Blowback - S2 Bonus 2 - "Lo Distinto Se Parece"

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

Interviews with history professor Michelle Chase and Cuban scholar Marta Nuñez Sarmiento.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James, and this is our second bonus episode of season two. This episode will feature interviews with two guests, and the theme of the episode, the subject of the episode, is the role of women in the Cuban Revolution and in Cuban society during the period of the victory of the revolution. In many ways, Cuba today reflects greater equality when it comes to gender than does the United States. A major study from 2008, for example, showed that women accounted for two-thirds of all Cuban university graduates. Even the United Nations has noted that as of February 2021, a slight majority of the seats in Cuban Parliament are held by women. But these are not facts that square easily with the U.S. government and its media and their official line about life in supposedly

backward totalitarian Cuba. So how did Cuban women achieve these gains? and what is their historical context? How are they related to other causes of Cuban social liberation? For this episode, we have a couple of guests to help us understand and explore these ideas. The first guest will be assistant professor of history at Pace University, Michelle Chase, who has extensively studied and written about this topic. In fact, she wrote a book on the topic published by the University of North Carolina Press, titled Revolution Within the Revolution, Women and Gender Politics in Cuba. And our second guest, listeners might already know,

friend of the show Marta Nunez Sarmiento, Cuban sociologist and feminist, who has been engaged with these issues all of her life. So let's get started first with Noah's interview with Michelle Chase. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. if you could just give like a quick introduction of who you are for our audience. My name is Michelle Chase. I'm an assistant professor of history at Pace University.

And I'm the author of the book Revolution Within the Revolution, Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952 to 1962. On the eve of the Cuban Revolution, what rights and privileges did Cuban women enjoy? I think a lot of people who were interested in the Cuban Revolution, they sometimes have a really polarized view of pre-revolutionary Cuban. Right? That's almost inevitable that people who support the revolution will kind of describe pre-revolutionary Cuba as this horribly underdeveloped and oppressed place. People who are critical of the revolution will have these really romantic views of pre-revolutionary Cuba. So it's important to kind of, I think, take some time to think of all specifically about what Cuban society was like before the revolution, including what it was like for women. So one of the things that people often don't know about is that Cuba was actually an important site for first wave feminism, which in this context, we're talking about the 1920s and 19. 30s. So there were a lot of feminist groups, self-defined feminist groups that emerged in Cuba in that time period, and they held all sorts of congresses, and they mobilized, and they pressured politicians. And because of that, they managed to press through a whole series of legal reforms that were really important. So one of the examples you can give is that Cuba had relatively early women's suffrage,

right? Women in Cuba got suffrage in 1934, which is earlier than most places in Latin America. they also had, at least on paper, you know, rights to custody over children, rights to alimony payment. There were a lot of labor rights for women, like paid maternity leave, things that you might not expect. A lot of those feminist demands and a lot of those feminist gains were enshrined in the 1940 constitution in Cuba. So Cuba had a very progressive constitution for its time. It was, again, one of those progressive constitutions in the whole region. And so they had this constitution that explicitly prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender, race, class, right? very progressive constitution that specified a lot of labor rights and women's rights,

etc. The devil, of course, was in the details. A lot of those legal reforms were not really recognized in practice, but it was an important series of gains that women had gotten in Cuba because of that first-way feminist movement nonetheless. One thing that I think was kind of different about Cuba, though, than compared to a lot of continental Latin America, is that the Catholic Church was not particularly strong. At least the institutional church was not particularly strong. many people consider themselves Catholics. But that became important, I think, after the revolution, when it was relatively easy to kind of challenge the power of the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church elsewhere in Latin America was sort of an entrenched work for conservative values and opposed things like abortion and divorce in a way that it was not as easy for the Cuban Catholic Church because it was a little bit weaker.

Among Cuban feminists at the time, I guess how did feminist politics differ or to what extent was there a difference between, feminist politics in the city or feminist politics in the, you know, in the countryside and in the provinces, because Cuban society was just so stratified along those kinds of economic, geographic, and ultimately racial as well, lines. I think a lot of the women's organizing, the feminist organizing that you saw in that period really was in the urban centers. It wasn't just in Havana, but it didn't necessarily spread to the countryside. There was one group which I found really interesting, which was a group of Marxist women who are affiliated with the Cuban Communist Party, they formed a group in the late 1940s, which has kind of been overlooked by historians. It was called the Democratic Federation of

