Joaquín Bustelo on rumors Raul Castro is gay. (September 2006)

I first learned the word "maricón" --equivalent to the English faggot-- in relation to Raúl Castro, I'm not sure if it was in Cuba or the U.S., but I do remember being very afraid of my mother's threat to wash out my mouth with soap if I ever said the word again. Pato --literally duck--meant the same thing and was almost, but not quite, as bad. The lesson I drew was that there were even worse things than communism, like using certain bad words in the presence of your mother. I must have been 8 or 9.

You only need to look at old newsreels or pictures of Raul from 1959 or 1960 to see what it was based on. He was a slight young man with a ponytail. Raúl's homosexuality was as much an established truth in Cuba counterrevolutionary circles as that the sun comes up in the East, or that Fidel was just waiting for the right moment to proclaim the law on the nationalization of children requiring parents to turn them over to the state at the age of three. The bit about their being shipped to the USSR to be ground up into sausage was not as well established a fact, but I daresay many people believed it. Especially us kids.

Allen Ginsberg visited Cuba in the mid-60's. Intrigued by Thorstad's reference, I googled Ginsberg and Cuba and then Ginsberg and Raúl. There are countless references to his 1965 visit to Cuba, all with basically the same information, that Ginsberg was deported after protesting Cuba's anti-Marihuana "stance" (I put the word in quote because it comes up over and over in these accounts) and saying Che was "cute." I believe the stories all have the same root, probably a Ginsberg biography.

The only data I could find on Raul and Ginsberg was an extremely short review in 2004 of a book about impressions of Cuba by famous people. The review says, "Allen Ginsberg, who was booted out of the country in 1965, was sympathetic to the Revolution's basic goals but enraged by its abuse of homosexuals. Reflecting years later on his ill-fated visit, he told a reporter, 'Well, the worst thing I said was that I'd heard, by rumor, that Raul Castro [Fidel's younger brother] was gay. And the second worst thing I said was that Che Guevara was cute.'"

I visited a perhaps three dozen sites specifically searching for Ginsberg-Raul information, which turned out to be a pretty random collection, and none but that one provided any information about Allen Ginsberg and Raúl Castro in relation to each other, despite the many sites repeating essentially the same story about Ginsberg in relation to Cuba. .

I finally decided the well had run dry when I came to a site where a self-proclaimed Che admirer wanted more information about Che ordering the execution of people with AIDS. To be fair, s/he admired Che despite this, not because of it, but understood it in the historical context of those days.

What can I say? You find a lot of really strange stuff about Cuba online, the island is a free-fire zone for allegations.


http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2006-September/003263.html