Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba

Smith, Lois M. and Alfred Padula. Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba. London: Oxford University Press, 1995. 247 pp.

The condition of women in Latin America is emblematic of a five-hundred year history of colonization. The motif of the rape of the continent by outside powers and their internal collaborators, so commonly found in Spanish-American and Brazilian literature, is more than a propaganda image; it symbolizes the reality that women's oppression is grounded in the capitalist economy that was forged with the arrival of the Europeans, which sacrifices human rights to the alleged benefits of economic growth. Latinas have been relegated largely to marginal areas of the labor market, and the law treats them as second-class citizens. Machismo, the cult of virility and male superiority, is alive and well. Domestic abuse goes largely unpunished, and most judges are reluctant to undermine the sexual double standard. Crimes of violence against women are seldom reported to the authorities, and even fewer are prosecuted and punished.

Cuba, the only nation in Latin America to undergo a socialist revolution, would seem an ideal laboratory to see whether a collectivist economy managed by a Marxist-Leninist regime can provide the mechanisms to free women from their subaltern status as found throughout the continent. Fidel Castro himself has been quoted as saying, "the most radical thing the Cuban) Revolution has done are the changes now occurring among women." Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula set out to test his contention by analyzing the transformation of the lives of Cuban women from the start of the Revolution in 1959 to its denouement in the 1990s. Rather than relying on extended interviews, as Oscar Lewis, Ruth Lewis and Susan Rigdon did in their classic Four Women: Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba (1977) Smith and Padula utilize government statistics and case studies culled from Cuban journals and magazines to determine what has gone right and wrong for women under Castro. As the first book-- length treatment of this problem the volume merits attention, but its methodology immediately raises suspicions, since the authors admit that data from Cuba regarding women (or any other issue for that matter) is often inaccurate, incomplete, and published only at the pleasure of the state.

Smith and Padula declare that they are feminist scholars interested in analyzing the relationship between gender, economics, politics and culture in a socialist regime. They take no overt position on the legitimacy of the Castro government, but their tendency to speak of the Revolution in the past tense makes clear they feel Cuban socialism has failed. Cuba has not overcome economic underdevelopment, and the price of making the Revolution triumph was the curtailment of civil liberties. The question then becomes what the Revolution accomplished for women from its inception until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which effectively sealed Castro's fate.

The social and economic gains made by women in Cuba in the last thirty-eight years are outwardly impressive. Females currently constitute one-quarter of the Cuban labor force, have moved steadily into traditional male fields such as medicine, and are protected on the job by an array of safety laws. Cuban women actually fare better than men in education; contrary to the norm in most Latin American countries female literacy in Cuba surpasses that of males, and women form over half the island's university, students. Health care is free and universal, and maternal deaths and child mortality have been cut down to the levels found in the developed countries. The Family Code of 1975 adjured both parents to participate in child-rearing and domestic chores. Day-care, although facilities are still inadequate, has become a Government priority in ordering the construction of new buildings.

Nevertheless, Cuban communism is still a man's world. Smith and Padula find no vehicle through which Cuban women can exercise power outside the confines of the Communist Party and its affiliate associations. The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), created in 1960 at the urging of Castro and headed since then by his sister-in-law Vilma Espin, provides useful services in education and health care, but still conforms to a Stalinist conception of itself as a conduit whereby instructions from the state are implemented. Government administration, the armed forces, and neighborhood committees are all infused with sexist practices because the FMC accepts Castro himself as the ultimate arbiter of how far women's liberation in Cuba is to go. "His words constitute a mandate," Espin has been quoted as saying (p.51).

The book offers strong proof that machismo is still prevalent in Cuba, though framed by a different rhetoric than in other countries. Labor laws exclude women from many occupational categories, but this is justified by the government on the grounds "physical danger." The Family Code proved largely unenforceable, and many men use it as an excuse not to care for their spouse and children after a divorce. The heavy emphasis in Cuban government propaganda on military valor Enforces macho stereotypes, while Cuba's efforts to lure foreign tourists have evolved images of the island as a resort destination filled with pliant females.