to New York” as you call it. NYC was where I first became aware of gay men and my part in the peace movement. Most lesbians of the time were better at fitting in. For example, it was not uncommon for two women to live together; two men, however, were suspect. Many gays and lesbians were my friends, though I was completely unaware of their sexuality. They didn’t care, nor did I. (That may be perceived as saying some of my friends were Bluish.) You’ve given me a new word for hate: homophobia in addition to antisemitism and Islamophobia. Ah, and misogynism. The Inuit have 70 words for snow. What a pity we don’t have more for love, though there are hundreds of compound words in Thai for heart. That’s my point. Who cares who you <deleted>? It’s nothing to be proud of and equally nothing to hide or being ashamed of. But if that’s all we’ve got going for ourselves in the tragic condition of the world, I find it immeasurably sad. This article makes me wonder about gays in the US Army and the North Vietnamese/NLF armies in Vietnam. Was there homophobia or was everybody more worried about getting their asses blown off. My Brigade was very mixed by colour, ethnicity, nationality and gender though there were no gays I was aware of. Perhaps we were a uniquely pacifist Brigade—I was sponsored by the Quakers—but none of us thought violent overthrow would work in our own countries. No Weatherman among us! If Cuban homophobia—exactly the same as it is in every South American country—negates the other positive benefits of the revolution for you, I can’t help you. Perhaps you think Cuban gays would be better off under free market capitalism. (Translation: American theft.) If brigadier gays actually “paraded around in Cuban towns in drag”, that demonstrate enormous cultural insensitivity and appropriation. Holding a foreign country to our own standards of tolerance. The Cubans were clearly wrong about gays being counter-revolutionary. The revolution needs everbody. By stigmatising gays in this way, you create counter-revolutionaries who were not so before. Power to the people means all people. However, I ask myself, are gays accepted in the US? Really accepted? Sure there’s gay Pride parades but I would say gays are more accepted in Thai culture with no parades. Is there less homophobia today than when <most> gays came out of the closet? Maybe. But gays are a minority (transgenders are taking over our classrooms, snipped in an afternoon without parental permission, at least when they're not eating cats and dogs!) and minorities of any sort are always discriminated against by the majority. Q: Are sanctions & blockades on Cuba more evidence of US imperialism? I would argue that Cuba was nothing more than a US colony and money-pot during the Batista regime. It was one more colony, like Puerto Rico, which was never formally recognised or given any power. I am hopeful Puerto Rico will separate from the US rather than accepting statehood, an offer which may never come without threat to secede. Will the USA enact sanctions and blockade in revenge? I'd bet on it. The revolution in Nicaragua was dependent on one revolutionary leader—like Fidel. I haven’t looked closely enough to see if their revolutionary goals have been accomplished. It was (of course) warred upon by the US. VB was not only about Cuba. We would have gone to Vietnam had there not been a war on. VB was about solidarity against imperialism and for self-determination. Is beauty and femininity not feminist? Is it counter-revolutionary to look good. Some of our brigadistas had liaisons with Cuban men though I did not observe the same for brigadiers with Cuban women, though some were definitely tempting. Tice write we had to cross ‘enemy lines’ to get to Cuba. That’s the first time I’ve heard Toronto classed an enemy! Perhaps America has already emasculated the Cuban revolution by attrition since 1959. Perhaps we’ll never be able to know the full flower of that revolution if left to Cubans without outside interference, both American and Soviet. To read Tice’s article, I am immediately convinced of the potential of the Cuban revolution, had the USA not interfered…out of spite. After all, the US has, historically to the present, not really been the “sweet land of liberty” except in our dreams. To whit, Marco Rubio, rumoured to be gay. Why should a second gen Cuban know any more about the revolution than, for instance, I do? Interesting to me upon observation is that the Cuban revolutionaries admitted their errors and worked to correct them. Have you ever heard this from the US govt? Having said this, the successes of the indigenous Zapatista revolutionary movement in Chiapas has given me great hope that resistance is still alive and well. This is not a leading question, but I’m most curious as to how you found this article and what made you interested in its content? I don’t mean in any way to pry. I sure loved the Cuban pavilion at Expo67 in Montréal. What could be better than rum & cigars! Probably the reason I became excited about VB. I got arrested there for climbing into the structure of the geodesic dome that was the US pavilion and unveiling an antiwar t-shirt. We were up there a long time. It took more than three hours to get us down during which time we were visible to every int’l visitor to the pavilion. Let us not forget that Lee Harvey Oswald organised for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Hehe..
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