Women, Resistance and Revolution (37 page)

Although a women’s Red Army battalion was formed, named after the mother of the famous nineteenth-century independence fighter, Maceo, the conditions of guerrilla fighting did not encourage the emergence of women. Among the guerrillas the female minority mainly did traditional tasks like cooking and nursing. It was something of an issue how far they were equal members. In his autobiography Che recalls a young girl called Oniria asking in an anguished voice if she could vote when a man was being tried for killing another accidentally. The rough and ready democracy of a guerrilla military unit in Cuban conditions inevitably meant almost complete male control. This particular aspect of the present remained unfreed from the past. There were a few individual exceptions like
Lydia and Clodmira whom Guevara mentions specially as messengers. They obviously knew themselves as exceptions: there was a kind of boastfulness in Lydia’s defiant courage, a high-handedness typical of those who become successful and distinguished themselves as individuals from oppressed groups. Like other women who have operated in a completely male world she felt the need to prove herself continuously. Guevara describes the complicated reactions of the men:

Cubans were not accustomed to taking orders from a woman.… Her infinite courage was such that male couriers avoided her. I remember very well the opinion – a mixture of admiration and resentment – of one of them, who told me: ‘That women has more [balls] than Maceo but she’s going to get us all killed. The things she does are mad. This is no time for games.’
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Both Lydia and Clodmira died fighting. Their only possibility for liberation in such a context was to become more manly than the men. In the towns, under normal living conditions the men were less suspicious and women became involved rather more, acting again as messengers because they were less suspect, and as saboteurs.

Though these individual women obviously shook the traditional concepts of femininity to which the men in the movement still adhered, it was very easy to distinguish them from other women who continued to live in the old way. It is quite easy for men to respect and grudgingly admire particular women who achieve a kind of sub-male status in exceptional conditions. It is a different matter for men to reorientate their ideas about all women, and question the world as seen only through men’s eyes.

As a first step the Federation of Cuban Women, set up in 1960 after the revolution, began a drive against illiteracy, partly so that women could enter in production and partly to enable them to participate fully in political and social life. The federation was not formed as a result of a strong women’s movement and consequently very elaborate attempts have been made to ensure that ideas about what should be done come from the bottom as well as the top. Irina Trapote and Ana Ma Navarro, two young members of the federation, described its organization to members of women’s liberation in London in October 1970.
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The federation has a million members and is led by a woman called Vilma Espin who played an active part in the struggle against
Batista. There are several layers of committees, a national central committee, six provincial committees, as well as regional, municipal and ‘block’ committees. Each level elects representatives for the plenary session where the work for the year is decided upon. Each local leader or
‘dirigente’
is elected by about fifty women and has a commission of about five women to plan work in specific areas like education or social work. Despite this constitution however the federation undoubtedly shares the problem of all political structures in Cuba in effecting communication from the base to the centre in practice, because a large-scale popular movement has been a post-revolutionary creation. The federation tries to involve women at first in practical work, organizing child-care facilities or some other locally needed amenity, because they won’t go to political meetings. Slowly the attempt is made to develop a revolutionary political consciousness among the women who take part. This goes along with measures like the same military training for boys and girls. At school girls do guard duty as well as the boys and there are women officers in the army. The aim is to involve women in the world outside the home.

The desperate needs of the Cuban economy mean that the emphasis on women taking part in production is as much because their labour is needed as it is part of the liberation of women. The familiar problem of male/female segregation at work arises here again. Though there are women in every branch of the economy, the largest number are in light industry, education, day nurseries and the food industry, which are generally accepted as women’s work. There are, too, areas in which only women are employed – child-care work and primary-school teaching. The Cuban girls interviewed in London were not particularly concerned about this. The continuing existence of jobs which are extensions of women’s traditional role in the family presents a problem which is distinct from the other related question about the extent to which emancipation means doing heavy and hard work. It seems to me that such work is not always skilled, and it is absurd that human beings who are physically weaker should exhaust themselves proportionally more than others who are stronger physically. Physique rather than gender should be the criterion. However, in other cases work which is heavy
and
skilled should not necessarily be exclusive to men, because if women are not free to choose, male superiority will be then reinforced.

American women members of the Venceremos brigade were insulted because they weren’t allocated to cutting cane. The Cuban girls were amused by this kind of feminism because they know what hard work it is and are relieved to collect rather than cut. But they admitted that although most of them collapsed exhausted, a few continued. Cane-cutting, like some other jobs, carries a strong male-orientated sense of value. This could be overcome in a wealthier society than Cuba which did not need to keep in mind the immediate need always to increase production, by alternating male/female roles and accepting inefficiency and a slower working rate. In the short term in Cuba this isn’t possible so they accept that men carry on working at heavy physical tasks. Underdevelopment limits the possibilities of social experimenting in small and particular practical ways.

