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24 2 Producing the New Woman The Early Revolutionary Years It is difficult now to capture the profound utopianism that emanates from the writings of the Cuban revolutionaries as they imagined a new society into being. The 1959 revolution was framed as the culmination of a long battle for national sovereignty and the authentic, idealistic, and moral society articulated most cogently by the nationalist poet José Martí in the nineteenth century wars against Spanish colonialism. It promised a society based on full egalitarianism ; the state would satisfy the needs of all of its citizens, eradicating the sharp inequalities along the lines of class, race, gender, and region that the revolutionaries viewed as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of capitalism and colonialism . A new society would rise from the ashes of the old; in this grand social experiment, the labor of the people would produce a new socialist person and an entirely new way of life. Inspired by the writings of August Bebel ([1879] 2009), socialist tradition viewed women as the “social barometer” of a civilization’s achievement. Like socialist movements elsewhere, therefore, the early Cuban revolutionaries singled out women as special subjects and objects of social and political work. Consonant with their intellectual roots, they saw the intertwined “social ills” of patriarchy and capitalism as the primary obstacle to women’s equality. Constrained within the domestic sphere and dependent upon men for their survival, women’s true potential for individual and collective emancipation remained captive to their false consciousness, familial expectations, and economic necessity. The revolutionaries ’ Marxist-Leninist framework meant that changes in class relations and relations of production were generally prioritized over explicit gender or familial policy. Even so, reforms aimed at incorporating women into the public labor force and ending the exploitation of poor working women inevitably reshaped broader gender and reproductive relations. PRODUCING THE NEW WOMAN 25 Marxists had long insisted that women’s engagement in public labor and activism was the key to their liberation; in Cuba, women’s labor outside the home appeared to be the silver bullet for the problems of both women and the new Cuban state, which experienced a severe labor shortage caused by mass emigration in the years following the revolution. In one bold stroke, the revolutionaries believed, the incorporation of women into the state work force would both liberate their labor from the household for the benefit of the fledgling state, and grant them autonomy from the patriarchal family through their economic independence and emotional self-sufficiency. This would in turn free them to contract conjugal relationships based on companionate love—assumed to be heterosexual—and appreciation for personal qualities rather than concerns around class, racial purity, or economic status. Articulating this new ideal, the minutes of the First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party declare, “Relations between couples under socialism take as their point of departure a different conception, they are based on equality, sincerity, and mutual respect” (Cuban Communist Party 1975). Cuban revolutionaries thus assumed a homology between what they defined as the interests of women and the interests of society. As the fledgling state threw off the shackles of capitalism and imperialism, women too would enjoy an unprecedented liberation from the twin oppressors of poverty and patriarchy. Yet while the revolutionary government launched sustained attacks on the association of reputable femininity with the private sphere of the patriarchal family, early policies reconfigured, but did not dismantle, gendered hierarchies and cultural assumptions about the sources of gendered authority. While state rhetoric exhorted women to remake themselves and society through their engagement in the public sphere, both public policies and informal practices often reiterated and reproduced entrenched ideologies about women’s nurturing and maternal nature. Such largely unexplored contradictions often led to tensions, as women’s association with the labor of nurturance was simultaneously viewed as the primary source of their subordination and as the locus for a new moral society. Heated debates, both within families and among policy-makers, revealed deep social tensions around the reshaping of the Spanish colonial ideologies that linked womanhood to reproduction—seen as both childbearing and responsibility for reproductive labor—as well as the degree to which the state should intervene into “private” gender and familial relations. Cuban women’s fight for their vision of a gender egalitarian society has been the subject of a number of publications by both Cuban and outside observers ,1 while Cuban social scientists have examined various facets of gendered and family life...

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