Adela Vázquez
Cuban American transgender activist and performer
Adela Vázquez (November 13, 1958 – October 11, 2024) was a Cuban-American transgender activist and performer. Hailing from Cuba during a time of political uprising, Vázquez was one of 125,000 people who sought asylum and migrated in the Mariel Boat lifts in 1980. Local to San Francisco's gay scene, Vázquez began to organize with HIV prevention organization Proyecto ContraSIDA Por Vida (also known as PCPV, or Proyecto) and became a community activist for transgender rights.
Early life
In 1958, Fidel Castro organized the July 26th Movement to overthrow Fulgencio Batista. Vázquez was born in 1958, and during her birth, homes were burned and cities were destroyed because of the revolution. Vázquez was born out of wedlock and was adopted by her grandfather and grandmother, with whom she lived.
Raised in Camagüey, Cuba, Vázquez spent her childhood walking around downtown and the Casino Campreste. She encountered a large Cuban LGBTQ community, eventually being baptized as "La Chica Streisandisima" at the swan fountain in Casino Campreste.
Her early involvement with the LGBTQ community in Camagüey and emigration to the United States was the influence for Jaime Cortez's graphic novel Sexile.
In Cuba, Vázquez was inducted into the military but was ineligible for service because of her homosexuality.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adela Vázquez” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.