This isn’t your grandfather’s Cuba anymore.
Cuba’s new president says he supports a change to the island’s constitution recognizing same-sex marriage.
Miguel Diaz-Canel said in an interview broadcast Sunday on the Venezuela-based television station Telesur:
“The approach of recognizing marriage between two people, without limitations, responds to a problem of eliminating all types of discrimination in society.”
Cuba’s current constitution limits marriage to the “voluntary union of a man and a woman.”
In a new constitution, however, that parliament has approved and that will be submitted for a national referendum next year, marriage is defined as a union between “two people.”
Díaz-Canel’s endorsement of same-sex marriage is in stark contrast to the persecution homosexuals suffered in the decades following the 1959 Cuban revolution.
Official attitudes towards homosexuality on the Communist-run island have changed over the past decades partly thanks to the efforts of Raúl Castro’s daughter Mariela.