Cuban Women's Democratic Federation, I guess, in English. And this is one of the few feminist groups that really did raise the issue of women in the countryside. They were concerned about the plate of peasant women. They tried to defend women workers in the sugar communities in rural parts of the island. So there was some attention and some mobilization among women in rural areas, but a lot of what you would call the feminist movement and feminist mobilization prior to the revolution did occur in the cities. Yes. And I guess, you know, like then as the Batista dictatorship takes control, was there any sort of, you know, reversal of these gains for Cuban women? Or I guess, you know, if there wasn't, then how did feminist politics come to play such a significant role

in the revolution, or at least the intellectual nucleus that did come from the cities and must have had some sort of contact with that first wave that you were talking about. So this is a really complicated question. I've written a whole book about this. So first, if I can talk a little bit about what role do women play in the anti-Batista movement? I think a lot of people know about some of the really famous women form part of the revolutionary leadership's nucleus in the Sierra Mountains. Celia Sanchez.

Exactly. Salia Sanchez was really important. Vilma Spine, Ida Santa Maria. There was a little group of women who were extremely close to the male leadership and who were important leaders in their own right. They were important strategists, important leaders. Many of them had come from the urban underground initially. Yeah, although it's interesting because like I, like the photojournalist Lee Lockwood, who has like a beautiful collection of photography from the first decade of the revolution in it when he talks about meeting Celia Sanchez, he talks. about her as being Fidel Secretary. And there is like a degree to which I kind of assumed that as outside projection inward. But I was kind of like, I was kind of curious that is something that as you're speaking, did come to my mind. Yeah, I think that's an important point that you're making. There were these women who are, have become very famous, right?

And they're like these lauded heroines in Cuba. If you go now, you see their picture and, you know, you hear a lot of praise of the heroines of the Sierra, they sometimes call them. But there was a lot, you're right, there was a lot of kind of patronizing descriptions of them also, especially in the foreign press, a tendency to see them as kind of like the secretaries of the men in power or the girlfriends and wives of the men in power, which may have been in some cases, you know, objectively true. You know, Vilna Spine did marry Raoul Castro. But Vilmas Bean was absolutely a revolutionary leader before she met him, right?

She was a really important leader of the underground in Santiago before she and Raul became romantically involved. Celia Sanchez. also was a really important organizer in her native Manzanil, one of the towns that's close to the Sierra Maestra. And she played a very important role in mobilizing people all along the coast so that when the grandma eventually came and had a horrific landing, as I'm sure other folks have told you about, she was able to make sure that the people who survived found safe houses, found supplies, found a network of collaborators and sympathizers. She was the one who organized all of that. So, you know, there were these ones.

women who are close to the rebel leadership who, even though they're well-known, they don't always necessarily get their proper due or sometimes are kind of belittled or talked about as kind of helpers or assistance to the male revolutionary leadership. And it's important to understand that that's not true, that they were really important strategists, as I said. But I think it's also important to know that there was a lot of women involved in the urban resistance movement in this period. People love to focus on kind of the Rebel Army, Fidel Castro and Raul Castro, Che Guevara, because that is a really romantic and inspiring part of the story for a lot of people. But the urban underground was also extremely important.

And I would say that in the urban underground, there was a lot of women who contributed, who organized and fought right alongside the men, who haven't gotten any kind of recognition, right? Because in general, the urban underground just hasn't been talked about as much. launch. So there were women in the Urban Underground who collaborated with some of the major revolutionary organizations like Fidel Castro's organization, the 26th of July, and others. And they did everything from transporting weapons and ammunition, purchasing weapons and ammunition. Some of them traveled to other countries to purchase and bring back weapons and ammunition. They played a big role in producing propaganda, like pamphlets and flyers and

stuff like that. They were the ones who really drafted that stuff, printed it. stored it, circulated it, right? There were a lot of women involved in that really important part of the movement, right, in getting out worried about the movement. They also did other stuff like they collected information, right? So there was a lot of women telephone operators in the 1950s, like in Santiago, for example, who collaborated with the movement, and they would eavesdrop on, you know, police and army generals and just kind of try to figure out who had been identified or where a bust might occur

and then try to get that information out. They operated safe houses, right, for men who were underground, who had been burned, identified with the police and needed either to travel up to the Sierra, to the rebel army, or just hide and try to get into an embassy and seek refuge somewhere, right? So they operated all of those types of things. They visited prisoners. A lot of times men would be caught thrown in prison, men who belonged to the revolutionary movement. And they would go under the guise of kind of a humanitarian gesture of maybe bringing them food or visiting them, bringing them letters, perhaps, from family members. But they were also doing the important work of identifying who exactly had been captured, whether those men had given up any information under questioning. And then they would take that information back out to the leaders of the revolutionary movements and the urban underground.

