Since the victory of the Cuban Revolution more than four decades ago, she said, the FMC has helped lead “the fight for the full integration and advancement of women in all areas of economic, political, cultural, and social life. This includes the fight to promote gender equality, to advance relations of equality between men and women within the family, and for nonsexist education in all areas of life.”

The U.S. visitors listened intently to Ferrer’s presentation. Then, for more than two hours, they engaged in a lively exchange with a panel of FMC leaders on subjects ranging from women in employment to abortion, gay rights, and women in the defense of the revolution. The panel, which included several members of the FMC’s National Secretariat, was led by Vilma Espín, president of the women’s organization and a leader of the Cuban Revolution since the beginning of the clandestine struggle to bring down the Batista dictatorship.

For many, the July 29 meeting, held at the Fe del Valle Women’s Training School, was one of the highlights of their visit to the island on the Third Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange, a one-week trip by nearly 300 young people from across the United States. Most were visiting Cuba for the first time.

The July 23-August 1 Youth Exchange was sponsored by the Federation of University Students (FEU), Union of Young Communists (UJC), and other Cuban youth groups. The visitors participated in a rally in Santiago de Cuba to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada barracks, which opened the revolutionary struggle in Cuba that deepened into the first socialist revolution in the Americas (see article in last week’s issue).

They also visited the Latin American School of Medicine, the University of Havana, a working-class community where students are carrying out revolutionary social work, a national computer center, the Museum of the Revolution, a Cuban Border Brigade post at Guantánamo, and several scientific research centers. They met with UJC and FEU leaders, members of a municipal legislative assembly, relatives of five Cuban revolutionaries locked up in U.S. prisons on frame-up charges of conspiracy to commit espionage, and a number of leaders of the revolutionary government.

Ferrer outlined some of the background to the Cuban Revolution and the struggle against women’s oppression. “Before the revolution, women faced conditions similar to those in other capitalist countries dominated by imperialism,” she said. “They had a second-class status of complete dependency on men, and were treated as sexual objects and commodities.”

At the time of the revolutionary victory in January 1959—when the Rebel Army overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship—only 194,000 women were employed. Some 70,000 of them were domestic workers and 100,000 were prostitutes—“something that for many was the only way to survive,” Ferrer remarked. Fifty-nine percent of women were illiterate—more than double the overall illiteracy rate at the time.

“Women played an important part in the revolutionary struggle against Batista,” which was led by the July 26 Movement and the Rebel Army under the command of Fidel Castro, Ferrer said. “In three of what was then our six provinces, the July 26 Movement was at times headed by women.” Vilma Espín, in fact, coordinated July 26 Movement activities in the key province of Oriente in eastern Cuba prior to becoming part of the Rebel Army .

“Fidel was very clear on the importance of women’s involvement in the revolutionary struggle,” Ferrer stated. “During the revolutionary war in the Sierra Maestra mountains, he led a sharp political struggle over this question among commanders of the Rebel Army.” Some commanders, reflecting antiwoman prejudices that were then still deeply ingrained even in some of the best combatants, argued that women should not be allowed to take part in combat, especially when there weren’t enough weapons for all.

Rejecting this argument, “Fidel organized the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon,” the FMC leader said. This action signaled the social course that the new revolutionary power would continue to take after the overthrow of the dictatorship in 1959.

The FMC, which today has 3.9 million members, was founded Aug. 23, 1960, as working people in Cuba mobilized to consolidate their power. At its founding convention, Ferrer said, “Fidel pointed to the initial tasks—to organize women, to teach them to read and write, and to fight to eliminate discrimination against them. To do so, he posed two tasks for the FMC: to create child-care centers and to establish schools for peasant women.”

Women—especially young women—participated massively in the 1960-61 literacy campaign, which virtually wiped out illiteracy in a year. “They joined voluntary work brigades in agriculture and in building hospitals and schools,” Ferrer said.  
 
1961: job training for rural women
In 1960, the FMC leader said, “the Ana Betancourt School for Peasant Women was created. Over a few years’ time, 14,000 young women from the countryside, including the most remote areas, came to Havana” to learn basic job skills. The program included sewing, reading and writing, and basic health and hygiene such as eliminating body parasites and fixing teeth. On Mother’s Day “parents coming to Havana to visit their daughters attending the school could barely recognize them because of the changes” in their skills, confidence, and health, Ferrer said.

In addition, the Schools to Upgrade Skills for Domestic Workers gave women training in skills that would enable them to break out of household work. As a result, “Black women, formerly domestic servants, were for the first time hired as bank workers,” a job from which they had previously been excluded.

