In Cuba, the dual role expected of women is called the “double shift,” and it is responsible for the high turnover of women in the work force. So, while 700,000 women entered the workforce between 1969 and 1974, 500,000 dropped out.³⁴ It also helps to explain the persistence of discrimination against women on the job. Marta Nuñez’s study of women workers at a brick factory found that women earned 54 centavos for every peso male workers earned. Management justified this disparity by pointing out that the law prohibited women from taking the higher-paying jobs, even though by then the law no longer was in force.³⁵ Managers tend to promote men more readily, and pay men more, claiming that men are more reliable and can work longer hours because they do not have the pull of family responsibilities.

Managers were also reluctant to hire single mothers, a growing problem as divorce rates skyrocketed. Though no reliable statistics have been compiled on the number of single mothers, in 1989, 61.2 percent of children were born to unmarried women.³⁶

Women are found in fewer numbers as one moves up the administrative ladder. Women are underrepresented in the Communist Party (CP) and the main state institutions. In 1975, at its founding congress, the CP boasted a female membership of 13 percent. By 1986, women were 21 percent of party members. There have never been any women members of the party’s nine-man secretariat (at least as of the mid-1990s). In 1989, four of the twenty-five members of the Council of State and only two of the forty-five Council of Ministers were women. In 1991, women constituted 17 percent of the 225-person Central Committee and 12 percent of the politburo membership.³⁷ Women were similarly underrepresented in the system of poder popular.³⁸

The question of abortion reveals most clearly the Castro government’s utilitarian approach to a woman’s right to abortion. Cuba’s 1938 criminal code sanctioned abortion only to save the life of a pregnant woman, in cases where pregnancy resulted from rape, or to avoid birth defects. Nevertheless, in pre-revolutionary Cuba safe abortions were available in the cities at fairly affordable rates. Ironically, the 1938 law was strictly enforced for several years after the revolution. When this led to an increase in deaths as a growing number of women resorted to self-induced abortions or to what would be referred to in the U.S. as “backstreet butchers,” the Ministry of Public Health in 1965 decided to shift gears and doctors once again began providing abortions. Abortion wasn’t officially decriminalized, however, until 1979. Government policy has been to officially discourage women from having abortions, but at the same time to provide them without charge through the tenth week of pregnancy. Second- and third-trimester abortions require a hospital director’s approval. In spite of the availability of contraceptive devices, about 40 percent of pregnancies ended in abortion in 1979—a fact which prompted Castro to blame women for using abortion as a form of contraception and threaten to start charging for them.³⁹ In the late 1980s the Cuban media began warning women of the dangers of having abortions.⁴¹ Research found that half of the women in a 100-woman study felt guilty for having had an abortion.41

Sexist attitudes also persisted. The 1975 CP thesis written for a discussion at its first congress noted that women continued to be portrayed in a sexist manner in the public media as either sex objects or wives, and beauty pageants remain popular in Cuba.⁴² The marriage contract read out at a 1973 symbolic wedding between female members of the CDR and male members of the Centennial Youth Column, committed the women to “wash, sew, iron, sweep, and beautify the environment and to participate in cultural and ideological activities.”⁴³ A 1985 study of students in Matanzas province found that 44 percent of males wanted to marry virgins, though three-quarters of women students rejected the idea that they should be virgin brides.⁴⁴

The Cuban leadership did not acknowledge the existence of rape or domestic abuse in Cuba until 1992. As a result, almost no data are compiled in Cuba on domestic abuse. But there are some statistics on self-inflicted violence among women. For example, a 1981 study on suicide found that Cuba had one of the highest suicide rates (27.5 deaths per 100,000 people) in the world, and the suicide rate for women in a 1970 study was twice that of men.⁴⁵

The Family Code, introduced in 1975, for the first time laid official emphasis not on drawing women into the workforce, but on the rights and duties of men and women in the Cuban family. It emphasized equality of the sexes, and in particular, the necessity of both men and women to share household responsibilities: “Both partners must care for the family they have created and must cooperate with the other in the education, upbringing, and guidance of the children according to the principles of socialist morality. They must participate, to the extent of their capacity or possibilities, in the running of the home, and cooperate so that it will develop in the best possible way.”⁴⁶ The Family Code also barred sex discrimination, proposed job quotas to increase women’s employment opportunities, gave paid maternity leave to women, and mandated a national sex education program. However, it was not legally enforceable. Yet by promoting shared housework, “In effect the Family Code acknowledged that the government’s intent to fully socialize household tasks was not feasible. Cuba could not afford all the day care centers, cafeterias, laundries, and other services that women needed, and so men would have to do their part.”⁴⁷

