[ A referendum to end discrimination against gay couples in
marriage and adoption just won big in Cuba. That’s a victory for the
core values underlying the socialist project.]
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CUBA’S GAY RIGHTS VOTE IS A VICTORY FOR SOCIALIST VALUES  
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Ben Burgis
September 28, 2022
Jacobin
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_ A referendum to end discrimination against gay couples in marriage
and adoption just won big in Cuba. That’s a victory for the core
values underlying the socialist project. _

Cuba has just approved a new Family Code that ends discrimination
against gay couples in marriage and adoption. , (Yamil Lage / AFP via
Getty Images)

 

Two-thirds of Cuban voters approved
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country’s new Family Code on Sunday, itself a result of an extensive
revisions process in which millions of Cuban citizens participated.
The new code ends discrimination against gay couples in marriage and
adoption. It also strengthens women’s rights by promoting “equal
sharing of domestic rights and responsibilities between men and
women.”

Preliminary results show that almost three-quarters of eligible voters
participated in the referendum — and even bitter critics of the
Cuban regime don’t seem to be suggesting that the results were
falsified. The Catholic Church and evangelical churches on the island
were strident in their opposition to the code, but they convinced less
than a third of the Cuban public. That result is a huge victory for
gay rights in a country where extreme and disturbing homophobia
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government policy just a few decades ago.

It also brings Cuban society closer to realizing the core values
underlying the socialist project.

Socialism and Democracy in Cuba

Afull and fair description of the Cuban system would include plenty of
elements that merit criticism from a democratic socialist perspective
— from the lack of democracy in most
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to the lack of a free press and real multiparty elections in the
national government.

Of course, it’s always advisable for _American_ critics to take a
beat to remember the role of the United States
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exacerbating the authoritarian features of that system by posing a
massive external threat to its existence — from attempting to invade
Cuba to spending decades sponsoring terrorism on the island to
imposing brutal economic sanctions.

Even so, we should be able to walk and chew bubble gum when talking
about Cuba. We can acknowledge the country’s very real
accomplishments in fields like health care and education, and its real
contributions to the rest of the world like helping to dismantle
apartheid in South Africa, without denying the many dysfunctional and
undemocratic features of its system. Similarly, we don’t have to
choose between portraying the island as a perfect socialist democracy
with a flourishing culture of political dissent and buying into the
nonsense of American commentators who portray it as a tropical North
Korea.

You can reasonably argue that the vote on Sunday was _unfair_ in so
far as the state-run media reflected the government’s support for
the referendum — but it’s hard to argue that was meaningless.
Almost a third of Cubans felt free to vote no, and multiple factors
combined to give those voters more access than they’ve had in the
past to alternative perspectives. First, this was the first referendum
to take place in an era when most Cubans have access to the internet
and social media. Second, a “no” vote was urged by some of the
most important nongovernment institutions on the island: its churches.

As the BBC noted
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dissidents urged a no vote less out of any opposition to the substance
of the new Family Code than because they saw it as a “unique
opportunity to hand the country’s communist government a defeat at
the polls.” It’s difficult to be sure how much of the no vote
reflected such sentiments — especially since it took place against
the background of a “serious energy crisis” spurring frustration
with the government. But the main opposition seems to have been
religious.

Liberal and Socialist Values

The Catholic Bishops of Cuba, for example, put out a statement
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that the new code violated “a child’s right to have a father and a
mother” and that “marriage between a man and a woman, which is the
natural basis of the family, cannot be displaced or deformed to make
way for other legally constructed ways” of forming families.

Of course, marriage between men and women _isn’t_ being
“displaced.” No one’s dissolving the marriages of Cuban
heterosexuals. The issue is whether gay people should enjoy the same
freedom to get married and start families. And whether children have a
right to be adopted by parents who want to provide them with a loving
home, whether or not the Bishops approve.

This is a basic question of liberal rights — which can be more fully
realized in a socialist society than in a _lasseiz-faire_ capitalist
one. John Stuart Mill famously talked about “experiments in
living” in his 1859 book _On Liberty_. He thought it was important
for human flourishing that, in the one lifetime any of us get, we all
receive a chance to figure out what will help us to live thriving and
happy lives. But as I’ve argued elsewhere
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telling people that they’re free to live however they want is a lot
less meaningful if you don’t also give them the economic support to
live however they want. Plenty of people stay in terrible
relationships, for instance, because they can’t afford to move out
— or have trouble keeping together good ones due to factors stemming
from or exacerbated by economic stress.

