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CONSUMER CULTURE AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN REVOLUTIONARY CUBA, 1971-1986

ALEXIS BALDACCI

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To my parents and to Ahren. For believing it was possible, even when I did not.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I thank my doctoral committee for all of their advice and direction, not only with regard to this dissertation, but also in the years leading up to my first research trip to Cuba. In seminars and office hours and emails, their support has been central to my development as a scholar. I thank my advisor, Lillian Guerra, for her tireless passion and work ethic, which have been an inspiration to me. I continue to learn from her constantly, even when she is not actively teaching. I thank Matt Jacobs, for demystifying many of the murkier elements of academia, and Ida Altman, for her frank and insightful comments on multiple chapter drafts. I also thank Jeffrey Needell and Efraín Barradas, in addition to the rest of my doctoral committee, for their guidance as I finish this dissertation and look forward to transforming it into a book.

I am grateful to have met many people in both Cuba and the United States who have suggested sources and approaches, commented on drafts of my work, and debated the legacies of the Cuban Revolution. My research in Cuba would not have been possible without the institutional support of the Fundación Antonio Nuñez Jiménez and Professor Reinaldo Funes. I also thank the staff of the Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba Jose Martí for their help in accessing many of the sources that form the backbone of this project; I extend similar gratitude to the staff at the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami. In Cuba, especially, it feels like almost every person that I met influenced this project in some way, either by sharing their recollections of the period that I study or reflecting on what scarcity continues to mean for Cuban daily life. I am grateful for each of these encounters, and I hope that, should any of those men and women ever get to read it, that this dissertation rings true to the complexity of these issues in the past and present.

Personally and professionally, I am so grateful to have met Claudia Martínez, who was my partner for many long walks and even longer conversations on the malecón and was a one-

woman family to me in Centro Habana. In Gainesville, Lauren Krebs has been the first audience for my scariest and most ambitious ideas. I cannot thank her enough for talking through big concepts and petty frustrations or for all the hikes and happy hours that let us leave both of those things behind for a little while. My thanks also to Mike Bustamante, Michelle Chase, Jesse

Horst, Rachel Hynson, and Billy Kelly, for their contributions on all things Cuba and Cuban history. At the University of Florida, Andrea Ferreira and Danny Fernández have been great colleagues and even better friends. I also thank Johanna Mellis and Elyssa Hamm for commenting on my work and challenging me to think big picture, beyond the borders of Latin

America.

Finally, I wish to thank my parents. My dad, for asking me every week if I had “finished the dissertation yet,” and my mom, for talking to me about anything else. Thanks also to my future husband, Ahren, who has supported me throughout this long process and given me countless pep talks. I would not have finished without him.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 8

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 9

ABSTRACT ...... 10

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 12

Arguments ...... 15 Historiography ...... 23 Sources and Methodology ...... 26 Chapter Overview ...... 29

2 WOMEN IN THE INSTITUTIONALIZED REVOLUTION, 1971-1975 ...... 33

Integration into the Soviet Bloc ...... 35 The Turn towards Consumption ...... 37 What to Buy and How to Buy It: The Situation Facing Consumers in the Early 1970s ...... 53 Combatting Scarcity through a Traditionally-Gendered Approach ...... 68 A Radical New Approach ...... 78 The Limits of State-Led Women’s Liberation ...... 91 Conclusion ...... 99

3 THINKING LIKE A THIN COW IN THE ERA OF THE FAT COWS, 1976-1985 ...... 100

Soviet Models and Cuban Realities: Rationalizing Consumption in the late 1970s ...... 103 Poder Popular: Female Legislators in a Popular Democracy ...... 118 I Now Pronounce You Husband, Wife, and Revolutionary State: The Impact of the Family Code ...... 123 The Self-Actualized Cuban Woman (or Superwoman) ...... 142 Quinceñera Politics ...... 158 Conclusion ...... 173

4 SOCIO-LISM: AUSTERITY AND A NEW CUBAN CULTURE, 1976-1985 ...... 175

(Ab)normalizing Crime?: The Struggle to Legitimize Socialist Legality ...... 177 Socio-lism: The Importance of Having Friends in a Socialist Society ...... 193 Time and Lines: from Coca-Cola to Cola-Cultura...... 199 Killing Time: Free Time and Boredom in a Collective Society ...... 209 To Invent or to Resolve?: Cuban Ingenuity as a Marker of National Identity ...... 219

Socialist Ownership and Shared Property in a Context of Austerity ...... 225 Conclusion ...... 231

5 SHOWDOWNS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, 1972-1980 ...... 233

Cuban Realities Collide: The American Dream in Exile ...... 233 Ideological Diversionism and the Temptations of Mass Consumerism ...... 251 The Cuban Press as Ideological Handbook ...... 264 “Pants from Outside the Island and Mindset from Outside as Well”: Debates over International Youth Culture in Cuba ...... 277 Exile in Blue Jeans: The Mariel Boatlift as Blue Jean Revolution ...... 287 Conclusion ...... 297

6 SOCIALIST CONSUMERISM: EXPERIMENTS IN MARKET REFORM, 1980-1986 ..300

Shared Needs, Collaborative Solutions ...... 303 Farmers’ Markets ...... 314 Vegetable Invasions: “The Only Invasion That We Would Welcome with Open Arms” ...330 New Dimensions to the New Man ...... 343 Conclusions...... 352

7 EPILOGUE ...... 357

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 363

Archival Sources ...... 363 Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami, Miami, FL ...... 363 Special and Area Studies Collections, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL ...... 363 Oral History Interviews ...... 363 Newspapers and Periodicals ...... 363 Periodicals in Print ...... 363 Digital Periodicals ...... 363 Films ...... 364 Published Primary Sources ...... 364 Web Sources ...... 365 Secondary Sources ...... 366 Dissertations and Theses ...... 369

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 370

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

1-1 Pánfilo and his altar to the ration book...... 12

2-1 Petra Almaguer, National Work Hero and “Symbol of the Cuban Woman of Today” .....79

2-2 “Today is my day to buy” ...... 93

3-1 Appropriate and inappropriate Cuban womanhood...... 150

3-2 An example of the infamous towel quinceñera photographs...... 165

4-1 The power of shopkeepers and the importance of having friends in a context of austerity...... 175

4-2 The socialist service industry’s daily schedule ...... 206

5-1 A cartoon published during the family visits poking fun at outlandish foreign styles and their prestige among Cuban audiences ...... 277

5-2 Two Marielitos on “the land of the free”...... 291

5-3 Demonstration against those who sought to leave Cuba as part of the Mariel boatlift ...294

5-4 Political cartoon of the U.S. president meeting with his military planners ...... 296

6-1 Pipo, Mima, and the rest of the neighborhood try out the MLC ...... 321

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ANAP Asociación Nacional de Agricultores Pequeños (National Association of Small Farmers)

CDR Comité de Defensa de la Revolución (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution)

Comecon Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

CTC Confederación de Trabajadores Cubanos (Confederation of Cuban Workers)

FEEM Federación de Estudiantes de la Enseñanza Media (Federation of Secondary Education Students)

FMC Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (Federation of Cuban Women)

ICAIC Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfricos (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry)

ICOIDI Instituto Cubano para la Orientación y Investigación de la Demanda Interna (Cuban Institute for the Orientation and Investigation of Internal Demand)

INDER Instituto Cubano de Deportes, Educación Física, y Recreación (Cuban Institute of Sports, Physical Education, and Recreation)

MININT Ministerio del Interior (Ministry of the Interior)

MLC Mercado Libre Campesino (Free Peasant Market, or Farmers’ Market)

ORC Oficinas de Registro de Consumidores (Offices for Consumer Registry). Previously OFICODA

PCC Partido Comunista de Cuba (Communist Party of Cuba)

UJC Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas (Union of Young Communists)

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

CONSUMER CULTURE AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN REVOLUTIONARY CUBA, 1971-1986

Alexis Baldacci

May 2018

Chair: Lillian Guerra Major: History

This dissertation examines everyday life and lived experiences of the Cuban revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, a period that historians are just beginning to study. Due to a series of disastrous policies enacted in the 1960s, the revolution entered the 1970s on the verge of economic collapse and facing widespread discontent from citizens who were demoralized and exhausted from a decade of hard work, sacrifice, and often unpopular incursions by the state into their private lives and civil society, which was effectively criminalized in the last years of the

1960s. In order to fix the economy, revolutionary leadership was forced to give up some measure of sovereignty to the Soviet Union and rely more heavily on Soviet models and sweetheart trade agreements. In order to re-legitimate itself in the eyes of its citizens, the state was forced to listen and respond to people’s problems. This dissertation traces this dynamic and argues that the new consumer compact forged between state and citizen in the late 1970s functioned primarily as a safety valve, in which the state co-opted citizen complaints. In the process, state leaders assigned the burden for overcoming the difficulties of generalized austerity, which persisted even in this period of economic stability, “the era of the fat cows,” on individuals, urging them to do more with less.

These processes had particularly negative impacts on Cuban women. Due to prevailing gender norms, the burden of austerity fell predominantly on their shoulders, as women were generally responsible for feeding and clothing themselves and their families, as well as maintaining the household. While the revolutionary state’s unique women’s liberation project has received significant attention both from contemporary observers and scholars, I found that on-going difficulties in the consumer and service industries–which by the 1970s and 80s were caused less by the U.S.-imposed economic embargo and more by the inefficiencies of central planning and widespread practices of pilfering from workplaces–ultimately undermined this mission by preventing women from taking advantage of the real opportunities for social, economic, and political advancement offered to them by the revolutionary state.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Figure 1-1. Pánfilo and his altar to the ration book (Gretta Espinosa Clemente, “La realidad dicta el guión,” El Caiman Barbudo (Havana), 18 Sept. 2017, accessed online 14 Feb. 2018: http://www.caimanbarbudo.cu/articulos/2017/09/la-realidad-dicta-el-guion/).

In January 2015, when I arrived in Cuba to do my dissertation research, it was not yet so common for an American to be wandering the streets of Central Havana. Everyone I met was curious about what I had come to do, and when I explained my interest in austerity and material and consumer culture, many people asked me the same question: “Have you seen Pánfilo?”

Pánfilo, as I came to find out, is the main character of the very popular television show, Vivir del

Cuento.1 Played by a young math professor, which is itself a testament to the ways that Cuba’s

1 It is unclear what relationship the character Pánfilo has with “Pánfilo de la Jama,” a Cuban man who went viral when a video of him exclaiming “Jama, aquí lo que hace falta es jama [Food, here what we need is food]” was uploaded to YouTube and the paquete, the Cuban system of sharing information via flash drive, in 2009. The video was a public embarrassment for the Cuban state, which maintains its commitment to social justice and providing for

professional class has had to seek alternative sources of income following the economic collapse of the 1990s, Pánfilo the character is an old man who is obsessed with the material circumstances of his life. He has an altar to the ration book in his living room, the cover blown up as large as a poster (Figure 1-1). Below it, on a small shelf, sits a glass of water, a common offering to the orishas of Santería. Each episode revolves around the everyday struggles of making do in conditions of austerity. While the television show is set in the present day, it is a testament to how decades of life under the Revolution have transformed how Cubans relate to the foodstuffs and material goods that ensure their survival.

Many Cubans told me that it was shocking that Luis Silva, the professor who plays

Pánfilo, had not been thrown in jail for his brutally honest portrayal of the absurd forms that scarcity has taken in Cuban daily life; yet, the more research I did, the less shocking this was to me. I found, in fact, that in the 1970s and 1980s, a period that is today remembered nostalgically as “the era of the fat cows,” material scarcity was a factor that occupied much of people’s time and energies. For women, who hefted the domestic burden due to the persistence of traditional gender roles, the ultimate result was that continued scarcity curtailed their ability to take advantage of the very real opportunities for social and political advancement offered by the revolutionary state’s women’s liberation movement. I found, too, that the continued existence of shortcomings in the consumer and service economies was a common topic not only in private conversations amongst friends and family but in the public sphere. In other words, the candid portrayal of scarcity that Pánfilo is known for today is not new.

citizens’ basic needs discursively if not in practice, and “Pánfilo de la Jama” reportedly faced harsh repercussions, which stand in stark contrast to the noted freedom of expression enjoyed by his TV namesake.

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw an explosion of public debate about these topics.

There were countless newspaper editorials and magazine exposés, public opinion polls, stories and poems written to shame actors on all sides of the consumer economy, from concerned shoppers to those working in production and distribution. On the consumer side, these discussions often hinged on gender roles and the generational divides between revolutionary youth and their parents and grandparents, who could be weighed down by retrograde ideas and values systems held over from the pre-revolutionary era. Cartoons and other educational experiences, such as the development of a boarding school system that enabled the state to take over extensive parenting functions, were crafted to teach children to deal with it all better than their parents had. In short, the meaning of material goods and consumer complaints was a topic of discussion and debate, as citizen and state together negotiated the economic priorities and other conditions that determined the conditions of daily life. There were limits to acceptable debate, however, even in this period of open discussion of the shortcomings of the consumer and service economies. The work ethic and revolutionary credentials of the individuals working in production and distribution were fair game for critique. Yet these critiques were rarely extended to high officials, despite the fact that the decisions these individuals made about how Cuba’s scarce resources should be distributed were central in determining the limits of what was possible in the material realm.

In 1959 Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement came to power promising an extension of middle class abundance to the Cuban nation. In 2018, as I write this introduction and Cuban viewers tune in each Monday to see what Pánfilo will say and do next, the Cuban population is marked by generalized poverty and the revolutionary state remains in power. This dissertation traces the emergence of this generalized austerity, in the process tracing citizen

efforts to convince and coerce the revolutionary state to prioritize their needs and return to a vision of shared abundance. While many have pointed to the 1990s, the Special Period, as the root cause of the economic problems faced by many Cuban consumers today, I argue that serious shortages of basic goods and foodstuffs marked even the most economically-stable period of revolutionary rule. In fact, debates about the rights and responsibilities of both state and citizen with regard to the supply and acquisition of the essentials of daily life were most common and most fierce in this period. This is precisely because the state had the economic capacity to improve the general standard of living in these years but chose to prioritize Cuba’s international standing over social justice in the domestic sphere by chasing elusive economic development and investing in internationalist projects in Latin America and Africa.

Arguments

Due to a series of idealistic but disastrous policies enacted in the 1960s, the revolution entered its second decade on the verge of economic collapse. As Cuban economist Carmelo

Mesa-Lago has argued, from 1966 through 1970 Cuban leaders embraced an idealistic approach to economic development, seeking to skip the transitional stages of socialism and jumpstart the economy directly into communism. This “Sino-Guevarist” approach was influenced by developments in China, especially the Great Leap Forward, and the ideas of Che Guevara. It aimed to transform Cuba’s agricultural economy into an industrial economy, a process which centered on the development of a new kind of citizen, a “New Man” who performed voluntary labor and was motivated through moral as opposed to material incentives.2 For this approach to function economically, Cubans had to internalize these norms by developing sufficient socialist

2 Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 1-10. See also Silverman, Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate, for an edited collection of the debates within Cuba about the merits of moral versus material incentives, which took place from 1963 to 1965. The “Sino-Guevarist” approach, to use Mesa-Lago’s terminology, was adopted in 1966 as a result of these debates.

consciousness to understand themselves as part of an egalitarian, collective society in which they labored for the benefit of all. Though the revolutionary state came to power in 1959, and some scholars have argued that the Cuban revolution ended as early as 1961, New Man ideology encouraged the idea that the revolution was an unending process that was constantly underway, even on a mental and emotional level within individuals.3

These efforts culminated in the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968 and the massive failure of the Ten Million Ton Harvest in 1970. With the Revolutionary Offensive, the state outlawed remaining private industry, further strengthening its hold on far-ranging aspects of national life.

The state did not have sufficient resources to replace the services offered by the businesses that the measure closed and nationalized, but it encouraged Cubans to understand the growing hardships of daily life as “morally cleansing”: formative experiences for the New Man.4 In addition to contributing to the moral development of the New Man, these economic hardships contributed to the state’s development goals by promoting capital accumulation at the cost of internal consumption.5 Leaders hoped that this capital accumulation would combine with the push for a record Ten Million Ton Harvest of the 1970 sugar crop to form sufficient economic foundation for the nation’s jump into communism.

