In paying for sex changes, Cuba breaks from past

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

In paying for sex changes, Cuba breaks from past
By Associated Press
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - Added 1h ago

HAVANA - Looking in the mirror used to make Yiliam Gonzalez sick to her stomach.

"I would see myself, and my body didn’t match who I was," said the 28-year-old wedding pianist, who went by William before receiving a sex change under Cuba’s universal health care system.

Gonzalez is living proof of a small but remarkable transformation for the rugged revolution of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and a band of ever-macho, bearded rebels, who long punished gays and transsexuals — but now are paying for sex changes.

Standing six feet (183 centimeters) tall, with shoulder-length blond hair, heavy makeup and an ID card still bearing a man’s name, Gonzalez underwent the procedure in 2008. She was one of eight Cubans to do so through a program begun in 1988 — then suspended for two decades, after many complained the communist government had better ways to spend its scarce resources.

The operations have begun anew under President Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela, Cuba’s top gay-rights activist, and 22 more transsexuals are waiting to have it performed.

Read more: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/international/americas/view/20100310in_paying_for_sex_changes_cuba_breaks_from_past/

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http://jonathanfryer.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2008/04/marielacastro.jpg http://www.advocate.com.nyud.net:8090/uploadedImages/ADVOCATE/POLITICS/COMMENTARY/2009/Mariela_Castro_EspInX390.jpg http://www.advocate.com.nyud.net:8090/uploadedImages/advocate/editorial/exclusive_detail/200807/Mariela_Castro_Espin.jpg

Mariela Castro

[Mika]

1. Yet another example of Castro's tyranny, like all of that education and healthcare.

Everyone in 'Murica knows that these things have to be forced on an unwilling populace. :crazy:


Waiting for the Cubaphobes to chime in with the uninformed tyranny talk.
:popcorn:

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[WriteDown]

2. Raul does seem better. nt

[IndianaGreen]

10. Miami Cubans are also appalled at Cuba's liberal abortion laws

LGBTs and women of reproductive age will be the first casualties of American-style "freedom and democracy" imposed by the Miami Cubans were they in power.

[anonymous171]

13. Do Cubans have a direct say in any facet of their government?

[Mika]

14. Yes. In all facets.

All levels of government are democratic, via a parliamentary system.


http://www.poptel.org.uk/cuba-solidarity/democracy.htm

This system in Cuba is based upon universal adult suffrage for all those aged 16 and over. Nobody is excluded from voting, except convicted criminals or those who have left the country. Voter turnouts have usually been in the region of 95% of those eligible .

There are direct elections to municipal, provincial and national assemblies, the latter represent Cuba's parliament.

Electoral candidates are not chosen by small committees of political parties. No political party, including the Communist Party, is permitted to nominate or campaign for any given candidates.

The Cuban government was reorganized (approved by popular vote) into a variant parliamentary system in 1976.

You can read a short version of the Cuban system here,
http://www.poptel.org.uk/cuba-solidarity/faqs-cuba.html

Or a long and detailed version here,

Democracy in Cuba and the 1997-98 Elections
Arnold August
1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0968508405/qid=1053879619/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-8821757-1670550?v=glance&s=books

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[jobwithout]

20. You cant be serious.

Oh never mind the political prisoners.

[Billy Burnett]

3. Meanwhile in the USofA...

.. Americans get "Defense of Marriage" laws, gay adoption bans, and corporate death panels for health care.

Good to see Cuba making such progress. Very sad to see the US revert back to the stone ages.


:hi:

[Initech]

11. Makes you sick doesn't it?

We are so damn backwards on this kind of stuff that it's fucking unreal. Weird that Cuba is so ahead of us in that prospect.

[Mika]

12. Its not weird that Cuba is modernizing in this area. What's weird? That Americans can't go to Cuba!

By the dictate of the US government, Americans are now 2nd class citizens and are banned from travel to Cuba, BUT Cuban-Americans are 1st class citizens in that they are granted their full constitutional rights to unfettered travel to Cuba.

