Gay bashers Fidel Castro, left, and Ché Guevara, in Mexico City sometime during the 1950s.
Individual freedom will never have a home in the Cuban communist party, so it is no surprise that the party, which acts quickly against anyone who deviates from its norms, has expelled a young member because he is a homosexual.
Independent journalist Ainí Martín Valero reports that Leonard "Leo" Alfonso Ramírez was expelled after he came out of the closet to some comrades.
Ramírez, 32, may not realize it — he reportedly considers himself a "revolutionary," and thus a good communist — but the party did him a huge favor. Hopefully, the expulsion will force him to face the fact that in Cuba, the communists have no future and that everything he thought he believed about communism, that somehow it would accept him despite his sexual preference, is a lie. The sooner he separates himself from a dictatorship that for decades has discriminated, and worse, against homosexuals, the better for him.
What happened to Ramírez is something that happens to straight Cubans every day. They are targeted and repressed not for anything they have done, but for what they believe and who they are as individuals. That the cruelty of the regime would extend to homosexuals, despite their champion in the higher reaches of Cuba's dictatorial family, is no surprise.
For the ruling phobia of the dictatorship is not just homophobia, but a fear of all freedom.
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