In practice, however, women continue to bear the heaviest responsibility for childrearing and other household tasks. This was acknowledged by Labor Minister Jorge Risquet in his explanation as to why the 1971 anti-loafing law criminalized working-age males who did not have jobs, but did not do the same for women. Women “have the job of reproducing as well,” and therefore should not be legally required to work like men, he argued.⁴⁸ In any case, for the growing number of single mothers in Cuba the code was irrelevant. A 1990 study of sixty-four Havana families concluded that working women continued to “care for and prepare children for life, take care of the home, and give their husband the idea that he is the head of the family.”⁴⁹

The rectification period of the late 1980s introduced a number of austerity measures detrimental to women. Dining facilities at work and school meals were cut back, and charges for workers’ meals were increased. Workers were asked to work unpaid overtime, an extra hour or two per day. Mothers working in volunteer “microbrigades” were expected to work ten- to fourteen-hour days, leading to problems arranging day care to cover work shifts and to hardly any time for mothers to see their children. A reporter visiting an industrial parts factory in 1987 talked to a union official who argued that the solution to the problem of work hours extending beyond child care hours was for women to be replaced by men.⁵⁰

Women faced even more difficulties since the onset of the extreme austerity of the “special period.” Sex-segregated unpaid work brigades were mobilized in agriculture on a wider scale, and housewives were mobilized in force. Yet at the same time, in 1991, the minimum age for day care eligibility was increased from forty-five days to six months. Many of the difficulties involved in juggling work and home life for women were severely exacerbated. The economic collapse reduced available fuel and energy, cutting public transportation and forcing working-class men and women into extremely long travel times. The cuts in energy and available appliances also increased the amount of labor time necessary to maintain the home, as did the increase in shortages of basic goods, which forced women to spend a great deal more time in long lines and on the black market searching for food. Women were forced to make and use substitutes for soap, detergent, and other necessities that were in short supply or unavailable.

Cuba’s ongoing housing crisis has also created severe problems for the family. Overcrowding has meant lack of places for young people to have sexual relations, the inability of young people to marry and live in a new home, or for couples to divorce and live separately. Home conditions have as a result become a source of tension.

The increased efforts to boost tourism also had its effects, promoting sexist public images of women and reviving prostitution (which was outlawed in 1963) as a means for young women to obtain dollars and improve their economic situation.

The persistence of women’s oppression in Cuba, in spite of the important changes wrought by the revolution, has its roots in the continued dependence of the Cuban state and economy on privatized childrearing and housework. A central dilemma for Cuban women, argue Alfred Padula and Lois Smith, “was the failure of revolutionary ideologues and policy makers to consider adequately the cultural and economic implications of women’s domestic responsibilities.” Yet “the lack of safe forums for public debate and the dearth of independently functioning institutions with clear powers complicated efforts to address and redress issues of particular interest to women in Cuba.”⁵¹

Gays in Cuba

While conditions for gays in Cuba are today considerably improved, the sad history of anti-gay bigotry in post-revolutionary Cuba is perhaps the most glaring example of the limits of revolution’s achievements. Gay lifestyles in Cuba were associated after the revolution with the “debauchery” of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary culture that surrounded the gambling hotels and casinos. After the revolution, as Marvin Leiner writes, “Not only was…prostitution condemned, but also any notion of sexual freedom or changes that endangered the traditional family institution, except for bringing women into the workforce.”⁵² Homosexuality was denounced as a deviant remnant of bourgeois society.

The revolution, rather than challenging the traditional machismo of Cuban society, embraced it when it came to the question of gays. The ideal revolutionary was a strong, bearded guerrilla, and leading figures denigrated “effeminate” behavior among men. “No homosexual represents the Revolution,” wrote Samuel Feijoó, “which is a matter for men, of fists and not feathers, of courage and not trembling, of certainty and not intrigue, of creative valor and not of sweet surprises.”⁵³ Fidel agreed, arguing that gays do not “embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary.”⁵⁴

While there was terrible anti-gay discrimination in Cuban society before the revolution, homosexuality was never an issue (positively or negatively) of government policy. Only after the revolution did it become a matter of state policy—for the worse.

