Women's liberation
WOMEN and the revolution
Taking advantage of the invitation we received from the Cuban Communist Party last year to give several politcal seminars on Latin America and two talks in the Women's Federation, we were able during our threeweek stay in Cuba to gain some familiarity with the evolution undergone by Cuban women in the period of transition to socialism.
The struggles of Cuban women have to be analyzed in two phases that are part of the same political process — national liberation and building socialism — which has made possible notable advances in women's liberation. That is, the participation of women in political and class struggles is inseparably linked to their specific demands as a sex.
In the last century, women led by Mariana Grajales and Ana Bentancourt fought together with Manuel de Cespedes, Antonio Maceo and Jose Marti to break the chains of colonialism. They managed to break the Spanish yoke in 1902. But they soon fell into another kind of semi- or neo-colonial dependency, with the Yankee intervention, which led to the imposition of the Platt Amendment. (1)
This marked the beginning of a half century of struggle against imperialism and the native bourgeoisie led by Gerardo Machado, Fulgencio Batista and other Yankee stooges, a struggle that culminated with the attack on the Moncada barracks, in which women of the stature of Melba Hernadez
### OF CUBAN and with that of their human identity was done in the name of the general interests of the community, and it was in the service of the community that women began to become conscious of their independence and their value as human beings. So, it is not surprising that Cuban women in the 1980s cannot understand their emancipation as women outside of the structural changes brought about in the revolutionary process. For them, private property and domestic slavery are synonyms and fit together into a shameful past. For them, women's liberation and social revolution have the same meaning."
The Federacion de Mujeres Cubanas [FMC - Federation of Cuban Women] was tormen gusta wik cre was formed on August 23, 1960 with the aim of incorporating women into the economic, political and social life of the country. As a revolutionary task, it assumed responsibility for investigating the problems, concerns and difficulties of women in order to refer these to the competent government bodies. Thus, in all these years, the FMC has worked actively in the literacy campaign, in setting up Ana Betancourt Schools, in sexual educational schemes, in formulating the New Family Code and in resolving the difficulties that have arisen in order to achieve full equality for women.
The Family Code in force in Cuba leaves no room for doubt about the equal rights of all human beings in Cuban society. It is important to point out that this Code, as all other Cuban laws, was discussed in all the bodies in which the masses participate, in the block organization of the FMC, in the Committes for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), in the unions, etc., before being promulgated. This point seems particularly important to us since one of the problems in our Latin American countries is that women of the poor and middle sectors often are unaware of favorable laws, and, of course, have not participated in, nor had any opportunity to express an opinion about, laws that directly concern them, such as divorce and the right to choose. 1. This provision amounted to limited sovereignty for Cuba, reserving paramount authority to the US. — IV. 2. Isabel Larguia and John Dumoulin: La mujer en el desarrollo — estrategia y experiencias de la Revolucion Cubana, a paper presented to the Fifteenth Simon Bolivar Latin American Sociologists Conference held in Managua, Nicaragua on October 10 - 14, 1983.
International Viewpoint 11 March 1985 and Haydee Santamaria participated. Luisa WERTH and Luis VITALE
The victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 opened a new stage in the struggle for the liberation of Latin American women, involving for the first time in our history the active participation of women in building socialism in one of the countries of our continent, where the revolution began to speak Spanish.
In the early years of the revolution, women joined the militias to defend the nation from the threat of US invasion, helping to bring about the imperialist defeat at the Bay of Pigs. Such participation by women in the people's militias, along with their integration into community tasks, such as urban and rural work and education, helped to break down the old patriarchal mode of life. Women started to come out of the four walls of their homes. As Isabel Larguia put it:
"Women's labor power ceased being the property of their fathers, husbands or pimps. In channelling their efforts to the benefit of the community, women began to become conscious of their worth, and fundamentally, of their right to the product of their labor. In the consciousness of oppressed Cuban women, two conceptions began to emerge, which for them were inseparable, the sense of community and of personal identity.
"In 1961, the literacy campaign, which initiated a massive process of educational improvement, especially in the rural areas, brought tens of thousands of young women in the towns and cities out 20 of the seclusion of the home. They stayed in the mountains for months as voluntary teachers, working alongside their male comrades, free to make their own decisions for the first time.
"As a useful social activity and a way for supporting the gains of the revolutionary, voluntary work appealed to women, because they identified with these gains. This became a bridge by which women emerged from the stagnation of the home, began to lose their fear of the world outside the family, gained experience and confidence in themselves. It prepared them gradually to consolidate their new position by becoming incorporated into the paid labor force." (2) Federation of Cuban women formed
Becoming established in jobs, the prostitutes who had proliferated into the tens of thousands to satisfy the appetites of Yankee tourists, went through a process of reeducating themselves and of recovery of their human dignity, devoting themselves self-reliantly to productive work and study. A similar process occurred among the 70,000 former domestic servants.
