Cuba and the Right to Intimacy

Irina Pino

HAVANA TIMES — Last night, I was reading an article about people who rent out rooms where couples can make love, or have sex (I assume the customer decides on the variant). I wonder whether this service is offered to all couples, as, from reading what the owners explained, only heterosexual couples, chiefly people who are married or in stable relationships, tend to rent these rooms.

In other words, the owners take great care not to break the rules. I imagine it’s out of the fear that the officials who monitor their activities may report on any “irregularities.”

In the article, the journalist provides a brief overview of the motels that existed in the 80s and 90s, places that have been turned into shelters or temporary residences for families whose homes have collapsed. Tongue-in-cheek, she compares these depressing rooms to the motel rooms in Alfred Hitchcock’s movies.

She barely touched on the fact that there are other sexual orientations and that such couples also want to have moments of privacy to enjoy sex and romance. Using these locales should be legal for these people, particularly at a time when the media is becoming more and more open about the issue of their rights.

What are slogans good for if there are no concrete results? It will take long for many people to awaken, and, in a male chauvinistic society like ours, forms of segregation will remain latent.

A small place for freedom, as fellow blogger and friend Warhol P says, may be an expression of rebelliousness, but I see it as necessary. Before, people threw gay parties, and those who went to them knew they stood a good chance of finding a partner there. Others who had not yet come out of the closet could also go there as a means of sexual exploration.

A friend told me that, near my neighborhood, someone discretely rents out rooms by the hour, for gays and lesbians.

The rooms are well decorated, fitted with ACs and other services, such as the ones referred to in the other article. Now, it is only a question of making these rooms legal.