Fidel Castro was many things: a revolutionary, a Communist, a garrulous orator. Amidst the fawning encomia released upon his long-overdue death at the age of 90, it should never be forgotten that he was also an oppressor, torturer, and murderer of gay people. 

“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,” Castro told an interviewer in 1965. “A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist should be.” 

In the eyes of Castro and his revolutionary comrade Che Guevara – who frequently referred to gay men as maricones, “faggots” – homosexuality was inherently counterrevolutionary, a bourgeois decadence. To a traditional Latin American machismo that viewed gayness pejoratively, they married an ideological fixation treating it as politically undesirable.