Women, Resistance and Revolution (36 page)

There is a strong strand of self-denial in Vietnamese culture which has been undoubtedly strengthened by the years of fighting. Like all northerners the North Vietnamese claim the southerners are less hard-working and more lax sexually, but in fact both cultures stress decorum, abstinence, formality and cleanliness. Buddhist respect for transcendence of self combines with a Confucian emphasis on cultivating the rules of appropriate and just behaviour, and the Communist Party’s ethics of struggle, sacrifice and social commitment. The Vietnamese possess a great admiration for sexual self-control
but are not remotely prudish. Male revolutionaries visiting North Vietnam found that when they tried to get off with Vietnamese girls they met with fits of giggles and the remark that they were too busy building socialism to make love. ‘Come back after liberation,’ they told them. Susan Sontag in
Trip to Hanoi
describes how men and women work, eat, fight and sleep together without any suggestion of sex. Separate accommodation was provided for her and her male travelling companions, but when one of the American men was ill the young pretty nurse slept in the same room as the guides and drivers, who were all men.

The Vietnamese have learned painfully that other countries have different customs. Susan Sontag’s North Vietnamese interpreter told her how shocked he was when he went to Russia and heard people telling dirty jokes. He understood that ‘marital fidelity’ is not common in the west. Vietnamese observations on foreign sexual customs have rather the quality of the Little Prince arriving on an alien planet. Again it is not possible to see yet whether the ethic of abstinence and fidelity will survive after the war. As it is it is obviously an integral part of the military morale, and provides a needed contrast to the degradation of the brothels for the U.S. troops in the south. In this context ideas of sexual liberation are somehow incongruous.

It would be rash to conclude from this that the Vietnamese are different from all other human beings, and adapt naturally and without suffering to sexual repression and separation from people they love. Mme Binh told Martha Gellhorn:

I can count the days – not weeks, not months – in all these years that I have seen my husband. My children count the time they have seen me or their father in days. People say we are accustomed to this life. But we have the same desires and wants as everyone else. It is difficult to live as we do.
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At a meeting of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in October 1970 in Budapest, women from America started to talk personally with the Vietnamese delegates:

Out came everyone’s pictures of children, grandchildren, husbands, friends, and also the stories. Almost all of them have at least one child who is missing. The Cambodian woman who has not heard from her five children for over three months began to cry. All have children who are guerrillas.
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The Vietnamese women were careful to distinguish between American imperialism and ‘their friends’. Alice Wolfson kept wanting to cry whenever she was with them. She wanted to just say ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ When she told one of the women from South Vietnam, ‘she took me in her arms and said, “This is not a time for tears, this is a time to rejoice because we are together and we are sisters.” ’
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The Vietnamese women have the sensitivity and kindness which women in women’s liberation are trying to discover. In various small ways – offering the American girls their embroidered dresses when they had nothing to wear for a ceremony, offering to share their beds, quite simply and without embarrassment, holding their arm or kissing them with real affection – they expressed their own form of sisterhood. ‘Somehow, the ability to show warmth and touch which our culture has crushed in us, is alive and beautiful in them and makes me feel free to respond.… They have never … lost touch with their humanness.’
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They continue to believe in the capacity of men and women to respond to reason and love, long after such a belief has been made unreasonable by their own experience. A Buddhist nun in Vinh City told American girls from women’s liberation that ‘She was sure that if women in the U.S. understood what was happening in Vietnam, they would stop it; they would find a way to stop the madness of their country throughout the world.’
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Sadly we have not yet reached such a consciousness among women in western capitalism.

The American girls in Budapest noticed that they were open to but thoughtfully critical of ways of organizing which differed from their own. Alice Wolfson explained the lack of leadership in the women’s liberation movement in terms of American individualism and the feeling that collectivity was an important and necessary stage. ‘Madame Cao thought for a minute and then said, “Yes, but collectivity which destroys the potential of the individual is not good collectivity. It is necessary to reach a compromise.” ’
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It is rather as if we were standing at two sides of a mirror.

The Vietnamese representatives in London politely call women’s liberation ‘the beginnings of thought’. To them we don’t go far enough, while to us it seems that their definition of women’s liberation is too narrow and does not touch many areas of consciousness which appear to us as integral parts of our subjection. We cannot
believe that they don’t feel as we do. Alice Wolfson is puzzled and honest:

My fears about speaking have lessened. The Vietnamese arc so helpful and they are so willing to accept that struggle … on any level … is good … that they have made us feel as though we are their equals. In comparison I am struck by the arrogance and imperialism of our movement. We are so quick to condemn people if their consciousness is not where ours is. We assume that the American reality … exists in some form everywhere, and this simply is not true. I must think more about this.
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So must we all.

Cuba

If we were asked what the most revolutionary thing is that the Revolution is doing, we would answer that it is precisely this – the revolution that is occurring among the women of our country.… If anyone had ever asked me if I considered myself prejudiced in regard to women, I would have said absolutely not.… I believed myself to be quite the opposite.… We are finding that … this potential force is superior to anything that the most optimistic of us ever dreamed of; we say that perhaps at heart, unconsciously, something of bias or underestimation existed.

Fidel Castro, The Santa Clara Speech, 9 December 1966

We know that it is not enough to transform the production relations that in ideology, customs in the superstructure, we can go on being bourgeois and reactionary … and in our case underdeveloped.

