Feminism, Gender & LGBTI Spaces
By: Nathaniel Sutherland
Feminist Thought and the Women’s Movement in Cubaj
With the 1959 Cuban Revolution came a shift in perspective toward every Cuban’s rights; while the Revolution did not highlight certain areas of oppression such as homosexuality and race, women made great strides forward under the new political paradigm. State sponsored initiatives intended to aid the rural poor and to curb illiteracy nationwide benefitted women, as did measures to ensure women’s right to education which resulted, eventually, in 62% of today’s Cuban university graduates being women, as women’s rights activist Isabel Moya Richards notes (Richards). Still, according to gender researcher Lisset Vila, even amidst academic circles, feminism is not seen as a philosophy or even a coherent body of thought: “there is no such thing as feminist thought” in Cuba. Given the traditionally sexist nature of Cuban society, often dominated by machismo, the lack of respect for feminism as a unified philosophy is unsurprising. That said, the success of Cubban women in that environment underscores the success of the revolution at ensuring women have the same opportunity to succeed and also of the Cuban people’s powerful sense of nationalism as they advocate for women in their own unique ways rather than simply incorporating Western ideas uncritically.
Feminist activist and poet Margaret Randall, who documented the experiences of Cuban women during her 11 years living on the island, describes her early, futile attempts to introduce a feminist agenda into Cuban politics in her memoir, To Change the World: My Years in Cuba. During Randall’s time in Cuba, the Federation of Cuban Women, organized soon after the Revolution to advocate for women and their social goals within the new regime, “never embraced a feminist ideology” (Change 103). Instead, its leadership stayed close to the overall Revolutionary message, making “it clear that decolonization was the priority,” and rejecting feminism as “an imported bourgeois notion that would ultimately divide the working class” (Change 103). Driven by the need to blaze its own path across the world stage, Cuba was not ready to embrace any idea deemed foreign in origin; however, even as early as 1970, American and European feminists were already warning “that a women’s organization under the thumb of a male dominated political party [the Communist Party of Cuba] would be unable to advocate for women in the deepest sense” (Change 104).
Even so, Randall’s assessment of women’s place in Cuban society at the time was, on the whole, positive: “The Cuban Revolution proclaimed women’s equality and seemed to have made enormous strides in its direction” (Change 103). For example, “there were more girls than boys at almost every educational level, and more woman than before [the Revolution] in the labor force” (Change 102). Unlike in the United States at the time, “the Revolution had given women control over their bodies and […] abortion, like all aspects of public health, was safe and free”; Cuban women even “earned the same as their male counterparts in jobs for which both were considered apt” as early as 1969. However, society still deemed many jobs “off limits to women [on] the rationale […] that these were dangerous to women’s reproductive health” (Change 103). While the problems of sexism still exist in Cuba to this day, the Revolution mitigated many of the harshest oppressive conditions women had faced under earlier political epochs.
The Cuban Revolution’s mission to equalize society at every level also served women, especially those suffering at the intersection of class and gender, by working to raise living conditions for members of rural communities. One of the women whom Randall interviewed, Edita, speaks of women making “charcoal alongside the men in the hills” before the Revolution, whereas afterwards “the change was like night and day” (Women 366). Even before the Revolution, Edita says that “in our house the women didn’t do that kind of work. Only the women who lived farther into the swamp,” that is, the poorest of Cuba’s pre-Revolutionary rural poor, did such difficult labor (Women 366). Moreover, “women had made up the highest percentage of the country’s illiterates and […] tens of thousands had learned to read” during the 1961 Literacy Campaign, itself fueled by more women than men acting as teachers, as the Revolutionary government strove to increase opportunity for all sectors of society, including the poorest farmer living in the remotest of rural environs (Change 102). That women disproportionally benefitted from these government programs compared to men in spite of Cuba’s rejection of feminist ideas as nothing more than further examples of Western hegemony demonstrates the strength of the Revolution’s values and its commitment to creating genuine equality.