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[Initech]

16. Totally fucked up. I dont see the Cuban travel ban lifted any time soon unfortunately.

[Mimosa]

29. Cubans can't travel out unfettered.

Yes, there is that pesky little problem of political prisoners, as well.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Earlier material: HEALTH-CUBA: Free Sex Change Operations Approved

HEALTH-CUBA: Free Sex Change Operations Approved
By Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jun 6 , 2008 (IPS) - New horizons opened up for transsexuals in Cuba with the approval of a Public Health Ministry resolution that establishes guidelines for their health care, including free gender reassignment operations.

"It was just approved. The operations will begin to be carried out as soon as the Cuban medical team is ready to start," Mariela Castro, head of the National Centre for Sex Education (CENESEX), told IPS.

Since 2004, Castro, President Raúl Castro’s daughter, has been the driving force in the effort to achieve integral health care for transsexuals in Cuba.

With the support of international experts, a team of Cuban specialists has been preparing for months to carry out sex change surgery, said Castro, who added that the operations may begin this year.

Only one sex reassignment operation has ever been carried out in Cuba, in 1988.

Resolution 126, which was signed Jun. 4 by Public Health Minister José Ramón Balaguer, establishes the creation of a centre that will provide integral health care for transsexuals. It will be the only institution in Cuba authorised to carry out gender reassignment therapy.

The decision also "legitimates the work of the National Commission for Integral Care of Transsexual People," created by CENESEX in 2005 as the continuation of a multidisciplinary team that has functioned since 1979, said Castro.

"This resolution establishes all of the aspects of care for transsexuals, including the operation for those who qualify and are interested, because not all transsexuals want the surgery," said the sexologist.

