Identifying as transgender in Cuba is a stigma that’s being dismantled. Up until the 1980s, LGBT individuals were regularly arrested and sent to prison – a corrupt system that lasted through most of Fidel Castro’s tenure as Prime Minister of Cuba. Two years since the death of Castro, and transgender women in Cuba have been reported as saying that attitudes towards them are progressing in a positive direction, but it’s still a highly stigmatised status that women face unlawful prosecution for.
We wanted to profile a group of women who represent a new era of transgender identity in Cuba, so we asked photographer Carlota Guerrero to travel to Havana and meet with a group of women that she had been put in touch with by our Fashion Editor Lorena Maza, who travelled to Cuba with Guererro.
From their week with Shayra from La Jimagua, Lady Diaz and Pochohontas from Havana, La Parabeña from Pinar Del Rio, Inelvis from Cienfuegos and Jenny from Matanzas – in which they spoke at depth about their varied experiences in Havana – Guerrero and Maza found that being a transgender woman is still stigmatised in Cuba. “The women we spoke to told us that they still face huge adversities. They told us that many people just don’t accept them as female,” says Maza, “and despite the fact there’s a law protecting the LGBT community in Havana, people are still very transphobic.”
Guerrero found that transgender women are frequently arrested and that the majority of gender reassignment surgeries (a legal entitlement on the Cuban healthcare system since 2008) are carried out on the black market. “They do very few reassignment surgeries on the healthcare system”, Maza says, “so women go to doctors on the black market”. Taken from Cabinet of SLEEK 58, we present Guerrero’s portfolio of the women she met in Cuba.