Leaders understood citizens’ experience of hardship during the push for the Ten Million

Ton Harvest—which involved performing backbreaking agricultural labor and living with even greater material scarcity as leaders reconfigured the economy to prioritize the Harvest at the expense of other economic activities—to be formative experiences, helping citizens to develop

3 See Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State, for a critical and insightful discussion of the use of the concept of on- going revolution by the Cuban state and by Cubanists in the academy.

4 Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 290.

5 Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 8.

the fundamental consciousness necessary for the jump to communism. As Lillian Guerra has argued, these measures were central to further consolidation of authoritarian rule in which alternative interpretations of revolution or communism were not tolerated. Leaders used these events to produce “a ‘rallification’ of everyday life” that they hoped would restore the “mass euphoria” of the early 1960s and in the process “restore unconditional standards of support for government policies.”6

The sugar harvest did reach record heights, but it fell short of the projected ten million tons, producing just 8.5 million tons. In addition, due to the short-sighted prioritization of the

Harvest, the remainder of the economy was left in shambles. As a result, “the Sino-Guevarist model suffered a mortal blow,” and the Soviet Union “increased its bargaining power,” at the expense of the Chinese influence evident in the Sino-Guevarist model.7 In order to fix the economy, leaders were forced to give up some measure of sovereignty to the Soviet Union and rely more heavily on Soviet models and sweetheart trade agreements, which kept Cuba in a dependent state much like the one it had been in for the previous 100 years, primarily dependent on sugar exports. Dependence on Soviet models and aid allowed for a period of economic stability in the 1970s and 1980s; however, this development was built on a foundation of sand that began eroding in the mid-1980s as Soviet leaders increasingly focused their attention and resources on problems at home and in Eastern Europe.

Not only that, but by 1970 the state faced widespread discontent from citizens who were demoralized and exhausted from a decade of hard work and sacrifice in the name of the revolutionary project. With the failed Ten Million Ton Harvest, the state had “achieve[d]

6 Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 290-293.

7 Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 9.

political exhaustion rather than popular euphoria.”8 This political (and physical) exhaustion prompted a wave of absenteeism among Cuban workers that was so severe it amounted to a two- year-long undeclared strike in a context in which strikes were illegal.9 Citizens on strike were also reeling from unprecedented incursions by the state into their private lives and civil society, as the state strengthened and centralized its power with the Revolutionary Offensive, abolishing the remaining private businesses and effectively criminalizing civil society. The 1970s and

1980s, then, are a period in which the state was forced to reconcile mistakes it had made in the

1960s.

In order to re-legitimate itself in the eyes of its citizens, the state was forced to listen to and respond to people’s problems, and the dissertation traces this dynamic. Tired of constant sacrifice for the sake of a utopian future that only seemed further away after the Ten Million Ton

Harvest, citizens ached for a return to normalcy in their everyday lives. Leaving behind the emotional extremes of the 1960s–the revolutionary forces’ triumph over the dictator Batista, the victory over U.S. aggression at the Bay of Pigs, and euphoric projects like the Literacy

Campaign, which aimed for 100 percent literacy in Cuba–the 1970s and ‘80s were also a period of institutionalization. In the process of institutionalization, leadership developed a new constitution as well as new institutions that sought to translate the revolutionary project into something more sustainable, compatible with normal lives in ordinary times. Membership in

Cuba’s Communist Party expanded in this period, up to 2.2 percent of the population at the time of the Party’s first congress in 1975.10 As this statistic illustrates, power remained concentrated

8 Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 316.

9 Domínguez, Cuba, 275.

10 LeoGrande, “The Communist Party of Cuba,” 397-419.

in few hands, and the ability of average citizens to shape revolutionary policy through the Party structure was extremely limited.

The most notable new institution developed in this period was Poder Popular, a parliamentary body that operates on every level from the municipal to the national.11 While the voices of average citizens remained far removed from national decision making, the municipal bodies of Poder Popular primarily functioned as spaces for average citizens to voice their widespread discontentment with austerity and work together to seek local solutions. As Carollee

Bengelsdorf has argued, the ability of local Poder Popular delegates to truly enact change was limited by political and economic factors.12 On the micro-level of everyday life, Poder Popular delegates were able to address many pressing problems, but as they ran into material difficulties, they tended to echo the rhetoric of upper leadership rather than using their constituents’ demands to push leadership to re-evaluate that rhetoric. My dissertation therefore sheds light on the nature of “popular democracy” in Cuba and the ability of Cuban citizens to shape government policy despite the fact that Cuba’s Communist Party remained among the smallest and least representative in the socialist world.

Due to prevailing gender norms, the burden of the economic collapse that loomed in 1970 fell predominantly on women, who were generally responsible for feeding and clothing themselves and their families, as well as maintaining the household. I found that throughout the

1970s, different groups, but most notably Cuban women, argued that in order for them to be able to dedicate their time and effort to the Revolution’s success, then the state had to prioritize fixing the everyday problems that monopolized their time. As this dissertation shows, women made

11 See Bengelsdorf, The Problem of Democracy in Cuba, for an extensive discussion of Poder Popular and evaluation of its function as a democratic institution

12 Bengelsdorff, The Problem of Democracy in Cuba, 155-157.

these arguments in diverse forums: in work place meetings and meetings of the Federation of

Cuban Women, in letters to the editor of the major magazines and interviews with journalists.

The everyday problems they hoped to resolve were primarily problems of scarcity and inefficiency in the consumer and service industries that persisted even in this period of economic stability built on Soviet assistance: “the era of the fat cows,” as it was called.

I found that as the state sought to re-establish its legitimacy in the wake of the 10 Million

Ton Harvest, these arguments were effective to the point that for much of the 1980s the state realigned its economic priorities to invest in fixing these problems. While the state was attentive to popular voices in this period, it was never truly accountable. Rather than looking to popular demands to guide the revolutionary project, leaders used speeches, national campaigns, and the press to encourage citizens to re-evaluate their relationship to material hardship. Therefore state incursions into formerly private realms, like the domestic sphere, did not end with the 1960s but instead intensified in the 1970s with these efforts to shape consumer behavior and desire. While the state was committed to meeting citizens’ needs and did invest in reducing scarcity in these years, leaders had a conflicted relationship with material desire and consistently sought to downplay materialist desires and promote consciousness among the population. It was easy for leaders to take these positions, as they did not require any personal sacrifice on their part. As elsewhere in the socialist world, a new class had emerged in which political power translated to material advantage, though leaders were careful to keep their consumption behind closed doors.

The concept of ideological diversionism was central to these efforts. Raúl Castro had first defined ideological diversionism in 1968 as “thought[s], actions, attitudes, and/or behaviors that criticized Marxism from supposedly Marxist positions.’”13 The ambiguity of this political crime

13 Guerra, Visions of Power, 228.

made it a handy catch-all for denigrating anyone whose interpretations of the revolution differed from those of leaders. As Cuba’s economic situation began to improve, he further elaborated on the concept in 1972.14 With this speech, Raúl Castro established materialism as a minefield that citizens consistently struggled to navigate: while some material desire was normal and central to furthering the revolutionary state’s goals, it could easily be taken too far, and the precise boundaries of what was too far were never established and were in fact fluid in these years.15

This impacted emerging ideas of the New Woman considerably. Unlike her male counterpart, the

New Woman was never explicitly theorized, but portraits of the ideal revolutionary woman came in a number of forms in this period. Together they created unrealistic expectations that pushed women to do everything—for the state, for their families, and for themselves—all while maintaining bourgeois standards of beauty and femininity that were increasingly difficult to maintain in a context of scarcity.16

In 1980, the state took its attentiveness to citizens’ material needs to new heights, embarking on economic reforms that included the development of a parallel market and other structures that allowed Cubans to connect to one another, independently of the state, to meet their needs. These new mechanisms allowed for greater levels of individual economic autonomy

14 Raúl Castro, “El diversionismo ideológico arma sutil que esgrimen los enemigos contra la revolución.”

15 The arbitrary and fluid boundaries that distinguished appropriate relationships to material goods from ideological diversionism mirror the line drawn by Fidel Castro in his 1961 speech “Words to Intellectuals,” in which he outlined the revolution’s stance on cultural production by famously stating “within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.” For an excellent discussion of how this concept functioned theoretically and in practice, see Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State, 21-29.

16 Lillian Guerra’s work has shown that in the 1960s the revolutionary state used a variety of methods, including programs designed to empower rural women, to extend bourgeois norms across the socioeconomic lines that had characterized pre-revolutionary society, Visions of Power, 222-225. I found that the state continued to value bourgeois notions of taste and beauty into the 1970s and 1980s, and in some cases took these processes further in these years by attempting to shame women into abandoning some of the more creative responses to scarcity that had first gained popularity in the 1960s, like the practice of wearing one’s hair in rollers in public.

than had been seen since the Revolutionary Offensive had established a true command economy.

Yet by the mid-1980s, as it became clear that socialism was faltering in Europe and as Soviet aid began to dry up, Cuban leadership saw rough times ahead. In this context, individual autonomy threatened the stability of one-party, authoritarian rule. To brace the population and consolidate their control, the state therefore turned away from its brief commitments to easing the burden of generalized austerity on the Cuban population. With the Rectification of Errors campaign, announced in 1986, leadership returned to the hardline stances of the 1960s, which once again called on Cubans to make daily sacrifices in service to the revolution.

These developments were centrally tied to the Cuban state’s women’s liberation movement, which sought to liberate women from the home to enable them to dedicate their time and labor to the revolutionary state. In the 1960s, when leadership still believed communism was just around the corner, long-time communist Blas Roca theorized that gender inequality in Cuba would be solved through the development of extensive service and consumer economies under communism. In that way, the domestic labor traditionally performed by women would be transferred from the private sphere to the public sphere, where workers would earn a livable wage to complete these tasks and be aided by mechanization in doing so.17 As leaders embraced a slower and more conventional path to communism in the 1970s, they experimented with different methods of easing the domestic burden. Ultimately, they chose to legislate it into obscurity with the inclusion of the Family Code, which stipulated that domestic and childrearing tasks were the equal responsibility of both genders, in the 1976 Constitution. While this was a powerful redefinition of gender roles, it resonated more with Cuban women than it did with

Cuban men, who resisted this state incursion into the home. I argue that this solution left all the

17 “¿Quién atiende al hogar, a la cocina y a los ninos en el comunismo?” Mujeres (Havana), May 1964, pp. 76-77

power in Cuban men’s hands; women could use the Family Code to urge their husbands to do their share, but they had nowhere to turn if they refused.

My focus on everyday life therefore reveals one of the unintended limitations of the

Cuban state’s women’s liberation movement. It illustrates that yes, gender equality was a goal of the revolution, but not one that was considered a high enough priority for the state to truly invest in solving the daily domestic dilemmas that prevented so many women from taking full advantage of the opportunities offered within the revolutionary project. True equity at home lost out to different economic priorities, for example Fidel Castro’s efforts to turn Cuba into a nation of exporters or increase Cuba’s influence on the global stage by investing in internationalist projects in Latin America and Africa. In addition, the vast divergence between the lifestyles of the political elite, and the role of the press in facilitating debates about and improvement in the consumer and service industries reveal considerable variation and complexity with regard to lived experiences of the Cuban revolution.

Historiography

Little academic work has been done on the decades of the 1970s and 1980s in Cuba.

Historians have tended to focus on the 1950s struggle against dictator Fulgencio Batista and the experimental era of the 1960s, a period in which revolutionary leadership worked to consolidate their control and carve out both a domestic and international path for the revolution.18

Anthropologists and political scientists, by contrast, have focused on the 1990s and the slow

18 For the struggle against Batista, see Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution and Paterson, Contesting Castro. Recent work on the 1960s includes Guerra, Visions of Power, and Benson, Antiracism in Cuba. In addition, historians are increasingly looking across the 1959 divide to find continuities between the 1950s and 1960s. Chase, Revolution within the Revolution is one example. In addition, Piero Gleijeses has published on international affairs and the interplay of Cuban, Soviet, African, and U.S. forces in southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. There have also been important works by political scientists Jorge Domínguez and Carollee Bengelsdorf on the period. Domínguez’s Cuba: Order and Revolution analyzes politics and government through the mid-1970s and Bengelsdorf’s study of political culture in Cuba extends to the 1990s.

decay of the revolution’s social and political commitments in the context of the extreme material scarcity engendered by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus, much of what we know about the

1970s and 1980s is based on conjecture and collective memory. I argue that sources from the period indicate that the era of the fat cows was much more divisive and shaped by scarcity than it has been remembered. In fact, I found that many trends associated with the Special Period emerged prior to the 1990s and were rooted in decades of scarcity. While the degree and nature of scarcity varied from 1959 to 1986, austere material conditions were a constant rather than an exception in lived experiences of the Cuban Revolution.

Despite the centrality of scarcity and material culture to lived experiences of the Cuban revolution, no historical study of these themes exists. My project builds on economic and political studies of the Cuban Revolution and connects them to sociological and oral history research on the question of gender equality in Cuba to explore the relationship between these themes through in-depth analysis of primary sources. Studies of the Cuban state’s economic policies and their economic impacts, most notably by economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, have been foundational to my own; however, I shift the focus away from the economic policies themselves to do a qualitative study of their social, political, and cultural impacts.19 In addition, Carollee

Bengelsdorff’s analysis of the Poder Popular system within her larger study of democracy in

Cuba has helped me to develop a broader political framework for the developments in material culture that I discuss.20

This question of gender equality has received significant attention from contemporaries and scholars because of the unique nature of the women’s liberation project in Cuba. The project

19 See Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s and The Economy of Socialist Cuba.

20 Bengelsdorff, The Problem of Democracy in Cuba.

was unique in two ways: first, it was state-led and therefore received considerable government support and resources, including from Fidel Castro himself, who was a vocal proponent. The goals of the project and the way that it understood women’s liberation is the second unique aspect. Unlike the second wave feminism that was sweeping the United States at roughly the same time the Cuban project was taking off, women’s liberation in Cuba was less about the individual woman and more about her role in society. Women’s liberation in a revolutionary context centered on freeing women from the time-consuming drudgery of domestic labor so that they could instead devote their time and labor to building a revolutionary society by getting an education, working outside of the home, occupying political posts, and performing volunteer labor through the mass organizations like the Federation of Cuban Women, hereafter referred to as “the FMC.”21

Texts produced by Cuban social scientists, collected and analyzed in Reca Moreira’s

Análisis de las invetigaciones sobre la familia cubana, note the obstacle that austerity posed to gender equality, but their central focus is on the quest for equality. By contrast, I am interested in exploring the nature of austerity and its social and political impacts on different sectors of society, including, but not limited to, women. Shifting focus to austerity reflects my methodological commitment to analyzing the Cuban Revolution from within. A focus on austerity accurately reflects how Cuban women themselves understood their own lives and the obstacles that they faced in attempting to take advantage of the very real opportunities for social, economic, and political advancement offered to them by the revolutionary state.

Smith and Padula’s Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba provides a broad overview of how the revolution impacted Cuban women’s lives from the 1950s through the early

21 See Lewis, Lewis, and Rigdon, Four Women.

1990s, touching briefly on nearly every aspect of this process, from public health reforms to the issue of women’s employment; however, the broad approach of the study limits the authors’ ability to engage in in-depth analysis. I agree with their assertion that “a fundamental problem with male-directed social movements is that their leaders rarely think about who is going to do the dishes,” as well as their argument that male leaders ultimately prioritized initiatives that they found more interesting than domestic labor, like “foreign military adventures.”22 Yet I find that shortcomings in the consumer and service economies impacted not just Cuban women, but all sectors of Cuban society, and not just with regard to individuals’ ability to access opportunities for social and political advancement. Scarcity in these realms impacted Cuban culture and national identity, social patterns of labor and leisure, as well as men and women’s perceptions of the legitimacy of the revolutionary state.

Sources and Methodology

I spent most of 2015 in Cuba doing the research for this project. Many of the archives that house material related to the revolution remain closed to the public, but it is possible to access some rich materials at the National Archive and the National Library of Cuba, including rare publications produced for a domestic audience. At the Instituto de Historia as well as the

National Library, I found a number of government publications that are central to this study, as they explain how the revolutionary state conceptualized its economic priorities and sold them to the citizenry. At the National Library, I also consulted rare periodicals introduced in the late

1970s precisely to educate people about on-going austerity, methods the state was taking to combat it, and steps the readers themselves could take to contribute to these efforts. These periodicals, particularly Opina but also magazines produced for women of all ages, like Mujeres

22 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 131-32.

and Muchacha, were invaluable sources for accessing the details of daily life that often do not make it into the archives at all, as well as for tracing the intellectual history of debates about the role of consumerism in a socialist society.

