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, part five, and part six.
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The truth is that socialism changed the role of women: from equality to ignorance built through censorship of ideas different from the official one; from the supposed martyrdom of domestic service to coercion in state factories, under the watchful eye of unions.
A moral degradation occurred when mothers and fathers had to steal basic goods from their workplaces to survive. Two logics operated there: “If the State pretends to pay me, I’ll pretend to work,” and “A thief who steals from a thief is forgiven for a hundred years.” Both, consciously or unconsciously enforced by the socialist system, deviated from Christian standards.
As for prostitution in Cuba before 1959, the Revolution did not end it; it only concealed it under the cloak of “favors” for officials who had access to luxury goods like a bar of soap, food, or a Soviet car. The problem resurfaced in the tourism boom at the end of the Socialist bloc.
From 1970 to 1979, the employed population far exceeded that of the general population. This coincided with the decline in fertility since 1965 and the increase in women in economic activity outside the home. In 1976, more than 600,000 women joined the production and services sector, representing 25.3% of the national workforce.
In 1983, those who participated “actively in the construction of socialism” were 35.2%. Even so, socialist intellectuals lamented the persistence of “difficulties of both an objective and subjective nature that impede their full incorporation.”
Note that the main female professions at that time continued to be relationally oriented, not objectively oriented, predominantly among men: medicine, education, culture and art, control and planning, social security, tourism, and commerce.
Housewives had also changed. They were no longer “women who traditionally lived solely to solve individual or family problems: today they also contribute with their work, their initiative, and enthusiasm to the work of the Revolution.”
However, for socialist experts, this was not enough, and instead they recommended that “the quantitative magnitude of those who constitute ‘traditional housewives’ and the reasons for their non-inclusion” should be investigated. A battle had to be waged on the terrain of conscience, because there persisted “backward conceptions that we carry from the past.”
Would the Marxist intelligentsia accept a woman who preferred to spend time with her husband and children rather than with other workers or the union leader? No. Revolutionary morality disdained such a decision.
The State singled out “the idle young woman” who “wastes the opportunities offered to her so as not to be left behind.” What about those in a traditional domestic role, Christians included? To liberate them, the State would impose “a profound ideological work” and gender quotas.
That policy, focused on managerial positions, failed. A 1974 survey asked women if, had they been elected to leadership positions, they would have been willing to take on the role. Only 45.7% said yes.
Castro’s regime considered domestic chores an “unfair workload for women,” and consequently, unfair for working women. The private sphere became political. Domestic chores, after the workday was over, constituted a hindrance “to [female] participation and required a much greater expenditure of energy.”
The State foreman refused to allow any energy expenditure outside the sugarcane field and, concerned, made an inventory:
“If we add up the amount of time spent commuting from home to work, taking the children to daycare or school, shopping for food and industrial products, washing, ironing, cooking, cleaning, caring for children, and caring for sick or elderly members of the family, it is clear that she will have to make great efforts to study and will have very little or no time to participate in cultural or recreational activities and rest. Add to this, on many occasions, the time required to fulfill activities in political and mass organizations.”
The “overload,” of course, only occurred in the revolutionary model: the state employee who, in turn, looked after the home. In the traditional model, beyond the physical and mental exhaustion of any task and responsibility, the focus of work was primarily on the second life: financial management, maintaining internal order in the home, and caring for the children.
For women dedicated to the full-time homemaking role, the path was difficult. In addition to cultural pressure, pressure from state organizations, or “ideological work,” they were unable to buy household appliances that would lighten their load. These were only sold or given to prominent women in state institutions, which imported them from the Eastern European Socialist bloc.
Like political and economic structures, the Revolution shattered intimate structures (from domestic lifestyle to interpersonal relationships) with a system of punishments and incentives.
It called for a new division of household chores, denying the classic roles of father, provider, protector, mother, caregiver, mentor. “There cannot be one morality for women and another for men; it is contrary to Marxist-Leninist ideology, to the principles of this Revolution.”
Equalize, equalize, equalize. By putting pressure on the social, they hoped to change the psychological and biological.
“Legacies in sexual relations” were described as “of petty bourgeois origin”; “phenomena of the past that the socialist present should exclude.” It called for men and women to be “free, equally responsible in determining their relationships in the field of sexual life.” (Another moral contrast with Christianity, which establishes sexual enjoyment within marriage.)
Beauty pageants were banned; Music producers, stage producers, publishers, and media outlets had to promote a feminine image distinct from that of the “capitalist past, a sexual object, decorative, passive, limited to household chores, whose highest aspiration was marriage.”
Christianity praises virtuous women; from judges like Deborah to followers of Jesus like Martha; and, in their maternal role, elevates them to teachers of generations, mothers of civilizations. Sex, which denies teleology outside the marital covenant, confines women to an animal, genital, and worldly order.