So women did a lot in the urban underground. And people don't know as much about it, but it was important work. And is there sort of, you know, like, were the, I guess then when sort of thinking about the role of women and the ways in which like feminist politics did become part of the actual content of the revolution and not just in the form of how these women assisted it, like how did that translation happen? How did that, how did, like, was it a quid pro quo? Was it that like a bunch of, you know, like that, that cadre of women leaders told for, for and the boys, like, listen, you have to give us ladies something. I'm obviously caricaturing it because I think that's a little bit simplistic as has often been represented, but it does seem, like, that process obviously can't have happened on its own. So, I mean, yeah, I would love to know how that worked out. Yeah, I think that that's a really good question.

Sometimes people just kind of assume that the liberation of women was just kind of an inevitable demand of a revolution that was dedicated to social justice and equality. And I don't think that's true at all. I don't think that any of this was inevitable. You know, a lot of the demands that took place during the 50s were just focused on overthrowing the military dictatorship, returning Cuba to democracy. There were also a lot of economic demands about like diversification of the economy,

maybe nationalizing some foreign companies, stuff like that, right? So you have to ask, right, if nobody was really talking about women's emancipation in the revolutionary movement in the 1950s, how did this idea become such a key part of the revolutionary platform after 1959. Right, because I do think, just to clarify for people who are listening, it did become a noticeable and very much legally inscribed part of the Cuban Revolution in terms of policy in the early

1960s. So it's not to say that, like, the Cuban Revolution, like, would go on to neglected. It's only to say that, like, there was this very long time of, you know, period of revolutionary for men, from Makada all the way up to, you know, like the victories in 1959, where they're not talking about these issues in such a direct way. And I think it's very important to understand then, well, what happened to subsequently change that? Yeah, exactly. So I think that there were kind of two political trends that kind of merged in 1959. And I see these trends as being embodied in kind of like two groups of women's activists.

On the one hand, you've had women who had taken part in the revolutionary movement in groups like Fidel Castro's 26th July movement or other groups from the urban underground. And a lot of times these women were young. They may have been as young as 17, 18, maybe 16. And they usually didn't have what you would call a really explicitly feminist consciousness. For example, if you interview them, they never say that they joined the revolutionary movement because they wanted greater women's equality. They always give the same answers that their male counterparts gave.

They joined the movement because they wanted a better future for Cuba. They wanted to overthrow an unpopular dictator, et cetera, right? But these women were highly mobilized and very passionate about the revolution. They knew that they had participated in something extraordinary, something transcendental, and they felt an incredible sense of political calling in 1959. They wanted to keep working for the revolution. They wanted to keep actively contributing to politics. In some cases, they wanted recognition from their male counterparts

and from the male leadership of the revolutionary movement about what they had done. And some women in the urban underground had gone through kind of particular experiences. For example, some of the women who I interviewed who were imprisoned were raped by prison guards. And sometimes they wanted to talk to other women in the revolutionary movement who had gone through similar experiences. But they had to first identify them because the cell structure of the underground movement was entirely designed to prevent you from knowing too many other people. So I would argue that for a lot of reasons, these women who had, you know, mostly young women who were participated in the revolutionary movement. They had what you could call a kind of incipient consciousness of being women revolutionaries, like kind of this sort of amorphous recognition that having been women revolutionaries was slightly

different from being a male revolutionary. And there was just this kind of explosion of activity in 1959 after the revolution came to power. And some of these young women kept on organizing that wanted to organize other women who had not been part of the revolutionary movement to suddenly get involved and support the revolution. So I would say that this was kind of one really important. group of women who raised, at least implicitly, the idea of women's possibility to contribute to the revolution, the idea that women should be included and recognized, the idea maybe that women could take part in military activities, which was something kind of a new idea at that time.

And then there was another group of women who I see as being really important activists in this early period of the revolution. And these were women who had been affiliated with the pre-revolutionary Communist Party. These women in the late 1940s had created a women's group. This was one that I had mentioned before, the Cuban Federation of Democratic Women. It was sort of like a women's auxiliary or sort of a women's chapter of the Communist Party, but it also had relations with an international women's federation that was affiliated kind of sponsored by the Soviet Union, which was pro-Soviet. So they had kind of a different set of political coordinates you could argue they were much farther to the left. They had a lot of political experience. They were much

older a lot of times and the women who had participated in the revolutionary movement. They had a lot of experience with the labor movement, for example. Some of them had first been labor activists, had joined unions, had joined the Communist Party, and eventually had formed this organization, which I would describe as a kind of left feminist or labor feminist organization. But one thing that's a little bit complicated, and maybe some of your other guests have talked about this, is that the Cuban Communist Party did not support the armed revolutionary movement right away. It kind of came to it slowly over time because the Cuban Communist Party in the 1950s was more oriented towards things like working with a labor movement or organizing, you know, night classes for