The research for this project was truly a transnational endeavor. I conducted oral history interviews in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and among Cuban expatriates in Moscow, Russian

Federation. I use a wide array of archival sources that I consulted in the United States, including correspondence between Cubans and their friends and family living abroad accessed at the

Cuban Heritage Collection in Miami. Cuban films, particularly comedies, as Cubans were well aware of the absurd role that scarcity often took in their lives, also offer rich insights into how

Cubans understood these phenomena.

Methodologically, I have been influenced by scholarship on the themes of everyday life and the role of the state in citizens’ lives in other settings. For example, Belinda Davis’ Home

Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in WWI Berlin reveals that as governments take on new roles in times of crisis, they alter how citizens understand the role of the government in their lives. Citizens can use and have used these experiences to make claims on the government, thereby altering the relationship between state and citizen beyond the moment of crisis. In the case of Cuba, the revolutionary state established rationing of basic goods and foodstuffs in 1962, and in doing so, revolutionary leadership made the state responsible for meeting people’s basic needs. I argue that Cuban women repeatedly invoked this logic and the responsibilities to the citizenry that the state established with rationing in their calls for greater attention to their daily needs. Works on everyday life in totalitarian contexts, most notably Sheila Fitzpatrick’s

Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times have informed my approach in highlighting the limits of state power and the array of unintended outcomes that stemmed from

government policy. In a similar vein, Elaine Tyler May’s work on the American family during the Cold War has impacted how I think about the domestic sphere in Cuba and how Cold War projects outlined by the state at the upper levels of society also shape individuals and family units.23

I am committed to both a top-down and bottom-up approach, though I emphasize the social history of how average citizens have experienced the revolution on a daily basis. I trace the discourses established by leaders like Fidel Castro and Vilma Espín in order to develop the context in which Cubans understood and engaged in the debates about the meaning and value of material goods. For the same reason, I trace the emergence of a new upper class whose political privileges translated into material privileges. In the early 1970s, the Cuban state considered material difficulties primarily women’s problem and sought to ease the burden of scarcity through gendered solutions that reinforced women’s traditional role in the household. With the

1976 Constitution, leadership shifted gears and began encouraging first men, and later children and the elderly, to ease the burden of scarcity on women by taking up their share of the domestic labor, reconceptualizing household maintenance as the responsibility of all who shared a home.

Echoing the progression of how Cuban leaders conceptualized and targeted material difficulties, this dissertation begins with a focus on Cuban women and expands to a broader focus on different groups, particularly Cuban youth, and society as a whole. This approach reveals that scarcity was never just a women’s problem but a phenomenon that shaped many aspects of

Cuban society and even national identity in ways that the revolutionary state did not anticipate.

While I sought to write an inclusive history of 1970s and 1980s Cuba, the available sources, particularly the press coverage, concentrated on urban areas and on Havana above all,

23 Tyler May, Homeward Bound.

thereby maintaining the rural-urban divide that characterized pre-revolutionary society and was a target of revolutionary reform. When I identified sources that spoke to how material scarcity impacted life in rural Cuba and cities and towns outside of Havana, I have made a special effort to include them. Yet as a result of the nature of the source material, this is primarily an urban story and the experiences of habaneros are overrepresented. Despite the inherent limitations for developing a broad and inclusive picture of island life in this period, the sources’ focus on

Havana was also illuminating, as in some ways, Havana experienced the trends traced in this dissertation in concentrated form. While Havana was materially-privileged to a certain extent, as outlined in this dissertation, the size and population density of the city complicated the distribution of goods and foodstuffs, leading to erratic and unpredictable scarcity throughout the period. In addition, women who lived in Havana were more likely to seek employment outside of the home, necessitating debates about domestic labor and gender inequality.24

Yet even within this time period and geographic focus, people experienced austerity differently. One of the greatest benefits of studying everyday life is that there is room for many voices. Such an approach presents an ambivalent picture of the revolution’s promises and progress, a picture which I believe to be well representative of the complex jumble of joy, frustration, faith, and fatigue with which Cubans have understood the revolution that has governed their lives for the last sixty years.

Chapter Overview

In Chapter 2, I establish what material conditions were like heading into the 1970s and how they improved as Cuba joined the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, a trade organization developed by the Soviet Union. In this chapter, I also trace how continued scarcity

24 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 158.

impacted women disproportionately. I argue that the state’s early efforts to combat this phenomenon through a traditionally-gendered approach were ineffective, as they were poorly implemented and, most significantly, continued to place this burden exclusively on women. By the mid-1970s, Cuban leadership began thinking outside of the gender norm box and proposed a

Family Code that would legislate gender equality by stipulating, in law, that both male and female partners were equally responsible for the labor of domestic upkeep and child-rearing.

In Chapter 3, I trace the impacts of this Family Code, which I argue was a grandiose, but ultimately empty, solution. While the state could hold it up as a forward-thinking response to the problems facing Cuban women, there was no means for enforcement, which meant that its impact in individual households was determined entirely by the dynamic between the men, women, and children living there. While there is evidence that many women internalized the norms established in the Family Code, there is overwhelming evidence that men did not. Even youth who were educated in state-controlled spaces like boarding schools, which, in theory, isolated students from the old-fashioned gender dynamics at home, maintained traditional gender norms that designated domestic labor as women’s work. Despite the retrograde impact family life could have on ideas about gender, I argue that families were key to overcoming scarcity, only not in ways that revolutionary leaders anticipated. Increasingly, it was the labor of grandparents that kept households running.

In Chapter 4, I expand my focus from the Cuban family to Cuban society as a whole to examine the broader social and cultural impacts of scarcity. I argue that continuous austerity impacted fundamental aspects of Cuban life, from conceptions of time to patterns of sociability.

It limited the ability of individuals to extend traditional hospitality to friends and family, which altered the form that these relationships took. In addition, in a society where the economy was

notoriously inefficient, and goods were pilfered at seemingly every stop in the process of production and distribution, acquisition and subsistence strategies impacted the meaning of friendship. Increasingly, people looked to form relationships that could help them resolve some of their daily difficulties.

In Chapter 5, I explore the impact that 120,000 returning Cuban exiles had on conceptions of the value of material goods and the role of consumerism in revolutionary society.

I argue that these family visits, and the exposure to U.S. lifestyles that they produced, led Cubans to re-evaluate the progress that the revolutionary state had made in alleviating scarcity since

1970. This new frame for comparison unleashed widespread discontent as well as new debates about the role of the individual in society. As historians of the U.S.-based Cuban exile community have pointed out, these visits were a contributing factor to the Mariel Boat Lift. I argue that these visits also had significant impacts at home, most significantly by spurring reforms aimed at market liberalization to improve the consumer economy.

In Chapter 6, I explore this market liberalization through the lens of emerging cottage industries and new farmer’s markets. I argue that one of the most significant features of these economic reforms was that they allowed Cubans to connect with one another, independently of the state, to solve their most pressing needs. This fostered levels of autonomy among the population that the revolutionary state could not and would not tolerate. By the mid-1980s, it was clear to Cuban leadership that the Soviet Union was faltering. Revolutionary leadership was forced to confront the fact that even the limited abundance that it had attained during the era of the fat cows was fleeting, built on subsidies that had begun to dry up. I argue that in anticipation of economic crisis, Fidel Castro and other leaders embarked on the Rectification of Errors

process precisely to try and batten down the social and political hatches in anticipation of rough seas ahead.

CHAPTER 2 WOMEN IN THE INSTITUTIONALIZED REVOLUTION, 1971-1975

The failure of the Ten Million Ton Harvest represents the failure of the idealism that had driven the island’s economy down unorthodox, creative, and expensive paths over the course of the 1960s. This public failure, one to which much of the Cuban population felt deeply connected through their voluntary and coerced contributions of time and sweat, sparked a turn to pragmatism among Cuban leaders. Radical changes in economic policy, including the decisions to formally join the Soviet trade bloc and turn away from the moral incentives that had dominated the late 1960s in favor of material ones, had ramifications for both the state’s larger economic strategy and the relationship between state and citizen. Consumerism–shunted aside again and again as an unnecessary comfort to be embraced only in an industrialized and militarily-secure Cuba’s not-too-distant future–was expanded almost begrudgingly. The state had spent years assuring Cubans that consumer comforts would resume once economic development had advanced enough to sustain the economic utopia of communism; yet the failure of the Ten

Million Ton Harvest forced even the most idealistic economic planners to scale back this dream.

Leadership sacrificed the possibility of reaching a grander end goal–true communism built through economic development as opposed to dependence on a superpower–in favor of pressing reality and quick(ish) comforts.

As they expanded the options facing consumers, Cuban policymakers were anxious to avoid a return to the class-stratified mass consumption that had marked pre-revolutionary capitalism. To counter this, they developed the Cuban Institute for the Investigation and

Orientation of Internal Demand (ICOIDI) and gave this new organ the task of managing consumerism. Molding socialist shoppers who bought rationally with an eye to both their personal needs as well as the mechanics of supply and demand was chief among the

organization’s goals. ICOIDI studied the issues facing consumers and pursued solutions from both the top down, by attempting to influence the state’s economic apparatus and official economic policy, as well as the bottom up, by reforming the often unpredictable behavior of individuals. This latter goal included establishing new shopping behaviors among consumers in addition to advocating for improved efficiency among the administrators, truck drivers, store managers, and clerks who were responsible for putting goods on the shelves and in shoppers’ hands.1

These wide-reaching economic reforms expanded the availability and accessibility of foodstuffs and basic consumer goods and services, thereby easing the domestic burden on Cuban women, but leadership was not content to stop there. In 1975 the Federation of Cuban Women

(FMC) kicked off a decade-long “Struggle for Women’s Rights” centered on the fight for gender equality. The revolutionary state’s first constitution, which was passed by popular referendum in

1976, enshrined this ideal in law with the Family Code. A total overhaul of traditional gender relations in Cuba, the Family Code aimed to reduce the double shift worked by many Cuban women in workplaces and homes across the nation, but it also marked unprecedented expansion of state authority into the household realms of family and domesticity. While the Family Code legislated an even, gender-neutral distribution of household tasks, it did not provide any mechanisms for enforcement, in part because leadership prioritized maintaining support among the male population, who comprised the majority of the workforce, over their own avowed goal of gender equality. Ultimately, policymakers found hearts and minds, where stubborn gender norms that leadership identified as bourgeois were deeply entrenched, much more difficult to

1 Dr. Eugenio R. Balari, long-time head of ICOIDI, outlined the history of the organization and its primary goals in his history of the consumer economy in revolutionary Cuba, Balari, Los consumidores,

shape than legislation. The failure to provide for the enforcement of the new norms and ideals stated by the Family Code rendered the document ineffective. The legislation was a trophy for state representatives to hold before foreign and domestic audiences, but one which supporters of gender equality found hollow with regard to its impact on lived reality.

Integration into the Soviet Bloc

Reeling from the public failure of the Ten Million Ton Harvest, Cuban leaders welcomed an intensifying Soviet influence in economic planning and oversight in the first years of the

1970s, a process which culminated in Cuba’s integration into the Council for Mutual Economic

Assistance (Comecon) in July 1972.2 This economic partnership had far-reaching consequences.

The economic policy of the mid-to-late-1960s had focused on temporary sacrifice in favor of ambitious strides towards the industrialization of both manufacturing and agriculture. This policy sought to remake Cuba’s economy entirely, pulling dependency up by the roots. While Cuba had continued to produce sugar, the economic staple of the pre-1959 economy and the much- criticized economic foundation of dependency on the United States, it did so to generate capital for the industrialization and diversification of the economy, an on-going process. Cuba’s entry into Comecon, however, marks the adoption of a new economic strategy in which leadership sought to simply get by on the economic status quo, developing a reliance not only on Eastern

European markets for traditional Cuban goods but also on generous Soviet subsidies. While this approach made possible the relative abundance of the 1970s and 1980s, a period that is today

2 Comecon was founded by Soviet leaders in 1949 to counter mutual aid associations established in capitalist Western Europe following World War II. The organization originally encompassed the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, but expanded into Asia and the Caribbean as membership was extended to Mongolia, Cuba, and Vietnam over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. The basic contours of the economic history in this section were garnered from Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, which includes a detailed examination not only of the economic changes made by the Cuban state in its turn from idealism in the early 1970s, but also the changes made in the realms of government, social organization, and diplomacy.

remembered fondly by Cubans as the “era of the fat cows,” the revolutionary state had built abundance on a foundation of sand. The slow erosion of the Soviet state in the late 1980s, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the late 1991, decimated the Cuban economy, leading to a “Special Period” of extreme scarcity that, in many ways, extends to the present.3

Increased reliance on Soviet models, advice, and economic handouts fostered economic development, including advances in industrialization and the mechanization of agriculture, but the nature of this development bred dependency. Trade agreements with Comecon relegated

Cuba to the familiar role of sugar and citrus fruit producer. As the Cuban state restructured its economic goals around its position in Comecon, dependence on sugar necessarily remained unaltered because sugar was the lynch pin that cemented the island’s Comecon role, as Cuba was the only tropical member nation capable of growing sugar cane and citrus fruits.4 Thus the sugar monoculture shifted from an economic issue to be temporarily tolerated and exploited to an unwavering and unchallenged necessity. While reliance on sugar had climaxed with the Ten

Million Ton Harvest in 1970, it did so as a sort of final push to accumulate the capital necessary to kick start industrialization. After 1972 sugar production declined in relative terms of its portion of economic production; taken at face value, however, this is misleading. While sugar

3 The extreme scarcity associated with the Special Period peaked in the mid-1990s. By the early 2000s, economic cooperation with Venezuela – particularly the importation of subsidized Venezuelan oil, market reforms, and the development of a tourist economy had mitigated the worst effects of the economic collapse. Yet while Cuba’s GDP has reached late-1980’s levels, real wages hover at less than half their 1989 value (Ritter, “Cuba’s Economy during the Special Period,” 9.). Most Cuban families, but particularly those without access to remittances or the extremely- competitive jobs in the tourist economy, continue to struggle to feed their families and maintain their households to a degree of comfort comparable to that of the 1980s.

4 The Soviet Union, prior to 1972, had been producing beet sugar in quantities that satisfied domestic demand and allowed for some export, but it proved more cost-effective to import Cuban sugar, which could be produced cheaply, and devote the land used for growing sugar beets to crops with higher yields and profit margins (Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 17). Cuba’s status as the sole tropical member of Comecon would be challenged in the late 1970s when Vietnam was admitted.

production quotas were set at much lower rates following 1970 to avoid leaching time, resources, and labor from other sectors of the economy, these reduced quotas were part of a long-term strategy in which sugar would continue to play a central, if not so disastrously large, role. As a result, Cuba maintained its economic dependence on sugar, and the island continued to play “a dependent role” on a global scale “that precluded industrialization just as much as pre-1959 U.S. domination.”5 Even plans to industrialize sugar production, a project intensely pursued by the

Cuban state, relied on the Soviet Union, as the revolutionary state was dependent on the Soviet oil, steel, and machinery that it received in return for Cuban exports in order to undertake and maintain any attempts at mechanization.6

The Turn towards Consumption

This new strategy expanded prosperity, allowing the state to meet some of its most pressing needs and alleviate the more strenuous demands placed on consumers’ time, creativity, and taste buds. The period from 1971 to 1975 saw an average economic growth per-capita of 13 percent, which was astronomical compared to the figures of 1.2 percent for the period from 1963 to 1965 and -1.3 percent for 1966-1970.7 In addition to stabilizing the economy, the pragmatic approach of the 1970s made an expansion of consumerism possible, as the less ambitious economic development to be achieved with Soviet aid would not be built solely through Cuban efforts and therefore did not require so much capital accumulation within the island. Yet Cuba did not become a consumer’s paradise during the 1970s and 1980s, despite the nostalgia that

5 Cole, “Cuba: The Process of Socialist Development,” 48.

6 Indeed, the loss of the Soviet market and the difficulties of maintaining the mechanized sugar infrastructure in the face of fuel shortages have resulted in the precipitous decline of sugar production in the years following 1990, when sugar comprised over half of Cuba’s exports. In 2008, sugar accounted for less than 2 percent of Cuba’s exports. Ritter, “Cuba’s Economy during the Special Period,” 7.