"The destruction of private ownership over women's labor power," Larguia and Dumoulin write, "was perhaps the starting point, the underpinning, that made it possible to integrate women later into production, scientific activity and political leadership.
"The rescue of women's labor power
In the CDRs, the basic unit of People's Power, the people of a block participate. Their function is to handle community problems such as mass vaccination, education and vigilance. Participation is voluntary and the leaders are democratically elected. Housewives and elderly persons have done outstanding service in the CDRs. In these bodies are discussed both community and national problems....
The First Congress of the FMC held in 1962 gave impetus to the creation on a massive scale of collective launderies and restaurants in order to lighten women's work in the home. "The problem was to get the state to provide effective services, paid for by those concerned at a low rate but one sufficient to finance these services." (3)
The women have a great ally, Fidel, who is the state leader that has most concerned himself with women's liberation in all of history. From the first day after the triumph of the revolution, he has encouraged it and supported it, not only in words but in deeds, recognizing that since women are doubly exploited they have to be doubly revolutionary. Women continue the fight for their specific demands
The resolutions of the First Congress of the Cuban CP held in 1975 also gave solid backing to women's struggle for emancipation. In the Theses "On the Full Exercise of Women's Equality," it was stressed that "the success of this historic battle involves totally rooting out, as communist morality demands, the vestiges of the old attitude toward women; the radical elimination of still existing prejudices and discrimination... It was essential to carry on intense and continuing work against backwardness, underestimation of women and prejudices, to get women to discover themselves, to become conscious of their possibilities, so that they will express and defend their views, so that they will feel capable of undertaking difficult tasks, of leading, of creating....This participation by women in society must be in absolute equality with men.
"While any vestige of inequality remains, it is necessary to continue working to achieve this objective of the revolution...The principle that care of children is an exclusive responsibility of the mother must be rejected....The competent bodies must promote conditions enabling workers to care for sick children both in the home and in hospitals....
"It is necessary that those who have not yet understood the just principles of equality on which our socialist society is based cast aside prejudices and backwardness and realize that men and women are equal in their situation and opportunities. Both men and women are capable of leading, of building. There is nothing unmanly about sharing in the household chores and in looking after the children... The concepts of socialist morality are the same for all citizens. But in many cases a different starting point is International Viewpoint 11 March 1985 used in evaluating the same action by a man and by a woman, with conceptions of bourgeois morality prevailing....There cannot be one morality for women and another for men." (4)
The percentage of women with jobs went from 17.8 in 1970 to 31.9 in 1979. At the Fifteenth Congress of the CTC (Confederacion de Trabajadores Cubanos - Cuban Workers Confederation) held in February 1984, companero Veiga pointed out in his report that women had reached 38.9% of the economically active population, that is, 1,044,000 women at work, in contrast with the 160,000 women who worked in 1959.
It is important to point out that the gains made by European and North American women in this respect cost them a century of struggle, whereas Cuban women achieved this in less than twenty years, thanks to the socialist revolution.
In his speech concluding the recent congress of the CTC, Fidel Castro pointed out that in some provinces, such as Havana, women now exceed 44% of the economically active population. Unlike women in the capitalist world, Cuban women work in highly skilled jobs. Some 53% of the technically skilled labor force is made up of women, according to the statistics published by the CTC in February 1984.
Some 60% of new professionals are women. In medicine, in the Carlos Finlay facility, two out of three students are women. Fidel even joked at the CTC congress:
"We have had to protect men and establish a quota - 52% women, 48% men. Because we wanted the proportions to be more or less equal in the medical profession. In a certain sense, we even wanted married couples of doctors so that when it was necessary to send doctors to some part of the world to carry out a mission we could send a couple." (5) In university fields such as economics and philosophy, women have taken up more than 55% and 81% of the posts, respectively.
Because of the facilities provided by the socialist revolution, the percentage of married women who have had the opportunity to work has risen from 16% in 1970 to 36.7% in 1979.
The participation of women in the trade-union movement has been increasing. In 1980, 42.7% of the elected union leaders and 32.6% of the members of union bureaus were women. In the basic units of People's Power, the CDRs, about 50% of those involved are women. However, the participation of women in the leading organs of People's Power, the municipal, provincial and national assemblies, remains small. Only 22% of the members of the National Assembly of People's Power are women.