In other forms of skilled work however there is officially no problem about women participating and the Cubans are justifiably proud of what has been achieved so far. There have been several federation campaigns to break down old ideas of what it is suitable for women to do. Now in practice there are women technicians, motor-car mechanics, refrigerator-engineers, tractor-drivers, city-planners, dentists, doctors, reporters, publishers. But there is still resistance from male workers and officials to women in industry, or in key posts of responsibility. Sometimes women are simply rejected in jobs for other reasons or they get work nobody else wants. Forced to employ women, male supervisors can take it out on them by trying to humiliate them with particularly arduous work which they won’t do very well, while boasting that this will ‘give them a chance to find out what hard work really is’.
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In other cases the resistance comes from families or husbands, who are opposed to young women going off to train. It is of the utmost importance in all these conflicts that the women have the authority of the revolution behind them. Elizabeth Sutherland in
The Youngest Revolution
quotes a young painter called Tomas as saying, ‘The changes have been traumatic for Cuban men. The hard thing is that they cannot legitimately oppose the changes. A woman who goes to work or on guard-duty is doing it for the Revolution. The men would have to be counter-revolutionaries to oppose it.’
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This means that within the bounds of economic underdevelopment and Marxist traditions of female emancipation there is a clear commitment to the liberation of women. Castro believes that while
sexual and racial oppression cannot be ended within capitalism, the existence of a socialist ownership of the means of production does not automatically secure their abolition. These groups have a further struggle against their specific oppression, a revolution within the revolution:

Among the functions considered to belong to women was – almost exclusively – that of having children. Naturally reproduction is one of the most important of women’s functions in human society. But it is precisely this function, relegated by nature to women, which has enslaved them to a series of chores within the home.
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Thus the Cubans, like the Russians in the 1920s and the Chinese today, are committed to trying to socialize the household tasks, and attempting to stop individual women being exclusively responsible for their own children. Immediately though there is an economic contradiction. Women’s labour is needed in production; it is politically desirable to free women from the home. Who, then, is to do their domestic work and care for the children, and how is money to be found for communal facilities? Here material circumstances are interlocked with traditional reactionary ideas of the woman’s place being in the home. Vilma Espin has commented on this dilemma:

Obtaining the participation of women in work requires overcoming numerous obstacles … of a material nature such as day nurseries, workers’ dining-rooms, student dining-rooms, semi-boarding schools, laundries and other social services which would make it easier for the housewife to work.
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Lack of such facilities can mean that women are trained and then can’t work. As a short-term measure the Women’s Federation is thinking of part-time work. Meanwhile, slowly the conditions are being created which will make this only a stop-gap measure. A woman automatically gets paid for a maternity leave of six weeks before and six weeks after delivery, and for the first year of her child’s life, if she wants to work, her hours are reduced. Most towns now have free nursery facilities for children from six weeks to school age. Every new housing community is built with well equipped centres and there are nursery schools in factories and work camps. Besides play and education the children also receive three meals and snacks and medical and dental care. The attempt is also being made to involve school-aged children in education away from home to relieve
the mothers. Besides boarding schools, usually on a weekly basis, there are semi-live-in situations where children are involved in their own activities away from home most of the day. In the Youth Organization, 12–17-year-olds combine study, work and community living on a project basis which leaves them quite independent of the family.

In this way some of the mothers’ traditional tasks are taken over by various agencies. In other ways too the revolution has changed people’s attitudes to the family. Divorce is now a much more casual matter than before. Couples are often separated from each other for quite long periods because of work or studying, or visits to the camps in the country. But on the other hand women still accept the idea that they are responsible for the housework. Nor are the Cubans consciously trying to create new forms of the family. The girls who spoke to the members of women’s liberation said the group-living on the Isle of Pines was not regarded as experimental social living but as a practical way of increasing production. When they were asked what they thought of the idea of living in communes they giggled at first and implied it was not among their priorities. Then they answered very seriously that it was not because they did not think that living in a communal way did not help the revolution. They said they thought small family-type communes were unnecessary. Since the revolution, villages and towns had become real communities – there was no need to create artificially lots of little communes within them. They saw the sense of community coming from sharing common aims and work rather than growing out of numerous mini-social units. They believed it was the general needs of revolutionary society which should define personal living-styles, not the other way round.

Insistence on small communes might well be an obsession peculiar to the isolated urban living conditions of advanced capitalism, but they were simply dismissive of the practical question of how to distribute household tasks equitably. Despite the facilities for children these still fall on Cuban women. The Cuban girls stressed that people were thinking in much wider terms than their own family; they weren’t dominated by old ties from working for people outside their own circle. This attempt to direct the inner personal units of living outwards is obviously important. The question is really whether it is sufficient without some attempt to transform the manner in which
men, women and children interlock in the family. The traditional family acts as a socializing agency and carries the values of the pre-revolutionary society, not so much by what is explicitly said but by what is implicitly practised. A small girl at school may learn that women must enter social and political life on the same basis as men, but at home without question mother cooks and stays with her and father goes out. A woman may hear Castro’s speech on the struggle of women at the point of reproduction, but deep inside her she knows she is attractive to her man when he controls her.

One of the most exciting features of the Cuban Revolution is the manner in which the demands of active female sexuality are being raised, and with them the subterranean formations of consciousness which remain untouched by Marxist theory. The painter Tomas, who would seem to have a shrewd eye for these matters, told Elizabeth Sutherland that he thought ‘the most interesting question in Cuba today is the new relationship of men and women.’
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Abortions are free on demand as long as you report to a hospital within a month of becoming pregnant. But the fact that the family is notified deters some girls. Contraceptives are easily available. Women use diaphragms and an intra-uterine loop called ‘anillo’. The pill is still regarded as dangerous. Most women still don’t use contraceptives, however, and suspicion runs deep. The party line wavers –
Granma
has carried birth control information but they don’t actively disseminate it, partly because they don’t want to upset old prejudices, but also because population control is seen as an issue used by overdeveloped countries to continue their control over poorer underdeveloped places, to prevent social redistribution. Fundamentally people’s resistance to contraceptives comes from opposition to women controlling their own bodies and minds. Women themselves fear the responsibility of such intervention in their own natures.