working class people or even trying to participate electorally, right, and trying to form what they consider to be like a mass movement. They were not interested at least at first with what they saw as like revolutionary adventurism. But eventually, the Communist Party did decide to support the armed movement led by Fidel Castro and others. And in 1959, I would say that these women who had a history with the pre-revolutionary Communist Party became really important in developing a platform demanding women's equality and greater women's rights. It was a platform they had already developed in the 1950s, partly as a result of attending kind of international congresses, with other women from the socialist block, right? They had a whole different set of influences from the women

in the revolutionary movement. And they organized other women also in 1959. They had their own rallies and round the streets. They tried to bring a lot of women together. And they demanded things like daycares for women or overt references to women's equality, right? Which you didn't hear so much from the revolutionary movement. These, I think, were the women who first pushed this idea of embracing women's equality as an important goal in the revolution onto the revolutionary agenda, right, in 1959. And I think eventually you saw these two groups of women,

these kind of two political tendencies in terms of women activists sort of merging and coming together, and that took a while. But, you know, I've said that both of those groups of women who were both very active at the very beginning, the first few months of the revolution, need to be credited with raising this idea of women's participation and women's equality

and women's liberation in slightly different ways. And I know that, like, you know, like Simone de Beauvoir and like would visit Cuba sort of famously in the late 50s with Sart. And I think that there's, you know, like there was clearly like a kind of radical political celebrity around Cuba during that time.

To what extent did, you know, sort of other like pioneering feminist thinkers of the time where people credited as such like Betty Friedan or something like was Cuba or were these kinds of gains on their radar? because these seem, you know, fairly politically seismic for the hemisphere, you know, more advanced than what almost any, I mean, probably what any other country in the Western Hemisphere is doing at that time. I mean, what was, was there an outside perception of what was going on? I think that all around Latin America, there was incredible excitement about the role of Cuban women in the revolutionary movement and in organizing and supporting the revolution after it came to power in 1959. So one of the things you see is that sometimes the 26th of July movement, the movement led by Fidel Castro, they would send people on these kind of like speaking tours around Latin America. And some of the women who had participated in the rebel army did this.

They traveled to South America and they met with women's organizations and they gave information. interviews and there was a lot of interest in the fact that these women had actually participated militarily in the revolutionary movement. Cuba also sent a huge delegation to the first Congress of Latin American women. It was a Congress that tried to draw women from all over the hemisphere to place in Chile just after the revolution. So this was, I think, in November of 1959. And women all over Latin America sent delegations, but maybe they sent three or five people. but Cuba sent this enormous delegation of like 75 women. And when they walked from the hotel where they were staying to the place where the conference was taking place,

people would literally line up on the sidewalk and cheer and clap and just try to get a glimpse of some of these women who had participated in the revolutionary movement, women like Vilmasbin, right, or others who sometimes wore uniforms. I mean, it was a very big impact, I think, and starting very early, right, as early as the first few months of 1959 that the revolution had around Latin America, especially in terms of thinking about women's participation and what that could look like. And was this sentiment, you know, did it extend to like women in the United States or, you know, intellectuals who were, I mean, you know, like to the, like, were there intellectuals who were aware of what was going on? And what did they think about it in the U.S. specifically?

Yeah, there definitely was. There was a couple of important publications that came out. One of them was by an activist named Margaret Randall. She was kind of the first person to publish a whole series of interviews that she had done with Cuban women. And the book might have come out in 1970 in English. I think that there was interest before that. But that book, I think, really crystallized for a lot of North American readers, what was going on in Cuba, the immense transformations that had taken place.

She interviewed women who had been really impoverished, working class women before the revolution, women who had been activists, women who were more middle class. She kind of captured, I think, a really broad swath of Cuban women and kind of wrote a sort of inspirational book about what was going on. and captured all the different things that women were doing, agricultural labor and other things. So that was one, I think, landmark for people outside of Cuba becoming interested,

as sort of Latin America, I mean, becoming interested in what was going on, in particular it was women's roles in Cuba. And then another real landmark was in 1975, Cuba passed something called the Family Code. This was sort of a civil code. Right. This is, I mean, in your book, you use the phrase, like, fortifying the family as sort of like the ultimate goal of this. And, you know, like there's a, there's a bunch that like Fidel and like, you know, sort of in his persona kind of announces and projects about like the, you know, the revolution of the individual and all that is going to happen to transform everyday Cubans from, you know, being like the, like almost like the victims, victims subjects of imperialism into being, you know, sort of masters of their own faith.

