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, part four, and part five.
***
Totalitarianism recognized the family’s “fundamental formative role, since parents educate their children based on their own moral standards. The stimuli that men and young men receive and the examples they observe within the family will have a very important influence on the formation of habits and attitudes and on their behavior outside the home.”
Therefore, the family was key to reproducing the “new morality” in “new relationships of equality between men and women.” A new supreme value? Equality. Not before the law, but socially and with respect to men. The de facto result? Elevating masculine values; that is, policies centered on men were the benchmark for women, and if they wanted to be “free,” they had to be and do what a man did.
The entire nation, the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) mandated, must “combine the struggle to uplift women and ensure that the traditional chivalry of our people takes root in childhood and youth, in its new proletarian dimension”; and advance the “struggle to overcome the ideological remnants of the old society and its various bourgeois manifestations” and “the battle against the prejudices and shortcomings of the past that hinder the achievement of full social equality for women.”
Was the PCC motivated by feminine fulfillment? No, only by utilitarianism: “The creation of the necessary material conditions that depend on economic development will be achieved more quickly to the extent that a greater number of women contribute to the productive process.”
The socialists, outraged by capitalist “commodification,” reduced the individual to labor.
The organization of the traditional family hindered Castro’s agro-industrial dreams.
If only men were available in the labor market, while women taught and cared for children at home, laborers were lost in factories and militias — perhaps for this reason, women and children were the focus of social engineering.
Faced with the burden of a life without the fruits of freedom (stores with food, appliances, or even electricity), in a system tending toward servitude, the PCC promised to alleviate shortages, “to the extent that the State could dedicate resources to the expansion of institutions and services that provide solutions to many of the problems of working families.”
In the redistributionist logic of the Palace of the Revolution, these resources would result from increased production and productivity. The approach referred to a cycle of blackmail: if women did not work hard for the State, due to the decline in their standard of living, there would be no resources for the State to reinvest in improving women’s living standards.
The regime called on “all those who, at every level of the state and political apparatus, in every part of the country, are part of the revolutionary power” to maintain a proactive attitude “in the face of the need for women’s incorporation and retention in the workforce.” In order for all women’s hands to serve the productive machinery, the PCC recognized that “the notion that childcare is the exclusive responsibility of the mother must be rejected.”
It urged women to join mass organizations and “training and development courses aimed at their incorporation into the workforce.” And within the factory army, the State would prescribe more ideological work to “better exercise their rights and at the same time fulfill their duties to the Socialist Homeland.”
The PCC and its members were to “promote the objective conditions for the increasing incorporation of women into economic, social and political life, and to carry forward, at all levels of national life, the ideological work aimed at eliminating the remnants of the old society, ensuring that all people participate in this fight.”
What shortcomings? That a woman would choose to dedicate herself to the spiritual, intellectual, and physical growth of her children at home rather than work eight hours for a meager wage in a caste factory?
If conservatism was attacked from all fronts, feminism (a model ideological movement for theorizing the projected family changes) was used as needed in Havana.
Figures from the movement, such as De Beauvoir and Eveline Pisier, visited the island in the 1960s.
The process also attracted domestic sympathy. According to scholars, measures for women’s participation in the Revolution were influenced by the sociopolitical demands of suffragists and feminists. Their demands and expectations regarding work, education, and health (for example, abortion) were added to the totalitarian project because, they believed, it had broken “with patriarchal hegemony and subordination in everyday life,” supporting “identity values that preceded the incorporation of the female masses into the implementation of the transformations and changes” after 1959.
By that year, three currents were visible: one nationalist, another North American feminist, and the Soviet. The regime did not identify them as enemies, as it interpreted each of these factions as having more or less socialist elements and an alignment against conservatism.
Elena Mederos, among the first two currents, was Minister of Social Welfare in the Revolutionary Government, although she was later replaced by Raquel Pérez, who was closer to the USSR.
Women’s mobilization in the Revolution was often a mandate of men. In March 1959, Ernesto “Che” Guevara directed the creation of the 26th of July Revolutionary Women’s Brigades to support Castro’s projects: agrarian reform, housing reform, literacy, etc.
In a propaganda effort, several feminists attended the Latin American Women’s Congress in Chile, organized by the leftist Women’s International Democratic Federation. They spoke of social rainbows; they ignored trials without due process. Vilma Espín forgot the Loma de San Juan massacre, which her husband, Raúl Castro, ordered months before the event. (Even today, many romantics confine this and other crimes to a “leftist nationalist patriotic project” overthrown, they say, in 1961 by another real socialist.)
A purifying matryoshka doll followed. Just as they removed liberal feminists like Mederos from the equation, Marxists co-opted the leadership of the future Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which scholars see as a continuation of the feminism of the Republic. Feminists of the time created and formed its first National Committee and are referred to as the “mothers” of Castroites Melba Hernández, Celia Sánchez, and Vilma Espín, leader of the FMC until her death in 2007.
The women enacted public policies born of feminism, both in the areas of family and morality. In October 1962, at the First Congress of the FMC, Fidel Castro said: “When it comes to creating a different society, of organizing a better world for all human beings, women have a very strong stake in this effort; because, among other things, women constitute a sector that was discriminated against in the capitalist world in which we lived. In the world we are building, it is necessary that every trace of discrimination against women disappear.”
Toward such a utopian and inaccurate end, the FMC sought to deconstruct the family, breaking down traditional gender roles; Vilma Espín sought to redefine marriage in the 1976 Constitution, which “could have made Cuba the first country in the world to legalize” gay unions.
The “liberation” of women, in totalitarian eyes, depended on Engels’s concept: marriage was a dynamic of oppressor and oppressed. (Faithful to distorting human nature, socialism believed nuclear union was another space for confrontation, rather than one of cooperation.)
The PCC flattened Engels’s logic thus: before 1959, “the future of working women and poor peasant women in the working-class family, in general, was nothing other than misery, degradation, ignorance, and suffering; for many, domestic service or prostitution; for almost all, in accordance with the dominant bourgeois mentality, consideration as a decorative figure and sexual object, whose status was related to the social class to which they belonged.”
Read part seven
