Coming out of the closet

My friend Miguel, gay and dissident, feels hope with the new measures pushed by Mariela Castro that will allow him access to sex change surgery.  He dreams of having an I.D. card with an identity that is “She” and not “He” and of being treated as the woman he feels himself to be. He knows, however, that he’ll have to wait a lot longer to affiliate legally to a social-democratic party, to demonstrate in a picket line for his labor rights or to vote, in direct elections, for another president.

With his new name, which for years he has decided will be Olivia, he’ll not be completely free from intolerance.  Maybe he’ll come to be accepted in his differences, as long as this is about his “sexual preference” and not about ideological tendency.  Coming out of the closet of his political opinions will take him more time and they will remind him, in due time, that this Revolution has allowed him the dream of his transexuality.

I can’t understand very well how we can invoke a tolerance that is parceled out and unfinished.  How can we be on the cutting edge in the subject of gay marriage and not allow, on the other hand, that we may “marry” another political tendency or social doctrine.  All of the thousands of Cubans locked in their closets of double morality, repressing their true opinions, as if they were effeminate gestures, are waiting for a Mariela Castro to say publicly, “These too we have to accept and tolerate in their difference.”  Miguel will be then the social-democratic woman that he has always dreamed of being.