A socialist society where everyone’s material needs have been met,
and workplaces are more like economic republics where everyone has a
voice and a vote than economic dictatorships where everyone has to
shut up and do as they’re told, would have the potential to realize
liberal values in a far more complete ways than even a very liberal
capitalist one. But that has to involve formally securing, as Cuban
voters finally did on Sunday, the basic rights against discrimination
that have long been in place in many liberal capitalist societies.

Without a baseline commitment to egalitarianism, it’s hard to make
sense of the normative foundation of socialist politics. One of the
most powerful moral arguments
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socialism comes in the Canadian Marxist analytic philosopher G. A.
Cohen’s short book _Why Not Socialism?_. Cohen roots the socialist
project in the values of _equality _and _community_.

The part about equality is straightforward. Capitalist economic
structures distribute access to power, material resources, and other
advantages on the basis of criteria like whether you were born into a
rich family or a poor one, or whether you happen to have been born
with just the right cocktail of dispositions, preferences, and
cognitive skills to climb the ladder of some professional career. All
of this is as morally arbitrary as creating a society where green-eyed
people have access to advantages that blue- or brown-eyed people do
not. Or, at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, stopping gay
people from being able to enjoy the same rights as straight people.

And even where people _do _end up with a smaller share of
society’s resources as a result of their own free
choices, _and_ those choices are objectionable in some way,
socialists don’t believe that the price of bad choices should be
destitution. We think everyone has a right to a reasonable baseline.
One way of understanding Cohen’s point here is to say that while
even an advanced socialist society might have some inequality as a
result of different personal choices, if you value someone and see
them as part of a larger community with which you identify, you
won’t want to see them fall dramatically below the quality of life
you enjoy. Here, too, the connection between liberal and socialist
values is obvious: if you care about gay people as much as straight
people, why wouldn’t you want them to be able to get married and
start families? And if you care about women as much as men, why
wouldn’t you want full gender equality within straight marriages?

The Cuban vote is a vindication of all of these values, and should be
celebrated as such. It’s also important and valuable that social
equality in Cuba was instituted by the will of the voters.

Some critics casting around for grounds for criticizing the vote
without opposing equality have tried to portray this as a negative.
Juan Pappier, who works as a senior Americas researcher at Human
Rights Watch, told
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Post_ that the fact that Cuba’s government is “asking people what
they think about the rights of a minority shows they don’t really
understand how democracies work.” There’s an obvious level on
which that’s hard to take seriously. Marriage equality was
instituted in the Republic of Ireland by a national referendum in
2015, for example, and I’ve never heard anyone suggest that this
reflects poorly on the Irish understanding of democracy.

On a deeper level, the idea that this is the “wrong” way for
equality to be instituted gets things exactly backward. It’s good
that equality in Cuba doesn’t hang by the thread that similar
protections hang on here in the United States — the opinions of
the panel of nine
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of elite colleges we’ve empowered to rewrite our laws. As we
recently found out in the case of abortion rights, where the Supreme
Court tossed out the _Roe_ precedent and Kansas voters
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to go to the polls to enshrine abortion rights in their own state
constitution, building majority support for basic rights through a
process of activism and education is a far more durable basis for
social progress than counting on a panel of unelected
philosopher-kings to do the right thing.

If Clarence Thomas gets his way
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American voters in red states may soon have to follow Cuba’s example
and reinstate their lost rights by passing pro-equality ballot
measures. Meanwhile, anyone who cares about human rights should
celebrate the decision of an overwhelming majority of Cuban voters to
institute a Family Code that more consistently reflects the
egalitarian values that animated their revolution in the first place.
For all the very real flaws of Cuba’s system, on this question,
today, all there is to say is: _Viva la revolución_.

_Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor
at Morehouse College, and the host of the YouTube show and
podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books,
most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went
Wrong, and Why He Still Matters._

* Cuba
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* Gay Rights
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* Referendum
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