HAVANA — It was around 7:20 a.m. on Thursday when I started hanging some clothes that I hand washed in the bathroom sink of my apartment in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood on the clothes line outside. A young man from the city of Santiago de Cuba who is renting the room next door saw me and introduced himself.

He is a cook who makes less than 50 CUC ($50) a month at the state-run restaurants at which he works. He and four of his friends were eating fried chicken they had just cooked and drinking Cristal, a Cuban beer, as dawn broke over Havana. He asked me whether I am gay and then told me that a lot of Cubans — regardless of their gender or sexual orientation — engage in sex work in order to support themselves.

“Life for gays in Cuba is very hard,” he said.

Life is certainly hard for the vast majority of Cubans, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. My neighbor’s matter of fact assessment of the situation in which he and his countrymen and women continue to live resonated with me as I was thinking about whether things have changed (or not) in the nearly six months since former Cuban President Fidel Castro’s death.

Fidel Castro’s niece spearheads LGBT issues in Cuba

The Cuban government in the years after the 1959 revolution that brought Castro to power sent gay men, among others, to work camps known as Military Units to Aid Production or by the Spanish acronym UMAPs. People with HIV/AIDS were forcibly placed into state-run sanitaria until 1993.

A gay Cuban man on Wednesday said he never learned about the camps in school, even though Castro apologized for them in 2010 during an interview with a Mexican newspaper. Castro’s niece, Mariela Castro, who is the daughter of his brother, Cuban President Raúl Castro, in recent years has spearheaded LGBT-specific issues in the country as the director of the National Center of Sexual Education, which is known by the Spanish acronym CENESEX.

One can easily conclude her efforts are paradoxical and a direct contradiction of the way that her uncle treated gay Cubans in the years after the revolution. This juxtaposition was on full display in 2015 when Mariela Castro gave a speech in the city of Las Tunas that commemorated the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

She spoke to hundreds of people — activists, CENESEX staffers and supporters and a handful of journalists from Cuba and abroad — against the backdrop of a large banner with Fidel Castro’s image that was hanging from a nearby building. Mariela Castro also led the crowd in a variety of chants that included, “Socialism yes. Homophobia no.”

Mariela Castro last week told Hatzel Vela, the Havana-based reporter for WPLG, a South Florida television station, that her father “understands” her work. She said that he also “supports” it.

One can make the case that Mariela Castro, who is also a member of the Cuban National Assembly, is the public face of the next generation of Castros who seek to continue to promote Fidel Castro’s ideals and keep his legacy alive. One can also make the case that Mariela Castro is the public face of a family that continues to spark scorn and outrage among independent LGBT rights advocates in Cuba and Cuban exiles in the U.S. nearly 60 years after her uncle came to power.

Cubans ‘making do with’ what they have

Fidel Castro’s image remains — literally and figuratively — on billboards, posters, murals and caricatures throughout Havana. The country continues to change poco a poco (bit by bit), but a lot remains the same.

Cubans and foreigners alike still need to stand in long lines in order to buy food, telephones and other things that most Americans likely take for granted. One still needs to purchase 2 CUC ($2) coupons from the state-run telecommunications company in order to access the country’s Internet network that remains slow and unreliable.

The coupons allow one to go online for an hour.

A grocery store to which I went in Vedado on Wednesday afternoon in order to buy some eggs and bread was “closed for lunch,” but I was able to purchase a bag of small breakfast rolls at a bakery that was near my apartment. I bought some fresh tomatoes, guava and bananas at a small fruit store down the street from my building that I have enjoyed during my stay.

The one thing that has definitely not changed since Fidel Castro’s death is the fact that Cubans simply make do with what they have, whether that is the young man from Santiago de Cuba who works at state-run restaurants or the foreign journalist who is on a seemingly endless search for an adequate Internet connection. The concept of “making do with what you have,” which translates intoin Cuban Spanish, is just as much a part of daily live on this beautiful island as it was when I first visited in May 2015.