7 Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 57.

many Cubans today have for the era. The expansion of consumerism amounted to a balancing act between addressing state goals, working within the economic confines of central planning and trade orientation toward the Soviet bloc, and mediating popular complaints, with popular complaints generally the lowest of these priorities.

To walk this tightrope, the Cuban Institute for the Investigation and Orientation of

Consumer Demand (ICOIDI) was founded in April 1971 to oversee and shape the consumer economy.8 The Institute would do so through two complimentary processes, the gathering of information about the consumer economy and the dissemination of that information. ICOIDI’s researchers gathered information through surveys, interviews with consumers and administrators, data collection on production and consumption statistics, and even undercover visits to stores and restaurants to evaluate customer service.9 It disseminated that information, along with recommendations for improvements, to two audiences: the state and the public. The state received countless reports from ICOIDI over the years, and economic planners assumedly drew on that information in evaluating and reforming the consumer economy.

The public received this information through a number of publications. Opina, which began publication in 1979, was the longest running and most widely distributed of these.

ICOIDI’s work in the media through publications targeting the public like Opina sought to rationalize consumption, clarifying the options and obstacles facing consumers. This included informing consumers of new products on the market as well as their uses and where they could be purchased. In the process, ICOIDI sought to realize state goals–which included maintaining

8 Balari, Los consumidores, 19.

9 Overview of ICOIDI’s research methods culled from review of ICOIDI publications Demanda and Opina. While Opina was geared toward a popular audience, Demanda, which began publication in 1976, was a more specialized publication that focused on questions of methodology and theories about consumerism in a socialist context.

the consumer economy as a relatively small component of Cuba’s larger economy–while still molding the rigid structure of central economic planning to redress the needs of citizens as reflected in complaints about the scarcity of goods and the low quality of those available, complaints which had skyrocketed during the push for the Ten Million Ton Harvest.

From the outset, the fundamental hurdle facing ICOIDI and Cuban economic planners was how to meet consumer demands without compromising the great gains the Cuban state had made towards reducing class inequality throughout the 1960s. On one hand, they worried that consumption stratified by income would foment the old class system that had characterized the capitalist era. On the other, economic planners recognized that it was not a small or elite sector of society that was interested in expanding its consumption. By the late 1960s, particularly as the state prioritized the Ten Million Ton Harvest in distributing labor and resources to the detriment of other economic endeavors, the issue facing the majority of Cuban consumers was not an inability to afford what they needed. Instead, they simply could not find anything to spend their money on! The scarcity of goods available for purchase was so severe, in fact, that many Cubans simply saved their money in their homes, and “by 1971, the National Bank figured that over $4 billion worth of pesos were out of circulation–an amount greater than the annual earnings of the entire Cuban work force.”10

Thus, most Cubans in the early 1970s found themselves with more disposable income than ever before. Researchers and economic planners worried that a modest increase in the production and importation of goods, all that was possible in the immediate future, would not satisfy the existing consumer demand and therefore do little to quell discontent. Market mechanisms, like variable pricing based on demand, were considered ideologically-suspect

10 Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 362.

methods of limiting demand due to their associations with capitalism and potential to foment inequality. As a result, ICOIDI had to explore new methods of distributing highly-sought-after goods that would be perceived as fair by consumers and as consistent with revolutionary goals by the state.

The concern over ensuring equal access to consumer goods was rooted in practical as well as ideological concerns. While the majority of Cubans found themselves with large portions of their salaries burning holes in their pockets, this was not the case for everyone, and so ICOIDI had to look beyond the “invisible hand” to expand consumption in a way that ensured equal access. Using market mechanisms, like high prices, to ameliorate the gap between high demand and low supply would inevitably leave certain segments of the population out of the budding consumer arena. Low income sectors of the population–retirees, students, the disabled, the infirm, even the “vagos,” the un- or under-employed–had little expendable income to devote to consumption and were dependent on the subsidized prices of the basic goods and food items offered through the ration. Since the early 1960s, rationing had ensured more or less equal access to available goods, which established a baseline of consumption and thereby achieved exactly what rationing was created to achieve.

Economic planners therefore had to find a way to expand consumerism while still maintaining the egalitarian aspects of the existing consumer economy. Rationing was first established in 1962, and from then until 1980, when the state undertook significant economic reforms, two internal markets existed in Cuba. The first was the rationed market, which was heavily subsidized to offer basic products at low, fixed prices, thereby guaranteeing the basic needs of even Cuba’s poorest citizens.11 These prices were first set with the establishment of

11 Balari, Los consumidores, 16.

rationing and remained unchanged, not even to keep pace with inflation, until 1981, when they were raised modestly, remaining below market value.12 Yet even though ICOIDI found that in

1970 90 percent of the public’s expenditures were devoted to rationed goods, rationing was never meant to apply to the entire consumer economy.13 This high statistic reflects the lack of goods available for purchase up to the early 1970s–what little was available was available through the ration, which designated the quantities of food and goods that consumers could buy based on the state’s perception of individual and household needs. The fact that such a large proportion of consumers’ income was dedicated to purchases through the libreta, or ration book, where subsidized prices reigned, further compounded the increasingly alarming issue of large amounts of money accumulating out of circulation: people spent a relatively small portion of their income to retrieve their rationed goods and were left with the remainder. And although rationing continues in Cuba today, the system was always intended to be a temporary solution to extreme scarcity. For these reasons, economic planners were hesitant to expand consumption on the basis of the existing rationing system, despite its allure over market mechanisms as a more equitable means of distribution.

The second type of market sold goods that were available on “venta libre,” or unrestricted sale, indicating that supply of these goods was sufficient to meet demand and therefore there was no need to limit the quantities bought by individual consumers through rationing. On this market, both basic and non-basic goods were offered at moderate prices that

12 These adjustments in food prices followed a process of wage reform in 1980, in which 2.5 million workers out of a total work force of 2.8 million received raises. Pricing and wage reform, as well as the introduction of new mechanisms for consumption, like the parallel market, were all part of efforts to “soak up” excess currency in circulation, a problem Cuba had faced since at least the late 1960s, as discussed above. The increases in food prices were calculated to represent roughly 25 percent of the average increase in income levels, which left 75 percent of the raises for elevated consumption of other goods. See Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch in Cuba, 79-81.

13 Balari, Los consumidores, 15.

were fixed by the state to ensure some measure of access regardless of income, though the prices on venta libre goods were not as heavily subsidized as those on rationed goods. Most of the products available through venta libre had at one point been rationed: In the course of the economic recovery of the 1970s, improvements in supply allowed leaders to transition these goods from the ration to venta libre.14 That was the general trend, at least, though the boundaries between rationing and venta libre were not always so clear cut. They varied geographically down to the level of individual stores. For example, if potatoes arrived at a local vegetable stand on

Monday, they might be available in rationed quantities until Thursday. At that point it was assumed that everyone who wanted to buy potatoes had sufficient opportunity to do so, and then the remaining potatoes would be moved to venta libre so that they could be sold on a first come, first served basis. This flexibility was important in preventing perishable goods from going to waste, especially in the cases of produce stands which did not typically have refrigeration facilities.15

In addition to goods bought through rationing or venta libre, Cubans could access meals through school cafeterias, which were free to students, and worker cafeterias, characterized by very low prices, and the service and restaurant industries. Access to the latter was never managed by the state to ensure equal access in any way, despite the fact that these businesses sometimes struggled to meet demand due to on-going scarcity and organizational issues.16 From the start, there were also unofficial economic transactions that took place outside of state-sanctioned venues, through the black market, grey market, and other interpersonal arrangements, a situation

14 Balari, Los consumidores, 16.

15 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch in Cuba, 36.

16 Balari, Los consumidores, 16.

that often frustrated officials and further complicated the consumer landscape. Except in black market cases that involved blatant pilfering of state resources, the legality of these interpersonal transactions was generally unclear.17 Even when laws against certain practices did exist, attempts at enforcement varied by location and time period: many illegal practices were tolerated because they provided crucial solutions to the shortcomings of the internal market. By allowing people to satisfy their daily needs, these illicit, and sometimes illegal, loopholes were key to mitigating discontent.

Ultimately, Cuba’s leaders found the existing models in the consumer and service economies incompatible with a significant expansion of consumerism, leading them to create a parallel market to co-exist with rationing and venta libre in 1980. In the early 1970s, economic planners chose a less ambitious course. They sought to expand consumerism on a limited basis through existing mechanisms. First priority for state officials was to rein in the large amount of cash circulating within the population. Rather than undertaking monetary reform to adjust the value of Cuban currency, economic planners chose to increase the amount and quality of goods available through venta libre and stimulate the service industry, in the hopes of giving people something to spend their money on. This involved expanding the selection and improving the quality of the goods and services currently offered, as well as gradually increasing the importation of consumer goods, especially those of durable use.18 The work of ICOIDI was

17 In the early 1980s, when Benjamin, Collins, and Scott were traveling through Cuba investigating the food question, they found confusion about these laws not only among the population, but amongst the officials responsible for enforcing the laws. Two officials gave them completely opposite answers about the legality of buying produce directly from private farmers, for example, leading them to conclude, “no wonder the Cuban people themselves seem confused on this issue!” No Free Lunch, 44. It is also no wonder that the press published educational profiles about these crimes and their consequences in this period, in an attempt to clarify the law (see discussion of Socialist Legality in Chapters 4 and, in the context of the farmers’ markets, 6).

18 Balari, Los consumidores, 14. Mesa-Lago has also noted an effort to combat “socialist inflation” beginning in 1970, which involved the state scaling back some of its more extreme measures of generosity. These measures included the re-establishment of a 5 cent fee for pay phone usage (fall 1976), the indefinite postponement (1970) of

central in this process, as the institute embarked on study after study to gauge everything from consumers’ needs and desires to business practices in various industries. Seemingly no issue was too small for ICOIDI’s researchers, who embarked on everything from analysis of localized issues affecting individual neighborhoods to island-wide studies. These studies focused on wide- ranging issues, from the availability of children’s shoes to consumer perceptions of the quality of service at pizzerias or the offerings at hairdressing salons.19

The socialist ethos was central to ICOIDI’s mission, balancing the more ruthless aspects of the market. While the Institute firmly believed that all Cuban businesses should self-finance and be geared toward profit and efficiency, economic imperatives were not the primary criteria in determining best business practices. Instead, profit, efficiency, and a desire to limit government subsidization to free up capital for other enterprises were subordinated to the interests of society, such as guaranteeing that all Cubans had access to a baseline standard of living. This was, in fact, perceived as one of the primary functions of the state. As Dr. Eugenio

Balari, head of ICOIDI, explained, “the state feels committed and responsible for guaranteeing basic articles of consumption” for the population.20 This meant that while ICOIDI made a concerted effort to address the persistent complaints about the consumer arena, ensuring that everyone had access to what they wanted was never so much a goal as ensuring that everyone had access to what they needed.

reforms that had not yet been implemented – including the abolition of house rents and raising the minimum wage – and the reduction or modification of salaries (late 1973) promised to sugar workers, as well as the sick or retired who had worked at vanguard factories (Cuba in the 1970s, 41-42).

19 Instituto Cubano de Investigaciones y Orientación de la Demanda Interna, Listado de los trabajos. While these specific examples are taken from a document listing the ICOIDI studies undertaken in 1985, they are representative of the organization’s work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with the obvious exception being studies focused on the parallel market, which did not yet exist in the early 1970s.

20 Balari, Los consumidores, 23.

This approach reflects that the Cuban government recognized that its legitimacy was at an all-time low following the Ten Million Harvest. Widespread discontent made the state more attentive to its citizens’ needs than it had been since the first years of revolutionary rule, when the new government was still solidifying its legitimacy. In the wake of the Harvest, the population was exhausted by the state’s demands on its time and labor, and yearned for a return to normalcy, particularly in the conditions limiting daily life. Leadership expanded consumerism in response to these social currents, but leaders were unwilling to embrace consumerism in ways that clashed with their fundamental understandings of the role of the revolution in Cuban history.

They expanded consumerism but maintained an emphasis on social justice and egalitarianism to maintain the ideological foundation of the revolution while also making it more compatible with the ordinary conditions of average lives.

Increasingly household appliances were ranked as a necessity, and therefore a priority for economic planners. ICOIDI studies reveal that throughout the 1970s, an average of 3.8 appliances per household were distributed.21 Some of these appliances – including 30,000 refrigerators, 31,000 radios, and 350,000 pressure cookers – were domestically produced, while others were imported from Comecon countries.22 Initiatives aimed at increasing appliance ownership were so successful, in fact, that distribution numbers for some appliances, like sewing machines and blenders, began to decrease in the early 1980s due to market saturation, indicating the satisfaction of demand for these goods.23 Even factoring in the abundance experienced by some under pre-1959 capitalism, the distribution of appliances markedly improved in this period.

21 Ibid., Distribution in this context does not denote a free service provided by the government. These appliances were made available for purchase.

22 Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 43.

23 Balari, Los consumidores, 23.

Statistics on appliance ownership reveal 49 radios for every 100 households in 1953, 75 in 1974 and 111, an average of over one per household, in 1984.24

Refrigerators, central to food maintenance and hygiene in Cuba’s tropical climate, showed similar improvements. In 1953, Cuba had an average of 18 refrigerators per 100 households. That average rose to 30 in 1974 and 65 in 1984, a marked improvement despite the fact that many households continued to struggle without access to a refrigerator.25 Interestingly, it appears that those who continued to struggle without a refrigerator in their homes in the mid-

1980s did not do so as a result of a dearth of refrigerators but instead as a result of a lack of spending money. After climbing steadily throughout the 1970s, statistics on refrigerator distribution dropped for the 1980-85 period. While ICOIDI researchers attribute this to market saturation, just under two-thirds of homes had a refrigerator in 1984, perhaps indicating that market saturation, in this case, is shaped by income level.26 By 1980, most people who could afford to buy a refrigerator perhaps had, but still over a third of households lacked one, indicating both some continuance of class inequality and that the growing consumer economy could not be accessed by all members of society.

Appliances are a particularly important aspect of the consumer economy because they could drastically improve quality of life by freeing up time and labor that would otherwise be spent performing tasks, like washing clothing manually. Thus, while all members of the household may have enjoyed a new TV or radio, ultimately improvements in appliance distribution most positively impacted the lives of women. The distribution of washing machines

24 Balari, Los consumidores, 24.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 23-24.

saw remarkable improvement from an average of 2 per 100 households in 1974 to 44 in 1984, and the washing machine transformed a time-consuming and backbreaking task into one which would be performed by pressing a few buttons.27 For this reason, working women, who had the greatest demands on their time, were given preferential access to the limited supply of washing machines as they were made available for purchase. Trabajadoras were given the option to purchase the Aurica 70 model, imported from the Soviet Union, beginning in 1974 through a joint sales plan put together by the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) and the Ministry of

Internal Commerce.28

In a celebratory Mujeres article profiling the washing machine, delighted new owner

Sofía raved that her Aurica saved her time and soap, a rationed good often impacted by shortages, and her husband Pedro said that its operation was so easy that “even [he] had tried it.”29 In a twee twist, the author allows the Aurica 70 to speak for itself, and it proudly reveals that its users have reported that “I am fast, I eliminate the churre, and I help them a lot.”30 While undoubtedly more efficient than washing clothing by hand, using the Aurica was more labor intensive than using a modern, conventional washing machine: the hoses on the back were removable, and the user was required to physically change the water multiple times during each cycle.31 The bulk of the article is dedicated to describing how the Aurica works, either to quell doubts about its efficiency or to highlight the huge impact it could have on a working woman’s

27 Ibid.

28 SG, “Una ayuda eficaz,” Mujeres (Havana), Oct 1974, p. 56.

29 Ibid., 57.

30 Ibid., 56.

31 Conversation with Lillian Guerra, who remembers using an Aurica washer at her family’s home in Cuba during the 1990s.

life, simultaneously encouraging demand and underscoring what a huge step forward the importation and availability of the machines was. The increasing availability of appliances was reported with pride by ICOIDI researchers and journalists alike, framed as a triumph of the revolution even though these statistics on appliance distribution undoubtedly reflect global trends, as the post-World War II period saw the expansion of household appliances to an increasingly large proportion of the population worldwide. That said, the timing of these improvements in Cuba cannot be separated from the shift in its economic position and outlook in the early 1970s. The importation of the Aurica 70 would not have been possible without the increasing Sovietization of Cuban socialism. These Soviet washing machines made such an impact on the Cuban population, that “Aurica” later became a popular name for children, alongside Cubanized versions of many popular Russian names.32

The debut of a new rationing booklet in late 1973 also impacted 1970s households. This new libreta was almost unchanged with regard to food but revolutionary in terms of access to manufactured goods, many of which were now available on venta libre, and others which were available through the libreta in ways that left room for consumer choice. Those goods now freely available for purchase included cameras, record players, coffee sets, silver wedding rings, deodorant, and some cosmetics. Among them were perfumes with exotic names that reinforced

Cuba’s economic and ideological connection with the Soviet Bloc, including “Red Moscow” and

“Bulgarian Rose.”33 Other manufactured goods were made available to consumers through limited distribution, a system which allowed consumers to choose one or more (depending on the good) non-essential goods two or three times a year. Such goods included toothbrushes,

32 Ibid.

33 Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 43.

handkerchiefs, underwear, rubber shoes, swimsuits, pots and pans, and selected furniture. These improvements, which not only took the form of increases in the quantity and quality of goods available but also in the expansion of consumer choice and control over how money and ration tickets could best be spent with regard to household needs, did not extend to all realms of the consumer economy. Many basic clothing goods remained in high demand and therefore strictly rationed. These included pants, shirts, dresses, blouses, leather shoes, and fabrics for home clothing fabrication.34

Despite the continued rationing of many foodstuffs, the early 1970s did see some important changes in the gastronomic realm. The amount of butter, one of the first goods to be rationed, that could be purchased through the libreta was increased slightly, and the supply of other goods, many of which were ostensibly available through the ration but often in reality not available at all, also improved. This was the case for fish, milk, potatoes, yucca, some fruits, and alcoholic and soft drinks.35 Additionally, to mitigate demand and reduce excess currency in circulation, the Cuban state raised the prices of certain popular though nonessential goods, including beer, cigarettes, and rum, as well as the cost of services, including restaurant meals.

