The Weekly Lift - September 29, 2022

Dear Readers:

Among the headlines of this past week, The Weekly Lift is highlighting the events in Iran, where women have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the repressive Islamic government after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in police custody for allegedly not covering her hair appropriately. The events initially centered on women's rights, have expanded into a general mobilization against the regime, with men also joining the uprising (see article below).

In an essay published in the New York Times today, Firoozeh Dumas, an Iranian-American writer states that "when women are oppressed, no one wins. Iran today is full of educated, capable women who have risen to the top of their fields and whose bodies, paradoxically, are regulated by the government. Regardless of their education or contribution to society, outside of their homes, every women is at the mercy of the morality police. This is insulting, soul crushing and not sustainable".

Women are increasingly at the center of global issues, sometimes as targets, be wearing a headscarf in Iran, the education of girls in Afghanistan, reproductive rights in the US or the private life of Finland's prime minister. More remarkably, their voices as leaders, thinkers, change agents, militants and advocates, inject a perspective and a resolve that can no longer be minimized or ignored in international relations, business, politics, global development, social change, and the fight for human rights. The Weekly Lift will continue to select headlines and articles to reflect those voices.

This week's selection*:

Gender Rights: Women Take Center Stage in Antigovernment Protests Shaking Iran

The New York Times (US) reports that "for Yasi, the news felt too close to ignore: A young woman, Mahsa Amini, had died in the custody of Iran’s morality police, days after being arrested for failing to cover her hair modestly enough.

When protests broke out after?Ms. Amini's death, 20-year-old Yasi — the first woman in her immediate family to reject the hijab — ran into the streets, waving the thin shawl she usually wears over her blond hair in public, in a grudging concession to the law of the land.

“I keep thinking Mahsa could be me; it could be my friends, my cousins,” she said in an interview from Tehran, where protests have since raged every night outside her family’s apartment complex. “You don’t know what they will do to you.”

The?nationwide protests challenging Iran’s authoritarian leadership, now in their 10th day, have fed on a range of grievances: a collapsing economy, brazen corruption, suffocating repression and social restrictions handed down by a handful of elderly clerics. On Monday, they showed no sign of abating, and neither did the harsh government effort to suppress them despite international condemnation.

But their catalyst was the death of Ms. Amini, 22, on Sept. 16 and its connection to the hijab law, the most visible manifestation of a theocracy that makes women?second to men in politics, in parenting, in the office and at home. Tossing head scarves into bonfires, dancing bareheaded before security agents, young women have been at the forefront of these demonstrations, supplying the defining images of defiance.

Iranian women had participated in protests against the clerical establishment before, but never before had they been spark, leaders and foot soldiers all at once. More than two dozen have been arrested so far, and several female protesters have been killed. It was a female journalist, Niloufar Hamedi of Shargh, an Iranian daily, who first brought Ms. Amini’s story to light. Ms. Hamedi was arrested last week and is being held in solitary confinement at Evin prison, according to her colleagues.

“I see a lot of anger and a lot of rage in young women,” said Golshan, 28, a women’s rights activist from Isfahan who has organized small groups of friends to gather every night to chant, “No to hijab, no to oppression, only equal rights.”

The first night of the protests, Golshan and about 50 other women locked arms to block an intersection, calling on men to join them. One man lit a bonfire. One by one, as the crowd cheered, women pulled their hijabs off, waved them aloft and tossed them into the blaze. “We want to be heard,” she said. “We don’t have one leader. The beauty and strength of our movement is that every single one of us here is a leader.”

Mariam, 34, an artist in northern Mazandaran Province, said she and her friends had not only burned their scarves, they had cut their long hair and shaved their heads. “It’s a statement that doesn’t need explaining,” she said. “You can’t control me and you can’t define me with my hair.”

Women are paying for their defiance in blood. On Saturday night, the riot police beat Golshan with a baton, leaving her dizzy and in pain, her neck frozen. (Like others interviewed, she insisted on being identified only by her first name to avoid reprisal.)

