Gay wedding in Cuba

They called him Cusio. He was the laughing stock of all the males in the school, but we of the feminine gender liked his taste in clothes and his kind, helpful character. He was born and brought up in a neighborhood where the average macho carried a knife that was likely to come out if you cast the slightest doubt on his virility. He also grew up in the 1980s when the Cuban regime was very much down on gays (it still is), and the police would arrest you in the street for being an obvious homosexual, to be sent to a camp for "reeducation."

As a gay man, he must have suffered unspeakably, but he never wanted or sought to leave his country, perhaps in the hope that better days would come. I lost track of him more than a decade ago, but it is to him that I owe my predisposition to perceive as normal the love that may exist between two men, or two women.

Now the memory of Cusio is back with me every day. I remember him often, with his gestures and his tight pants, his perennial smile that got him past so many insults. The memory returned powerfully when I accepted an unusual proposal - to be godmother at Cuba's first wedding between a transsexual and a gay.

My dear old granny would faint if she could see me involved in this "shameful spectacle," as she would put it. My old schoolmates would say I had lost my sense of proportion, while the macho boys I used to know in the neighborhood of Cayo Hueso would be sharpening their knives.

But the frowns of annoyance are not only on these faces from the past. Some of my most open-minded friends have stopped speaking to me, in protest against this insolence. But the fact is that Wendy and Ignacio - the happy couple - still reflect much of the suffering I saw in Cusio, part of the torment he must have known. To witness this union between the girl who once had a male name, and the HIV-positive young man so long hammered by homophobia and political intolerance, is my way of paying tribute to the child who taught me to respect difference.

Wendy was born in the wrong body. Ignacio went to prison at a young age for distributing pamphlets about human rights. They met in February of this year, when she had already obtained corrective genital surgery, and he had been struggling with HIV for years. They immediately knew that between them, it was love. She worked in the Sexuality Studies Center (Cenesex) run by Mariela Castro; he wrote for a website run by "enemies of the revolution." When Mariela (Raúl Castro's daughter) learned that her protégée was connected with a gay dissident, she told her to choose between her job and her love life. Wendy chose the latter, and a date was set for the wedding.

Wendy Iriepa had obtained not only the surgery, but what is still a dream for many Cuban transsexuals: an ID document with a feminine name. When they went to the notary, he gave them a marriage date without noticing that her birth certificate still read "Sex: male." They thus slipped through a legal loophole, in a land where gay marriage does not yet exist. To stop them would have made a liar out of no less than Mariela Castro, who had authorized the feminine ID document for Wendy.

My own small role was to accompany them in their decision, and watch them overcome each new obstacle, laughing in the knowledge that they were already a couple and a wedding would be only a formality. It is they who have had to bear the sarcasm of others; the pressures of the political police (who see the wedding as an affront); and the annoyance of Mariela Castro, who did not attend.

During the ceremony in the Palace of Matrimony, I thought I saw a familiar face. Perhaps it was only the heat, combined with a little rum that I had drunk before it began. I went out to the grand staircase and scanned the crowd, but couldn't spot the face again. I could have sworn it was Cusio - smiling, gesticulating, wearing pants as he always wore them, shockingly tight.