The decision to increase prices on items like alcohol and cigarettes was also considered a step forward for public health, although given government desire to stimulate spending, it is likely that economic planners hoped people would continue to indulge despite the higher costs.36

In some cases, these increases could be quite dramatic. Cigarettes, for example, had been available to consumers aged seventeen and up through the ration since the early 1960s, but the

34 Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 42-43.

35 Ibid., 42.

36 Balari, Los consumidores, 14.

Cuban state eliminated this privilege in 1971.37 So, from 1971 on, only those born in 1955 or before, meaning those who had already been collecting cigarettes through the ration, were entitled to continue doing so. Everyone born in 1956 or later was forced to buy their cigarettes through venta libre. This is significant because cigarettes were sold on and off the ration at staggeringly different prices, and therefore this measure would certainly have elevated consumer spending. While each eligible consumer was entitled to a certain number of packs through the ration at twenty cents each, the exact same cigarettes could be purchased off the ration in unlimited quantities at 2.40 pesos a pack – a twelve times increase!38

As consumer conditions improved, so did opportunities for black market and other activities that undermined state economic and ideological goals. To prevent the population from getting carried away in its embrace of consumerism, the state increased its efforts to educate the population about the acceptable limitations of consumerism in a socialist society. Likely anticipating that the increased supply of goods on the market could entice people to commit property crimes, the Cuban state issued a new booklet to the Committees for the Defense of the

Revolution (CDRs) in 1972, the same year that they joined Comecon. This booklet warned the

CDRs about property crimes and detailed how the neighborhood organizations could best combat these crimes. It encouraged neighbors to spy on neighbors, and to monitor not only for suspicious behaviors but also to keep a close eye on neighbors’ lifestyles to ensure that no one was living in too much luxury.39 Austerity remained a public value into the 1990s, and the state

37 Oscar F. Rego, “Sobre la venta de cigarros” Bohemia (Havana), 6 Dec 1985, p. 81.

38 Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 42.

39 PCC, Los CDR y el delito conta la propiedad. This document is discussed extensively in relation to concepts of Socialist Legality in Chapter 4.

was anxious to reinforce this value as economic conditions increased opportunities for conspicuous consumption.

The CDR booklet on property crimes also made it clear that these crimes were to be interpreted as ideological or political crimes. Leaders sought to couch the expansion of consumerism in warnings that material desires, if taken too far, conflicted with revolutionary values. In the words of Fidel Castro, “he that robs today robs our workers, our peasants; robs those that work, those that produce, and these actions cannot be justified in our society because in our country unemployment and misery do not exist; today no one has to steal to eat, dress or satisfy their other necessities.”40 Thus, Fidel argued, the state had given Cubans everything that they needed, and to seek out anything beyond what the state was willing to give at any given time was a political crime. Also in 1972, Raúl Castro gave a speech to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of the Ministry of the Interior that elaborated on similar themes.41 That speech focused on how capitalist countries used consumption as a tool to undermine socialism. Its primary message was that material desires were dangerous, and that they reflected internalized norms that served capitalist and imperialist aims that were not compatible with the revolution.

The early 1970s undoubtedly saw an improvement of the situation faced by Cuban consumers, particularly compared to the difficult years leading up to the Ten Million Ton

Harvest; however, these gains were made in adverse conditions, as the availability of goods and services was not a primary concern of the Cuban state, despite its predominance in the minds of consumers. Instead, economic planners were forced to prioritize both economic development and

40 PCC, Los CDR y el delito, 3.

41 Raúl Castro, “El diversionismo ideológico arma sutil que esgrimen los enemigos contra la revolución,” Tomado de una conferencia pronunciada por el Comandante Raúl Castro el 6 de junio de 1972, con motive del onceno aniversario del MININT, (Havana: Ministry of Culture, 1985). This speech is analyzed at length in Chapter 5, in the context of greater openness to the United States in the late 1970s.

military preparation over improving the daily lives of the citizenry, despite the Cuban revolution’s ideological emphasis on social justice. This meant that the production of goods for export–including sugar and citrus fruits, as well as high-quality rum and tobacco often unavailable on the domestic market–and military development received the largest investments from the Cuban state. The rationale behind this, of course, was that improvements in standard of living meant nothing without the economic development that could guarantee their extension into the future and the military preparedness that would defend them from the looming aggression of

Cuba’s northern neighbor. Even more directly within the realm of social justice, standard of living as determined by the state of the consumer realm was not the priority. The development of the healthcare and educational systems–long touted as revolutionary triumphs–as well as infrastructure, all took precedence over expanding the availability of goods and services.42

Placing the consumer economy so low on its list of priorities–perhaps because of its association with the frivolous and unjust aspects of capitalism–reveals the blindness of the

Cuban state to the centrality of these issues for the success of its homegrown women’s

“liberation movement.” As a result of enduring gender norms that relegated domestic labor to women, the expansion of consumerism and the service industry fundamentally affected the lives of Cuban women. Many of them, if not most, were the ones “resolving” the everyday crises posed by empty shop shelves, long lines at bodegas, restaurants, and other places of food acquisition as well as the relative lack of labor-saving appliances and services, such as washing machines or laundromats.

Women often resolved these issues by allocating more and more of their time to them: hours experimenting with creative food combinations, waiting in lines, washing clothing by

42 Balari, Los consumidores, 5.

hand, and so on. These solutions, while the simplest to implement, made the burden that women had carried in domestic sphere prior to the revolution even heavier. The growing domestic burden stood fundamentally at odds with the Cuban state’s women’s liberation movement, which aimed to “free [women] to serve, though participation in the mass organizations and in the labor force.”43 Yet the hours dedicated to creative solutions to austerity severely limited the time that women could dedicate to the revolutionary labor that they performed in their workplaces and neighborhoods and in the mass organizations. Until 1976, the revolutionary state and organizations like the FMC alternately denied the problem and encouraged Cubans to overcome it through individual will, encouraging Cuban women to be superwomen, who somehow found time for it all, and Cuban men to be New Men, who hefted their share of the domestic burden.

Before examining these solutions and their shortcomings, we will take a closer look at how austerity impacted individuals’ lives.

What to Buy and How to Buy It: The Situation Facing Consumers in the Early 1970s

The improvements in the consumer realm did little to address the unique obstacles that many encountered due to medical conditions and other variables. This was one of the shortcomings of central planning–it was difficult if not impossible to plan for all the exigencies confronting a population that was diverse in age, race, and overall health, as well as in the more amorphous categories of taste and interest. Though rationing had incorporated some of these differences in the form of special diets for young children and people with certain medical conditions, the embargo, the desire to rationalize consumption to correspond to central economic planning, and other economic limitations impeded the ability of the Cuban state to fully meet the population’s needs. Through the 1970s those who were fortunate enough to have family living

43 Lewis, Lewis, and Rigdon, Four Women, x-xi.

abroad who were willing and able to send goods continued to depend on these shipments. Up until 1976, the year of his death, many of José Lezama Lima’s letters to his sister Eloísa living in the United States thank her for shipments of medicine and medical equipment not available on the island.44 Yet the goods for which he relied on her were not limited to highly-specialized medical equipment but included items that would have been needed by people facing a variety of medical conditions, including the rigors of aging. Many of these letters end with a discussion of clothing, sizing, and his needs as well as those of his wife. While his wife, Maria Luisa, remained an average weight for her height late in life, Lezama Lima struggled with his weight and struggled even more to find clothing that fit.45 Despite the fact that underwear was supposedly available through the ration to each consumer two to three times a year, multiple letters specifically request underwear in his size, indicating that plus size consumers especially had difficulty finding clothing that catered to their bodies. These discussions of waist size also revolve around the need for pants, a basic clothing item that remained strictly rationed due to continued scarcity with which consumers of all shapes and sizes grappled.

In April 1975, Eloísa was able to send her brother a pair of orthopedic shoes, a necessity for anyone of advanced age and elevated weight that was not sufficiently available on the Cuban market.46 Despite consistent improvements in the range of goods available for purchase in the

44 José Lezama Lima Papers, 1961-1976, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami, Collection No. 5047, Series No. 1, Box No. 1, Folders No. 15 and 16 (hereafter cited as Lezama Lima, CHC). See letters from March 1975, 27 June 1975, and 5 March 1976.

45 Ibid. See letters from 25 February 1975, March 1975, 12 April 1975, 4 May 1975, 2 June 1975, and 20 September 1975. Even after the expansion of consumerism throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as late as 1987 there was only one store in the city of Havana that carried plus sizes, “Vanguardia.” Vanguardia was often negatively impacted by shortages. As the authors of an article in Opina put it, the plus size clothing produced in Cuba amounted to “a drop of water in ‘a sea of overweight people.” Lezama Lima’s need to find pants that fit him would have been especially pressing given that plus size belts were rarely available. Vanguardia sometimes went a full year without any in stock, Zayda Grinan, “Se armo la gorda,” Opina (Havana), Jan. 1987, pp. 3-4.

46 Ibid., 12 April 1975.

1970s and 1980s, orthopedic shoes remained almost impossible to acquire late into the 1980s. In

1987, acquiring orthopedic shoes involved a nine month wait, even with a doctor’s note verifying your need, despite the fact that the shoes were acknowledged to be “not a luxury, but a necessity.”47 Orthopedic shoes would be particularly helpful for anyone facing the daunting prospect of standing in line to secure all of a household’s needs, a task from which Lezama

Lima, as a man, was relatively isolated by the labors of Maria Luisa. In the realms of both goods and services, he describes “lines for bread, lines for dirty clothes, lines for the dry cleaner, lines to get groceries from the bodega, etc., etc., and this wears you down and makes you sick of caring.”48 While the lines were a demand on the time and patience of a healthy person, they were even more of a struggle for the elderly and infirm, as Lezama Lima’s wife was.49 In February

1972, the couple was able to hire a girl to wait in lines and cook lunch and dinner for them, a prospect not available to everyone but one which dramatically improved their quality of life.50

Though the girl only came three days a week, the respite from the domestic labor that her presence offered Maria Luisa allowed her condition to improve, though one wonders who was standing in line to secure the girl’s groceries.51

Lorna Burdsall, as a North American and the wife of Cuba’s director of state security

Manuel “Barba Roja” Piñeiro, had enjoyed privileged access to goods from her arrival in Cuba due to her family living in the United States and her husband’s political connections. Her

47 Gustavo Gómez, “El sexton sentido,” Opina (Havana), Nov 1987, p. 11.

48 Lezama Lima, CHC, Folder 11, 24 October 1971, 1.

49 Ibid., Folder 10, December 1970.

50 Ibid., Folder 12, February 1972.

51 Ibid., Folder 12, 15 May 1972 and Folder 13, 14 February 1973.

experiences in the 1970s, however, reveal that even those with significant resources could exhaust every loophole available to them and still sometimes come up short. Whether through political connections or improvements in food supplies, Burdsall was able to muster an elaborate birthday feast for her son Kahlil in 1971, ordering chocolate cake, eclairs, and guava tarts and making pizzas to celebrate the occasion.52 However, she continued to rely on her family connections in the United States as well as her ability to travel internationally as head of Cuba’s modern dance troupe to augment the goods available to her family in Cuba. Practically since her son’s birth they had depended on Lorna’s mother to send shoes from the United States for him, a practice that continued into the 1970s.53 Her mother also helped her to overcome some of the dietary monotony that so many Cuban consumers complained about by sending her some parsley seeds, which flourished in Lorna’s small garden, so much so that she requested more.54 In the fall of 1971 Burdsall was concerned that “Cuban food is so starchy and not much in the way of yellow and green vegetables,” so she requested that her mother send her multivitamins to offset the lack of fresh produce available to her. Her mother balked at the hefty price tag of the vitamins, proving that ideal nutrition remained difficult in Cuba, even for someone of means.55

Despite the difficulty of securing adequate clothing in local shops, Lorna considered herself something of a fashionista, often making her own clothing from scraps and fabric sent from the United States. She proudly wrote home to her mother that “everybody comes to inspect

52 Burdsall Family Papers, circa 1930s-1970s, Cuban Heritage Collection, Collection No 5311, Series No 1, Box No 1 (hereafter cited as Burdsall, CHC), Folder No 2, July 1971.

53 Ibid., Folder 3, 14 May 1972.

54 Ibid., Folder 2, 8, 25-26 September 1971.

55 Ibid., Folder 2, 8, 25-26 September 1971, 1.

me at the receptions to see what I have invented – F. is usually an admirer of my creations.”56

The “F.” not so cryptically referred to Fidel Castro himself. Making your own clothing, or having a family member who could do so, was a crucial tactic for overcoming the clothing shortages with flair. Yet even in this arena Lorna had a leg up on her Cuban counterparts. Not only was she receiving fabric from family in the United States, but she was also receiving replacement parts for her Singer sewing machine.57 Such parts would undoubtedly have been difficult if not impossible to find in post-embargo Cuba, a real problem for anyone who acquired their sewing machine prior to 1959, when it was likely to have been a Singer model imported from the United States.

Additionally, as director of Cuba’s modern dance troupe, Lorna Burdsall was able to travel abroad at a time when international travel was heavily restricted. Her husband was also able to travel abroad due to his political position. International travel opened up access to hundreds of markets for the couple, allowing them to buy beautiful, unique, and luxurious goods that stood in stark contrast to the bare bones offerings being produced and sold by the state in the

1970s. In addition to a clay tree of life candle holder which she bought in Mexico, her “quite international” living room held “rugs and coffee tables from Algeria, wall decorations from all over, throws for the sofa from Chile, pillows from Panama, etc. etc.”58 At a time when the majority of the population could find very little to spend their money on, Burdsall did not “have space to put all the gifts” that she and her husband had acquired on their international travels. “I don’t like cluttered rooms,” she explained, “so I put things away and then take things out to

56 Ibid., Folder 3, 31 July and 1 August 1974, 4.

57 Ibid., 28 October 1973.

58 Ibid., 28 March 1973, 1.

change every once in a while.”59 During an October 1975 tour of Eastern Europe with the troupe,

Lorna picked up goggles for Kahlil, a sweater, and wool socks. Her fairly limited consumption stands in stark contrast to that of the dancers, who “use all – not all but most – their food money buying things for their families and friends in Cuba.”60 While Lorna could count on continued access to scarce goods through future trips, her husband’s political position, her status as a foreigner who was both inside and outside of the revolution, and her family in the United States, the dancers could not be so sure that this would not be the only international trip of their careers.

