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Cubans voted in a weekend referendum to legalize same-sex marriage and adoption, as well as surrogacy, election officials in the communist country said on Monday.
Electoral commission chair Alina Barceló said on state television that preliminary results showed an “irreversible trend”, with nearly 67 percent of the vote so far in favour of the government-backed changes.
“The family code has been recognized by the people,” she said.
President Miguel Diaz-Canel tweeted: “Yes, won. Justice has been served.”
The updated code represents a major shift in a country where machismo is strong and where authorities sent LGBTQ people to militarized labor camps in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Official attitudes have since changed, and the government has launched an intense media campaign in support of reforms that would replace the country’s 1975 Family Code.
The new regulations allow surrogacy, as long as no money changes hands, and legally recognize same-sex adoptions, as well as multiple fathers or mothers in addition to the biological parents.
It defines marriage as a union between two people rather than a man and a woman, while also promoting the rights of children, the elderly and the disabled.
“Finally we won!” wrote LGBTQ rights activist Maykel Gonzalez on Twitter.
Diaz-Canel said the change “settles the debt for generations of Cuban men and women whose family projects have been waiting for this law. We will be a better country from now on.”
According to the National Electoral Commission, 74 percent of Cuba’s 8.4 million eligible voters cast their ballots, with 3.9 million valid votes in favor and 1.95 million against so far.
However, turnout was far lower than in the last referendum, when a new constitution was passed in 2019, with 90% voting. It was also the lowest percentage of the vote for a Communist government since Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959.
For political scientist and opposition figure Manuel Quista Morua, the government’s victory was “expensive”.
“We had new rules for families … but the regime failed,” he told AFP.
“First, because when you add up the negative votes and the abstentions, it actually equals – if not more than – the sum of the yes votes.”
Diaz-Canel acknowledged on Sunday that “there are multiple criteria” for such a complex issue that people might cast a “punishment vote.”
Experts had predicted before the vote that many Cubans would use the referendum as a means of expressing their dissatisfaction with the government.
Dissidents are calling on citizens to reject the code or abstain.
But Cuban political scientist Rafael Hernandez said the introduction of the new family law was “an effective step in the direction of social justice”, the “most important” legal protection of human rights since the revolution .
Also read: Need to change society’s attitudes towards LGBTQ living with dignity: Justice Chandrachud
“With this legislation, Cuba is at the forefront of such rights,” Arturo Lopez-Levy, a Cuban scholar from Holy Name University in California, told AFP.
The law needs 50 percent approval of voters to pass.
The referendum comes amid the country’s worst economic crisis in 30 years, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
This is the first time Cuba has put an issue other than constitutional amendments to a public vote.
The main opposition to passing the law came from the Protestant and Catholic churches, the latter of which dubbed the changes “gender ideology.”
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