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Few people represent as María de los Ángeles Matienzo Puerto (Luyanó, Havana, 45 years old) the maxim that the personal is political. For this journalist, writer and human rights activist Lesboafrofeminista, “there is no literature or writing without politics.” From his exile in Madrid, where he arrived two years ago after a brief stay in Argentina after being forced to leave his island, Matienzo articulates a constant complaint to structural racism and homophobia rooted in Cuban society.
In the Cuban context, Matienzo ensures that he had to build his identity as a black and lesbian woman in an environment where Afro referents were scarce or invisible, even within her own family. “I have reached this understanding about my identity evading training and intellectuality, which in Cuba is totally white,” he explains in a cafeteria in the La Latina neighborhood, in the center of Madrid. And he regrets that, in his country, the cultural and religious expressions of African root have been historically criminalized. An eloquent example is the term “Asere” (friend, partner) – common saludo derived from the Abekuá brotherhoods – whose popularization contrasts with the stigmatization suffered on the island groups that practice syncretic religions of African matrix.
The professional path of Matienzo began with studies in Pedagogy, an option limited by the restricted spectrum of opportunities that, in their words, is offered to the Cubans like her, to whom the popular imaginary reserves the scope of care. “Black women in Cuba can choose between being teachers or nurses,” he says. However, her desire to write led her to find referents among small booksellers and Afro -descendant dissident figures that, without explicitly belonging to the intellectual field, offered her the initial keys to build her own speech. “They taught me to break with the myth of the uncultured black still so present on the island,” he says.
Maria wanted to write, but she knew that was not expected of someone like her either. “Journalism in Cuba had a name, surname and color, and I did not fit with these criteria,” he says. Despite not being among the people aligned with the party, her talent and determination led her to write in the official cultural magazine THE JIRIBILLA. In his first column, in 2003, he spoke of racism in Cuba. That text marked the beginning of a path full of tensions, as its critical position quickly placed under surveillance of the single party. Subsequently, he disconnected from the state media and traveled to independent journalism –ilegal in Cuba – writing for media such as Havana Timeswhich led her to be subject to growing reprisals by the State Security apparatus.
“At 27 years, I decided to say that it was a lesbian and this changed everything, ”says Maria, explaining how this confronted him even more with the social, patriarchal and heteronormative norms of the country. Cubaliteraria and Cuban lettersuntil the exercise of free journalism placed it again in the sights of the regime.
In 2013, he consolidated himself as an independent journalist writing for him Diary of Cuba. His participation in opposition media ended up closing the official spaces. The turning point came in 2019, when the regime intensified the repression against the San Isidro movement (where several friends of his were, such as Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara) and other dissident groups. María, together with her partner Kirenia Núñez, remained under constant harassment until, in 2022, she was forced to leave the country, despite having been a beneficiary of precautionary measures granted by the Inter -American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) from 2021. The two women arrived in Argentina and, after eight months in Buenos Aires, traveled to Madrid. Back today would most likely mean an arbitrary judicial process and jail. Several independent observatories have denounced that Cuba presents one of the highest imprisonment rates in the world, with thousands of people deprived of liberty without procedural guarantees or adequate defense.
Since his Spanish exile, Matienzo continues to denounce human rights violations in Cuba, particularly the conditions of women imprisoned for political reasons. Through her media work (she is the author of the column Wings women In the independent feminist magazine Tense wings) and in multilateral spaces – as his participation before the Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in Geneva in 2024 – has documented cases of psychological torture, lack of medical attention, sexual violence and discrimination due to sexual orientation and gender identity. Your documentary Thaiswhich tells the story of a political prisoner, and its articles in independent media are a reflection of this committed work that places it among the essential voices to understand the contemporary Cuban reality from an intersective look that interwoven gender, race, sexuality, political dissent and human rights.
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