This seven-part series explores how totalitarianism was implemented in Cuba, dismantling democratic institutions under the promise of social justice. Through its early stages, we examine the mechanisms of control and repression that solidified power. The goal: to warn the United States about far-left ideologies.
Read part one, part two, part three, and part four.
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Did entities such as the National Working Group on Sexual Education (later the National Center for Sexual Education, Cenesex) of 1972 have anything to do with the cultural redesign and its consequences?
The group, of utmost interest to the regime, advised on the legislation of the National Assembly of People’s Power, developed and implemented educational programs, which considered “achieving the full exercise of women’s equality, also in the intimate sphere” a priority — social engineers and technocrats experimenting on millions, without qualifications.
The German feminist Monika Krause, whom the group entrusted with creating the National Sexual Education Program, admitted that she “had no idea” how to conceive it. To which Vilma Espín replied: “No one in Cuba is qualified to implement sexual education,” and invited her to read about the subject.
From the early decades, the State recorded “poor training” among teachers to provide sex education. But this did not prevent the State from being the primary source of sexual information among children aged 12 to 15 during the first quarter of the revolutionary century, through “scientific and popular literature specialized in the subject,” followed by “work developed by the mass media, especially TV and radio programs.”
The results? Here are some from 1987. More than half of those born were to women without a legal marital bond; consensual unions between Cuban men and women between the ages of 15 and 19 exceeded the legal limit in almost all provinces; there was an “alarming” increase in teenage pregnancies and abortions as a means of birth control. As the number of married couples grew, the number of divorces was increasing, with a predominant trend among the most fertile ages: women between 20 and 35 and men between 25 and 40. A short marital relationship was also associated with early divorce: more than half of divorces among those under 30 occurred within the first two years of marriage.
Experts noted two causes — one material, the other immaterial. First, the general economic decline, with expressions such as several generations living together in a single home, lack of food, possessions, etc. Two: marital “spiritual poverty,” translated into “lack of communication issues related to culture, international politics, intimate-personal relationships, and reflections on one’s own personality,” and the failure to exhaust all avenues to resolve disputes within the marital framework. The early onset of sexual activity and its effects, experts admitted, led to the “absolutization of the sexual sphere and a lack of interest in spiritual life.” Thirty years into the new society, there was no “current model of relationships that corresponds to the preparatory phase for marriage.”
Socialist culture did not promote marriage to build homes, much less as a sacramental institution, and, in the 21st century, not even one anchored in natural law. Rather, it promoted marriage as a prison for women. Was a result other than complete disdain on the part of millions of Cubans expected?
Intellectuals called for more state intervention: the implementation of more short- and long-term youth education programs; and strengthening the knowledge and use of contraceptive methods.
They attacked merely the natural consequence of a disordered sexual life, not the cause: lax morality caused by a culture in which abortion was on the rise, with tacit social approval. “Young women, their partners, their families, and society in general associate the solution to an unwanted pregnancy with induced abortion; it’s more ‘normal’ to talk about what to do about an unwanted pregnancy.” They appealed to a technological solution and death, in the face of a lack of virtue.
A layer of revolutionary arrogance and scientific myopia prevented them from examining a return to Christian ethics to avoid social disintegration. The problem with futurist ideologies is the belief that we must constantly move forward, even if what lies ahead is an abyss.
Along with the indoctrination of children and adolescents, intended to erode the Christian family model, came the attack on women. The Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) announced, programmatically, in 1976 that, “The Revolution laid the foundations for the liberation of women, and it is the task of the Party at this stage to achieve their full social equality, increase their participation in social work, and promote them to leadership positions.”
This meant serving the political caste in the widespread and only possible employment system, the state system, to the detriment of family care, whose education would fall largely to the state. Mothers were repeatedly told the Leninist promise to take on some of the domestic work by expanding and improving public services, daycare centers, semi-boarding schools, and providing household appliances. But the impoverishing socialism failed to deliver.
The “basic cell of society” was to embrace “the principles of morality and education advocated by our Revolution, progressively eliminating elements of material dependence among its members, consolidating itself on the basis of common spiritual interests.”
In revolutionary moral assimilation, what is spiritual? Does it mean the same in an atheist regime as in a Christian entity? Does the progressive elimination of elements of material dependence refer only to husband-wife relationships, or does it also include parent-child relationships? Would the State, and not the father, be not only the indoctrinator, but the provider?
The supplanting of the paternal role is as important for social control as the distancing between the mother and the home. An individual, not only atomized and without identity, but also ideologically and professionally tied to the State-Party machinery for most of their productive life, also weakens internal social ties and is infinitely easier to manipulate.
Loyalty must first be to the regime. The first homeland was no longer the family. In my memory as an exile, I still cherish the hot Havana afternoons when my mother sat on the edge of her bed next to my four-year-old son. She read to him ancient stories: men who looked to God and defeated armies, others who refused to bow to tyranny. In his grandmother’s voice, tradition, a testament to virtue, extended to the child’s eyes. His senses wide open, wanting to name everything, my son remained silent before the woman who embraced him and synthesized the world beyond what he could see, beyond the horizon and time.
