Reprinted below is the introduction by Mary-Alice Waters to the new Pathfinder book, Marianas in Combat: Teté Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon in Cuba’s Revolutionary War, 1956–58. Copyright © 2003 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

Before the revolutionary victory, women were objects--mere bed decorations. After the revolution this changed. Women began to organize massively, working to change the conditions of their lives and to free themselves.

Teté Puebla
Marianas in Combat

The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by the progress of women toward freedom.... The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation.

Karl Marx
The Holy Family

Brigadier General Teté Puebla, the highest-ranking woman in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces and a Hero of the Cuban Revolution, joined the struggle to overthrow the bloody U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1956, when she was fifteen years old. Marianas in Combat is her story--from clandestine action in the small town of Yara in the foothills of eastern Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains, to officer in the victorious Rebel Army’s first all-women’s platoon, to protagonist in and defender of the social and economic transformation of Cuba.

On January 1, 1959, barely two years after the initiation of the revolutionary war, Batista’s army disintegrated in face of the rapidly advancing forces of the Rebel Army and the spreading popular insurrection and general strike called by the July 26 Movement. The dictator and his closest entourage of murderers and thieves fled Cuba. What millions of Cubans came to proudly call "The First Free Territory of the Americas" was born.

The new revolutionary power, responding to spreading mobilizations of working people, set out to change the living and working conditions of ordinary Cubans. In doing so they ignored the supposedly inherent prerogatives of wealthy U.S. families and their retainers in Cuba who decades earlier had taken control of the island nation’s lucrative sugar plantations, cattle ranches, nickel reserves, oil refineries, railroads, utilities monopolies, and banks.

Within a few months’ time, the first elements of a more equitable social order had been established. A sweeping land reform program had recognized the title of 100,000 peasant families to the land they had been working. Onerous rents, telephone charges, electricity rates, and other utility fees had been slashed. Public education and health care had been expanded to all social layers in Cuba. Racial discrimination in employment and public activities had been outlawed. The brothels and casinos built for the pleasure of the imperialist lords and laddies had been closed. And hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants, especially the youth, had poured into the newly created revolutionary militias to arm and train themselves to defend their gains.

As Washington’s antagonism to this popular and patriotic course sharpened, Cuban working people and their government refused to back down. The revolution deepened and grew stronger in the face of U.S.-organized and -financed sabotage, subversion, assassination plots, and countless acts of murderous terrorism directed at the population. In April 1961, in less than seventy-two hours of intense combat, a full-scale U.S.-orchestrated mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs was crushed by the determined response of the popular militias and revolutionary police and armed forces. The victory at Playa Girón, as the battle is known in Cuba, marked a decisive turning point in the revolution.

From these years of titanic class struggle, the first socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere emerged.

In the pages that follow we meet some of the ordinary women and men--many, like Teté Puebla, still in their teens at the time--who made this history. We see how they were themselves transformed in the course of the struggle. We begin to understand the class trajectory that for more than forty years has enabled Cuba’s working people to hold U.S. imperialism at bay as they defend their course, building a new society based on economic and social relations that are the negation of the dog-eat-dog realities of capitalism.

We see how the door to advances such as those registered by women in Cuba over the last half century can be opened only as working people in their majority act to break the stranglehold of the propertied classes, the beneficiaries of the second-class status of women. And we see why a revolutionary cadre committed to advancing women’s equality is decisive to reaching that goal.
 

Some eight years after the triumph over Batista, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, addressing a plenary meeting of the Federation of Cuban Women in December 1966, drew attention to the number of women who were shouldering weighty and challenging new tasks in agricultural programs where widespread social prejudices would previously have prevented them from assuming leadership responsibilities. Among their ranks, as she describes in these pages, was soon to be Teté Puebla. "This is one of the great lessons," Castro noted,

one of the greatest victories over prejudices that have existed, not just for decades or centuries, but for millennia. We refer to the prejudice that all a woman was capable of was to scrub dishes, wash and iron clothes, cook, keep house, and bear children [Applause and shouts]--an age-old prejudice that placed women in an inferior position in society. In effect, she did not have a productive place in society.

Such prejudices are thousands of years old and have survived through various social systems. If we’re talking about capitalism, women--that is, lower-class women--were doubly exploited or doubly humiliated. A poor woman, as a part of the working class or a working-class family, was exploited simply because she was poor, because she was a worker.

But in addition, even though she was herself a worker, within her own class she was scorned and underrated. Not only was she underestimated, exploited, and scorned by the exploiting classes, but even within her own class she was the object of innumerable prejudices....

If women in our country were doubly exploited, doubly humiliated in the past, then this simply means that women in a social revolution should be doubly revolutionary. [Applause]

And this perhaps is the explanation, or at least provides the social basis, for the resolute, enthusiastic, firm, and loyal support given by Cuban women to this revolution.

This revolution has really been two revolutions for women; it has meant a double liberation: as part of the exploited sectors of the country, and second, as women, who were discriminated against not only as workers but also as women, in that society of exploitation.

