Mariela Castro

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Mariela Castro
Mariela Castro addressing the Latin America plenary of the International Conference on LGBT Human Rights in Montreal.
Born	1962 Havana, Cuba

Mariela Castro Espín (born 1962 in Havana, Cuba) is the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education in Havana and an activist for LGBT rights in Cuba.

She is the daughter of Cuban president Raúl Castro Ruz and Vilma Espín Guillois, and the niece of former president Fidel Castro Ruz.

Her group campaigns for effective AIDS prevention as well as acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality, transvestism, and transsexualism. In 2005 she proposed a project to allow transgendered people to receive sex reassignment surgery and change their legal gender. The measure was became law in June 2008 which allows sex change surgery for Cubans without charge.^[1]

Mariela Castro is president of the Cuban Multidisciplinary Centre for the Study of Sexuality, president of the National Commission for Treatment of Disturbances of Gender Identity, member of the Direct Action Group for Preventing, Confronting, and Combatting AIDS, and an executive member of the World Association for Sexual Health. She is also the director of the journal Sexología y Sociedad.

She has published 13 scholarly articles and nine books.^[2]

According to former Castro family confidante Norberto Fuentes, Mariela is considered the rebel in the family; "a free spirit who performed topless in one late 1980s production". She also reportedly favored perestroika in the 1980s. Mariela is now married to an Italian and has two children with him, plus a boy from a previous union with a Chilean.^[3]