Despite the Federation of Cuban Women’s anti-colonial rejection of Western feminism in favor of nationalism and therefore a uniquely Cuban approach to women’s rights, women have made great strides since the Revolution due in large part to legislation like the 1975 Family Code. This legislation, influenced at every step of the process by everyday, grassroots Cubans, “stipulate[ed] that men take on half a family’s housework and childcare, encourage their wives to work or study, actively support their doing so, and in other very specific ways try to level the playing field with regard to the division of domestic labor” (Change 144). In this way, the notion that “housework is second-class knowledge” began to weaken (Richards). Even so, Cuban society still affords “no recognition” to domestic work; in a culture where chefs are considered artists, housewives remain unrecognized n the public sphere (Richards). The Family Code, despite all the positive changes it put in motion for Cuban society and Cuban women in particular, falls short of accommodating society’s socialist goals as Cuba moves into a new century.
The Code, written in the wake of the United States’ disastrous Operation Peter Pan, in which approximately 50,000 children were sent to the United States without any family to avoid imagined Communist indoctrination, contained extremely strict provisions concerning child custody (Richards). Under those provisions, a mother would retain custody of her child after being incarcerated long-term, leaving the child to underfunded government institutions even when family could have taken care of the child (Richards). As such, women’s rights activists are currently working to revise the Family Code and make it more appropriate for the contemporary world; included in their demands, perceived by some segments of society as “controversial,” are provisions for same-sex relationships and gendered violence such as domestic abuse (Richards). As both Randall and Richards note, “cultures change slower than laws”; however, the 1975 legislation provided a solid foundation from which the necessary societal changes could be made, and Richards hopes that an updated Family Code could serve the same purpose today (Richards).
which after the Revolution endorsed only positive portrayals of women as a replacement for the highly sexualized and objectified images that have polluted the Cuban media landscape for so long. According to Richards, two salient goals orient all state sponsored media projects: 1) avoidance of pornography and sexualized imagery, and 2) promotion of equality, gendered and otherwise. Unfortunately, a third aspect is emerging in Cuban mass media, that of commercial advertisement and publicity (Richards).
Since the Special Period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the government has allowed some portion of the nation’s economy to operate out of the private sector such that certain advertisements are now created outside of governmental oversight. While this movement toward privatization may seem like a good thing, eliminating a needless layer of censorship, the reality is much darker: where public sector ads function more like public service announcements, the ads created by private firms opt instead to generate “non-critical copies” of Western ads on the theory that if they fail to imitate Western tropes, their products will not sell as well as their Western counterparts and so advertisements for beer become more about selling the idea that buying beer will lead to close encounters with attractive women than about selling beer directly (Richards).
An obvious example of these societal changes can be found in Cuba’s contemporary mass media, especially the state sponsored variety
As Cuba delves farther into the 21 st century’s unmapped landscape, this dynamic between a socialistic public sector and a capitalistic private sector may prove the nation’s largest hurdle, and not just where women’s rights are concerned. Newly opened to renewed relations with its behemoth neighbor to the north, Cuba now faces the threat of U.S. hegemony with a force it has not seen since the blockade began and which its people, so long sheltered in its relative isolation from the demons of globalization, cannot imagine. However, the nationalism dominating Cuban society, the same nationalism which rejected feminism as a colonial idea, may still prove durable enough to save Cuba from America’s homogenizing hand. After all, the Revolution’s values have managed to forge ahead for nearly sixty years despite their rejection of Western thought; what is to stop them from carrying Cuba into a new era undamaged behind their shield of decolonial, nationalist pride and socialist values?
Works Cited
Randall, Margaret. To Change the World: My Years in Cuba. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP,
-- -. “Women in the Swamps.” The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Ed. Aviva Chomsky,
Barry Carr, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. 363-9. Print.
Richards, Isabel Moya. Penn State University and Mujeres Magazine. Mujeres Magazine,
Havana, Cuba. 19 May 2016. Lecture and Discussion.
Vila, Lisset. Penn State University and ICIC Juan Marinelo. ICIC Juan Marinelo, Havana, Cuba.
18 May 2016. Lecture and Discussion.