Christianity does not urge passivity. It commands women to be industrious, to gather grain, to accompany the widow, to be a crown to her husband. For the new socialist morality, on the other hand, marriage and its fruit, the growth of the family through children, takes a back seat. In the 1980s, intellectuals argued that Marxists could understand and assimilate aspects of the concept of “patriarchy” because they acted “as mechanisms of the capitalist system and oppose the changes required for the construction of a socialist society.” However, feminists called for going beyond “economic transformation” (which was ruining Cuba) because “it does not guarantee — nor can it — an automatic ideological change.” Totalitarian and feminist wills united in the cultural sphere: “the struggle must be common and simultaneous; women must fight for the creation of a new society and they must also fight for their own liberation.”
By the 1970s, feminism displayed two widespread revolutionary strands. The radical feminist Shulamith Firestone believed she could achieve true liberation by destroying the nuclear family (whose patriarchal oppression arose from a biological cause: the reproductive function), and confiscating “control of reproduction” and any entity directed toward the birth and education of children.
Other radical feminists like Zillah Eisenstein moved away from biologism and returned to patriarchy, but from the perspective of the hierarchical sexual division of labor — which, she believed, permeated every social relationship.
This perspective seems to be the basis of the first texts on marriage and family during the Castro regime. Elena Díaz, a leading figure in gender studies in Cuba, proposed in the 1980s developing a theory that would go beyond Firestone and Eisenstein, integrating them. Was it ever applied?
In short, how did all the social engineering efforts affect the family in the short and long term? In the post-1959 family composition, the rate of grandchildren living with the head of the census increased (4.3% in 1953 and 5.1% in 1970). The promised child care and housing were scarce after the transition from a free market system to a centralized one, in which more women became an apparatus of the productive State.
A 1971 report evaluated the evolution of family roles across six urban centers, using variables such as size, educational level, women’s entry into the workforce, and revolutionary integration. It concluded that families experienced a “revision of old moral norms,” greater independence of children, and that the maternal figure became the authority in the family, perhaps prompted by high divorce rates and an increase in single mothers.
In 1970, the single population (31.7%) surpassed the married population (19.2%). For decades, Cuba had suffered some of the highest divorce rates in the world.
In 1984, the regime’s social scientists lamented that, “although the transformation of the economic base and, consequently, social relations” had been broad and profound, “certain family groups, material factors, norms, and values” persisted, negatively influencing “young people’s scientific worldview, constituting forms of ideological and behavioral deviations” that did not correspond “with the new ideology.”
This is no small note: after 25 years of the system, there was cultural resistance. Christians, certainly, were at the forefront.
Socialist morality exploded in a revolutionary cultural environment, which called “progress” irruption, instability, and rebellion, not firmness, preserving what is good, and respecting tradition. Why save a marriage if it is simple to dissolve and divorce is socially widespread and accepted? Why care for a child in the womb if the State subsidizes its dismemberment?
By removing God from the equation, transcendent values are clouded. Under totalitarianism, there is no omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God to respect, but a finite State; the Eternal is not listened to, but rather to men who fertilize the earth and return to it.
The biblical guide for the family and marriage is antithetical, in its theoretical foundations and practical results, to that proposed by socialist or secular philosophy. Perhaps because Christian philosophy recognizes human nature in its proper measure and incorporates a sacramental representation that exalts it.
If at the beginning of the Revolution, Socialist Feminism peddled “free love” and went against tradition to bring more slaves into the state apparatus, in the 21st century, a merger with Radical Feminism (as dreamed of by Elena Díaz) served Castroism to rewrite two institutions: marriage and family.
Thus, the “feminist” label came to the forefront of state media discourse and that of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC).
In 2023, Teresa Amarelle Boué, president of the organization, explained the official adoption of the intersectionality in vogue: “We assume that the FMC is a space where all women fit: feminists, environmentalists, animal rights activists, Afro-descendants; but also people with different gender identities and sexual orientations; professionals, workers, and homemakers.” She described this as the feminism that Vilma Espín always recognized and of which they remained proud. By the 21st century, the marriage of totalitarianism and feminism was evident in the voices of well-known activists. Lirianis Gordillo, who published in the state media and the think tank Cuba Posible, wrote, “Feminism is dreamed of to radicalize the communist utopia.”
Stories of leftist fanaticism abound in Cuba. So too are those of evangelical leadership in the first quarter of the 21st century, which must be told to inspire and challenge consciences. But not all of them can be told here. Only a portion. The other portion, of brave people still on the island, must remain silent.
The church is, physically a building, legally and administratively a structure, but essentially, its people. Think of Oscar Elías Biscet, the anonymous woman who feeds the hungry, the pastor who preaches against injustice, María Cristina Garrido and her poems from political prison.
After the San Isidro strike, at the end of 2020, several participants were placed under house arrest. One of them, the Muslim author Abu Duyanah, spent weeks unable to go out to get food, with a police patrol car stationed at the entrance to his house. When I visited him with some food, I prayed for him and said, “Today I visited you, but so did the church.”
Church, what will we do in the land where God placed us?
