La reina del condón

Ceschi and Stamm's documentary tells the incredible story of Monika Krause, a former East German citizen, who became Fidel Castro's (Sexual) Education Minister. After 20 years in Cuba, Krause set the Cuban sexual revolution in motion: in favor of a woman's right to sexual fulfilment and legal abortion, and against exclusion of homosexuals, she acquired the title “Queen of Condoms”. A film about potent female agitators, staunch machos and Caribbean love lives.

Monica Krause grew up in Rostock, in East Germany. At the age of twenty, this student of Latin American culture embarked on a life she could never have imagined even in her wildest dreams. When Jesus Jimenez came to join the cargo boat Sierra Maestra in Warnemünde in 1961, she fell in love with the young Cuban captain and immediately decided to follow him to Cuba. Raul Castro's wife employed her for an educational campaign aimed at the island's thousands of pregnant teenagers. This emancipated German girl fought for equal rights, in line with the regime's directives, but found when it came to sexuality, the situation was more complicated. She wrote popular books, produced television programmes that transfixed the nation but which the political bureau finally prohibited. In this male chauvinist country she came up against a fundamental lack of knowledge, prudery, and taboos regarding sexuality. She propagated the idea that women were in charge of their own bodies and became famous under the pseudonym la Reina del condón: a mocking soubriquet she bore like a queen.