Gays were barred form membership in the Communist Party, and were publicly denounced as decadent and perverted, driving many of them abroad or turning them against the revolution. The low point came in 1965, when for two years, until international pressure led to their disbandment, the Cuban state set up Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP). UMAP camps were rehabilitation work camps for those “whose behavior was not in accordance with the public definition of good citizenship,” including gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and devout Catholics, among others. According to Leiner, early draftees were treated so badly that some officers in charge of running them were court-martialed.⁵⁵ In the 1960s “effeminate” boys who exhibited “homosexual tendencies” were sent to special schools for problem children, and separated into “yellow brigades,” where they were taught to “use baseball gloves, pistols and swords,” among other manly pursuits.⁵⁶ This was at the same time that Che Guevara was writing about the “new man” in Cuba.

A 1974 law banned homosexuals from positions of influence on children because “homosexualism…may have a negative effect on the education and conscience…of children and young persons.”⁵⁷ The ban was lifted in 1978. However, the army does not permit known gays to serve, and a 1981 interview with a Cuban official by Leiner elicited these remarks: “We do not harass homosexuals. But as soon as we discover that a Party member is a homosexual we dismiss him.”⁵⁸ The 1979 penal code banned any public display of homosexuality, imposing three-to nine-month sentences for doing so. Under the Ley de Peligroso (“social dangerousness”), gays could be detained for up to four years for “therapy and reeducation.”⁵⁹

But the changes in women’s status were bound to lead to changes in attitudes toward gays. The National Task Force for Sex Education, formed in the mid-1970s, at first reflected prevailing attitudes about homosexuality. However, in 1979, the organization published an extremely popular book, Man and Woman in Intimacy, whose 27,000 copies sold out immediately. It contained a ten-page section on homosexuality that stated, “Homosexuality cannot be classified as a sickness…. Homosexuals do not ‘suffer’ from homosexuality; they suffer from the difficulties that their condition causes them in society.”⁶⁰

Homosexuality itself was no longer a crime, and it was no longer defined as a “disorder.” One of the task force’s directors, Monica Krause noted, however, that this did not mean that discrimination against gays disappeared in Cuba. “There’s not a law that forbids a person because of his or her sexual preference to study this or that, but it happens; the discrimination exists.”⁶¹ Krause tells of leading postgraduate classes for family doctors in the 1980s in which the doctors interrupted her and shouted angrily when she began explaining that homosexuals were normal and should be treated with tolerance and respect.⁶² An FMC group in Cienfuegos explained in answer to a question about homosexuals that, “We make sure they are not in a position such as teaching school which will bring them in contact with children. There may not be laws against them, but we, the community, deal with the situation.”⁶³

In 1988—the same year that homosexuality was decriminalized in Cuba—a Latina film student from Texas went to study in Havana and made a short film that interviewed gays about their experiences. The common theme was the sense of being isolated and not accepted at home, by friends or at work, and how that forced gays to lead a “double life.” This film, however, was not shown in Cuba.

The approach that the Cuban government took to the AIDS crisis, though effective in holding down the number of cases, was shaped by its attitude to homosexual behavior. Instead of offering widespread testing combined with a comprehensive liberal sex education campaign (similar to the literacy campaign of the early 1960s), it resorted to draconian measures. After compulsory testing of the population, those testing positive for HIV (numbering in the high hundreds by the early 1990s) were required to enter sanitariums separate from the rest of the population. Though only about half of the “inmates” were gay men, early AIDS education in Cuba gave the impression that only homosexual men could get the disease. Internees were permitted to make chaperoned trips into the outside world, and a small number were released after it was decided that they were sufficiently “responsible.” The very existence of the quarantine policy contributed to a sense of panic about AIDS, combined with a sense that knowledge of it, or of the necessity of safe sex, was “solved” by separating AIDS patients from the rest of the population.⁶⁴

This coercive approach was based on the assumption that male sexuality cannot be controlled, and that therefore men infected with the AIDS virus cannot be trusted. It takes as a given a society where there is not free debate or collective decision-making about social policy. An educational approach would have required free discussion, and an open attitude to different sexual orientations and behaviors; certainly not one where gays still do not feel comfortable coming out to friends, family members, and workmates. Yet because the Cuban regime allows no political expressions outside its own control, the gay and women’s movements in the United States and elsewhere in Latin America did not emerge in Cuba. As Leiner notes, “essential to AIDS prevention is freedom to assemble and form political and social organizations of choice.”⁶⁵

Official tolerance for homosexuality increased in the 1980s, and conditions slowly improved. Castro told Sandinista founder Tomás Borge in 1992 that he opposed discrimination against gays, and Vilma Espín has called for an end to homophobia. Gays were more emboldened to appear openly, and some theatrical productions began to offer sympathetic portrayals of gay characters.⁶⁶ In 1993, the popularity of the film Strawberry and Chocolate, which deals with homophobia, was another indication of the shifts that were taking place (though it was never shown on television), and in the same year the enforced quarantine of HIV-positive people ended, replaced with a modified program that allowed patients to stay at home after attending a course teaching them how to take care of themselves and avoid spreading HIV. The first publicly held gay wedding took place in a Havana suburb in 2001.

