Opinion · By Luis Perdomo
The homophobic mockery reported during an incident involving Cuban regime representatives at the United Nations raises an uncomfortable question for Havana: what is its rhetoric about diversity worth when homosexuality is once again used as a tool of political humiliation?
According to journalist José Luis Tan Estrada’s account, the activist delegation led by Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat and José Daniel Ferrer was subjected to insults that included “homophobic mockery.” The journalist pointed to the contradiction between that behavior and the inclusive image the Cuban government presents, or tries to present, internationally.
The incident took place on Monday, October 19, 2026, at United Nations headquarters in New York during the panel “Free Cuba: The Oppression Havana Hides,” organized by the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. As Cubanos por el Mundo reported, diplomats from Cuba’s mission shouted “terrorists” and other slogans at panelists, including Ferrer, Gutiérrez-Boronat and artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla called the event a “deceitful spectacle.”
Journalist Maykel González Vivero, co-founder of the independent magazine Tremenda Nota, who has faced reprisals for covering LGBTI issues in Cuba, also explicitly identified the discrimination: “The act of repudiation Cuban diplomats staged against opponents at the UN, including homophobic and transphobic expressions, is depressing.”
That is the heart of this discussion. Using gestures that disparagingly associate someone with homosexuality to discredit them reproduces prejudice against an entire community. The humiliation works because the person performing it—in this case, a diplomat linked to Havana’s regime—assumes that appearing gay diminishes a person.
Homophobic mockery at the UN: the gesture and its justifications
Among the comments collected, social media user Raquel Suarez described the behavior at issue: “Shameful, honestly, one of them in a suit and tie, acting like a bird.”
The reference helps explain how the alleged mockery works. In Cuban usage, pájaro, literally “bird,” is also a derogatory term for a gay man. Caricaturing someone in this way invokes a familiar code of contempt toward gay men or men perceived as effeminate.
Among the panelists, Otero Alcántara is the one with a public record of gender-nonconforming performance. In 2015, he portrayed a Tropicana dancer in Miss Havana Biennial, a performance he presented again at Miami Beach Pride in 2024. This makes him the apparent target of the gesture in the author’s reading, although the complaints cited did not explicitly identify its intended recipient.
The incident footage shared on Instagram is available here.
This is not the first time sexuality has been used as a weapon against Otero Alcántara. In August 2020, the San Isidro Movement’s Facebook page was hacked, and intimate photographs of the artist were posted alongside a homophobic attack on him. The movement blamed State Security. Otero responded in a video on his Facebook profile, describing it as his response to “homophobia and the violation of my privacy” by Miguel Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro. He accused the regime of encouraging homophobia to discredit activists.
The gesture used by the Cuban “diplomat” at the UN turns sexual diversity into an object of ridicule. Using homosexuality to degrade someone reproduces homophobia, whoever the political opponent may be.
Adrian Escobar connected the episode with historical expressions in revolutionary rhetoric: “It was always like this, or even worse… effeminate shows.” He also recalled the phrase “incompatible immoralities.” His comment points to a political tradition that treated certain ways of dressing, expressing oneself or experiencing desire as signs of insufficient revolutionary commitment.
One example of the official message is a post by the Cuba X Siempre account quoting Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla on the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.
The message states that Cuba rejects all discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Under the slogan “Love is law in Cuba,” it presents the defense of diversity as part of the state’s commitment to human rights.
But the homophobic mockery reported at the UN contradicts that inclusive image. If representatives of the same state use gestures that turn homosexuality into a source of humiliation, their actions undermine the Foreign Ministry’s declarations.
Given the history of the UMAP camps and the persecution of gay writers, the proclaimed commitment requires a real break with those practices. The dignity the regime claims to defend must also be respected when the person involved is a political opponent.
The UMAP camps: when prejudice became state policy
Homophobia existed in Cuba before 1959. Acknowledging that makes it necessary to define the Castro regime’s responsibility precisely: revolutionary power incorporated that prejudice into institutional mechanisms of surveillance, exclusion and punishment.
The Military Units to Aid Production, known by their Spanish acronym UMAP, operated between 1965 and 1968 and stand among the gravest examples. Gay men were confined in these agricultural labor camps alongside religious believers and other citizens deemed incompatible with the revolutionary project. The regime intended to “reform” them through labor as a supposed personal and political corrective.
Related: Previously unpublished documents on Cuba’s UMAP camps (Spanish).
The principle was profoundly authoritarian: the state claimed the power to correct people whose sexuality did not fit its ideal citizen. Revolutionary masculinity became a measure of social acceptance.
Decades later, dictator Fidel Castro acknowledged his responsibility. In an interview with Carmen Lira published in La Jornada on August 31, 2010, he said: “If anyone is responsible, it is me.”
Arenas and Piñera: culture subjected to prejudice
Reinaldo Arenas offers one of the best-known accounts of that persecution. His homosexuality, his writing and his confrontation with the socialist regime intersected in a life marked by harassment, imprisonment and exile.
Reducing his story to a simple ideological disagreement would erase an essential dimension of the punishment: Arenas defended sexual and artistic freedom that challenged the obedience demanded by those in power.
Virgilio Piñera, another central figure in Cuban literature, suffered marginalization and silencing in a climate where his homosexuality fueled his exclusion. His stature as a playwright, poet and fiction writer did not protect him from ostracism during the years of greatest cultural intolerance.
Their stories reveal the human cost of a policy that sought to decide which artists could represent the nation and whose lives deserved recognition.
That is why the mockery reported at the United Nations carries a historical weight beyond the incident itself: the Cuban delegation resorted to an offensive gesture whose meaning is well understood by Cubans.
A government that claims to defend diversity has a duty to demand the same behavior from its representatives, including when they confront their strongest opponents.
The complaints expose that contradiction. As long as homosexuality remains available as a weapon for humiliating an opponent—or simply someone who disagrees—the Castro regime’s inclusive rhetoric will contain a crack that no slogan can conceal: human dignity remains subordinate to the convenience of those in power.
English version of Luis Perdomo’s original opinion article. Quotations translated from Spanish. Linked source material and videos are in Spanish.