That's like the story of the individual that the new Cuban regime is telling. And I think that like there's a sort of way in which there's like another revolution, this parallel revolution of the revolution of the family that, you know, is like, you know, at once traditional and at once quite radical. And there's something, yeah. And I think that your phrase fortifying the family is kind of interesting as a way to describe that and capture. And it feels like that's what you're about to get into now.

Yeah, that's an interesting question because sometimes detractors of the revolution say that kind of the revolution has destroyed the family. There's all kinds of reasons why they say this and think this. And it's true that there were a lot of different forces that I think worked against fortifying the family, right? And this all throughout the revolutionary period. But it's not true that the revolution was not interested in fortifying the family or maintaining the family. There was a lot of different ways that the revolution addressed the family, sometimes kind of ambiguously throughout the revolutionary period. But one of the things I look at in my book is that the Cuban revolutionary leadership in the early 1960s encouraged a lot of people to marry, as opposed to just cohabitate, right, without papers. I mean, they paid for weddings and would pay for, like, so you would see, like, there are these, like, amazing photos of, like, indigenous peasant couples in suits and wedding gowns with, like, cars at, like, you know, giant, gaudy Catholic churches that they shortly would have never been married for, married in before. Um, all. paid for by the state. Right. So there were these mass weddings that they, um, that they tried to

hold, and especially in the countryside in the early 1960s, sometimes they'd be presided over by some official and they'd kind of marry everybody at once and then try to inscribe or register the children that the couple might have. So there was, there was that. And then later on in the revolutionary period, they also had other incentives. Sometimes there were, um, certain material shortages in Cuba. And so they would give people as a kind of gift if they got married, let's say, food for the wedding, like beer to carry out the wedding celebration or maybe like sheets and towels with the idea that people might be starting a new home together. Right. So there were there were all these different ways which over time, you know, the Cuban government actually did have an investment in the family. But the family code was an interesting one. So the family code in 1975 was something that people all over the world found interesting feminists all over the world were very curious about this because one of the things that stipulated was that housework and child care should be born equally by men and by women. And that was a revolutionary thing to put on paper. I think it was not

very easy to enforce, obviously. This was like a statement of ideals. Like these are our revolutionary principles. We believe that men and women should shoulder these burdens equally. But again, that was something that you could see as an attempt to kind of regulate. the family or ensure kind of more democratic relations within the family. There's also people who criticize the family code as basically an acknowledgement that the government, the state, would never be able to really collectivize certain duties that they'd never really be able to offer universally available childcare or they'd never establish, you know, popular laundries and cafeterias that would take all the cooking and cleaning off your hands, right? That was maybe a goal earlier on.

I mean, is that because of, is that because of, like, material limits, like, an acknowledgement that, like, we're a small country that has been, you know, kept as an agricultural, like, like, are, we haven't industrialized. We have extremely limited economic capacity because of, like, you know, years of, like, colonial domination, centuries even. And, or is it, like, an ideological thing that, like, these were not things that they were necessarily so interested in having the state administer. that these were things that they wanted to encourage with the authority of the state, but not to provide themselves. Like, yeah. I think it did reflect material shortcomings. You could also argue that maybe they prioritized other things like military expenditure

over things like building more daycares. That may also be true. But yeah, I think that a lot of the recognition that you find in the family code, that some of these duties just had to be carry out within the household that would never be collectivized and never be offered by the same. state. Yeah, it reflected ongoing material shortages that could never really be resolved. Yeah, that's correct. I am interested to know, however, and I think it would be like sort of, you know, with the benefit of hindsight and looking back about the like specific and substantial gains

made by women in those early years, what were the biggest and most enduring ones? And, you know, what is their legacy? I guess looking back, you know, some 60 years later now. You know, undoubtedly, the Cuban Revolution really expanded women's access to health and education, right, especially rural women. It encouraged women to enter the workforce. And over time, those things really did result in great strides for women. Some of those gains, those material gains, those kind of structural gains, were challenged by the collapse of the Soviet Union because Cuba really was dependent economically on the Soviet Union. All of their trade was with the socialist bloc. So some of those gains were challenged, but they were never completely undone. So I think that that's one

important thing we need to recognize about women's rights within the revolution. Another thing that I think is worth pointing out is that the Cuban Revolution has made maternal health and reproductive health a real priority. Cuban women have had access to abortion more or less upon demand ever since the mid-1960s. You can criticize a lot of the aspects of how that has taken place. For example, access to abortion is not necessarily seen within a framework of sort of a woman's right to choice or, you know, kind of part of, you know, some kind of feminist agenda having to do with women claiming reproductive justice. But that's not exactly how those things developed. But those