Edmundo Desnoes

In the 1960s the Cuban film
Lucia
was made. It tells the story of three different ‘Lucias’ struggling for liberation in very different historical circumstances. While her brother fights Spanish colonialism, Lucia in 1868 is courted by a Spanish gentleman during the war of independence. Even though he has deceived her, as he already has a wife in Spain, she rebels against the life of tea parties, church going and false respectability of the Cuban upper-class girls and runs away to join him. But when she takes her lover to her brother’s hide-out
the Spaniard betrays them both and in the battle that follows her brother is killed. As she is dragged away a poor old woman comforts her. Tears stream down both their faces. The fate of the first Lucia is one of individual tragedy. She is very much a helpless pawn and it is the men who fight.

In the 1930s, the second Lucia, in contrast, herself participates in the movement against the Machado dictatorship. When Batista takes over, most of her companions settle easily into the bureaucracy – but her lover goes on fighting and is killed finally by the police. She is left to wander hopelessly in the street, pregnant, with nowhere to live, carrying a suitcase. Though she can participate there is no place for her own specific needs and the hope of liberation fades with Batista in power.

The third Lucia is, significantly, a black woman living in the country, married to a young white farm worker who drives a lorry. The focus of conflict has shifted. This Lucia does not have to struggle to be allowed to love, she has to confront the contradiction between her own sexuality and the attitudes of the man she loves. Their love is gay, passionate, and at first carefree but it is overshadowed by his almost pathological jealousy. This jealousy is part of the machismo of the Latin male and is deeply hostile to the smallest sign of female independence. He locks her in the house to prevent her from learning to read and write from a boy of fourteen. She goes finally to one of the women leaders in the village and explains tearfully that she loves her husband but can’t go on living this way. She leaves him with a note in her newly learned handwriting: ‘I am not a slave.’ Separate they are both miserable and long for each other. She returns and explains that she wants him but wants her freedom too. Though he is overjoyed to see her he still has to try to possess her. They start fighting again almost immediately. A little girl watches from a distance, not comprehending at first, and then, slowly realizing what is happening, bursts into laughter. The third Lucia has not won, but she is fighting in areas the others never even entered. The film hints that the fourth Lucia will not encounter such problems.

The film not only raises questions about the nature of women’s liberation in Cuba now, it indicates something of the narrow alternatives women faced before the revolution. There were really only three possibilities for women: to be a slave to a man in the house, become a mother, or be an object of pleasure. When the middle-class girl
was handed over from father to husband, her virginity was part of the contract; an already used object was of no value to her purchaser. The other side of the coin was the poor women touting for trade in Old Havana or along the waterfront in Santiago. In the countryside the women of the camps toiled in the fields as well as at home, bearing endless children and looking fifty when they were twenty-five.

Cuba was a deeply divided society. There was a great split between rich and poor, between Havana and the rest of Cuba, between black and white, between men and women. There were a whole series of little colonies within the colony, strata upon strata fattening upon one another, and on top the ruling minority of government officials, army officers, mill- and plantation-owners and large businessmen, who were bound together as an elite by family tradition and a semi-feudal mentality. In Havana the poor lived in ramshackle slums, with no running water or lavatories, with terrible overcrowding and high rents. Many of the men were permanently underemployed, the women struggling to make do, with vast families of eighteen sometimes in tiny units divided by thin partitions, so that sometimes they were even cooking in the yard. Working-class women were despised even by their own men: ‘Even her own class looked down on her and under-rated her. Not only was she underestimated, exploited and looked down upon by the exploiting classes but even within her own class she was the object of numerous prejudices.’
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If anything the peasants lived somewhere below them in palm tree huts and the earth for a floor. Disease, malnutrition and a high mortality rate were common. The poorest of the poor ‘
desalajos
’ squatted homeless by the highway. Blacks and mulattoes were invariably among the poorest. Even here there was a hierarchy according to skin colour, with Haitians and Jamaicans at the bottom. As for the women, they suffered the combined oppressions of class, sex and race. A young black woman might be in high demand as a prostitute or a cabaret dancer but she rated for little else.

Nonetheless, in all the rebellions against slavery and against Spanish colonialism women took part. Maceo’s mother and wife were active. ‘Canducha’, daughter of the man who wrote the Cuban national anthem, rode proudly through the streets of Bayamo in 1868 carrying the patriots’ banner. A slave, Rosa Castellanos – ‘La Bayavese’ – joined her husband in the 1868 insurrection. There is a long tradition of the heroic, long-suffering woman in Cuba. Catholicism
and machismo from the Spanish colonizers combined with slavery to produce a kind of matriarchy in which the older women were responsible for holding things together. Afro-Spanish culture never succeeded in internalizing sexual guilt and the corollary of the stereotyped feckless male and the cult of the noble tragedy of mother and grandmother meant that a particular kind of female assertion was acceptable. However, this has meant that the resistance to feminism has taken specific forms which are by no means identical with the responses in European protestant countries and in North America. Slavery and the interaction between sexual and racial dominance has further complicated the manner in which ideas about the liberation of women have emerged.

The demand for equal rights came with the war against Spain in the 1860s, when a woman called Ana Betancourt demanded equality for women at an assembly of leaders of the independence movement. In the early twentieth century a suffragette style feminist movement arose; in 1934 Cuban women got the vote, and other formal equalities followed. These served really to highlight the contrast between legal equality and economic and cultural subordination. The insurrection against Batista brought women who were active into situations in which a machismo-defined femininity appeared absurd and irrelevant. Haydée Santamaria was among the group who attacked the Moncada barracks in 1953. After she had been captured her brother’s eyes and her fiancé’s testicles were brought to her in a box by Batista’s police to get information from her. Her response was, ‘If you have done this to them and they haven’t spoken, how can I?’ On her release she fought with the rebel forces in the Sierra Maestre.
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