About two-thirds of Cuba’s population voted to legalize marriage and adoption for LGBTQI+ folks in a national referendum held for the country’s new Family Code.

While the law continues to maintain Cuba’s image as one of the most ‘progressive’ countries in Latin America, it follows a violent history of persecuting LGBTQI+ folks, who were imprisoned, fired, and sent to labor camps.

Pre-revolution Cuba was infamous for erasing LGBTQI+ folks, and the country’s survivability diminished with the post-revolution traditional notions of gender held by white middle class men in power.

The Ministry of Health medicalized queerness in 1965, and any sign of gender nonconformity was silenced through gender essentialist impositions of sport, military, and self-defense.

"No homosexual represents the Revolution, which is a matter of men, fists and not feathers, of courage and not trembling, of certainty and not intrigue, of creative valor and not of sweet surprises," a sign at University of Havana's campus read, according to Sexual Revolutions in Cuba.

In 1965, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro said: “Nothing prevents a homosexual from professing revolutionary ideology and, consequently, exhibiting a correct political position. In this case he should not be considered politically negative. And yet we would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist should be.”

Being queer was decriminalized in 1979, but the courts cannot control the implicit biases and explicit intolerance and hate that people continue to harbor towards LGBTQI+ folks in the country.

In 2010, Castro took the blame for persecuting LGBTQI+ folks in an interview with Mexican newspaper La Jornada: "If someone is responsible, it's me," he said.

The Family Code will create broader rights for grandparents-grandchildren relationships, place protections for older adults, and address gender-based violence. It’s backed by LGBTQI+ advocate and director of the National Center for Sex Education, Mariela Castro, who is Castro’s niece.

Cuba’s growing evangelical community strongly resisted the law.