are certain important bedrock gains, nonetheless, right? Especially when you see it in the context of the region, right? Argentina has just legalized abortion. A lot of other countries have struggled against kind of the conservatism of the Catholic Church and right-wing sectors to institutionalize some of the things that the Cuban Revolution was able to institutionalize very early. So I think we need to recognize that despite, you know, lots of criticisms about how some of those things have taken place and how much choice women have in terms of their maternal health. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff that you can say. I think that those are some of the things that are important to kind of some of the material gains that were really important. Then politically, you know, I think one thing you can say is that there was a lot of emphasis on women's uplift on getting women to the workforce, getting them out of the house, getting them more training, more education.

getting them to participate. That was kind of a key word, I think, and thinking about the way people interacted with the Cuban Revolution, right? There was a lot of them to just mobilizing people, getting people to participate, right, on women being part of the revolution, being included in the revolution. Another thing that I think is important to recognize

when you look back kind of at the long history of the Cuban Revolution and its gender relations is that there was always a lot less emphasis on changing men. A lot of emphasis on changing women and uplifting women, but a lot less emphasis on changing men or changing relations between women and men. So there was always a lot of emphasis on revolutionary unity. And I think that the revolutionary leadership feared that trying to emphasize changing men

or changing men's behavior toward women would either generate some pushback from men or somehow, you know, introduced divisions between women and men. So they kind of didn't want to go there. And that made certain subjects really taboo. For example, domestic violence. Right? That's a real failure, I think, of the Cuban Revolution. They have never really had a public debate about gender-based violence. And it's really only now that there are some proposals from feminist activists to have some kind of comprehensive law outlined gender-based violence. But I think there's another reason that the Cuban Revolution worked hard to incorporate women. And it has to do with the fact that the growing opposition movement within Cuba was also doing a good job of recruiting women. And there was concern within the revolutionary leadership about preempting that opposition by reaching out to women to convince them to embrace the revolution. For example, 1961 was a very turbulent year, as I know you guys have been hearing a lot about. The conflict between Cuba and the United States was escalating,

and that had a lot of spin-off effects that affected women in particular. For example, by the spring of 1961, he started having really long lines for food and other necessary goods in the cities because the U.S. had broken off trade relations with Cuba. Because it was mostly women who were in charge of providing food and cooking for the family. It was mostly them standing in these very long lines. You also started to have rumors flying around that the government was somehow going to separate children from their families, for example, by forcibly sending them to the Soviet Union for some kind of training. I should say that these rumors were actively encouraged and maybe even started by the CIA. You also had more conflict between the revolutionary government and the Catholic

church, and women tended to be practicing Catholics more often than men. So as the opposition movement was growing in Cuba, some women joined it or sympathized with it, and there was an effort to mobilize pro-revolutioner women in response to counter protests by women critical of the revolution. And I think that that idea, that idea that revolutionary women should mobilize to defend the revolution was very strong in the Cuban leadership. I was recently reminded of that because I was reading something about Fidel Castro visiting Chile, years later when the Marxist president, Salvador Allende, was in office. And Fidel attended some kind of reception for the president at the time. And there was a march of right-wing women in the streets. And Fidel was just shocked to see that there was leftist women

attending this reception, he thought they should be out physically confronting the right-wing women, like literally out in the streets instead of hanging out at some reception. And I think that anecdote really captures that idea, that idea that Fidel and other leaders had, that it was important to get pro-revolutionary women involved in defending the revolution and challenging the women who might be mobilizing against it. One thing that I guess just before I let you go that I wanted to ask about is that it does seem that like in reading your book and in reading the accounts of women during the revolution and the revolutionary period in Cuba, that Cuban women viewed their own liberation as women as being fundamentally bound up in a greater

story of liberation for the Cuban people. And it's kind of interesting that even the Cuban feminist activists who identified as feminists and framed their work explicitly in that way, they viewed themselves as being part of a sort of, I guess almost, I don't want to say a coalition, but they viewed themselves as being, I guess, in coalition with a lot of, you know, like with with a much larger struggle. One might even call it class struggle. And I think that that is sort of like an interesting paradigmatic difference from how we're sort of conditioned to think about these issues in America and how our listeners may be our media tells people to listen to it. And I'm kind of curious about how, you know, like the degree to which

that view and the period that you study, kind of that conflict bears out and what your thoughts on it might be? No, yeah, I think that you're right about that. I think that when we think about women's liberation within the Cuban Revolution, it is really tied to these ideas of new men and new women that the revolution unleashed. You can have a lot of criticisms of those ideas. For example, I think the ideal of revolutionary masculinity that the revolutionary leadership embraced, it ended up being very oriented towards a kind of militaristic ideal kind of guerrilla warfare was seen as kind of the, a guerrilla warrior was seen as kind of the ideal revolutionary man in a way that made it harder to think about, let's say, different types of masculinity like male caregivers, right, or men who were not really oriented towards physical violence or warfare, right? You could say that there's all these kind of contradictions in terms of how the revolutionary movement thought about new men and new women.