Two years after ultraconservative Muslim clerics seized power in the 1979 revolution, they required women in government offices to wear the head scarf, then all women and girls over age 9, justifying it with Shariah law. The hijab, they proclaimed, would protect female chastity and honor. But it has also become a weak point for the regime, symbolizing social restrictions that men and women alike chafe at — and flout behind closed doors.

Iranian women have been contesting the law mandating hijabs and long, loose robes that cloak the body for decades. The women’s rights movement has also pushed — with limited success — against laws that allowed men to divorce more easily than women, granted men exclusive custody of children, lifted restrictions on polygamy for men, lowered the marriage age for girls and required women to get their husbands’ or fathers’ permission to travel.

But the current protests have spread far beyond the usual ranks of activists. Yasi’s mother, Minoo, seeing her daughter in Ms. Amini, signed an online petition by religious women calling for the abolition of the morality police and the repeal of the hijab mandate. Minoo says she wears the head scarf willingly, but the choice should be hers, not the government’s.

“We can’t impose what we think on one another,” she said. “I’m religious, but I’m fed up with the hypocrisy and lies of this regime treating us ordinary people like dirt.” On several nights she has driven Yasi and her friends to protests around Tehran.

Nahid, 65, a retired banker, said she made sandwiches and first-aid kits for the demonstrators every night. She said other women who were not directly participating let protesters sleep in their homes to avoid security forces, and gave them sweet drinks and cakes. Activists say the response has been made possible by decades of quiet, grass-roots networking, even as prominent rights advocates have been imprisoned or gone into exile.

Under former President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, young Iranians got used to a degree of flexibility, as the morality police grew less stringent. Long hair snaked from under ever-looser head scarves. Makeup got heavier, hemlines shorter. Clothing once restricted to dark, somber shades turned chartreuse and hot pink, embroidered and appliquéd. In recent years, some women have dared to go even further, removing their headscarves in public in restaurants and while riding in cars, as Yasi does.

Iranian women “have never conformed to the state’s ideal of what the hijab should look like,” said Sussan Tahmasebi, a veteran Iranian women’s rights activist who lives in exile. “And we see now the emergence of a younger generation that really care about their bodily rights, and the hijab is probably the most visible infringement on their bodily rights.”

Successive governments, including Mr. Rouhani’s, periodically cracked down on hijab noncompliance with fines, arrests and verbal warnings, but hard-liners were impatient to reverse the liberalizing tide. Since?Ebrahim Raisi, an ultraconservative,?became president a year ago, he has systematically tightened enforcement of strict social and religious rules.

In July, the president ordered all “responsible entities and institutions” to devise a strategy for stepping up hijab enforcement. Violations, he said, were damaging the values of the Islamic Republic and “promoting corruption.”

Iran’s chief prosecutor declared his support for barring women who were improperly covered from getting access to social and government services, including the subway. The Ministry of Guidance ordered movie theaters to stop showing women in ads.

The backlash to the policy has come not just from the country’s secular camp, but also from religious and conservative Iranians who said it would only deepen the divide between the government and its people.

But the clerical establishment was unmoved, blaming the reaction on foreign interference. “In the history of Islamic Iran, the life of the women of Iran has always been associated with chastity and hijab,” Mr. Raisi said last month.

His campaign spurred growing tension and violence in the months before Ms. Amini’s death. Cafes were shut for allowing bareheaded customers. Videos on social media showed morality police officers insulting, beating and dragging women into vans to be sent for “re-education” in proper hijab.

In one widely seen video, the mother of a woman who had been arrested threw herself in front of a moving morality police van, screaming: “My daughter is sick. I beg you not to take her.”

Sapideh Rashno, a 28-year-old writer who had taken off her head scarf on a bus, was caught on video in mid-July arguing with a conservatively dressed woman who berated her for “improper dress.” Ms. Rashno was arrested. Two weeks later, state television broadcast an interview showing her apologizing for the episode, her face bruised and her eyes ringed with purple circles.

