You couldn't make it up dept no.78: swing, comrade, swing and turn around!

[fpb]

Most of us know that ever since the bloke with the beard took over Cuba, homosexuality - associated with the island's supposed pre-revolutionary past as a haven of Yanqui degeneracy - has been suppressed, persecuted and punished by (what passes in Cuba for) law. Well, no more. Raul Castro seems to have noticed that his putative allies in the

Comments

[rfachir]

San Francisco without the Diet Coke
What is this Strange New World you're describing? It's too weird to wrap my brain around, like "Britain without rain," or "Americans suffering in silence."

[fpb]

True. Perhaps I have gone too far. But "San Francisco with secret police and concentration camps" just would not have been funny.

[kalimac]

I'm a little confused - exactly who are the allies whom Raul Castro is grovelling before by passing toleration laws?

[fpb]

The whole international hard left from San Francisco to Rome. If you had any idea what Communists were like in, say, 1970, and what their children are like now, you would not be confused. The standard Communist attitude to homosexuality until recent times moved in a narrow range between the gulag and the psychiatric hospital. Now the last Italian communist parliamentary delegation included the country's most flamboyant and extreme transvestite, and the movement has not just metaphorically swapped the red flag for the rainbow flag. Those of us who are old enough to remember Communism as it was when it was Communism find this development rather startling.

[kalimac]

I confess that, being neither a homosexual nor threatened by Communists myself, the attitude of the latter towards the former has not been a subject of my particular study.

But I suspect those old enough to remember the changing Party Line towards, say, China in the 1950s and 60s, or better yet towards Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941, would not be a bit surprised at these abrupt changes of gear.