National Unity and Cohesion: Limitations of Citizenship For Trans* Persons in Cuba 1

Abstract

The rhetoric of national unity as the basis for building a new society is one of the inspirations in the implementation of policies in the current Cuban context. As an example, the National Strategy for the Care of Transgender People in Cuba aims at the social integration of trans* people, using narratives of national and unity cohesion. This work reflects critically on the limits of public policies and on how certain rhetoric calls into question their universality. To this end, we take into consideration some contributions from cultural and feminist studies and debates about radical and plural democracy. In the conclusions, we point out alternatives to the discourse on the integration of trans* people in Cuba through national unity and cohesion. Among the alternatives we take a distance from conceptions that think of differences only in terms of subordination and antagonism relations as well as based on the provisional nature of policies, their possibility of creating alliances, to be mobilized by the passions, seem more feasible to contribute significantly to improve the citizenship of trans * people in the Cuban context.