Her case prompted a public outcry. But with the explosion of protests, the conversation has moved beyond the hijab to the system itself. “The hijab is a symbolic thing that has brought women to the front and center,” said Nazli Kamvari, an Iranian-Canadian feminist author, “but it connects them to all sorts of discrimination that everyone is facing.”

International Relations: An Israel-Lebanon Border Deal Could Increase Natural Gas Supplies

The New York Times also reports that "Israel and Lebanon have technically been at war since 1948, but the countries are close to an agreement that could increase production of natural gas, helping energy-starved Europe.

Officials from the two countries have said they are close to resolving long-running disputes over their maritime borders, which would allow energy companies to extract more fossil fuels from fields in the Mediterranean Sea.

The increased production won’t make up for the gas that Europe is no longer getting from Russia. But energy experts say an Israeli-Lebanese agreement should give a vital push to efforts to produce more gas in that part of the world. Over the last four years, energy production in the eastern Mediterranean has been growing as Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Cyprus have worked together to take advantage of oil and gas buried under the sea.

“This is a very important step for the region to come into its own,” said Charif Souki, the Lebanese American executive chairman of Tellurian, a liquefied natural gas company based in Houston. “Players are finally realizing that it’s better to cooperate than to continuously fight.”

The Israeli-Lebanese negotiations will most directly affect the Karish field, which is set to produce gas for Israel’s domestic use. That fuel is expected to displace gas produced from other fields, which can then be exported. The new field is also expected to produce a small amount of oil. The latest coverage of business, markets and the economy, sent by email each weekday.?Get it sent to your inbox.

Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil and gas company, and several smaller businesses are already producing gas from two larger fields off Israel’s coast. That fuel has increasingly replaced coal in the country’s power plants and factories. Israel now has so much gas that it has become a net exporter of energy, sending fuel to neighbors like Jordan and Egypt. Some of that gas has also found its way to Europe and other parts of the world from L.N.G. export terminals in Egypt.

The U.S. government, across several administrations, has encouraged the growth of the gas trade in the region by helping to negotiate deals between countries that have long had tense relations. The Ukraine crisis has accelerated efforts to explore and produce natural gas because of the soaring cost of the fuel in Europe, where countries are desperate to end their dependence on Russian gas.

Chevron and its Israeli partners are discussing the possibility of building a floating liquefied natural gas platform in the Leviathan gas field, Israel’s largest. The companies are expected to make a decision on the project in a few months.

But getting the gas out of the region will not be easy. Floating export terminals are vulnerable to terrorist attack. And, even if they could be adequately secured, the terminals will not be able to process as much gas as the larger coastal facilities used in major gas producers like the United States, Qatar and Australia. Building terminals on land can take several years, and often longer, because of opposition from environmental and other groups

“Energy infrastructure offshore is very volatile and vulnerable,” said Gal Luft, a former Israeli military officer who is a co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington. “You have to manage risk.”

Theoretically, transporting gas by pipelines would be easier than liquefying natural gas for export before converting it back into gas at its destination. But building long-distance pipelines is expensive and difficult. A long-running conflict involving Turkey, Cyprus and Greece, for example, has made constructing a pipeline from Israel to southern Europe incredibly challenging, if not impossible.

Even an Israeli-Lebanese border agreement faces risks. Hezbollah has threatened to attack the Karish field, and it sent unarmed drones over it in July; Israeli officials said they had shot down the aircraft.

Still, Israeli and Lebanese officials have said in recent days that they are pressing on with the negotiations, with officials from the Biden administration acting as a go-between, and are close to a deal. The talks gathered momentum during the United Nations General Assembly last week.

Prime Minister Najib Mikati of Lebanon said on Thursday at the United Nations that he was confident about reaching an agreement with Israel. “Lebanon is well aware of the importance of the promising energy market in the eastern Mediterranean for the prosperity of all countries in the region,” he said, “but also to meet the needs of importing nations.”