More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42693

~~~~~~~~~
When it comes to gay rights, is Cuba inching ahead of USA?
Posted 2/26/2007 7:18 PM ET
By DeWayne Wickham

HAVANA — Years before George W. Bush proclaimed his support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages in the United States, the ideologically rigid government of Fidel Castro made a big move in the opposite direction.
It sanctioned the production and viewing of Strawberry and Chocolate, an Academy Award-nominated film about the awkward friendship between a straight man and a gay man — and the homophobia they both had to battle.

Since this movie debuted in theaters here in the mid-1990s, the Cuban government's intolerance of homosexuals has given way to a more egalitarian treatment of gays and lesbians.

The public persecution of homosexuals has declined sharply. Two years ago, Cuba had its first gay film festival. Last year, the highest-rated show on Cuba's state-run television was a soap opera in which a married man fell in love with another man. And now this country is on the verge of enacting a law that gives same-sex couples some form of legal status.

Ending bias

"We have to abolish any form of discrimination against those persons," said Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's National Assembly. "We are trying to see how to do that, whether it should be to grant them the right to marry or to have same-sex unions."

Alarcon said he expects Cuba's communist government will soon enact a law to do one or the other. "We have to redefine the concept of marriage," he said. "Socialism should be a society that does not exclude anybody."

This awakening comes less than a year after President Bush renewed his call for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. "Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them, and changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure," Bush said in June.

More:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2007-02-26-opcom_x.htm

[Judi Lynn]

5. Same AP article at CBS bears hard spun headline: "Ever-Macho Cuba Now Paying for Sex Changes"

HAVANA, March 10, 2010
Ever-Macho Cuba Now Paying for Sex Changes
Cuba Once Persecuted Homosexuals and Transsexuals But Now Funds Sex Changes under Universal Health Care System

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/10/world/main6285149.shtml

CBS posted a different photo of Yliam Gonazalez:

http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com.nyud.net:8090/images/2010/03/10/image6285147g.jpg

In this March 5, 2010 photo, Yiliam
Gonzalez has her hair done by a stylist
in Havana. Gonzalez is one of eight
transsexuals to undergo a sex change
under Cuba's universal health care
system. (AP Photo/Javier Galeano)

[tonekat]

6. The US is becoming the primitive society now

At least there's hope. Recently, here in the U.S., a transsexual woman won her suit against the IRS after the agency rejected a $5,000 deduction for about $25,000 in medical expenses associated with her surgery, asserting it was a cosmetic procedure and not medically necessary.

[customerserviceguy]

9. Glad you pointed that out

I must have missed it, the last time I checked, the case was still going on.

But--it may not be over yet, the decision was reached on February 2nd, and the IRS has 90 days to appeal it:

http://www.glad.org/uploads/docs/publications/odonnabhain-win.pdf

I would be very surprised if any public option covered this sort of surgery. In the debate about national healthcare, we'd have had all kinds of culture wars about sex-reassignment surgery, medical marijuana, and other controversial treatments, but we've just been fighting that battle on the issue of abortion.

[Mimosa]

31. How odd that the IRS would contest the surgery

The IRS seems to challenge and fight against the poorest or most vulnerable. The very rich they don't bother with.

[LeftinOH]

7. Just another talking point for Republicans: "Universal Healthcare = Sex changes"

The teabaggers will latch onto this, just watch.

[Judi Lynn]

8. People have known about Cuba's steps forward for a long time.

Cuba's not unique concerning this procedure.

Clearly the two cultures are ENTIRELY different, a fine point right-wingers never have been able to grasp when attempting to consider other people in other places: our slow people simply compare everything to the U.S., and themselves.

You can't possibly protect against right-wingers' violent ignorance. Don't expect Democrats to worry about it, either.

[Mika]

19. You are correct. Link here.

http://www.dallasvoice.com/instant-tea/2010/03/10/some-thoughts-on-health-care-reform/


RW echo chamber is fast!




{hr]

[laughingliberal]

15. Damn! And we can't even get a system to cover basic needs! nt

[SimonPhoenix]

17. Cuba ever apologize for quarantining people with AIDS from 1986-1993?

Didn't think so.

[Mika]

18. That is not true. Cuba created a sanatorium system exclusively for HIV patients

There are cases, however, of HIV carriers having been convicted of negligence by intentionally/knowingly infecting others. There are many cases of this in the US also.

There are just so many RW myths against Cuba to deal with. No wonder. Americans are banned by their own gov from seeing Cuba for themselves.

FYI, Cuba created a voluntary sanatorium system at the very onset of the (then unknown) HIV/AIDS epidemic that could have inundated their universal health care system. Cuba set to the task of investigation of cause and effective treatment and preventative programs. Cuba has been awarded many times for their progressive and effective HIV prevention programs - resulting in the lowest per capita infection rate in the Western hemisphere.

While Cuba was doing aggressive research and development on care and treatments, the then US president Ronald Reagan would not mention AIDS or HIV by name, and the administration was complicit in the delays of funding for R&D and most especially limiting information on prevention modalities, resulting in many more deaths and infections.

Cuba's AIDS patient #1 dies
By Karen Lee Wald, Havana <[e-mail]>
4 October, 1995
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/011.html

Reynaldo Morales wasn't the first person in Cuba to test positive for HIV. Nor was he the first to die of AIDS. But through a quirk of fate, and the universal propensity of hospitals to give all patients case numbers, when Reynaldo Morales returned from military service in Angola in early 1986 he became Patient #1 at Cuba's newly created AIDS sanitorium.

