Vol. 77/No. 35      October 7, 2013

Militant/Baskaran Appu

Participants in Aug. 29 event launching Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution in Indonesia discuss transformation of women’s status in Cuba from the opening of revolution in 1953. Meeting took place at Kalyanamitra women’s center in Jakarta.

Many of the 30-plus people who attended were women who work or volunteer for organizations seeking to advance women’s status in Indonesia. They listened, with rapt attention, to the speakers’ accounts of the revolutionary struggle that began July 26, 1953 — a struggle that was marked from the start by the demonstrative involvement of women — and to the record of social and economic gains for both women and men that became possible as a result of the revolution’s socialist course.

The event, conducted in Bahasa Indonesia and English and ably translated by Kendaru, was the Indonesian launch of Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution. The book, published by Pathfinder Press in 2012 and edited by Waters, features interviews with Vilma Espín (1930-2007), a legendary leader of the revolutionary struggle and founding president of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC); her contemporary and close comrade-in-arms Asela de los Santos; and Yolanda Ferrer, long-time general secretary of the FMC, who retired last year.

The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution is the “interesting book that we will be discussing today,” said chairperson Listyowati in opening the meeting. She is the executive director of Kalyanamitra, a well-known women’s center in Indonesia that was founded in 1985 as the popular struggle against the weakening Suharto dictatorship made it possible for an organization fighting violence against women to function. The meeting took place at its center in east Jakarta.

“We often discuss the Indonesian women’s movement here,” Listyowati continued. “Today we would like to discuss women in Cuba, what they have achieved and how this differs from Indonesia.”

She noted, “Some of you here may have attended the Cuban Five cartoon exhibition at the Kontras office; we thank you if you did.” Two days earlier, Kalyanamitra and Kontras (Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, also founded during Suharto’s military-based regime) had sponsored the first broad public showing in Indonesia of political drawings by Gerardo Hernández, one of the five Cuban revolutionaries framed up by Washington and handed draconian sentences in U.S. prisons. Waters had spoken at the event, which was held at the Kontras headquarters in Jakarta. (See article in Militant issue no. 33.)

Viant began her presentation with a review of the position of women in Cuba before the revolution. “For the vast majority of the female population,” she said, “there was no chance of employment, education, access to health services or social security.”

Only 13.5 percent of women worked outside the home in 1953, many of them as domestics who received no pay, only “room and board,” such as it was. The FMC was founded to change these social conditions, and its formation in 1960 was a “landmark day,” Viant said.

The ambassador paid tribute to the “collective wisdom” of those who inspired or founded the federation: among them Espín and de los Santos, who had “fought in the Sierra Maestra mountains as part of the Rebel Army led by Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro,” and other central leaders of the revolution.

“Around the new organization coalesced women breaking social and gender barriers,” said Viant. The FMC was “deeply involved in many important tasks,” in the early days, including the massive literacy campaign of 1961. In that one year, 250,000 volunteers — many of them women in their teens — taught more than 700,000 Cubans, the majority of whom were women, to read and write.

Origins of women’s oppression

First published in 1975, Woman’s Evolution has become a classic in the arsenal of women’s liberation that has been translated into at least seven other languages. It explains why and how “the second-class status of women was born a few thousand years ago — a microsecond in human history — as class-divided societies emerged,” said Waters. “That is when a handful of men — in bloody battle — appropriated as their own the social surplus made possible by the collective labor of all, and women, much like cattle, were reduced to a form of private property,” she added.

“The oppression of women is above all an economic question, a class question,” Waters said. “It has taken different concrete forms in different societies over the millennia, but women’s inequality today is built into the foundations of capitalism.

“Equality between men and women will be possible only when capitalist exploitation is overturned and women’s private work in the home is socialized,” Waters said. “And that has been the course of struggle followed by working people in the Cuban Revolution, the course that has made possible the economic and social transformation of Cuban society and women’s social status within it.

“This didn’t happen automatically,” Waters added. It was only possible because of the continued struggle by women and men, and the caliber of the leadership — Fidel Castro, above all,” Waters said.

The FMC was formed not around a “preconceived structure or agenda,” Waters noted. “The impetus came from below, from women demanding to be involved in the revolutionary struggle.” That spirit marked not just the literacy brigades, but other early campaigns, like the schools that brought more than 20,000 young rural women to Havana to learn basic skills and those that trained thousands of domestic workers for new jobs.

In three decades, women in Cuba “conquered more than their sisters in advanced capitalist countries conquered in nearly a century,” Waters said. Marriage and divorce are simple matters of civil registration. Attitudes toward homosexuality and other matters of sexual orientation have changed radically in the last quarter century.