U.S. and other Western oil companies have long shied away from Israel, in part because they do not want to alienate Arab countries. But, as relations between Israel and countries like Egypt, Jordan and, more recently, the United Arab Emirates have improved, more companies have expressed interest in the eastern Mediterranean. An agreement between Israel and Lebanon could accelerate that trend. “I think it will appease many minds,” said Leslie Palti-Guzman, chief executive of Gas Vista, a consulting firm. “Companies that have been reluctant to invest could be more incentivized to develop additional projects.”

Gas fields in the Mediterranean are one of several new suppliers that Europe will need as it seeks a long-term replacement for Russian gas. Other suppliers include energy companies operating in the United States, Qatar, Africa, the Caspian Sea and the North Sea.

“There is no silver bullet,” said Paddy Blewer, spokesman for Energean, a London-based exploration company that hopes to begin producing gas in the Karish field. “The East Mediterranean is one of a series of marginal gains that Europe has to look at.”

Energean plans to begin production in the next few weeks, and has said it expects to produce up to eight billion cubic meters of gas a year by 2025. If it is successful, the company could significantly add to Israel’s output. The country will produce roughly 22 billion cubic meters this year. Once an importer of almost all of its energy, Israel increased gas production by 22 percent in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2021. It exported roughly 40 percent of its gas, earning the government royalties of $250 million.

An agreement between Israel and Lebanon would also open the way to drilling in Lebanese waters by a consortium led by Eni of Italy and TotalEnergies of France. Lebanese officials view natural gas as a critical financial tool in its attempts to revive the country’s depressed economy. The government has wanted to drill offshore since at least 2014, but disputes with Israel over the border have delayed exploration.

“It’s not for sure Lebanon will find gas,” said Chakib Khelil, a former president of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. “But, if they do, Lebanon will get a big boost.”

Climate Justice: Biden Administration Launches Office Devoted To Environmental Justice

The Los Angeles Times (US) reports that "forty years after a predominantly Black community in Warren County, N.C., rallied against hosting a hazardous waste landfill, President Biden’s top environment official visited what is widely considered the birthplace of the environmental justice movement Saturday to unveil a national office that will distribute $3 billion in block grants to underserved communities burdened by pollution.

Joined by civil rights leaders and participants from the 1982 protests, Michael S. Regan, the first Black administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced he was dedicating a new senior level of leadership to the environmental justice movement they ignited.?

The Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights — composed of more than 200 current staff members in 10 U.S. regions — will merge three existing EPA programs to oversee a portion of Democrats’ $60-billion investment in environmental justice initiatives created by the Inflation Reduction Act. The president will nominate an assistant administrator to lead the new office, pending Senate confirmation.

“In the past, many of our communities have had to compete for very small grants because EPA’s pot of money was extremely small,” Regan said in an interview. “We’re going from tens of thousands of dollars to developing and designing a program that will distribute billions. But we’re also going to be sure that this money goes to those who need it the most and those who’ve never had a seat at the table.”

Biden has championed environmental justice as a centerpiece of his climate agenda since his first week in office, when he?signs an executive order pledging 40% of the overall benefits from certain federal clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities overwhelmed by pollution.?

The new office intertwines environmental justice with the central fabric of the EPA, Regan said, equating it to other top offices like air and water — cementing its principles in a way that will outlive the administration.?

North Carolina in 1978 designated Warren County, a small, predominantly Black farming community along the Virginia state line, as a disposal site for truckloads of soil laced with highly carcinogenic chemical compounds that later contaminated the area’s water supply.?

As the first trucks with contaminated soil rolled into town in 1982, hundreds of residents and supporters flooded the streets, blocking their path to the landfill. Though the demonstrators were unable to shut down the operation after six weeks of nonviolent protests and more than 500 arrests, their efforts have been lauded by civil rights leaders as the impetus for a global uprising against environmental racism in minority communities.