Morales was married, with a 9-year-old son, and was working as a driver for the daily newspaper "Granma," when he answered the call for internationalist volunteers to serve in Angola in 1984. When he returned two years later, AIDS had just become a reality for Cuba, with one person dead, another HIV positive, and the beginnings of contact tracing underway. The Health Ministry proposed testing all citizens returning from extended periods abroad, and the military were among the first to be tested.

It was to be the first of many "firsts" for Reynaldo.

On February 10, 1986 Reynaldo Morales was the first of the returning volunteers to be admitted to the Naval Hospital.

On April 30, he was part of the first group of 23 patients who opened the new AIDS sanitorium in Santiago de las Vegas. His patient ID: number one.

In 1989, Reynaldo Morales was among the first group of patients to begin working within the sanitorium. From chauffeur he graduated to mechanic, carpenter and electrician.

Later that year, he and his wife Maria Julia (who became infected shortly after his return, before he knew he was carrying the deadly virus) were the first patients at the AIDS facility to be offered the option of returning to their home and jobs as outpatients.

A few months later, they were the first of many to turn this option down. Life had become too precarious outside the sanitorium, the medical and psychological benefits of Cuban-style hospice care too great. The sanitorium -- a sizeable community of attractive, modern one-family homes and duplexes set among lush tropical gardens on an old rural estate outside Santiago de las Vegas, a small town on the outskirts of Havana -- had become home to Reynaldo and his family.

Here, he was able to put his many mechanical skills to use, fixing everything from cars to electric irons.

Here, his wife --like Reynaldo, a 20-year veteran of the "Granma" newspaper, where she had been an office worker -- became the first president of the neighborhood council set up in the sanitorium to duplicate the local CDRs and Popular Councils that are the backbone of Cuba's participatory democracy.

Here they had friends, felt useful, kept busy. Reynaldo was a wise-guy, jokester, a good friend, someone who was always ready to lend a helping hand, to fix what was broken. Maria Julia was the serious one in the family, liked and admired by patients and neighbors as a leader, a mediator, a trusted spokesperson.

To some people, the AIDS sanitorium was viewed as a prison. Not to Reynaldo and Maria Julia. Here, they lived a bucolic life Monday through Friday, going home on weekends to meet up with their teenage son, who would arrive a few hours after they did from the boarding school where he was training in judo while finishing high school. (His scholarship to the sports school was a lifelong dream granted immediately by the Ministry of Education when his parents fell ill.)

more at link .... http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/011.html

Cuba is NOTHING like the RW myths depict it as being.

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[jobwithout]

21. Cuba is nothing like you want it to be

[Judi Lynn]

25. Cuba is exactly as Dr. Mika KNOWS it to be, for years, and his relatives living there know it to be.

You are wildly off base. You've completely attempted to belittle someone who knows far, FAR more about the subject already than you ever will.

[Happy Hippy]

22. Oh, how sensible of them...(not).

Just what we need to push HCR along. Tax payer funded sex changes. Why stop there? Breast implants, penis enhancements, tummy tucks, chin job, liposuction.

[FreeState]

24. Sex changes are vastly different than elective plastic surgery

often its life or death for the person. To imply its even in the same class of surgery is beyond offensive.

Edit to add:

http://www.jenellerose.com/htmlpostings/transsexual_surgery_its_pros_and_cons.htm

In looking next at suicide, the authors found that it was first necessary to assess transsexual patients' pre-reassignment suicidal tendencies. Dixen et al (1984) found that among 479 MFs and 285 FMs seen in the Palo Alto program, about 25% of the MFs and 19% of the FMs had attempted suicide prior to transition. Most studies reported a pre- transition suicide attempt rate of 20% or more, with MFs relatively more suicide-prone than FMs. Post-reassignment, Pfafflin and Junge found reports of only 16 possible suicide deaths among over 2000 cases: 14 in MFs, one in an FM, and one with gender not specified. Five of the 16 may have been accidental medication or drug overdoses rather than genuine suicides. In the remaining 11 cases, suicide was usually not thought to be related to gender problems per se. These results suggest that post- transition, suicidal tendencies probably get no worse, and may actually improve.

[Name removed]

28. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Starry Messenger]

30. Oh do go on Happy.

Please explain more to the class. Show everybody what you've got. Be a hero.

[jobwithout]

23. Freedom of expression and association

Freedom of expression remained limited, with all mass media outlets remaining under state control. Journalists working for independent and alternative news agencies continued to face harassment and intimidation in the form of short-term detention and monitoring by security officers. Opposition political groups and many civil and professional associations continued to be barred from gaining legal status. In December, more than 30 people were briefly detained by the Cuban authorities, preventing them from celebrating International Human Rights Day in Havana.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/cuba/report-2009

Prisoners of conscience
At the end of the year, 58 prisoners of conscience continued to be held solely for the expression of their political views. In February, four prisoners of conscience were released on health grounds, but were ordered to leave the country. There were reports of harassment and intimidation against prisoners of conscience and political prisoners by other prisoners and prison guards


Id Love to be just like Cuba :sarcasm: :eyes:

[Mika]

26. AI, HRW, RsF all get their Cuba "reports" from RW funded Cubanet paid "independent journalists".

X-post: How Reagan's Propaganda Succeeded
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x31859

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[tmyers09]

27. You come off as rather desperate.