“Today it is not only in areas such as education and health that women are to be found in leadership positions,” Waters said. “They are also directors of several sugar mills and a quarter of the scientific research centers.

“And they are part of the industrial working class as never before, working as oil riggers, railroad engineers, crane operators, in nickel mines and other nontraditional occupations.”

But none of this, Waters stressed, “would have been possible without a socialist revolution and that is what has fueled the undying determination of the U.S. rulers to destroy it.”

Pointing to the frame-up and imprisonment of the Cuban Five, Waters noted, “That is why they are being held hostage — to punish the Cuban people. Fighting for their freedom, and the broader defense of the revolution, are inseparable from what we are discussing today.”

Indicators of progress

When Viant noted that a Cuban woman is entitled to a full year’s maternity leave — including 18 weeks at full pay and the rest at 60 percent — and is guaranteed the job on her return, the audience gasped in approval. Their interest was further heightened when Viant said a couple can share the leave time. By comparison, women in Indonesia are entitled to only three months’ unpaid leave.

Waters’ report that abortion was decriminalized in the early years of the revolution and is available free of charge, like all other medical procedures, was also greeted with murmurs of approval. In Indonesia the procedure is illegal in many cases, and many die from botched abortions.

Participants were also impressed by the ambassador’s comment that average life expectancy in Cuba is 78 years — on a par with advanced capitalist countries. The comparative figure in Indonesia is 69.

One of the first questions asked in the discussion period was: what had Waters meant by the socialization of private labor in the home, and why did she consider it so important?

Waters said she had paraphrased a statement by Frederick Engels, the founder with Karl Marx of the modern working-class movement — a statement cited in the introduction to The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution. In 1885 Engels wrote, “True equality between men and women can become a reality only when the exploitation of both by capital has been abolished, and private work in the home has been transformed into a public industry.”

Waters went on, “I don’t have to explain to this gathering that no matter what kind of jobs we have or what else we do outside the home, women always face a double day of labor. Until that is eliminated — and not by ‘sharing’ it with a companion or hiring someone else to do it for you — there can be no true equality between men and women. Employers reap the benefits of this inequality and the lower value of women’s labor power because of it. That inequality will not be overcome in capitalist society.”

However, said Waters, “with political and economic power in our hands, working people can organize together to change these things. We saw this in Cuba on the question of child care, on which women themselves took the lead.” The child care centers constructed by the FMC in its very early days provided quality health care and early education and helped free up women to work, study and broaden their participation in the revolution.

A young man asked about Internet accounts of decades-long official persecution of homosexuals in Cuba, including allegations of concentration camps for gays in the 1960s.

“These kinds of reports are typical of the slanders against the Cuban Revolution,” Waters said. “At the time the revolution triumphed in the early 1960s, homophobia was ingrained in social attitudes. But Cuba was not unique or unusual in that respect,” she added. “The same was true in advanced capitalist countries. The important thing to look at is what has changed.”

The accusation that there were concentration camps for gays is false, Waters said. It is a distorted reference to the Military Units to Aid Production established in the mid-1960s. At that time, when “the revolution was under ferocious attack” by Washington, universal military service was established for all young men. Those who refused to bear arms on religious or other grounds, or were classified as unfit for military duty, served in these largely agricultural production units as a way to contribute to national defense. Because of the prejudices against homosexuals, men who were openly gay were assigned to these units — a policy that former Cuban President Fidel Castro described in 2010 as a “great injustice.” On Castro’s initiative, the units were shut down in 1968 after three years of existence.

“Attitudes to sexual orientation have changed,” the ambassador added. “We are very open regarding this issue.” Both speakers noted the important role of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education, formed in 1989 under the leadership of Vilma Espín and now headed by Mariela Castro, the daughter of Espín and Cuban President Raúl Castro.

In response to a comment from one audience member that neither speaker had mentioned religion, Viant observed to appreciative laughter that this wasn’t the subject of the meeting and, in any case, it would be out of order for her to discuss religion in Indonesia.

She added that she would be happy to answer questions about religion in Cuba — a “secular country” where freedom of worship prevails.

The two-and-a-half-hour meeting did not exhaust the interest of participants. Many stayed to continue the discussion informally for another hour. The table displaying a range of Pathfinder books for sale was stripped bare, as participants bought multiple copies of The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution and many other titles.

Prominent newsweekly Tempo ran a report on the meeting in its Aug. 30 edition headlined “Lessons from Cuba: Women’s Equality.” The reporter noted the country’s generous maternity leave provisions, and the significant number of female parliamentarians as well as medical professionals who “receive the same salaries as men.” The online journals Sayangi and Wartafeminis (Feminist News) also reported on the meeting.

Baskaran Appu and Linda Harris contributed to this article.
 
 
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