But I think it's also important to see that those ideals, right, that belief the individuals could be deeply transformed and that Cuba and even the whole world could be truly remade through revolutionary consciousness and commitment. I think that is part of what made the Cuban Revolution important and radical, right? And that you see that reflected in the way that a lot of women embrace. the Cuban Revolution and wanted to participate. Professor Chase, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you.

Thanks again to Michelle Chase for coming on the show. Again, if you want to learn more about the subject, her book, Revolution Within the Revolution, is a good place to start. Now, the second part of the episode is a selection from our conversation with Marta, who spoke with us about a lot of different subjects, but one thing that kept coming up was the subject of women in the revolution. And we also discuss a bit about gender discrimination and homophobia before and after the Cuban Revolution. Specifically, we address the period in the late 60s of institutionalized homophobia, because you will hear this brought up by opponents of the revolution or of Cuba in general.

So we talk about that with Marta and talk about the development of LGBT rights in Cuba, the way they've changed and developed since then and indeed where they are today. What were the kinds of innovations or advances that the Cuban Revolution took to address these problems that were distinct from the ways that, you know, let's say, you know, American liberals tried to deal with them when comparing themselves to a state like Cuba? Well, the first thing is that Cuba was in a complete change of all the structures, which is not the case of the states. because the structure of the United States did not change, which was not the case of Cuba. Cuba started changing completely, politically, economically, ideologically, culturally, everything. But we don't have already, although we have machismo and we have lots of discrimination against women. No, women are stronger than men here in Cuba in many aspects. But we still have a, with a COVID thing, it was horrible for women working all the time,

being professionals, being with the vaccines, with the majority of the professionals in healthcare, they're all women, the doctors, the nurses, the scientists, but we have to do the second shift. So that's much more in Cuba still. But anyway, we have advanced much more. Marta, I think one topic we want to address, especially in an episode about gender relations in Cuba,

is the subject of the UMAP camps, or the military units to aid production and the institutionalized homophobia. Yes, yes, yes. It's certainly brought up, I think, by those who would rather dismiss the revolution altogether, but it is something that happened.

It's probably one of the darker chapters of the revolution. For our listeners who don't know, essentially what happened was in the middle of the 60s outside of the time period we discuss on the show, there was an attempt to militarize

all sectors of society that were uncooperative or seen as so far incompatible with the goals of the revolution, especially given the looming threat of an American attack or invasion. And one initiative located in Kamauway that eventually materialized were these military units to aid production. These were supposed to be places where politically uncooperative people would do their part and assist in the defense of socialist Cuba. But these developed into forced labor camps. And what's more, those roped into these camps, although it was not exclusively gay people.

There were also conscientious objectors, you know, pacifists, people who were not generally down with the revolutionary program. Gay people were included here because of, as many scholars have observed, the long history way before the revolution of machismo in Cuba, you know, an aggressive, militant masculinity. So I just wanted to set the scene there for the listeners. could you please tell us, you know, what was the legacy of the UMAPs? How are they thought about in Cuba? What was the self-criticism there? Very good question. Very good question.

Yes, UMAP was a very big mistake, a very big mistake. And Fidel talked about this in 2000. Yeah, he took responsibility and said it was wrong. He condemned it. It was a very big mistake because, but a mistake that must be put into the year, when it was happening. It was from 1964, 60, 5, up to

1967, end of it. That was all. And people still start in the States, for example, even my students coming from these consortium. They think that it's still happening.

No, no, it was from 64, 65 to 67. As you said, they were gay people and even religious persons. Even religious persons were there, too. And when it was closed, It never happened again. But thus, it's a bitter taste.

It's a bitter taste. And you know why? Because we haven't been able to study why did it happen? What happened? Why were there closed? What happened afterwards? If we had, if we would have been able to study this, which I think at some point we should have, we would have our word.