So they took advantage of every penny, outfitting their loved ones to the best of their ability, even if it meant going to bed hungry.

The clothing shortages that led Cuban dancers to starve themselves in order to buy a few more sweaters were so extreme that they garnered recognition from the highest levels of government. In implicit acknowledgment that these shortages affected women first and foremost,

Fidel Castro discussed them as part of his speech at the closing ceremonies of the Second

National Congress of the FMC, which took place in 1975. Characteristically, Fidel began discussing the problem as if it were already solved, detailing the on-going plans to construct three additional textile factories in addition to improving the output of the existing factories. As he continued, his remarks revealed how fraught even discussing the problems facing consumers was. Even someone with the unquestionable revolutionary chops of Fidel Castro felt the need to preface his remarks with an explanation: improving the options facing consumers did not mean embracing consumerism or capitalism.

We are not thinking like they do in consumerist societies, but we indisputably need a little more clothing. It is unquestionable. We have a lot of need for covers, sheets,

59 Ibid., 1-2.

60 Ibid., Folder No. 4, 31 October 1975, 2.

towels, and all these things. We know it perfectly well. Not only clothing to dress ourselves, but to dress beds and all of that. We know the per capita figures of what we have, and unfortunately we have not been able to improve. But already in the next five-year plan we are contracting with some of these textile factories. Unfortunately the process, from what we contract to what they construct and are in production, will take years. Unfortunately.61

In many ways, these comments are the same old song and dance. Castro acknowledged the problem as legitimate and promised solutions, urging revolutionaries to look beyond their current hardship to the abundance that would allegedly await them in a few years. However, the credibility of these particular comments likely benefitted from the new economic horizons of the

1970s. In order to coordinate the Cuban economy with that of other Comecon members, the

Sistema de Dirección y Planificación de la Economia (Economic Management and Planning

System-SDPE) began producing five-year plans designed to spur economic growth in Cuba.62

The first five-year plan covered the period from 1974 to 1979 and incorporated another wave of the future, computerized planning, so consumers could rest assured that their complaints, at least those deemed legitimate and “unquestionable” by the state, would be factored into those plans.

Despite the dire condition of clothing production, the state was quick to hold up improvements with regard to other goods and services in this period. The improvements in arenas that aligned with consumers’ tastes were often limited or based on shaky foundations, suggesting they were economic afterthoughts. For example, people had long despaired over the blandness of the available food. Even when supplies of basic staples like rice, beans, seasonal root vegetables, and meat were sufficient to make the preparation of a typical Cuban dinner possible, most families struggled to stay true to the taste profile of such foods without access to

61 FMC, Memoria II Congreso, 302.

62 Cole, “Cuba: The Process of Socialist Development,” 47-48.

the ingredients that traditionally add flavor to comida criolla. This issue was not so easily solved by the Cuban state’s integration into Comecon, as many of these ingredients traditionally had been grown on the island, not imported. Their increasing scarcity had been one ramification of the collectivization of agriculture, which was informed by a desire for modernity in the agricultural realm and defined by mechanized, mass production. Certain foods that added crucial flavor in cooking, like garlic and onions, were not easily adapted from small harvest, peasant- style agriculture to the large harvest, collective agriculture practiced on state and collective farms. Moreover, they were not prioritized by state economic planners because of their limited nutritional value. As a result, supply of these foods declined as agrarian and agricultural reform pushed forward. Despite their importance to consumers, these foods were never prioritized by economic planners because of their incompatibility with state goals for agriculture.63 The relative unimportance assigned to these foods is indicated by the fact that prior to the establishment of the farmers’ markets in 1980 improvements in the availability of such goods were achieved through volunteer agricultural labor, an inefficient practice that was supposed to fade from

Cuban life during the 1970s. Instead, it was simply repackaged.

The social and political pressures behind voluntary labor dwindled following the failure of the Ten Million Ton Harvest of 1970. Not only had people’s patience been worn to the breaking point by the amount of time and energy many had felt compelled or coerced to contribute to the harvest, but research had shown that the cost of mobilizing large numbers of inexperienced and sometimes lackadaisical volunteers for agricultural labor, providing them with

63 See Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 64-65, for a discussion of the crucial importance of onions and garlic even to seemingly simple dishes like black bean soup. As the authors discuss, the state never found an effective way to make these items compatible with large-scale state agriculture, though by the early 1980s even high officials recognized that “the nutritional significance of something like onions or garlic can be far greater than their individual properties would suggest,” a phenomenon then-Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodríguez referred to as “the importance of the unimportant.”

transportation from urban centers to fields as well as food and sometimes electricity and water for overnight stays, was actually higher than the value of the crops that it created. Following the

1973 Congress of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC), the labor union pushed to reduce the economic reliance on volunteer labor. Volunteer labor was to be used only in necessary tasks, such as the sugar harvest, and even then the volunteers should be vetted based on their ability to perform, with a new emphasis on the quality of the volunteers over the quantity of volunteers. In addition, the CTC congress called for the cost of mobilizing a volunteer labor force to be calculated in advance and for the abandonment of any plans in which the benefit did not outweigh this cost. The CTC even went so far as to encourage the news media to avoid publicizing volunteer labor activities unless they could also provide data that underscored the effectiveness and productivity of such activities, perhaps to discourage overeager participants from jumping at the chance to prove their political chops despite the cost in time and resources.64

Yet, even as the Cuban state turned away from volunteer labor as a drain on time and money, the harvest of crops that were crucial for food enjoyment if not for nutritional value continued to depend on the practice. The FMC and the National Association of Small Farmers

(ANAP) joined forces to develop “Plan Condiment” to increase the availability of the flavorful building blocks of creole cuisine like tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers. The plan sought to use volunteer labor, but these volunteer labor campaigns targeted the FMC’s rural wings, where members were more likely to have the agricultural experience necessary to ensure efficiency.

This aligned with the CTC’s recommendations for improving the cost-benefit ratio of volunteer labor. Of the FMC’s 602 rural chapters, 589 had put together brigades dedicated to Plan

Condiment by May 1975, for a total of over 9,000 participants. These participants worked five-

64 Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s, 50.

hour days in the fields, tended to their homes, and attended evening lessons designed to drive home the ideological element of their task. Thus, Plan Condiment did not just aim to influence the economy; it sought to shape budding communists by inculcating political development among the participants. Of course, given the nature and organization of Plan Condiment, these participants were already politically-developed enough to be FMC members and dedicate a substantial portion of their waking hours to voluntary agricultural labor. Theoretically at least, the participants’ political education combined their labor with political ideals, to promote love of work and socialist consciousness.65 On the ground, many of these women were likely driven by the more concrete rewards that accompanied volunteer labor, such as political status and access to local power. The rewards for performing volunteer later, and the pitfalls of not doing so, are discussed in further detail below.

Even though volunteer labor had been proven to be economically questionable, if not outright wasteful, it continued to play an important ideological role in Cuban society by building socialist citizens. It was increasingly implemented in the boarding schools established by the

Cuban state, where, as with Plan Condiment, it played both an economic and ideological role.

Scholarship students, “happy and smiling,” were expected to perform socially productive labor throughout the school day.66 Up to two hours each day were dedicated to agricultural labor, with older children (3rd through 6th grade) dedicating ten hours weekly and younger children

(preschool through 2nd grade) only six.67 The program gave students the opportunity to see the agricultural process through from planting to harvesting to eating, as part of the harvest was

65 Luisa Espinosa Hecheverria, “Asi ayudamos Plan Condimento FMC,” Mujeres (Havana), May 1975, pp. 72-73.

66 Paula Pina, “Los huertos escolares,” Mujeres (Havana), Aug. 1978, p. 56.

67 Ibid., and Sara Gonzalez, “Educar para la vida,” Mujeres (Havana), July 1974, p. 36.

dedicated to self-consumption or sent to the cafeterias of other schools and another part, the acopio, was sold to the state for resale to the public. These school gardens were one area where varied produce flourished, as profiles of the gardens mention onion, garlic, tomato, bell pepper, eggplant, cabbage, spinach, green beans, lettuce, corn, carrots, and squash, among other crops.68

The idea for these extensive school gardens stemmed from a UNICEF pilot program designed to teach peasant children to eat more vegetables, but it was continued by Fidel as a means of developing socialist consciousness among the children (also a stated aim of the FMC-

ANAP plan targeting adult women outlined above). The initial goal of the program – to improve student’s diets – was quickly achieved. Not only were students eating more vegetables but they were even eating new vegetables that they had never encountered before, like cauliflower and chard. In trying these new foods, the children became nutritional envoys, bringing “this dietetic message to their respective homes, [and] enriching the nutritional regimen of their families.”69

Despite the rosy tone of this Mujeres article, this generational reversal, in which children were expected to educate their elders through the revolutionary consciousness and habits inculcated at state-run boarding schools, often led to tension at home. Not only did this reversal of traditional roles upset hierarchies of power within the household, but it also pushed children to hold their parents to standards that may have been attainable in the boarding schools, with their privileged access to goods, but were not accessible in most urban centers. In many cases, a child coming home preaching about the nutritional benefits of cauliflower brought nothing but increased pressure to the dinner table, where the child’s parents’ limited resources complicated the process of crafting nutritional meals. State representatives as well as teachers did not hesitate to

68 Ibid.

69 Paula Pina, “Los huertos escolares,” Mujeres (Havana), Aug. 1978, p. 57.

acknowledge that the ideological and pedagogical effects of the harvest were much more important than its economic effects. As the director of one school proudly explained, the children

“learn to love the earth, to be creators, useful,” and they felt satisfied knowing that they were not only feeding themselves but contributing to feeding the population at large.70

In contrast to the agricultural gains made through volunteer labor, many of the improvements in the consumer realm that were made through state plans for economic development and increased production did not align to Cuban tastes at all. Instead, the nature of

Cuban-Soviet relations mostly determined the quality and relative reach of such improvements in the daily lives of citizens nationwide. In the cases of unfamiliar Soviet imports, officials charged the press with creating a taste, or demand, to match the supply of strange new goods. Despite the lack of shared history or culture between Cuba and Russia, the increasing centrality of their partnership to the Cuban economy also translated into attempts at fostering political and cultural closeness. As Soviet-produced goods began to fill Cuban shop shelves, there is evidence of a concerted effort to spark an awareness and appreciation of Soviet culture among the Cuban population.

Perhaps the most striking representation of this trend is the opening of a restaurant called

Moscow in Havana in August 1974. The restaurant was built to seat a staggering 400 diners, with

300 in its primary dining hall and an additional 100 in a smaller room. The space reflected distinctly Soviet tastes. It included a dance floor, a samovar, vodka, and Kvas, which can be understood as a Soviet Coca-Cola: a carbonated beverage that was popular in Russia but an acquired taste for most. It was ostensibly developed as a collaboration between “two countries that admire and love each other, the Soviet Union and Cuba;” however, the restaurant reads more

70 Ibid.

like an imperial imposition than a space for cultural partnership. Strict adherence to Russian culture and custom with little regard for Cuban sensibilities did not leave room for any Cuban elements at all. Although many Cuban students had traveled to the Soviet Union for education beginning in the early 1960s, the majority of the population had little contact with the ins and outs of Russian culture. While Moscow was a gesture toward resolving the enormous gulf between Cuba and its Soviet allies, a profile of the restaurant in Mujeres reveals that most

Cubans needed to be taught to appreciate such a foreign experience. Before Cuban diners could really make the most of a night out at Moscow, they needed further instruction in order to make sense of the educational opportunities provided by the restaurant. The piece is dominated by attempts to explain the restaurant and its offerings. For example, it explained that it was

European custom to include dance floors in restaurants (Moscow was the first Cuban restaurant to do so) and that the samovar was for after dinner tea. It also explained Moscow’s menu. Two of the most popular dishes were blini and shashlik, either because they were two of the most well- known Russian dishes or because the pancake-like composition of blini and the shish kabob of roasted meat that is shashlik were the most easily identifiable offerings. The unwavering popularity of these dishes reflects that most Cubans had no idea what the other items on the menu were, despite a display case in the entry way meant to address this problem.71

Not all of the new products profiled by the press in these years were Soviet imports. As the economy improved and developed, many products were produced in Cuba for the first time or for the first time since the economic shakeup of the early years of the revolution. Just as for their Soviet counterparts, these new products and their uses needed to be explained to consumers.

In the food realm, Nitza Villapol spearheaded this process, at least until the development of the

71 Ibid., 48-50.

parallel market in 1980 spurred the creation of new organs devoted entirely to the plight of the consumer. In her regular column in Mujeres, Nitza would explain these new products with her characteristic enthusiasm and provide recipes that highlighted these ingredients. When the

Ministry of Internal Commerce introduced arepa flour in late 1974, Nitza dedicated a number of columns to it. “It’s useful in varying your menu with available ingredients,” she explained, “a packet of [arepa flour] in our kitchen becomes a ‘magic wand’ that resolves almost anything.”72

With her somewhat exaggerated praise for arepa flour, Nitza implicitly acknowledged the scarcity that contributed if not to hungry bellies, at least to bored bellies. As her columns illustrate, a single packet of arepa flour could be used in countless ways to spice up a routine and uninspired menu.

Left unstated in Nitza’s column is that while arepas would have been unknown in Cuban cuisine prior to the 1970s, they are similar to pancakes, which were quite common in pre- revolutionary Cuba and often known by a Cubanized version of their English name, “pancay.”

Arepas, which in contrast to pancakes are generally made of corn, are typical to Latin American cuisine, particularly in places like Venezuela and Colombia. The 1974 development of arepa flour in Cuba seems like a response to both pancakes and their Soviet cousins, blini. It was an attempt to neutralize the imperialistic cultural aspects of the product by removing it from either the United States’ or the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Giving it the name arepa and relying on the American staple, corn, served to make the product sound local, or at least Latin

American.

Sometimes these informative portraits focused not on new products per se, but instead on new uses for old products in the context of scarcity. For example, Nitza dedicated a profile to

72 Nitza Villapol, “Nuevas ideas para utilizar las arepas,” Mujeres (Havana), Jan. 1975, p. 46.

oats as a great alternative source of protein that could be substituted for ground meat. Though not terribly popular, given the need for an informative profile written by Cuba’s most famous TV chef, oats were not unknown in Cuba in the 1970s, when they were imported in increasing amounts from the Soviet Union. In fact, they were still popularly referred to as “Cuaker,” because the Quaker brand had been imported from the United States prior to 1959. Yet in the post-revolutionary context of food shortages and Soviet imports, oats took on new currency. In recipes that called for ground meat, Nitza explained, it was always better to use second-tier meats, but oats could be substituted at ¾ cup for each pound of meat with no negative impact; in fact, the final product would come out juicier and smoother.73 Though Nitza lauds oats as the preferable alternative to meat both in terms of nutrition and taste, few home chefs would have agreed with her. Embedded within this specific profile on oats, as well as the 1980 edition of

Nitza Villapol’s classic cookbook, Cocina al minuto, is acknowledgment of the struggles of

Cuban consumers to access enough meat for their families. First preference would be given to first-quality meats, also the most popular and hardest to acquire and next to second quality meats, like those she recommends for use in recipes that call for ground meat. When even second quality meat was not an option, the third choice would be oats, integrated into traditional recipes following Nitza’s tested instructions.

These examples reveal that even as things improved, many aspects of the plight of the consumer remained the same. In order to deal with these issues, the Federation of Cuban Women introduced a number of programs aimed at helping Cuban women get their homes in order despite the context of scarcity. Initially, these programs were based on a traditionally-gendered approach to the domestic sphere, assuming that, with a little help from the revolution, women

73 Nitza Villapol, “Para que sirve la avena,” Mujeres (Havana), July 1975, p. 75.

could complete the tasks necessary to keep their houses in good condition and their families fed.

Yet by reinforcing traditional gender roles, these programs actually increased the burden on women, by reaffirming that, even from the revolutionary standpoint embodied by the FMC, this was women’s work.