The attitude of Cuban women toward the revolution corresponds to this reality; it corresponds to what the revolution has meant to them....

There are two sectors in this country, two components of society that, aside from economic reasons, have had other motives for sympathizing with and feeling enthusiasm for the revolution: the black population of Cuba and the country’s women.

Teté Puebla’s account provides a vivid and concrete picture of this revolutionary transformation. We see what involvement in the struggle meant for one young woman from a poor family of working people in Oriente province--how and why she refused to accept the status quo, her hopes and achievements, how she grew and changed as the war intensified. In the Rebel Army camps of the Sierras, she relates, "what we wanted more than anything was to earn the right to fight." In words that capture the determined struggle of women everywhere to establish their equality, she notes that "we had already proved that women could do just about everything.... ‘If women have to take part in all the duties of the revolution,’ we said, ‘why can’t we fight the same way as our men fight?’"

After a major offensive by the troops of the Batista regime had been defeated in the summer of 1958, and as the Rebel Army was preparing to launch the counteroffensive that would carry them to victory, "we asked our commander in chief to allow us to fight arms in hand. He agreed. Fidel said yes, women had won the right to fight with a rifle, face to face with the enemy."

The political battle waged by Fidel Castro and those closest to him within the leadership of the Rebel Army to take on the antiwoman prejudices that were then still deeply ingrained even in some of the best combatants, and to establish the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon, is a measure of the caliber of that revolutionary leadership. It was one of the most important steps taken by the Rebel Army command in the midst of the war, demonstrating in practice the social course, the class course, that would continue to be followed by the new revolutionary power once victory over the dictatorship had been won.

To the men who complained--"How can we give rifles to women when there are so many men who are unarmed?"--Fidel responded, "Because they’re better soldiers than you are. They’re more disciplined." The Marianas proved him right, and their actions helped open the way to further gains for women as the revolution advanced.

The name of the squad could not have been more appropriate. The Rebel Army unit of which Teté Puebla was second in command was named after a heroine of Cuba’s wars of independence from Spanish colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Mariana Grajales was a black woman who sent all her sons to fight for Cuba’s freedom; eight members of her family were killed in battle. The most prominent was the Bronze Titan, Antonio Maceo, the legendary general of Cuba’s independence army, killed in battle in 1896. Her name has come to symbolize the spirit of resistance and unbreakable courage of the oppressed fighting for their liberation the world over.
 

The interview printed in these pages took place in Havana, Cuba, in two sessions, the first on November 18, 2000, and the second on March 1, 2002. It was made possible through the support and encouragement of the leadership of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, especially its president, Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida, who authored the foreword to this volume, and Brigadier General Harry Villegas, who is today the executive vice president of the association.

Without the assistance, perseverance, and capacities of Cuban editor Iraida Aguirrechu, it would not have been possible to bring the manuscript to completion with anything close to the quality and accuracy desired and, we hope, realized.

Special appreciation goes to Teté Puebla herself for the time and attention she generously gave, and for the selection of irreplaceable original photos from her personal archives. Help in assembling the photo pages was also provided by Delfín Xiqués of Granma and the leadership of the Federation of Cuban Women, as well as Manuel Martínez of Bohemia.

The glossary, annotation, and much of the editorial preparation in English was the work of Pathfinder editor Michael Taber. Pathfinder editor Luis Madrid participated in the first interview with Teté Puebla and was responsible for final preparation of the text in Spanish. Martín Koppel, the editor of Perspectiva Mundial, participated in the second interview session.

A large team of volunteers who are part of the international Pathfinder Reprint Project made possible the simultaneous publication of this book in Spanish and English. They made their time and abilities available to translate, copy edit, format, proofread, prepare photos and maps, and competently dispatch many other tasks indispensable to prepare the manuscript for press.

Through the collective efforts of many, one more strand of the rich history of the Cuban Revolution is now accessible to all. Marianas in Combat is dedicated to the young people in every corner of the earth who today, like fifteen-year-old Teté Puebla before them, refuse to accept the brutality and injustice of the capitalist system that surrounds them and decide to join with others in a disciplined fight for a better world.

Mary-Alice Waters November 2002

Reprinted below is the foreword by Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida to Marianas in Combat: Teté Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon in Cuba’s Revolutionary War, 1956–58. Almeida is the president of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, an organization of Cuban revolutionary fighters of many generations, from the revolutionary war against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in the 1950s to international missions around the world.

Havana, November 19, 2002

Year of the Heroes Imprisoned by the Empire

After reading the valuable book based on the interview with our comrade in struggle, Brigadier General Delsa Esther "Teté" Puebla Viltres, I believe it’s best not to add words by way of a preface, but rather to let Teté’s straightforward answers help readers discover for themselves her humanism, her humble origin, her revolutionary fiber, and to appreciate more deeply the generosity and firmness of our revolution.

She says she has lived the revolution so intensely that she cannot separate it from her life. We might add that through her account the reader will learn to admire Teté and have a better understanding of the justice of our cause.

Juan Almeida Bosque
President of the National Directorate
Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution  
 
 
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