Though women were disallowed to participate in the Moncada attack as soldiers (many women protested this), they played a large organizational role during Castro’s subsequent imprisonment. Women were then disallowed from the journey from Mexico to the Sierra Maestra in November 1956, when zero women boarded the Granma, but this lack of involvement in battle was about to change. In the summer of 1958, a brigade of some fourteen women called the "Mariana Grajales" was formed in the Sierra, and M-26-7 women officially became active combatants in the revolution. After the first of their battles, a guerrilla commander wrote to Castro:
I must tell you that after being one of the main opponents to having women in our troop . . . I congratulate you once again because you’re never wrong . . . I wish you could see if only on film . . . the behavior mainly of Teté [Puebla] and also of the other women comrades who when ordered to advance, while some of the men lagged behind, were out in front with a degree of courage and coolheadedness worthy of the respect and recognition of all the rebels and everybody else.
Despite women’s involvement in the Sierra campaign, and despite the common opinion that women’s role in the revolution is not paid enough attention to, the relationships between the main M-26-7 women and men of the M-26-7 takes away from the women’s individual accomplishments. Cuba’s three most famous revolutionary women were Celia Sanchez, Vilma Espín, and Haydeé Santamaria. Celia Sanchez was Fidel’s secretary, Espín married Fidel’s brother immediately after their victory, and Santamaria was the wife of party leader Armando Hart Dávalos.
Attitudes towards the women by some of the main guerrilla leaders has also damaged the perception of women in the revolution. Che Guevara’s notebook includes this quote about M-26-7 women:
But also in this state [the guerilla struggle] a woman can perform her habitual tasks of peacetime; it is very pleasing to a soldier subjected to the extremely hard conditions of life to be able to look forward to a seasoned meal which tastes like something . . . The women as cooks can greatly improve the diet and, furthermore, it is easier to keep her in these domestic tasks; [such duties] are scorned by those [males] who perform them; they are constantly trying to get out of those tasks in order to enter into forces that are actively in combat.
While there are accounts of the important jobs women accomplished in the M-26-7, it is hard to determine whether or not their actions were appreciated as they should have been. The next big step towards gender equality took place after the M-26-7 successfully overthrew Batista on New Year’s Day 1959, with the creation of the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC) in 1960.
La Federación de Mujeres Cubanas
"The ideal new woman is a healthy woman, mother of the future generation who will grow up under communism."
Vilma Espín
Soon after the triumph of the rebellion, Fidel Castro appointed Vilma Espín, a leading woman in the M-26-7 as well as the new wife of Raúl Castro, director of the FMC. Espín has maintained her position as long as Castro has maintained his, and is still director today. The FMC was designed as more than a women’s rights group, its goal has been to mobilize and monitor an important sector of Cuban society. Since its conception forty years ago, the FMC has grown and flourished with relatively few problems. In 1962, the first FMC congress was held, and 4,000 delegates were present. At this time, the total number of FMC members was 376,000. Just three years after the revolution the accomplishments of the FMC were astounding.
In 1962, more than 19,000 women who had formerly been household servants had graduated from special schools and had gained "higher" employment. The seamstress programs that were begun in conjunction with the FMC trained 7,400 rural women in the use of sewing machines. These women then became instructors to nearly 29,000 peasant women, greatly expanding the traditional role of the Cuban women and greatly enlarging their options outside of the home. First aid training was given to 11,000 women and the FMC managed over one hundred day care centers. In addition to the 10,000 women who worked in the food industry, more than eight hundred became union leaders, and over nine hundred former household servants gained employment as bank clerks. (data source: Pérez-Stable, p 107-108)
Ana Betancourt Schools for Peasant Women
In 1960, in connection with the FMC, Castro created the Ana Betancourt Schools for Peasant Women. The program brought Cuban women from the countryside into Havana for training. One of the rural areas focused upon by the program was Escambray in central Cuba. This was a deliberate selection because there was the beginning of a peasant counterrevolution in the region and Castro saw the opportunity to quiet the uprising by getting young women of the region into the heart of the revolution in Havana.
The young women who attended the schools, nicknamed Anitas, were examined by doctors upon their arrival, and it was often the first medical attention they had ever received (Smith and Padula, p 38). The schools’ curriculum included a lot of pro-revolution information and messages. In addition to the political influence, the Anitas took courses in physical education, dancing and singing, hygiene, and first aid. After a year in the school, the Anita would graduate with a diploma as a professor of dressmaking. Then they were given a sewing machine and lessons on how to teach ten other women how to use it. Many of the Anitas would return to their rural homes and start up programs of their own to further pass along the knowledge they had attained in the school, and some went as far as to found FMC delegations in their regions. By the time the Ana Betancourt Schools for Peasant Women program ended in 1976, nearly a hundred thousand women had been through its training (Smith and Padula, p39).
Women and health
Castro’s revolution, no matter how one might like to criticize it, has been an unbelievable success as far as health care goes. Today, Cuba has more doctors than it knows what to do with, and every citizen is entitled to solid health care for life. The number of doctors in Cuba increased by a factor of eight between 1953 and 1992, and the number of nurses increased fifteen times (Smith and Padula, p 57). Women played a large part in the nation’s post-revolutionary health kick.
Among doctors, women’s representation grew from six percent to forty-eight percent from 1953 to 1990. During this same period, women dentists grew from eighteen to sixty-nine percent and women increased from sixty-eight to eighty-eight percent of all nurses (Smith and Padula, p 57). The dramatic increase in women’s participation in the medical field did nothing to diminish its value in the culture, as it has remained the most prestigious career field in Cuba.
