News
EXCLUSIVE: Fla. congresswoman meets with Cuban LGBT rights activists
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen met with Wendy Iriepa Díaz and Ignacio Estrada Cepero.
LGBT advocates Wendy Iriepa Díaz and Ignacio Estrada Cepero meet with Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) to discuss human rights in Cuba in the Rayburn House Office Building on Wednesday, July 31, 2013. (Washington Blade photo by Damien Salas)
Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on Wednesday met with two Cuban LGBT rights activists in her Capitol Hill office.
The Washington Blade had exclusive access to the majority of the meeting between the Cuban-born Republican who represents portions of Miami-Dade County and Wendy Iriepa Díaz and Ignacio Estrada Cepero that lasted more than half an hour.
Estrada, who founded the Cuban League Against AIDS in 2005, dismissed the Cuban government’s claims that people with HIV/AIDS receive free anti-retroviral drugs and other treatment under the island’s health care system. He and Iriepa, a transgender woman whom he married in a high-profile wedding in the Cuban capital of Havana in 2011, also criticized Mariela Castro, the daughter of President Raúl Castro who is the director of Cuba’s National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX) that has publicly backed LGBT rights in the country.
Cuba has offered free sex-reassignment surgeries to trans Cubans under the country’s health care system in 2008.
Iriepa, who worked for CENESEX for seven years until she married Estrada, underwent the procedure herself in 2007. She told the Blade during an interview earlier this week that only 20 trans Cubans have received SRS since the law changed – and CENESEX determines those who will actually receive it.
Estrada and Iriepa arrived in D.C. on Monday and are scheduled to return to Miami tomorrow.
They are in the nation’s capital less than three months after Mariela Castro traveled to Philadelphia to receive an award from Equality Forum, an LGBT advocacy group.
Mariela Castro in May 2012 appeared on a New York City panel with Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Mariela Castro also met with LGBT rights advocates in San Francisco while she was in the U.S.
“With these international trips, with this amount of recognition she has undermined the work of the (Cuban) LGBT community,” Estrada told Ros-Lehtinen as he showed her posters of Pride walks and other events that he and other Cuban LGBT rights advocates organized independent of CENESEX. “You are seeing a broken policy.”
Ros-Lehtinen applauded Estrada and Iriepa at the end of the meeting.
“I feel very honored to be able to meet you,” she said. “I am grateful to you for filling this tremendous role inside of Cuba that is certainly not easy.”
“It’s very important for the U.S. community to understand what is the status of LGBT rights and the denial of rights in Cuba,” Ros-Lehtinen told the Blade after the meeting. “Mariela Castro, as part of the regime, has been on a propaganda tour internationally and here in the U.S. especially trying to sell this facade that is really non-existent in Cuba.”
A Cuban government representative did not immediately return the Blade’s request for comments about Estrada and Iriepa’s meeting with Ros-Lehtinen.
Iran
Grenell: ‘Real hope’ for gay rights in Iran as result of nationwide protests
Former ambassador to Germany claimed he has sneaked ‘gays and lesbians out of’ country
Richard Grenell, the presidential envoy for special missions of the United States, said on X on Tuesday that he has helped “sneak gays and lesbians out of Iran” and is seeing a change in attitudes in the country.
The post, which now has more than 25,000 likes since its uploading, claims that attitudes toward gays and lesbians are shifting amid massive economic protests across the country.
“For the first time EVER, someone has said ‘I want to wait just a bit,” the former U.S. ambassador to Germany wrote. “There is real hope coming from the inside. I don’t think you can stop this now.”
Grenell has been a longtime supporter of the president.
“Richard Grenell is a fabulous person, A STAR,” Trump posted on Truth Social days before his official appointment to the ambassador role. “He will be someplace, high up! DJT”
Iran, which is experiencing demonstrations across all 31 provinces of the country — including in Tehran, the capital — started as a result of a financial crisis causing the collapse of its national currency. Time magazine credits this uprising after the U.N. re-imposed sanctions in September over the country’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
As basic necessities like bread, rice, meat, and medical supplies become increasingly unaffordable to the majority of the more than 90 million people living there, citizens took to the streets to push back against Iran’s theocratic regime.
Grenell, who was made president and executive director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last year by Trump, believes that people in the majority Shiite Muslim country are also beginning to protest human rights abuses.
Iran is among only a handful of countries in which consensual same-sex sexual relations remain punishable by death, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Virginia
Mark Levine loses race to succeed Adam Ebbin in ‘firehouse’ Democratic primary
State Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker won with 70.6 percent of vote
Gay former Virginia House of Delegates member Mark Levine (D-Alexandria) lost his race to become the Democratic nominee to replace gay state Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) in a Jan. 13 “firehouse” Democratic primary.
Levine finished in second place in the hastily called primary, receiving 807 votes or 17.4 percent. The winner in the four-candidate race, state Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, who was endorsed by both Ebbin and Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger received 3,281 votes or 70.6 percent.
Ebbin, whose 39th Senate District includes Alexandria and parts of Arlington and Fairfax Counties, announced on Jan. 7 that he was resigning effective Feb. 18, to take a job in the Spanberger administration as senior advisor at the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority.
Results of the Jan. 13 primary, which was called by Democratic Party leaders in Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax, show that candidates Charles Sumpter, a World Wildlife Fund director, finished in third place with 321 voters or 6.9 percent; and Amy Jackson, the former Alexandria vice mayor, finished in fourth place with 238 votes or 5.1 percent.
Bennett-Parker, who LGBTQ community advocates consider a committed LGBTQ ally, will now compete as the Democratic nominee in a Feb. 10 special election in which registered voters in the 39th District of all political parties and independents will select Ebbin’s replacement in the state senate.
The Alexandria publication ALX Now reports that local realtor Julie Robben Linebery has been selected by the Alexandria Republican City Committee to be the GOP candidate to compete in the Jan. 10 special election. According to ALX Now, Lineberry was the only application to run in a now cancelled special party caucus type event initially called to select the GOP nominees.
It couldn’t immediately be determined if an independent or other party candidate planned to run in the special election.
Bennett-Parker is considered the strong favorite to win the Feb. 10 special election in the heavily Democratic 39th District, where Democrat Ebbin has served as senator since 2012.
Congress
Van Hollen speaks at ‘ICE Out for Good’ protest in D.C.
ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is among those who spoke at an “ICE Out for Good” protest that took place outside U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s headquarters in D.C. on Tuesday.
The protest took place six days after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis.
Good left behind her wife and three children.
(Video by Michael K. Lavers)
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Rollback of health IT standards will harm LGBTQ patients
Mark Levine loses race to succeed Adam Ebbin in ‘firehouse’ Democratic primary
National LGBTQ Task Force brings Creating Change conference back to D.C.
Van Hollen speaks at ‘ICE Out for Good’ protest in D.C.
Hundreds protest ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good in D.C.
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