Wayne Moseley, 73, was one of the initial protesters arrested on the first day of demonstrations. The Raleigh resident commuted to Warren County to march on behalf of his mother, whose health prevented her from participating. He called Saturday’s ceremony “a homecoming” for himself and many other protesters he hadn’t seen for 40 years.

“We became a family — no Black or white, no rich or poor — we were all one,” Moseley said. “The state was hellbent on putting that dump site here. I knew we couldn’t stop it, but we could elevate the consciousness of not only the state but the nation.”

Dollie Burwell, a protest leader known in the community as “the mother of the movement,” honored the bravery of her late daughter Kimberly Burwell, who was only 8 years old when she joined her mother on the front lines.

“She stood up and led so many children in the protests,” Burwell said of her daughter during the ceremony. “She was not afraid of being arrested. But she was afraid of her family and friends getting cancer” from carcinogenic compounds in the soil.

Government officials have routinely targeted low-income communities of color like Warren County to host hazardous waste facilities since the early 1900s. And the neglect of crucial infrastructure in predominantly Black communities, including?Flint, Mich., and?Jackson, Miss., has led to problems still seen today.

An April?study by UC Berkeley and Columbia University found that largely Black and Latino neighborhoods that received low scores in a discriminatory federal housing program known as redlining were home to twice as many oil wells as majority-white communities. According to the?Clean Air Task Force, Black Americans are 75% more likely than white Americans to live near a factory or plant and nearly four times as likely to die from exposure to pollutants.

The Rev. William Barber II, a prominent social activist and leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, said that he sees Regan’s announcement as “a great starting point” and that he will continue to demand more of the Biden administration.

“Our votes are not support. Our votes are our demands,” Barber said in an interview. “This is not about right versus left; it’s about right versus wrong. This is about a lifestyle versus disability, because when you poison the land and the water, you hurt people’s everyday life.”

Regan, who is from Goldsboro, N.C., said he grew up listening to local civil rights leaders like Barber and Burwell — the early inspirations for his work at the EPA.

“I’m taking all of these experiences and matching that with the vision of the president,” Regan said of his childhood. “We’re using this opportunity to not only honor those who came before us, but we’re building on the work that they started. We’re standing on their shoulders and trying to reach higher heights.”

With just over six weeks until the midterm election, Regan is among several Cabinet members visiting North Carolina this month to promote the president’s achievements, including the visits of Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 1 and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen next Tuesday in Durham.?

Democrats have set their sights on the Southern swing state as a potential pickup for the narrowly divided U.S. Senate and other key offices.

International Relations: Tiny Island On Taiwan’s Frontier With China Wants Peace – And Return Of Mainland Tourists

The Globe and Mail (Canada) reports that "the musty bomb shelter buried five metres below his family’s ancestral shrine is a bleak reminder for Andy Wang of how his home, on the front line between Taiwan and China, was for many years a fierce battleground between two governments.

Mr. Wang, 36, lives on Kinmen Island, one of?Taiwan’s outlying possessions that also lies less than 10 kilometres from the mainland. It may be governed from Taipei, 200 kilometres away, but China looms large in the minds of its 60,000 residents.

People in Kinmen are eager for an unwinding of?COVID-19?travel restrictions so throngs of mainland tourists can return. They talk of seeking peace with Beijing, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province and has reserved the right to annex it?by force if necessary. And they hope any attack by China focuses on the main island of Taiwan and leaves them unscathed.

“There are many ways to solve the problem. War is not the only way,” said Mr. Wang, who works in film production. He’s in favour of some kind of political and economic union with China. “Maybe we can build a commonwealth like the European Union where Taiwan is still an independent country.”

Kinmen is one of the offshore islands that the defeated Nationalist forces occupied and held as they retreated to Taiwan after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in 1949. The relics of war litter Kinmen, which was the target of 475,000 Chinese artillery shells in 1958 alone during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. Between 1958 and 1979, Beijing rained down about one million shells on Kinman, though in the later years these contained propaganda leaflets.

