Vol. 77/No. 6      February 18, 2013

Women and Revolution: The Living Example of the Cuban Revolution by Asela de los Santos, Mary-Alice Waters, Arelys Santana and Leira Sánchez. 59 pages. Pathfinder Press, 2013.

BY EMMA JOHNSON 
Women and Revolution both merits its own reading and serves as a strong complement to Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution, published by Pathfinder Press last year.

The new 59-page book helps draw out the most important political lessons of Women in Cuba and helps the reader see its relevance for working-class struggle today.

Women and Revolution contains four talks on Women in Cuba given at the launching of the book at the 2012 Havana International Book Fair. Speakers included Asela de los Santos, a historic leader of the Cuban Revolution; Leira Sánchez, a member of the National Bureau of Cuba’s Union of Young Communists; Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and editor of the book; and Arelys Santana, second secretary of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), who introduced the panel.

The booklet also reprints the introduction to Women in Cuba by Waters. Its opening lines let the reader know what the book deals with: “This is a book about the Cuban Revolution. It is about the millions of working people—men and women, of all ages—who have made that socialist revolution, and how their actions transformed them as they fought to transform their world.”

De los Santos was a combatant in the Cuban revolutionary movement before the 1959 victorious overthrow of the U.S.-backed tyranny of Fulgencio Batista.

Talking about the first section of Women in Cuba, she summarizes the value of the struggle before the revolutionary victory. “In the mountains and in the underground groups, equality and fraternity, solidarity and friendship, truth and justice, work, generosity, and respect for human dignity prevailed over the mediocrity, pettiness, selfishness, and prejudices of all types that were imposed by the times of slavery, rooted in mind and behavior by centuries of colonial rule.”

Through the contributions of Sánchez and Santana, you get a feel for the importance for revolutionaries in Cuba—from all generations—of studying the rich lessons of the Cuban Revolution from those who made it.

Waters explains why Pathfinder published the book and “why it is important in the United States and elsewhere outside Cuba to the increasing numbers of workers who are searching for ways to effectively resist. …

“The living example of the men and women who made the Cuban Revolution, and are still making it, needs to be known,” said Waters, “because working people everywhere, sooner or later, are being pushed toward revolutionary action.” This record, she said, “is indispensable to the revolutionary continuity of the working class.”

Waters stresses why “the Cuban Revolution is distinguished from all previous revolutions since the beginning of the modern working-class movement.”

Both de los Santos and Waters describe the interaction between the Rebel Army combatants and the exploited, landless peasants and agricultural workers and the growing involvement of women in the ranks of the leadership.

“Interaction opens the way for the formation of new human beings, one of the main guidelines of revolutionary work,” says de los Santos. “For women this process meant, in practice, a personal revolution: revolutionizing their thinking and actions, leading them to fight the customs of the past.”

The organizational structures, including the Federation of Cuban Women itself, “grew out of the goals” of the revolution “and above all were the product of deeds leading to the accomplishment of those goals,” Waters says. Leaders led in practice and action, everything began with deeds.

The FMC, established in 1960, grew out of this participation, not the other way around, speakers emphasized. Women insisted on organizing themselves and being organized into its most pressing tasks. In the process they created an organization that would enable them to do just that.

De los Santos’ closing words highlight the value of Women in Cuba and the collaborative work that went into making it. The book, she said, “underscores our unbreakable friendship and our determination to remain united, working for the revolution, here in Cuba and there in the United States.”  

 
 
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