Vol. 81/No. 6      February 13, 2017

 
(Books of the Month column)

Cuban women wanted to participate in a
genuine revolution

 
Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution by Vilma Espín, Asela de los Santos and Yolanda Ferrer is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for February. The excerpt is from the chapter “With No Preconceived Structure or Agenda,” a 1987 interview with Espín, a leader of the Cuban Revolution for more than 50 years and the president and principal leader of the Federation of Cuban Women from its founding in 1960 to her death in 2007. Copyright © 2012 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY VILMA ESPÍN  
The Federation of Cuban Women was launched on August 23, 1960. In reality, however, we had been laying the foundations for more than a year.

In 1959, the first year after the triumph, women wanted to organize to participate more effectively in the tasks of the revolution, and we responded to this pressure. I remember being struck, in the first months after the January 1 victory, by the large number of women, some carrying babies, who took part in demonstrations and street actions. There was strong support for the revolution, even before it had demonstrated its full meaning.

Women who were already organized in various small groups approached me. They wrote letters; they asked to meet. These included people from the women’s sections of the political parties that supported the revolution. Others came from religious organizations, such as groups of Catholic and Baptist women. There were trade union members — from the garment union, for example. There were peasant women. And, of course, there were women who had taken part in the war.

As you might expect, those of us who had participated in the war — whether in the urban underground or in the mountains — were approached by women who wanted to do precisely what we had done, to take part in the revolution. They looked to us for leadership.

“What can we do?” they asked.

“How can we show our support for the revolution?”

“What’s needed most?”

They asked to be trained in emergency medical care, because of the threats and attacks from imperialism. So that became one of our first tasks, even before we organized the Federation of Cuban Women. It was these classes, in fact, along with the sewing classes we organized, that gave birth to the federation — not the other way around. …

When I talk about how the federation was created, I always emphasize that at the time we didn’t talk about women’s liberation. We didn’t talk about women’s emancipation, or the struggle for equality. We didn’t use those terms then. What we did talk about was participation. Women wanted to participate. This included women who had taken an active part in the struggle, who had been in the mountains. They, like other women across the country, wanted to help in this new stage that was dawning, which was a genuine revolution. …

Women had confidence in the revolution — because there was real proof, every day, that the revolution wasn’t just hot air, it wasn’t empty phrases of the kind people were used to hearing from politicians in the past. This was the genuine thing. And women wanted to be part of it, to do something. The more the revolutionary laws strengthened this conviction, the more women demanded a chance to contribute — and the more they saw how necessary their contribution was.

Sometimes I’m asked to give a one-word definition of the Cuban Revolution. I reply that it’s about participation —the participation of the entire people in everything. Together, the population went through difficult years. For women, this had an impact right from the beginning. They began to understand the point Lenin emphasized over and over — that for a revolution to move forward, to develop, women had to participate.

This was the beginning of political consciousness for women. When Fidel on August 23, 1960, officially gave a name to this organization — an organization that was already functioning and carrying out work related to public health, education, sewing, teaching jobs skills, and emergency medical training — and when he gave it new responsibilities such as setting up child care centers, women were already convinced they had a growing opportunity to help push forward the revolution.

As we organized the local units, especially in 1960, we focused on the most urgent responsibilities, those that emerged with the revolution. As I mentioned earlier, one of the federation’s first tasks was to provide crash courses to women who had more than a sixth grade education so they could become teachers. Before the revolution there were ten thousand unemployed teachers. They weren’t working in any school. But immediately after January 1, these ten thousand teachers weren’t nearly enough to meet our needs.

As we organized medical aid and sewing classes and began establishing more local units, it became clear that we had to take on more responsibilities in education and public health programs as well. We organized campaigns to eliminate unhealthy neighborhoods, “barrios insalubres,” as they were known, where people lived in crowded shacks without water, electricity, or sewage disposal. We organized to wipe out malaria and gastroenteritis, to get rid of flies and mosquitoes, and to raise sanitation standards in general. For example, we needed to teach women how to boil milk and water — not just tell them to do it, but explain how, in detail.

Toward the end of 1959, planes from Miami started to bomb cane fields and sugar mills. Counterrevolutionaries began to sabotage factories. So in 1960, we instituted the Emergency Medical Response Brigades. These were more than just classes on a massive scale. They were intended for women who wanted to take an active part in defense. …

All this work helped women believe even more in their capabilities, because they had to take on new responsibilities, without having any idea beforehand what their particular tasks would be. This willingness to take on whatever had to be done was what drove all the campaigns, including health and education. Those were truly heroic years, beautiful years, in which women grew tremendously.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Revolution made health care a right,’ Cuban doctors say
Regional summit calls for end to US embargo of Cuba
Washington ends ‘wet-foot, dry-foot’ Cuba program
 
 
 
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