Cuba votes to legalize same-sex marriage, surrogacy

Cuba's new Family Code defines marriage as the union between two people, rather than that of a man and a woman

Electoral authorities count ballots at a polling station in Havana, on September 25, 2022

Cubans voted to legalize same-sex marriage and adoption as well as surrogate pregnancies in a referendum over the weekend, the communist country's electoral officials said Monday.

Preliminary results indicate an "irreversible trend," with almost 67 percent of votes counted so far in favor of the government-backed change, electoral council president Alina Balseiro said on state television. 

President Miguel Diaz-Canel tweeted: "Yes has won. Justice has been done."

Official attitudes have since evolved, and the government conducted an intense media campaign in favor of the overhaul, which will replace the country's 1975 Family Code.

It defines marriage as the union between two people, rather than that of a man and a woman, while also boosting the rights of children, the elderly and the disabled.

Diaz-Canel said the change "settles a debt with several generations of Cuban men and women whose family projects have been waiting for this law. From now on we will be a better nation."

According to the National Electoral Council, 74 percent of Cuba's 8.4 million eligible voters cast a ballot, with 3.9 million valid votes counted so far in favor and 1.95 million against.

It is also the lowest percentage the communist government has received in a vote since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.

"We have new rules for the family... but the regime lost," he told AFP.

Diaz-Canel acknowledged on Sunday that "for such complex issues, where there is a diversity of criteria," people might cast "a punishment vote."

Dissidents had called on citizens to reject the code or to abstain.

And Cuban academic Arturo Lopez-Levy, from the University of Holy Names in California, noted to AFP that "with this legislation, Cuba is at the forefront" of such rights.

The referendum came amid the country's worst economic crisis in 30 years, which was exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The main opposition to the law's adoption came from Protestant and Catholic churches, the latter of which blasted the changes as "gender ideology."

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