Because up to now, what you have in the minds of the Americans, It's, for example, the book of Arenas was put into a film, but Night Falls, no? Yeah, by Julian Schnabel. That's the version, American version of that it's still, this is going on still in Cuba. Well, we have another version of Fresas and Chocolate, strawberries and chocolate. You know the film from 1932? That's our point of view of two big, big, very big. discrimination, discrimination against gay, discriminating nation against people that were leaving the country.

And so that was put on terms of the whole of the population, in the view of the whole population in the midst of the special period. And people applauded that in the movies. So it was a turning point for the question of homophobia in Cuba. That film, for me, is a breaking point. more much more important for Cubans than when night falls. Now, of course, you can't help but point out that in America, for example, being gay was literally illegal for most of the 20th century, and people were locked up for it. They were essentially tortured for being gay here. You know, Western Europe, I mean, in Britain, they would chemically castrate people.

They chemically castrated Alan Turing, who, you know, helped them win World War II. So there's a humility that is conspicuously absent from those criticizing Cuba from the United States. But years roll on the rights and freedoms for gay people and queer people in Cuba expand. Gay marriage, which I believe is about to be legally enshrined in the country's family code. For many years has been basically pro forma recognized the union of same-sex couples. And what's more, in 2008, while Barack Obama, Obama is still evolving on gay marriage. Cuba's Minister of Public Health signed Resolution 126, and I'm reading here from a study in health and human rights. This is an act that assured

complete coverage for Cubans seeking gender confirmation surgeries, the first of any country in Latin America to do so. Ten years later, Cuba is celebrated as having one of the most open and inclusive LGBTQ public health and education programs in the Americas. It actually became became part of the health care system through law that transitions for transgender people who need them is actually part of the universal health care in the country. Those services are part of what you can expect as a citizen. Yes. Not only the right to health care, but the right to transition and have it be paid for. Now, one could not help but observe. The United States does not have even universal health care yet, but that even if we got that far, the fight to have transitions covered in

universal health care, I would imagine, would be quite a battle in the U.S. Congress. But this was a couple years ago in Cuba, I believe. So what was that like to see that past? And more broadly, for the critic, or the skeptic who would point out the UMAP camps in that history, is this evidence of the revolution extending and growing, including more people in the social liberation, that project? Well, the first change of gender. The first one was practiced, I think, in somewhere around the beginning of the 90s. A woman who was trapped in a man's body and a man

who was trapped in a woman's body. And I've met both. They're already in their 50s or almost 60s. And well, this process was stopped in the special period because people started saying how are we

spending money in these operations, in the surgical operations when we don't have money to eat. This is one of the effects. You know, we bring up the special period. The special period was brought on because of the fall of the Soviet Union. And Cuba no longer had that partner. And it produced this period of incredible instability, which, as you pointed out, produces, you know, new kinds of social regression and homophobia and racism and discrimination and so on. But the thing that, like, you know, ultimately require, you know, like the thing underneath the fall of the

Soviet Union underneath the special period is, of course, the American economic embargo and program that continues to deny Cuba from full participation in the global economy. And it's very similar to the American story in Iraq in the 1990s, which was the first season of our show, where sanctions in the 1990s ended up, you know, destroying all of the social and physical infrastructure in the country. And, you know, Cuba was able to withstand that, but I only bring it up just as a way of pointing out how sanctions. In this case, it led to a decade and a half of trans Cubans not being able to get the medical care they required. Yes. So they stopped. The media, the media stopped them and the

public opinions stopped them. They were only renewed at the beginning of this century. And now they're around 57 or 60 persons who are mainly women trapped in men's body. They're real women. So that was a program that started in the 80s, in the 80s. But people that made those first operations were trained in, I think it's Belgium where they were trained. Some Western European country, I think it was Belgium. And the doctors that made the first operations were from those countries, aided by Cuban doctors. So this training never stopped, by the way.

The doctors kept training, and now there's a Cuban doctors doing them during the last 20-something years. The Cuban doctors doing these operations. Now, transgender, there's a problem, no, I, by the way, yesterday, on the 8th of March, there was a new program for the advancement of women that came up. It's a law by the president of Cuba, and it includes. Everything concerning gender, not only advancement of women, concerning, advancement of all genders, and it includes in one of the articles, I just read it yesterday,

one of the articles has to do with these gender operations, surgical operations. There is a complete set of articles headed for the Ministry of Public Health. Here is actually a clip for those who can speak Spanish of Rao Castro at the Eighth Party Congress earlier this year, discussing these goals to make the revolution more inclusive, particularly on this front. and the identity of her. Thanks again to Marta and Michelle

for joining us and thank you for continuing to listen. Next week will be a discussion going a bit deeper into the relationship between the Cuban Revolution and the Black Liberation Movement in the United States. See you next time.