Rusting spike barricades erected to thwart amphibious landings still ring Kinmen’s beaches. An abandoned tank lies half buried in sand. A massive broadcasting speaker, tall as a building, once blasted anti-Communist propaganda at the mainland. Now, outfitted with coloured lights, it plays soft music. Mr. Wang, like many on Kinmen (pronounced Jeenman in Mandarin), is hoping, and betting, that he and his relatives won’t have to hide in a bomb shelter again.

Many on Kinmen point to China’s escalatory military drills in August, when People’s Liberation Army warships encircled Taiwan’s main island, as a sign that they aren’t at risk. The live-fire exercises, including firing ballistic missiles over northern Taiwan, was sparked by U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s?visit to Taipei – an event that has ramped up tensions between Washington and Beijing. “I think there is a high possibility of war,” Mr. Wang said. “But the Chinese government is targeting Taiwan’s main island rather than Kinmen.”

The family bomb shelter was last used in the 1960s. Today it holds quite a few spiders and a bottle of rice liquor that Mr. Wang’s aunt was delighted to discover after opening the shelter for a visiting journalist.

Someone on Kinmen has found a use for all the Chinese artillery shells that poured down over more than 30 years. Blacksmith Wu Tseng-dong, 65, carves them up with a blowtorch and then forges knives that have become a hit with mainland tourists.

Until COVID-19 hit, hundreds of thousands such visitors would visit Kinmen each year, many of them making a beeline for Mr. Wu’s stores. He does business under the name “Maestro Wu.” Travellers from cities such as Xiamen, across the water, liked the symbolism of repurposing an artifact of war, he said. “They feel it is quite historical and symbolizes peace between Taiwan and China,” Mr. Wu said. Now, those sales are gone. “It’s really bad.”

Tourism helped Kinmen replace the business lost when Taiwan’s military drew down its presence on the island. The number of soldiers has dropped from 80,000 a few decades ago to several thousand today.

But Taipei is now adding more military assets again: It began construction in 2019 of forward deployment bases in Kinmen for elite special forces soldiers. It’s also reportedly stationing its new Bee Eye mobile radar systems to Kinmen to monitor drones and spy aircraft.

Kinmen County Councillor Tung Sen Po can see the city skyline of Xiamen, which has a population of four million, from his rooftop. He said before 1949, Kinmen was like a suburb of Xiamen – he offers the example of Brooklyn and Manhattan – but said this relationship was severed instantly when a new border was created at the end of China’s civil war.

“The war never stopped. It just took different forms,” Mr. Tung said. The councillor compared Kinmen to other Cold War border points, from the now-dismantled Berlin Wall to the demilitarized zone separating North Korea and South Korea. “I think we’re in a second Cold War today between China and the United States.”

Mr. Tung said Kinmen’s economy has taken a hit since COVID-19 stopped travel to and from Xiamen, where thousands of his city’s residents own property. Some Kinmen shops that sold cosmetics to mainland tourists have shut down; restaurants and car rental agencies are hurting. He said Kinmen has no choice but to restore good relations, direct trade and tourism with Xiamen: “It has to be built on a peaceful relations,” he said.

Zheng Qing-Li, 86, was a soldier on Kinmen during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. His most vivid memory from 1958 is when his family’s house was hit by artillery shells four times, and he and his brother were forced to tunnel out from the collapsed building so his mother and grandmother could escape the rubble. They fashioned a temporary shelter and foraged sweet potatoes from nearby fields until the shelling died down.

He blames Ms. Pelosi for the trouble in August, accusing her of stirring up trouble to burnish her legacy. “She’s retiring soon, and the visit was for herself,” said Mr. Zheng, who doesn’t blame Beijing for firing ballistic missiles over Taiwan. “They did it to show America they are capable.” Mr. Wu, meanwhile, has hired extra staff in the hopes that business will pick up, and he said he could even make knives from remnants of ballistic missiles if the opportunity arose.

