ABSTRACT
The island's capital Havana is its 'gay Mecca', the city to which gay men from all over the island come to live in relative freedom and well-being. It is the place in which the ambiente and Cuban gay identity evolved. This chapter describes the city's main characteristics related to the subject and serves as a key to understand its role as the center of Cuban gay life. The ambiente's ethnoscape includes gay men and transgenders from different social and functional categories. In the gay ambiente the sense of living in an imagined community takes on a special meaning and an extra layer, as the gay community in Havana is, in a sense, an imagined community. In the case of gays, migration from the provinces to Havana is not only a financial move but driven by the hope of finding a certain sense of freedom to live according to one's sexual orientation, thus escaping the hometown's 'closet'.