Likewise the participation of women in the Cuban Communist Party remains weak. In 1975, 14.1% of the membership were women, and in 1980 it was 19.1%. This was pointed up by Fidel in the recent CTC congress, when he said:
"Why aren't there more women in the leaderships of the party, the state and the mass organizations? One of the reasons for this lesser degree of participation by women in the leadership of the party and People's Power is that the main responsibility for household tasks and childcare still falls on women. In the Second National Congress of the FMC held November 25-29, 1984, it was pointed out, 'we are encountering great difficulties in advancing companeras, especially at the level between the block and the municipal assembly and from the municipal to the regional level. Family problems, along with changing residence, have tended to make such promotions extremely difficult, and we are finding very little understanding on the part of husbands when transfer from a work center is needed." " (6)
Cuban women have resolved most of their basic problems so that they can continue fighting for their specific demands. For five years now, the problems of housing, health and education have been largely solved. There are more than 100,000 places in kindergartens, and some 400,000 places in part-time boarding schools. More than 600,000 children and teenagers have scholarships. In almost all work centers, there are collective restaurants. Some contradictions for women remain
Nonetheless, women have to continue bearing the burden that goes with the reproduction of labor power and of the greater part of domestic tasks. Larguia and Dumoulin write, "The elimination of the home as a private economic cell, as a labor center devoted to the direct reproduction of labor power, is a law of scientific communism. But the replacement en masse of the small domestic economy by a great socialized productive force not only requires a very high development of the productive forces but a thoroughgoing technological redesigning of the human habitat, which must be accompanied by the creation of a daily consciousness of the highest scientific level." (7)
The period of transition to socialism presents serious problems for overcoming underdevelopment and dependency, especially in our Latin American coun tries, at the economic, class and political levels. But these problems are much more difficult to overcome on the level of culture and the relations between 3. Ibid., p. 9. 4. Luis Vitale: Historia y sociologia de la Mujer Latinoamericana, Ed. Fontamara, Barcelona, 1981, p. 61. • 6. First Congress of the Cuban CP: Teala y Resoluciones sobre el plen ejercicio de la igualidad de la mujer, Imprimeria Federico Engels, Havana, 1976, pp. 4, 9, 22, 44 and 47.
Fidel Castro: Closing Speech at the Fifteenth Congress of the CTC, Granma, February 25, 1984. 7. Second National Congress of the Federation of Cuban Women: Memoria, Ed. Orbe, Instituto Cubano del Libro, Havana, 1975, p. 18.
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spouses. The structural changes achieved in the first decades of a socialist revolution are not automatically reflected in individual and social consciousness. Racial prejudices and male chauvinism inherited from the capitalist system cannot be abolished by decree.
It is possible that Latin American revolutionary feminists visiting Cuba have been surprised somewhat by the contradictory appearance of this process that is aimed at the total liberation of human beings, since vestiges of notions of male superiority remain in the conduct of many companeros and also companeras.
Over these 25 years of revolution, we can say that there has been an important change in the collective consciousness about the equal role that women should have in the society. Nonetheless, in the family, we often still find cases of a mistaken sexual division of labor. There are also notable differences between the generation that came to maturity before the revolution and which is still alive and the present generation. The role that grandmothers play is striking.
Working women rely on their mothers. We asked a number of grandmothers about this, and they answered that it was natural for them to help their daughters and to take care of their grandchildren when they got out of school. At bottom, the grandmothers continue reproducing the forms of male domination, since by their work they substitute for what the husbands should do in an equal division of the household tasks.This function of reproducing the system of male domination is clearest when the grandmother in question is the mother of the spouse that appears as the head of the household. When we asked the same the household. When we asked the same question to young women, they answered that this was a problem of transitional society, that they did not consider it just and that the problem would have to be solved.
Cuban women's high level of collective and social consciousness enables them to understand that these and other needs that have still not been entirely met will be satisfied as production and productivity rise. Cuban women know that their labor will produce wealth that will benefit the entire society.
The ideology of the patriarchal family, corresponding to a state and a society that no longer exist in Cuba, persist despite the efforts that are being made from all sides and by all the social organizations. Fundamentally, they are preserved by the transmission of values from mother to daughter and by the sexual division of labor in the home.
We were able to see that many comrades have been unable to change the relations within the family or divide the domestic tasks. Nonetheless, as a result of the intense and sustained ideological campaign carried out by the FMC and be cause of the strength of the new generation educated in revolutionary principles of equality, parents have found it impossible to perpetuate the tradition of male superiority in which they were educated. 22
In many cases parents have come to understand, since at the same time as they have given way in their patriarchal claims, they can see the benefits of equality in their daughters.
Cuban women have the benefit of laws that permit divorce when necessary. Abortion is no longer the clandestine practice that takes so many lives in the other Latin American countries, especially among the poor. Health and sexual education programs conducted in the schools from the time they are seven years old enable women to have a full knowledge of their sexuality and fertility. Nonetheless, there are many cases, especially among teenagers, when contraceptive methods fail. Abortion is not recommended as a method of contraception. But it is available as a solution where pregnant women are not in a position to assume the responsibility of motherhood. In these cases, it is free and carried out under the best hospital conditions. RELAND