Volume 42, Number 7 · April 20, 1995
Is Cuba Really Changing?
By Jeri Laber
Just before I left New York for Havana, at the end of February, I went to see the Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate. Shown to record crowds in Havana last year, the film is a moving and sympathetic portrait of the restricted lives of Cuban homosexuals, who have long been persecuted by the Castro regime and were interned in 'rehabilitation' camps during the 1960s. Through its central character, a sensitive and cultivated homosexual leading an anxious life in Havana, the movie is critical of the government's intolerance not just of homosexuals but of artistic freedom and of free expression in general. The fact that it had been made and shown in Havana and distributed abroad made me wonder whether Cuba was, at last, easing its strict control over free speech. Might news of glasnost, which had been kept from the Cuban public by censorship when it appeared in the Soviet Union, have reached Cuba after all?
Feature, 4656 words
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