But discrimination persists. There are no officially sanctioned gay bars or clubs, and there is still public hostility to homosexuals.⁶⁷ A growing number of gays and lesbians feel more confident about identifying themselves than they have in the past, but they are also acutely aware of the fact that they are expected to be “restrained and respectful.”⁶⁸ These changes are also a reflection of changes in attitudes generally about women’s role in society.

Mariela Castro Espín, the director of the Cuban National Institute for Sex Education (and Raúl Castro’s daughter), recently came out in favor of the Cuban Constitution outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. When asked if the 1990s opened up an era of greater social tolerance toward homosexuals in Cuba, she gave this very qualified answer: “Yes, I believe that people are a little more relaxed about a homosexual presence, both in public and in the privacy of the family, but only a little bit relaxed, not more tolerant. We have much more work to do in our society for this ‘relaxation’ to mean real respect towards sexual diversity.”⁶⁹

Conclusion

Some left-wing apologists for Castro insist that to the extent that any of the problems outlined here exist, they are either relics of the past in the process of withering away or problems created by the onset of Cuba’s deep economic crisis in the 1990s. The implication is that a lifting of the embargo would result in the renewal of the “process” of liberation in Cuba. Part of the confusion on these questions stems from the way in which the Left—taking its cue from Cuban state propaganda—continues to speak of the Cuban Revolution as if it were an ongoing process that began in 1959 and has never stopped, even fifty years later.

But inequalities in Cuba persist for reasons that are economic and structural. Oppression is not the product of an unfinished revolution; oppression continues to exist in Cuba because exploitation continues. Cuba achieved national independence but not socialism. “It is important to understand this, because many people make their case against Marxism on the grounds that various forms of oppression continued under Stalin’s rule, and in other societies calling themselves socialist, such as those in Eastern Europe, and Cuba or China.”⁷⁰ The argument is based on the same assumptions made by apologists for the Cuban state—the identification of nationalization with socialism. Once it is understood that the exploitation of the working class persisted after the revolution, it places these other issues in perspective. A society that has not liberated the working class is incapable of achieving the full liberation of the oppressed either. The condition of one is the condition of the other. The embargo may exacerbate inequality in Cuba, but it has not created it.

The foundation of women’s oppression (though not its only manifestation) is privatized reproduction; of women’s liberation, the socialization of household tasks. But an economic system based upon the exploitation of wage labor—whether it is in Cuba or Canada—is incapable of freeing women from this burden. Cuban state accumulation depends on the labor of women both in and out of the home. Hence in Cuba, the limits of women’s freedom, however far it may advance, runs into the barrier of the family and can go no further without the collective socialization of production under workers’ control.

The liberalization in attitudes towards gays cannot of course be attributed to the triumph of the revolution, since the revolution acted in a completely oppressive and repressive manner toward gays in its early years. Moreover, the positive changes in the status of gays has lagged behind many other countries—chiefly, I would argue, because Cuba has not permitted the development of independent organizations of gays that could fight against discrimination.

As for the question of Blacks in Cuba, the persistence of racism in certain forms cannot be passed off as a historical holdover on its way to extinction because the onset of deep crisis has made racial problems worse in Cuba. At the same time, the mere declaration by Cuban officials that racism had been eliminated when its worst visible manifestations were rooted out was not only incorrect, but made it more difficult to debate and discuss the question of race. If racism is eliminated, and society is color-blind, then talk of racism is seen as threatening to the state. What becomes clear in any honest assessment of Cuban society is that the end of legal forms of racial discrimination, in the context of a society that is economically stratified, has regional economic disparities, and where the mass of the population is atomized and politically powerless, cannot lead to complete racial equality.

The Left acknowledges the right of women, gays and lesbians, and the nationally and racially oppressed to organize and combat their oppression virtually everywhere except Cuba, where the fact that Cuba denies these rights is often glossed over with references to the existence of “mass organizations” and Fidel’s verbal commitment to equality. This paternalism, which is also applied to the working class, accepts the idea that liberation is something that is given rather than fought for. Even if one accepts the dubious proposition that Cuba simply needs more time—after fifty years!—to overcome the obstacles to full equality in Cuba, this begs the question. Shouldn’t Blacks, women, and gays—and the working class overall—have the right to organize and fight for their own emancipation in order to hasten this process?