On Sunday, Cuban voters “overwhelmingly approved” a referendum that will legalize same-sex marriage as well as same-sex adoption in the country.
Sixty-seven percent of voters were in favor of the code, with 33 percent opposed, according to a press release from Cuba’s National Electoral Council. In addition to legalizing same-sex marriage and civil unions and allowing those couples to adopt children, the updated Family Code also enhances women’s rights and the rights of the elderly, promotes equal sharing of domestic responsibilities, legalizes surrogate pregnancies, and provides the legal basis for prenuptial agreements, per Reuters. The code also enhances children’s rights: Rather than having “custody” of children, parents are said to have “responsibility,” and must be “respectful of the dignity and physical and mental integrity of children and adolescents,” adding that older children should be granted greater agency.
In a Monday tweet, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel wrote that, “To approve the #CódigoDeLasFamilias is to do justice.”
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
“It is paying off a debt with several generations of Cuban men and women, whose family projects have been waiting for this Law for years,” he added. “Starting today, we will be a better nation.”
Cuba’s constitution originally defined marriage as between one man and one woman, leading activists to rally to remove that language from the constitution at least as far back as 2017. While marriage was redefined as a “social and legal institution” in 2019, the government removed language that would have explicitly legalized same-sex marriage, caving to pressure from evangelical protestors. Same-sex marriage was subsequently left to the Family Code. It wasn’t until 2021, however, that lawmakers actually made moves to update the Family Code to legalize same-sex marriage.
Since then, the document has gone through 25 versions based on feedback from Cuba’s people, modifying nearly half of the original articles, according to a press release from the office of the Cuban government. The final version of the code was published in June, with the Cuban government heavily promoting the updated document via a “media blitz,” according to Reuters.
However, the updated code also faced stark opposition from religious conservatives. The Cuban Roman Catholic Church told Reuters that the updated law was riddled with “gender ideology” that would lead to “indoctrination of children in schools without parental consent,” echoing the language favored by large swathes of the U.S. Republican Party. Numerous of the island’s Protestant delegations have been extensively campaigning against same-sex marriage for years as well.
Still, advocates celebrated the passage of the landmark legislation, including Mariela Castro, the daughter of Fidel Castro and a longtime advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. “The most emancipatory, fair and beautiful law in the world, which regulates family law, has been ratified,” she wrote in a note published on the Cuban National Center for Sex Education Twitter. “Now, love is law on the island of freedom.”
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.
