A Transgender Elected Official Reflects an Evolving Cuba

[Natasha]

A Transgender Elected Official Reflects an Evolving Cuba

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/world/americas/a-transgender-elected-official-reflects-an-evolving-cuba.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
3/15/13
By VICTORIA BURNETT

Ms. Hernández, 48, who identifies as a woman and goes by Adela, would sooner cut a lazy bureaucrat to size with her sharp tongue than chop sugar cane with a machete. And you would more likely catch her hauling water to her house in platform heels than trudging the streets in fatigues and work boots.

So Ms. Hernández was more than a little tickled when she became the first transgender person to be elected to public office in Cuba, a country whose government once viewed homosexuality as a dangerous aberration and, in the 1960s, packed gay men off to labor camps.