Cuba gay marriage option dropped from new constitution

Cuba’s new constitution will not include any reference to straight or gay marriage, the commission in charge of drafting a new version of the Cold War-era document has decided.

The National Assembly, Cuba’s legislative body, shared the news via its Twitter account on Tuesday (December 18), as part of lawmakers’ wider discussion of the draft document.

“The Commission proposes to defer the concept of marriage, i.e. to leave it out of the constitutional draft, as a way to respect all opinions,” the tweet read.

An earlier draft of the constitution released in July had proposed to define marriage in gender-neutral terms, thus opening the door to marriage equality.

“The new draft erases the gender binary and heteronormativity which defined marriage in the 1976 constitution.”

— Mariela Castro

The change to Article 68 was fiercely opposed by the religious forces in the country, who insisted on keeping the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

The evangelical and Catholic churches had already begun campaigning against the constitutional changes, which need to be approved in a popular referendum before being officially implemented.

A poster defining marriage as the union of a man and woman is seen at a Methodist Church in Havana, Cuba, on September 20, 2018.  (Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty)

Efforts to modernise the 1976 constitution were initiated by the island’s new president Miguel Diaz-Canel, who expressed support for gay marriage.

Diaz-Canel succeeded former president Raul Castro, whose daughter Mariela Castro has been at the forefront of the fight for gay marriage and LGBT+ rights in the country.

LGBT+ people in Cuba were once persecuted and sent to prison labor camps under the leadership of Fidel Castro, who led a coup against the US-backed regime of Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Homosexual acts were decriminalised in 1979 and in 2006 Castro admitted his responsibility in the “great injustice” against the LGBT+ community.