Reproductive health has been among the principal goals of Cuba’s health revolution. This means that improvement of maternal, infant, and child health has been a priority in the health care system. In 1992, Cuba held the lowest figures in Latin America for infant mortality and for maternal mortality. The health revolution also changed the average family structure in Cuba. A trend towards smaller families in Cuba was accelerated by the health revolution even though the first few years of the sixties appeared to show an opposite trend. During the onset of the revolution, the government was strictly enforcing antiabortion laws, and the United States economic trade embargo cut Cuba’s supply of contraceptives. Condoms from China were of poor quality, and the price of the imported birth control pill was excessive. The government was left with no choice but to offer female sterilization surgeries for free.
An interesting insight into the government’s view of the female’s body is that sterilization was only authorized for women with the husband’s consent. Men, on the other hand, were not required to obtain their wife’s permission to get a vasectomy. This point in government policy brings in to question the idea of body ownership. When looking at these biased policies, it becomes quite clear that men are the owners of their bodies in the eyes of the government, but females apparently share their bodies with their husbands. With all of the forward progress women have enjoyed in the health field since 1959 in Cuba, points such as these remain as reminders that equality has still not been reached.
Women and education
With the M-26-7 success in 1959, Castro was able to impose a new educational system. His system provided many new schools and therefore new jobs (which were mainly filled by women), as well as making it easier for every citizen of Cuba to receive an extensive education. The system was far superior to the system in place under Batista, but the systems were equal from a gender difference standpoint educationally. Cuban women did not differ significantly from men from a higher educational standpoint under Batista and they did not differ significantly from men under Castro either (Pérez-Stable, p 137).
Cuban women in the 70’s
Despite all of the advances made by the FMC and Castro since 1959, society as seen through gender was still not equal. As Castro plainly put it at the 1974 FMC congress, "Women’s full equality does not yet exist (Pérez-Stable, p 135)." As a result, a year later the party congress formulated an affirmative action policy. In the mid-1970s, women’s options had expanded immensely, but in terms of political power they were still the lesser. No women sat on the Politburo or the Secretariat, and in the party Communist Youth women represented twenty-nine percent of the membership, but only ten percent of the leadership. In Committees for the Defense of the Revolution women were fifty percent of the membership, yet they only held nineteen percent of the national leadership.
On Valentine’s Day of 1975, a bizarre and controversial piece of legislation was passed in Cuba with regards to the individual Cuban families, or "the essential cells of society" as the code referred to them. The Family Code was aimed at finally balancing the burdens of home and work conflicts between the sexes. Cuba was not in a financial position to provide free day care for all of the nation’s families, and the traditional issue of "housework versus paid-work" was an issue even in Cuba’s society based on equality. The code demanded that the duties of the family be shared, and that they would be agreed upon as part of their marriage. The code aimed to bring about the following:
· the strengthening of the family and of the ties of affection, aid, and reciprocal respect between its members
· the strengthening of legally formalized or judicially recognized marriage, based on absolute equality or rights between men and women
· the fulfillment of parental obligations for the protection, moral upbringing, and education of their children . . . as worthy citizens of a socialist society
· the absolute fulfillment of the principle of equality of all children
Cuban women after the fall of the USSR
Cuba has been hit hard by the loss of the USSR. Until 1990, Cuba conducted more than seventy-five percent of its trade with the socialist bloc. When the bloc disappeared, Cuba’s state revenues plunged, and the government’s subsidies dried up. In response to the serious economic hardships which were hitting Cuba, Castro announced the "special period". Many feel that it is Cuban women who have been hardest of all in this scenario. With the loss of Soviet aid, the tourism industry once again became fundamental to Cuba’s economy. The image that pre-revolutionary Cuba had as an island of sexual tourism began to reemerge with an increase in prostitution in the 90s. A fear has developed that if Castro is forced to bend back his programs, the Catholic Church may once again gain power in Cuba, and the revolutionary gains of divorce, abortion, and contraception may be reverted.
Along with a few reservations for the future, the withdrawal of Soviet aid has hit women in a more direct sense as well. With the lack of Soviet oil coming into Cuba, bicycles have had to replace many buses and oxen have replaced many tractors. This switch in tools has had a significant effect on Cuban society. It represents the replacement of mechanical energy with human energy. This change means that physical strength has once again become more important, therefore lessening women’s career options in Cuba.
Has the revolution helped or hurt Cuban women?
The overwhelming answer to this question is that the Cuban revolution has helped Cuban women dramatically. In 1990, a poll was taken of Cuban women in which they were asked about how Cuba had been progressing in recent years. Sixty-three percent of the women answered "quite a bit", twenty-eight percent said "a lot", and only nine percent answered "a little" (Smith and Padula, p 182).
The FMC continues to serve as a reminder of the progress that women have made in the revolution, and it continues to be one of the stronger revolutionary parties in Cuba. In 1990, the FMC included more than eighty percent of Cuban women between the ages of fourteen and sixty-five. On September 8, 1995, Vilma Espín had this to say at the Fourth World Conference on Women:
Thirty-six years ago, the Cuban people conquered victory, after a century of struggles for their independence and sovereignty against the colonizers who exterminated the auctoctonous population, of the interventionists who sought to take up our Island, of the dictators and governments in power under the disgraceful servitude of transnational mandates impoverishing the country. Resolute and brave women patriots engaged in every necessary period of the war for national liberation. When the people took power, women identified the starting revolution, as their own Revolution, which immediately established education and medical care services free for all without distinction, the land and urban reforms, measures of greatly popular benefits made it clear what the revolution intended to do, and therefore they embraced at once, participating intensively in all construction and defense works of the new society that opened its doors with all the rights and opportunities they never had before.