“As long as it’s made of steel,” he said."

Human Rights: Cubans Approve Same-Sex Marriage

Le Monde (France) reports that "ignoring for at least one day the misfortunes of Cuba, the LGBTQI community on the communist island celebrated, euphoricly, the?"historic"?result?of the referendum on the family code held on Sunday, September 25. At 66.9%, according to the provisional results unveiled on Monday by the National Electoral Council, Cuban voters approved the legalization of "egalitarian marriage" between people of the same sex.?"The yes won. Justice has been done,?welcomed President Miguel Diaz-Canel.?Apparenting the family code is a way to pay off a debt to several generations of Cubans. From today, we will be a better nation. ”

Pending the final results, expected on Wednesday, the government declared the election?"valid and irreversible".?And, at the end of the day, Mr. Diaz-Canel and the President of the National Assembly of People's Power, Esteban Lazo Hernandez, have ratified the new code.

The 104-page document, which also allows adoption for homosexual couples and frames?"solidarity"?gestation?by people?"unified by family or emotional ties",?overhauls?the 1975 code until then in force. It prohibits marriages of minors - until now authorized from the age of 14 for girls and 16 years for boys -, redefines the responsibilities of parents, prohibits corporal punishment within families, asserts the right of grandparents to keep in touch with their grandchildren after separation, places on paper the duty of protecting the State towards the elderly and people with disabilities, takes into account the voice of children in the It was to be published urgently in a special edition of the Official Bulletin on Tuesday, for immediate entry into force.

In this increasingly authoritarian country, this ambitious text, which sets new rights while those that already exist are regularly violated, has not failed to provoke controversy. And the results confirm the Cubans' dissatisfaction?with the regime, which is already reflected in their exodus of unprecedented magnitude and in the rise of social protest, linked to shortages and attacks on public freedoms. More than a thousand people were detained following the historic demonstrations?"against the dictatorship" of July 11, 2021.

Not only 33% of voters, or nearly 2 million people, said no to the Family Code, despite the vast communication campaign in favor of the yes deployed by the National Center for Sex Education led by the influential daughter of former Cuban leader Raul Castro, Mariela Castro, in all organs of the state, from the Supreme Court to the Electoral Council.

But turnout, at 74%, fell by ten points compared to the?2019 referendum on the Constitution (approved at 90%), if we add the abstentions and the votes against, nearly 4.4 million Cubans - more than half of the voters - braved the voting instructions of the Communist Party, a single party, which represents a serious warning blow for the regime.

"To support the family code is to support the country's project,"?Mariela Castro said in May, making voting a kind of plebiscite for or against the regime. However, it is precisely to avoid participating in a vote used to politically legitimize the highly contested government of Miguel Diaz-Canel, and to whitewash its regular attacks on public freedoms, that many critics of the regime, in favor of the text, have chosen, in the face of this dilemma, abstention.

Similarly, many LGBTQI activists considered hypocritical and unworthy that their rights were subject to the popular vote, recalling that in May Parliament approved a reform of the penal code tightening the repression of dissidents without taking care to submit it to a referendum. Some of them have also chosen not to vote, despite the considerable progress of their rights brought by the text, after years of persecution.

During the first decades following the Cuban revolution of 1959, gay people were stigmatized.?"We cannot believe that a gay person can meet the conditions and demands of conduct that would allow us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist activist,"?said Fidel Castro (1926-2016) in 1965.

At that time, gay people were sent, like priests and other "counter-revolutionaries", to "military production aid units", forced labor camps, to carry out their "rehabilitation". Same-sex relations were decriminalized in 1979 and Fidel Castro acknowledged in 2010, in a Mexican newspaper, his responsibility for the?"great injustice"?committed against gays and lesbians.

With the reform of the Family Code, Cuba becomes the ninth country in Latin America to legalize same-sex unions."

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