Over the past few years, the government of Cuba has earned praise for an unlikely development: a campaign to improve the status of the island’s gays. Standing at the forefront of this effort has been an even unlikelier figure: Mariela Castro Espín, the daughter of Raul Castro, who officially assumed the Cuban presidency last year after his brother Fidel fell ill. The latest entry in this narrative was a largely laudatory profile of Espín in The Advocate, which described her as a “champion” of the island’s “gay and transgender community.” Espín is director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education, an organization which, according to its website, promotes “the development of a culture of sexuality that is full, pleasurable, and responsible, as well as to promote the full exercise of sexual rights.”

Like most Latin American countries, Cuba has long been marked by regressive policies concerning homosexuality, due largely to a machismo culture that promotes a heroic masculinity portraying gays as weak and ill-suited to positions of leadership, whether in home or government. As Espín herself says, “Homophobia in Cuba is part of what makes you a ‘man.’” But while Espín should be praised for her attempt to change Cuban attitudes about homosexuality, her advocacy in this realm ought not disabuse anyone of the fact that she is part and parcel of the architecture of repression that has governed the island for five painful decades.

Whatever pleasant sounding pieties she mouths about the dignity of gay people, Espín is a communist, an appellation that ought carry no less opprobrium today than it did before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Castro’s Cuba it’s still 1956, the year Soviet tanks crushed a peaceful democratic uprising in Hungary, one of the Cold War’s darkest moments. Cuba remains the most repressive country in the Western hemisphere; Freedom House, the international human rights monitoring organization, lists it as the only “unfree” nation in the region (on a scale of one to seven -- seven being the worst -- Cuba earns a seven for political rights and six for civil liberties). The time warp is evident in a more literal sense: the few cars you’ll see on the streets are decades old, except, of course, the late-model Mercedes that chauffeur around the island’s elite.

It may seem strange that, in this day and age, one still has to mount a case against communism, but as long as a prominent member of the family that has ruled Cuba without interruption for 50 years is the subject of a flattering profile in a major publication, the work remains sadly necessary.