Combatting Scarcity through a Traditionally-Gendered Approach

In response to the growing incorporation of women into the work force, the Cuban state introduced Plan Jaba in 1972. The plan was named using common Cuban slang for “grocery bag,” and its goal was to allow working women to get groceries for herself and her family without requiring her to miss work or take more time away from her other domestic duties than necessary.74 While meant to reduce the domestic burden on working women, the plan was also designed to serve the needs of the state, by removing or reducing one obstacle, the shopping, that may have prevented women from joining the workforce. In addition, the plan was meant to increase economic efficiency by limiting absenteeism among women who had already joined the workforce. If a woman could be guaranteed quick access to her groceries, the masterminds of

Plan Jaba hoped that she would be less likely to skip work or leave early to get the shopping done. To sign up for the plan, working women could pick up a form at their local bodega, fill it out, and return it. Local FMC activists would pick up the forms weekly, verify the woman’s employment information and the goods her family was entitled to through the ration, and notify the bodega of her acceptance or denial.75 Those who were accepted could then choose between two methods of streamlined grocery pick up: pre-dispatch or immediate dispatch. The pre- dispatch system allowed women to leave their bags at the store, where employees would fill

74 Gladis Castaño y Daisy Martin, “¿Que opina usted sobre el Plan Jaba?” Mujeres (Havana), May 1974, p. 72.

75 Gladys Castano, “¿Que opina usted sobre el Plan Jaba?” Mujeres (Havana), June 1974, pp. 86-87.

them with the goods for her family, and leave them for her to pick up at her convenience.

Depending on the store and a woman’s availability, bags could be picked up daily, every other day, or weekly.76 Immediate dispatch allowed women to show up, bags in hand, and skip the lines to be served first.77

According to the FMC’s official spokeswomen, Plan Jaba was a hit. When interviewed by Mujeres two years after the introduction of the plan, one woman explained how it had revolutionized her family’s lives. Before Plan Jaba, she told reporters, she had often missed out on the more exciting and quickly snatched up products that arrived at the bodega because she could not face standing in line and delaying all of her other household labor after a long day of work.78 Another happy customer noted that “It gives me peace that when I arrive from work I do not lose time in a line. I pass by the bodega, buy whatever there is, and continue home to start the day’s chores.”79 This explanation signals one major feature of the consumer experience in Cuba that was heavily shaped by scarcity, which was that consumers did not necessarily buy what they needed but instead whatever was available. A Ministry of the Interior (MININT) worker said that

Plan Jaba helped her to get home earlier in the day because she too could pick her groceries up quickly on her way home from work. While clearly good for working women, the plan was also perceived as good for everyone. The MININT worker goes on to explain that those who were ineligible for the plan – such as retirees and housewives – did not complain about the privileged treatment received by working women because they understood that “’Plan Jaba’ is not a

76 Ibid., 87-88.

77 Gladis Castaño y Daisy Martin, “¿Que opina usted sobre el Plan Jaba?” Mujeres (Havana), May 1974, p. 75.

78 Ibid., 74.

79 Ibid., 73.

privilege but a necessity.”80 The two housewives interviewed for the report echoed this opinion, stating that they had never heard anyone complain about the program and that they themselves had no complaints, as they had much more flexibility in their schedules to accommodate lengthy lines than a working woman did. Grocery store employees were also on board with the plan because it was easy to implement and it made for happier customers, which made their jobs easier and more pleasant.81

Despite the rave reviews published in Mujeres, the plan was far from perfect. Though

Plan Jaba had been in effect for two years at the time of the Mujeres report, one working woman who was interviewed had yet to sign up for the initiative because she did not really understand how it worked, signaling that some qualified women were missing out on the benefits of the plan due to a lack of clear information.82 Even for those who took full advantage of the program, it was not without its serious flaws. ICOIDI researchers found a number of issues that stymied ideal application of the plan. First and foremost, “the hours of operation in most businesses, for both industrial and food products, do not satisfy the exigencies of the working woman,” as the ability to swing by and pick up goods quickly and painlessly after work was not particularly helpful if the stores were already closed by the time working shifts ended.83 Plus, “Plan Jaba does not cover the sale of all products and is not systemically updated, which results in deformations in its application,” meaning that the plan was fine in theory but did not always

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid., 75.

82 Ibid., 74.

83 Reca Moreira, et al., Análisis de las investigaciones, 162.

correspond to the reality faced by consumers.84 One reality that the plan never successfully addressed was the ability to guarantee access to perishable goods, like produce. This was especially an issue with the pre-dispatch system, as produce may have been fresh when packaged, but with up to a week’s wait before pick up, store employees could not guarantee that it would still be edible.85 It was also especially ironic given concurrent FMC efforts to increase vegetable consumption through programs like Plan Condiment. In establishing goals that were difficult if not impossible for working women to achieve given the limits of the consumer economy, the FMC set an impossible standard. This left Cuban women, jabas full of rotting produce in hand, feeling like they had given all they had and still could not achieve everything that they were supposed to for themselves, their families, and the revolution.

Additionally, the nature of the plan and its implementation left gender norms that fixed grocery shopping as a woman’s responsibility unchallenged. In theory the plan applied to any household in which all adult members worked. Therefore, single men could also sign up for Plan

Jaba, as they faced struggles similar to those of working women in balancing work and the time- consuming task of grocery acquisition.86 Although any member of the nuclear family, not just the trabajadora, could pick up the groceries, in reality, it was almost always the working woman who did so.87 The nature of the plan–from the motivation behind its creation to its implementation and coverage in the press–revolves around the double shift of Cuban women who worked outside of the home. There was no apparent effort to offset the working woman’s double shift by

84 Ibid.

85 Gladys Castano, “¿Que opina usted sobre el Plan Jaba?” Mujeres (Havana), June 1974, p. 88.

86 Ibid., p. 86.

87 Gladis Castaño y Daisy Martin, “¿Que opina usted sobre el Plan Jaba?” Mujeres (Havana), May 1974, p. 72.

encouraging other members of the household to contribute to this labor, thereby making domestic labor the responsibility of all members of the household as opposed to solely that of women. Rather the FMC, through Plan Jaba, sought to alleviate this burden not by distributing it more evenly across the household but instead by streamlining the task itself. In addition, as the

FMC explained through its profile of the program in Mujeres, facilitating this task was simply a way of facilitating all of “the other tasks around the house that [a woman] must perform” by saving her a bit of time.88 Thus, Plan Jaba was simply a stopgap measure designed to allow women to accommodate both traditional and revolutionary identities by enabling them to complete domestic labor and serve the revolution by joining the workforce.

The revolution significantly impacted traditional female identity associated with the domestic sphere: the lines that Plan Jaba was designed to circumvent grew out of production and distribution issues embedded in the function of the economy. This traditional identity was also shaped by another FMC initiative that was developed in the early 1970s which focused on establishing and enforcing standards for home upkeep that placed additional pressure on women.

The FMC launched the Mi Casa Alegre y Bonita plan in 1970 on an experimental basis in the province of Sancti Spiritus. The campaign involved two separate distinctions to be granted to homes by the local delegation of the FMC. A “happy and beautiful house,” the ultimate prize, was one in which sanitary conditions were met in both the interior and exterior and the exterior was deemed aesthetically pleasing. A “happy house” met sanitary standards but lacked an attractive garden and exterior. These distinctions were not permanent, but could be won or lost based on reevaluation, which made the maintenance of distinction a never-ending battle for homeowners. This program amounted to a sort of socialist “keeping up with the Joneses,” based

88 Ibid.

less on the acquisition of consumer goods and more on the maintenance of tidiness and charm– no easy feat in a society in which cleaning supplies, including basic goods like soap, mops, brooms, and buckets, were often rationed, thereby available only in limited supplies or at high prices on the black market. Construction supplies for home upkeep–from nails to window glass—were even more difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.89 Sanitation campaigns like Mi

Casa Alegre y Bonita were also limited by shortages of materials into the 1980s.90 For example, lids for garbage cans, crucial for keeping pests out of the garbage, were impossible to find throughout the 1970s.91

While ostensibly both men and women could engage in the cleaning and upkeep necessary to gain the coveted distinction, the FMC program targeted women in a society in which domestic labor was overwhelmingly seen as women’s work. In Banes, a small town in the province of Havana, Eugenia Suárez boasted that 80percent of the homes on her block have achieved “happy and beautiful” status. Yet, the pressure remained, and not only for the 20percent deemed unworthy of recognition. She told journalists that “the plan has kept the local compañeras in a state of constant preoccupation over hygiene and the arrangement of their yards.”92 This observation was made with more than a hint of pride and satisfaction and confirmed at another local home, where journalists found two women hard at work. While

Edelmira cleaned, Estela, “hoe in hand,” weeded the yard. Estela said, “I take great pains so that my house will be happy and beautiful. I don’t allow even a single weed to grow in my garden.

89 Randall, To Change the World, 63.

90 Bitmai, Opina (Havana), Oct. 1981, p. 35.

91 “Museo del consumidor,” Opina (Havana), Oct. 1981, back cover.

92 Unión de Periodistas, La Mujer, 196.

This plan has served to make us all aware of hygiene. Plus, we engage in emulation between delegations, so none of us want to lose our award.”93 Within the first year of its existence,

463,142 homes were declared happy and beautiful, with an additional 271,313 declared happy under the plan.94

The award was a distinction but solely an honorary one; its value was primarily social.

Hence the importance of emulation, which was a socialist principle in which citizens competed amongst themselves to embody revolutionary behavior. Essentially, the women competed amongst themselves to prove their revolutionary chops. The FMC itself associated the award primarily with housewives. In the published thesis that preceded the Second Congress of the

FMC held in 1975, the program was placed firmly under the heading of the role of the FMC among housewives. The thesis argued that being in the home placed housewives in a privileged position to monitor their neighbors for antisocial behavior and influence them through work in the community. This essentially amounted to neighborhood surveillance, with housewives complementing the work of the CDRs through their “vigilance in the fulfillment of the principles of socialist legality, [and] combating all traces of individualism as well as attitudes not in accordance with the revolutionary process.”95 Though awarded to individual homes, “happy and beautiful” status did not run contrary to these aims by fomenting individualism. Rather, the status was less about individual distinction and more about social identification, establishing one’s home in the company of other homes whose owners were recognized as upholding their revolutionary duty and thereby establishing oneself among revolutionary company.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid., 197.

95 FMC, Tesis profundizado la accion revolucionaria, 24.

In determining who was worthy of this status, housewives were expected to make use of their years of experience in not only evaluating their neighbors’ homes, but also educating their neighbors about the sanitary requirements of housekeeping and cooking. “Happy and beautiful” status was determined by the sanitary brigades, groups of women, many of them housewives eager to contribute to the revolution without joining the workforce, who had been educated in basic courses focusing on public health. By 1974, 47,491 women had graduated from such courses.96 While these courses focused on sanitary standards and disease prevention, the information was marshalled through the Mi Casa Alegre y Bonita campaign to evaluate homes based on criteria well beyond the scope of hygiene, such as physical appearance and aesthetics.

Undoubtedly, the standards taught in such courses were informed by ideas about cleanliness and beauty that were deeply shaped by social class. The urbanization that took place following the revolution resulted in both rural and urban as well as lower and middle-to-upper class worlds colliding. Just as once impoverished, rural revolutionaries from Oriente encountered disdain from their new neighbors in the upscale Havana neighborhood of Miramar because of their perceived “dirtiness,” so the sanitary brigades empowered housewives to judge their neighbors’ homes on the basis of cleanliness and beauty.97 While these categories seem objective, they were in fact rooted in geographic and class-based realities. Thus the Mi Casa Alegre y Bonita campaign not only reinforced the gendering of domestic labor as women’s work, but likely increased the domestic burden on many women by mandating high standards. In many ways, the

96 Ibid., 22-24.

97 See Lewis, Lewis, and Rigdon, Neighbors, for an in-depth case study of these cultural collisions in one apartment building in Miramar.

“happy and beautiful” status awarded by the brigades amounted to bourgeois values dressed up in revolutionary olive green.

Allowing the sanitary brigades into one’s home in order to achieve “happy and beautiful” status meant allowing state representatives into the private domain and empowering them to pass judgment on its inner workings. This process blurred the line between the public and private spheres, extending the power of the revolutionary state into individual households and everyday issues like home and garden maintenance. Some women undoubtedly resented the additional burden–as if completing the housework were not enough!–and resisted allowing the state’s representatives into their homes. Yet hundreds of thousands of homes were awarded the distinction, signaling that many were happy to participate, and others who may not have been particularly happy to do so participated as a result of social or political pressure. Yet, allowing state representatives into the home to evaluate the results of individual efforts in home maintenance proved to be quite different than allowing others into the home to ease the burden of that home maintenance.

When Margaret Randall, a North American writer who lived in Cuba from 1969 to 1980, suggested to a group of her neighbors that the burden of housework could be eased through collective solutions, such as the creation of neighborhood work brigades that could clean homes, she met sizable resistance. “’You can bet I’m not letting anyone come into my house and clean,’ a woman on [her] block sneered, ‘now that would be an invasion of privacy!’”98 The scorn with which Randall’s neighbor responded to her suggestion reveals that while the revolution had empowered neighbors to judge their neighbors’ homes and lent substantial social and political value to their judgments, it had not significantly impacted attitudes about who was responsible

98 Randall, To Change the World, 143.

for maintaining the home. This responsibility continued to rest firmly on the shoulders of individual women. Thus the collective answers to the domestic problem that Blas Roca had optimistically foreseen in 1964 were certainly not feasible a decade later.99 Access to goods and services continued to lag, and even the kinds of collective solutions that would have been possible to implement with the time, enthusiasm, and hard work of revolutionary participants met such substantial resistance as to be impossible to implement.

FMC initiatives that targeted the domestic sphere in the early 1970s, like Plan Jaba and

Mi Casa Alegre y Bonita, did not significantly reduce the burden of the double shift performed by Cuban women who had entered the workforce. While Plan Jaba did streamline the shopping process for some women, there were many problems embedded in the plan that prevented it from reaching its goal of transforming shopping from a time-consuming endeavor to a quick errand.

More significantly, Plan Jaba, like Mi Casa Alegre y Bonita, reinforced traditional gender roles that designated the domestic sphere as women’s responsibility. These traditional gender roles only became heavier to bear in the context of austerity; yet the FMC did not adjust social expectations to reflect this scarcity. The standards that it sought to enforce, implicitly with the call to eat more vegetables through Plan Condiment and explicitly with the aesthetic qualities of the “happy and beautiful” status awarded to homes, remained largely unchanged from the pre- revolutionary era. These norms were determined by the bourgeois conventions that revolutionary leadership like FMC-head Vilma Espín and Fidel Castro were raised with as a result of their privileged status in pre-revolutionary society, norms that revolutionary policies never truly challenged.

99 “¿Quién atiende al hogar, a la cocina y a los ninos en el comunismo?,” Mujeres (Havana), May 1964, p. 76-77.

A Radical New Approach

Even as these initiatives were reinforcing traditional gender roles, attitudes about gender, all the way up to the top leadership of the FMC, began to shift. As the sanitary brigades educated women on household maintenance through the Mi Casa Alegre y Bonita campaign and Plan Jaba eased the daily burden on working women, it became clear that meaningfully diminishing women’s double shift could not be achieved through measures that approached the problem traditionally, as simply a woman’s problem. Increasingly, domestic labor was conceptualized as not just women’s work but rather something that should be shared by all members of the household. This ideal would be codified into law through the Family Code, as part of the revolutionary state’s first constitution, which was adopted by referendum in February 1976. The state could and did pass legislation with this aim, but how could it encourage people to embrace it in their individual households, challenging some of the longest held and least questioned assumptions about how daily life should run? As the FMC geared up for its second congress in

1975, the double shift was on everyone’s mind.

Figure 2-1 Petra Almaguer, National Work Hero and “Symbol of the Cuban Woman of Today” (Nereyda Barcelo Fundora, “Petra: Símbolo de la mujer cubana de hoy” Mujeres (Havana), Dec. 1973, p. 67).