Over the past four decades, Ferrer said, Cuban women have made huge strides in the fight for equality, from employment to education to free access to abortion. For example, she added, women now make up half of university graduates, compared to 3 percent in 1959. They are now 44.7 percent of the work force—up from 12 percent in 1953. Two out of three skilled technicians are women. In industrial jobs, 22 percent of workers are women. And women are active in the defense of the revolution from the militias to the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Ferrer described the challenges that women faced in the 1990s with the economic crisis that followed the collapse of Cuba’s aid and trade on favorable terms with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe —known here as the Special Period. The severe shortages of everything from fuel to soap to food, and the steep decline in industrial and agricultural production, especially in the first half of that decade, left many workers without jobs to go to and compounded women’s burden of domestic chores enormously.  
 
More women in work force
“The severity of the crisis, however, did not mean that women returned to the home,” Ferrer said. Through the efforts of the FMC and the revolutionary leadership, the proportion of women in the workforce is now even higher than it was at the beginning of the Special Period—up from 38.7 percent in 1989 to 44.7 percent as of last year. This is not far from the comparable figure in the United States, where in 1994 some 46 percent of the work force was female.

In response to a question, Ferrer said that the FMC and the country’s revolutionary leadership rejected arguments that in face of increased unemployment, men should be given priority in jobs over women. A number of employment programs were organized to make sure that women and youth were not disproportionately affected.

“We assessed women’s employment possibilities in every municipality and province in the country, and made progress in maintaining the percentage of women in the work force,” she said. “Programs were established to find jobs for female heads of household and women with disabilities.

“A national women’s employment commission was established, made up of representatives of the Labor Ministry, Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC), and Federation of Cuban Women. When there is a workplace shutdown or reduction in workers, women workers are evaluated on an equal basis with men to relocate them to other jobs. For example, urban agricultural projects were created in the cities, and 100,000 women have been hired into these jobs.”

Panelists added that one recent advance was a 2001 regulation, which the FMC and the CTC had pressed for, that extended paid maternity leave from 6 to 12 months.

“What about the rights of gays and lesbians?” asked another youth from the U.S.

Vilma Espín responded to this question. Espín, who fought in the Rebel Army during the revolutionary war, was the founding president of the FMC. Today she is a deputy in Cuba’s National Assembly, a member of the Council of State, and a Heroine of the Republic of Cuba.

Espín said the approach by Cuba’s revolutionary leadership toward homosexuals has been a process. “For a long time in this world there has been discrimination against homosexuals and transsexuals,” Espín said. After the revolution, Cuba faced a legacy of sexist prejudice against women and gays.

As the revolutionary leadership advanced the fight for women’s rights, promoted sex education, and expanded broader education, “we began to learn about discrimination and other problems faced by homosexuals,” the FMC president said. That process was aided by discussions with individuals in the United States and other countries where, as a result of the women’s rights movements there, advances had been made in combating antigay discrimination. “We say there can be no discrimination against women or homosexuals. Homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else to their personal life.”

Espín also replied to a question on whether there is child abuse in Cuba. Yes, she said, there are cases of sexual abuse and violence against children, although much less than in the United States or other capitalist countries. “Our laws prohibiting violence against children are very strong and the FMC works hard to combat it,” she said. Last April Cuba hosted an international conference on child abuse.

Another question was about the resurgence of prostitution in Cuba since the early 1990s, especially around the tourist centers. FMC leader Sonia Beretervide said that one of the first results of the advancing revolution was dismantling of the organized prostitution business that flourished in capitalist Cuba. The FMC worked to train women who had been prostitutes with skills that would allow them to work in productive jobs, to teach them to read and write, and to integrate them into the work of the revolution. “It was the women themselves who did this,” she said. “At first we thought this would be a long process, but we were surprised at how quickly organized prostitution virtually disappeared.”

With the economic crisis of the Special Period, prostitution in Cuba began to grow into a significant social phenomenon again. Unlike the pre-1959 period, Beretervide stated, women engaging in prostitution today do so “not as a means of bare survival but to get the latest fashions and other consumer products that are scarce and expensive in Cuba.”

As always, however, it is driven by economics and is a concrete expression of women’s second-class status.

“Prostitution involves a relatively small number of women today, but working with them is an important part of the work of the FMC,” Beretervide added. While pimps are dealt with as criminals, FMC members, social workers, and health volunteers are working in neighborhoods where prostitution is most widespread in order to integrate the women into jobs, school, and other productive activity. “This work requires individualized attention,” she noted.

After the meeting, many of the youth from the United States said that, for them, one of the high points of the exchange was the reading by an FMC member of a poem titled “Letter from a Cuban mother to an American mother.” The letter says that if the American mother’s son Robert comes to Cuba in peace, he will be welcomed by her son Juan to play baseball and be friends. But if the U.S. government sends Robert to invade Cuba as “a pirate,” he and the other invaders “will not remain alive.”

“That’s the kind of women’s organization I like,” remarked a student from Los Angeles during the dinnertime exchange of experiences that night.  
 
 
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