The case of Petra Almaguer, the first Cuban woman to win the distinction of Héroe

Nacional del Trabajo (National Work Hero), was covered extensively in Mujeres in December

1973, and it underscores the importance of an equal division of domestic tasks in enabling the equal participation of Cuban women in the revolution (Figure 2-1).100 Petra’s life and the way that it was showcased in Mujeres illuminate emerging ideas about the ideal woman in socialist

Cuba as well as the role of the New Man as her partner. According to Mujeres, Petra was poor, a campesina, prior to the Revolution. While abundance existed in society prior to 1959, and shop shelves were full of goods, only the rich had the money to buy them. People like Petra were

100 Nereyda Barcelo Fundora, “Petra: Símbolo de la mujer cubana de hoy” Mujeres (Havana), Dec. 1973, pp. 67-73.

excluded from this abundance.101 Yet the revolution, and her extensive participation in it through voluntary and compensated labor both inside and outside of the home, revolutionized her life. In fact, she told Mujeres that she had always loved to work and that she and her husband, like most campesinos “worked like beasts” prior to the revolution. Yet only revolutionary society rewarded them for this hard work, winning their devotion in the process.102 As a result, they no longer

“work[ed] for money,” but instead to advance the revolution however they could, thus exhibiting a proper socialist outlook on the impetus behind and value of labor.103

Throughout the piece, Petra’s husband of twenty-eight years, Miguel Carralero, is portrayed as remarkable for his lack of machismo – he not only let her cut cane, but he taught her how and handled it gracefully when her ability grew to equal his own. Yet Petra’s cane cutting and Miguel’s endorsement of it did not take away from either her femininity or his masculinity.

As Petra put it, “Miguel helps me to be a real woman,” by cooking, cleaning the house, washing the clothes, and taking care of the children. And all “without grumbling!” Miguel is careful to add.104 He explained to journalists that he found immense joy in working side-by-side with Petra, be it cutting cane or taking care of the house. He also felt satisfied with the few short-term separations they had faced as a result of her labor for the revolution, which included Petra’s trip to the Soviet Union with a brigade of distinguished cane-cutters in 1970.105

While Petra and Miguel both worked as cane-cutters, Miguel’s labor at home enabled

Petra’s prolific work for the revolution outside of the home. She was a housewife, a mother of eight, a worker, a miliciana, a member of the Communist Party (PCC), and the secretary general

101 Ibid., 69. 102 Ibid., 68. 103 Ibid., 70. 104 Ibid., 70. 105 Ibid., 73.

of her local FMC. She also attended classes aimed at “superación obrera,” ideological instruction focused on overcoming the obstacles facing the female worker. She did all this and finished the housework in an hour after work every day, she boasted, a feat only possible because, for her, the housework consisted of washing and ironing. Her husband did everything else. The subtitle of Mujeres’ profile on Petra is “Symbol of the Cuban Woman of Today,” but

Petra certainly did not embody widespread trends. The division of labor in her household was truly exceptional, as were Petra’s other accomplishments. At the time of the PCC’s First National

Congress in 1975, two years after Mujeres published its profile of Petra, the PCC counted only

202,807 members in a population of millions: Less than 2.2percent of the total population were

Party members, even after concerted efforts to increase Party membership throughout the early

1970s.106 Women comprised just 13.23 percent of PCC membership in 1975, meaning that Petra was one of fewer than 27,000 female Party members nationwide.107

Petra explained her success and contributions to the revolution as follows: “I always say that one can always do more. I have seen women with two children, no more, who cannot develop themselves, who drown in a glass of water. I don’t know how this could be, because I, with all the children I’ve had, have always taken up everything, tried to do everything and to do it in the best way possible.”108 This push to always do more, give more, and work more for the revolution with little regard for financial compensation embodies the New Man, making Petra an idealized sort of New Woman. Yet perhaps the most interesting facet of the state’s showcase of

Petra as an ideal revolutionary woman is that her ability to embody this identity was directly

106 Leogrande, “The Communist Party of Cuba since the First Congress,” 399.

107 Ibid., 404.

108 Barcelo Fundora, “Petra: Símbolo de la mujer cubana de hoy,” 73.

dependent on the labor that her husband completed at home. Petra and Miguel’s marriage reversed the traditional roles that had long positioned men to dedicate themselves to the tasks that them brought social and political distinction while their wives toiled with little recognition in the home.

In order to enable every woman to have the opportunities to contribute to the revolution that Petra had, the Cuban state needed to find a way to give every woman access to the support system that Petra had in Miguel. These efforts took two forms. One was the expansion of initiatives begun in the 1960s to socialize some of the labor traditionally performed by women, such as childrearing, through the establishment of boarding schools and other state-run industries where this labor could be performed collectively. The FMC itself identified one of the goals of the revolution as “the creation of the material base necessary so that the mother, the woman, is able to see how she can dedicate the most time possible to work and study.”109 To achieve this aim, the state had developed a number of programs in the 1960s dedicated to reducing the household labor performed by individual women. These services included the círculos infantiles, often referred to as “círculos,” for affordable daycare; school and worker cafeterias, so that women need not prepare lunch for their children or husbands; and the boarding school system for older children, with some schools taking kids from Monday through Friday (seminternados) and others full-time during the school year. Petra and Miguel had at least one child in such a school, a daughter enrolled in a boarding school in Miramar.110 From the start, these initiatives were hindered by economic obstacles, however, not least of which was the state’s positioning of the development of the consumer and service economies fairly low on its list of priorities. As a

109 FMC, Tesis profundizado la accion revolucionaria, 11.

110 Ibid., 72.

result, the possibility of socializing domestic labor lagged behind expectations, though it continued to be held up optimistically as a cornerstone of the communist society that Cuba would one day achieve.

The state and its representatives recognized and accepted that achieving the aims of its women’s liberation movement and recruiting the labor of as many women as possible in service of the revolution, rested on reducing the domestic burden on women; however, as discussed above, improving the consumer and service economies was never a top priority for the state.

While the socialization of childcare fitted neatly within state goals, by allowing the state privileged access to young malleable minds for revolutionary instruction and freeing up the time and energy of parents for revolutionary work, the benefits of improving the consumer and service economies were less clear cut. These sectors were tainted by associations with capitalism and individualism and required massive capital investment with little ideological reward. While the círculos infantiles could easily be held up as an example of the superiority of socialism to capitalism, improving the consumer and service economies to the point of being able to point to them as successes of socialism meant trying to beat capitalism at its own game, a losing battle due to the limited economic resources of the Cuban state and the rigidity of central planning.111

Yet by not prioritizing improvements in this arena, the state essentially hobbled its own women’s liberation movement. Overcoming the difficulties of daily life continued to be a time-consuming

111 Fidel Castro often pointed to social services like the circulos to showcase the superiority of socialism. In December 1977, Castro gave the final speech at the second meeting of the National Assembly of People’s Power, the final meeting of the legislative body’s first year. His discussion of how Cuba was faring during the Latin American debt crisis hinged on how Soviet aid had allowed Cuba to emerge relatively unscathed from the crisis. While he acknowledged the sacrifices that people had made in the consumer and service industries during 1976 and 1977, he characterized them as relatively minor, especially when compared to the real advances that Cuba had made during the period in the construction of new health clinics, hospitals, and círculos, Castro, II período, 22.

endeavor, one that someone had to complete because the survival and well-being of Cuban families depended on it.

The second form that efforts at increasing female participation in the revolution took was an FMC-led campaign aimed at mandating a gender-neutral division of household labor that mimicked the equal (and highly unusual, for Cuban society) division of labor that Petra and

Miguel had organically stumbled upon. This strategy took on increasing importance in the mid-

1970s, as the FMC marshaled all of its resources to shame, convince, or coerce men to take up their share of the domestic burden. The first strategy had been emphasized by Blas Roca a decade prior to ease men’s fears that they might be expected to contribute to household labor in order to free their partners from the “slavery of the home” described by Lenin, but with the development of the Family Code, these fears appeared to be coming true.112 A gender neutral division of domestic labor, if it could be achieved, would truly revolutionize Cuban society. The numbers speak for themselves: a 1975 ICOIDI study found that during the traditional work week

(Monday through Friday), men spent an average of 38 minutes a day on household duties, while working women spent 4 hours and 44 minutes, and housewives a whopping total of 9 hours and

14 minutes!113 Despite this crushing inequity, men were not the only ones who responded to the idea of a more equal division of household labor with skepticism. Regardless of the success and harmony that Petra and Miguel seemed to have found, most women perceived the solution to their problems along the lines identified by Blas Roca, that is, the expansion of social services,

112 Blas Roca, “¿Quién atiende al hogar, a la cocina y a los ninos en el comunismo?” Mujeres (Havana), May 1964, pp. 76-77. Reprinted from Hoy.

113 Referenced in Reca Moreira, et al., Análisis de las investigaciones, 132.

resulting in some tension between how Cuban women perceived their problems and how their representatives in the FMC leadership perceived them.

The difficulty of mobilizing women as a result of everyday domestic burdens was a well- known fact that the FMC alternately chose to marginalize, ignore, or reframe. As part of its II

Congress in 1975, the FMC passed a “Thesis concerning the Full Exercise of Women’s

Equality.” This thesis was discussed by millions of participants in the local, municipal, regional, and provincial committees of the Communist Party, as well as in the Union of Communist Youth

(UJC), and in the mass and student organizations, which were given the opportunity to critique the document and contribute to revisions. According to a speech given by Vilma Espín in

December 1975 describing the process, the largest group of suggestions focused on the obstacles that time management and material difficulties presented to increasing women’s participation in the revolution:

A great many of the propositions referred to the need to increase the círculos infantiles, the seminternados, to broaden and improve laundry services, businesses’ hours of operation, the system of distribution, the system of prioritizing working women and other initiatives directed at alleviating the domestic labor of the family, as well as new schedules in work centers to permit greater incorporation and retention of women [in the workforce].114

Yet, as the Congress approached, FMC leadership rejected this group of propositions, perhaps knowing that the development of the consumer and service economies–even those aspects, like socialized childcare, which were ideologically in line with the revolution–was low on the state’s list of economic priorities. They were loath to admit that much of their mission rested on material developments unlikely to be achieved in the near future. Thus, even as material problems were acknowledged as a major cause of gender inequality, Espín took her cue from

114 Espín Guillois, “Informe presentado a la comision de trabajo,” 14.

Fidel Castro, optimistically resigning them to obsolescence well before the state’s economic capabilities made that obsolescence possible. Yes, Espín acknowledged, inequality persisted “as a consequence of material difficulties,” but these material difficulties would “be eradicated in the process of economic development.”115 Espín’s optimism marginalized the economic difficulties facing women, even as she acknowledged them as a major contributor to gender inequality and thereby a significant obstacle in the way of the FMC’s central mission of mobilizing women in service of the revolution.

For the present, Espín argued that the material problems facing Cuban women were not as great as many of the participants perceived them to be. The solution to these problems lay not in waiting for economic development but instead in re-conceptualizing domestic labor. She and the rest of the national leadership refused to include the suggestion that women could not make further progress until the revolutionary state had developed its material capacities in the final version of the “Thesis.” On the decision to reject the proposition, Espín explained that the delegates made suggestions that FMC leadership simply could not condone: “They suggested that women’s equality will not truly resolve anything more until the material situation is already resolved . . . that women must continue with the inequality that exists until the material problems have been fundamentally resolved. Naturally, we could not accept this statement.”116 This was one of just three propositions to be rejected, and it was the only proposal that was rejected on the basis of substance (the other two dealt with the structure and type of program put forth in the

“Thesis”).

115 Ibid., 20.

116 Ibid., 16.

There are two factors that contributed to FMC leadership’s decision to reject the proposition on the need for further development. On one hand, accepting the suggestion that the fight for gender equality could not proceed without material improvements rendered the mission of the FMC obsolete until a future date when economic development had eradicated the material difficulties of everyday life. The organization’s leadership certainly was not going to proclaim itself out of a job that came with significant political cachet. On the other, the FMC believed that it had already found an acceptable solution to these material difficulties. In the discussions leading up to the Congress, Espín explained, the solution was stated many times: “Material issues can be resolved through the participation of the entire family.”117 So, while awaiting the economic development that would ultimately do away with these material difficulties, the only available solution to gender inequality was to reframe difficulties in the domestic sphere as familial problems to be dealt with by families as opposed to women’s problems to be dealt with by women.

This approach was soon enshrined as a major FMC initiative, and by 1975 the FMC’s stance on gender equality with regard to the double shift centered on a more equal division of household tasks. While the socialized services model described by Blas Roca remained a long term goal, one which was constantly chipped away at through the construction of new círculos, workplace cafeterias, and dry cleaners, increasingly the FMC focused its primary efforts on promoting a gender neutral division of household labor. Even in situations where women chose not to join the workforce, the FMC pushed for husbands to take on some of the domestic burden so that housewives would have more time to devote to themselves and their personal development. In keeping with the goals of the Cuban state’s women’s liberation project, which

117 Ibid.

were developed in opposition to the model of U.S. feminism, such personal development was always conceptualized in terms of women’s service of the revolution. A husband’s help with household tasks would enable his wife to “distribute and organize her time in such a way as to be able to dedicate a considerable portion of it to her own personal growth, community projects, and political work.”118 Convincing women of the utility of such an approach through FMC meetings, educational materials, and mass media targeting women like Mujeres was one thing, convincing their husbands was quite another. Luckily, the FMC, as a powerful wing of the Cuban state, had significant political power as well as the ear of Fidel Castro.

In 1974, a “Family Code” was drafted for inclusion in the revolution’s first constitution, which was passed by referendum in February 1976. The Family Code sought to eradicate legal principles that were rooted in a pre-1959 understanding of the family that was “bourgeois, obsolete, and contrary to equality.”119 It legislated the full legal equality of women and included protective measures for children, regardless of their legitimacy. Chapter two of the Code laid out rules governing marital relations in order to ensure gender equality within marriage, and the provisions within this chapter reveal significant penetration of the private sphere by the state.

Article 26 specifies that “both partners are obligated to care for the family they have created” and mandates that married couples cooperate in raising their children according to socialist morality as well as participate and cooperate equally, in line with their capacities or possibilities, in home governance and development.”120 Though careful to use gender neutral language, Article 27

118 FMC, Memoria II Congreso, 21.

119 Ministerio de Justicia, “Código de la Familia,” 282. This is evidence that, contrary to the state’s approach to aesthetic norms for home upkeep and personal appearance, revolutionary leadership was willing to challenge bourgeois norms in other aspects of the private sphere.

120 Ibid., 294.

clearly mandates that husbands with stay-at-home wives are still required to help out at home and with the kids. Perhaps most radical is the assertion made in Article 28 that both partners have the right to a profession and that each should cooperate to the best of their ability in facilitating the educational and professional activities necessary for professional development by helping out at home.121 Through the Family Code, the revolutionary state sought to completely eradicate the gendered hierarchy that had long structured familial relations and replace it with a new model in which husband and wife stood on equal footing in furthering the goals of the revolution.

There is little doubt that the Family Code met with significant skepticism, if not outright concern and even semi-public rejection from many men. In the months of debate and discussion over whether and in what form the Family Code would be included in the new constitution, FMC coverage of the Code attempted to minimize the threatening nature of the legislation. Rather than highlight that the Family Code would be a huge step forward for the fight for gender equality, which it was undoubtedly designed to be, the FMC and its allies cast it again and again as a case of law being adjusted to fit the current reality. In an interview with Mujeres, Blas Roca argued that “all of the policies reflect, in part, realities already achieved,” though he admitted that the document would also be useful in pushing the retrograde portions of society to catch up with the vanguard, who already structured their homes in accordance with the Code.122 One woman interviewed by Mujeres echoed this sentiment while also recognizing that the measure was more controversial than FMC coverage would suggest, stating that while the section on gender

121 Ibid.

122 Martiza Cabrera, “El Código de Familia: Cinco preguntas al companero Blas Roca,” Mujeres (Havana), June 1974, pp. 42-43.

equality had been much debated, truly Marxist couples already split the domestic labor.123 Only

Fidel Castro, with the candor available to him as the leader of the revolution, addressed the full scope of resistance to the measure. In his closing statements for the II Congress of the FMC, he argued that “although some were afraid when discussion of the Family Code project launched, we do not see why anyone should be afraid, because what should really frighten us as revolutionaries is that we must admit the reality that there is still not absolute equality of women in Cuban society.”124 Though Castro acknowledged the resistance to the measure, he dismissed it, reaffirming the morality of the Family Code and the fight for gender equality as part of the revolutionary mission.

The Family Code was discussed and debated by millions of participants through the mass organizations and passed with 98percent of the vote.125 In just a few short years, the FMC was able to legislate gender equality and achieve resounding acceptance by the Cuban population.

Yet enforcing gender equality proved much more difficult than legislating it. Unlike the problem of racism, which the revolutionary government had legislated against and almost immediately declared resolved in the early years of the revolution, legislation against gender discrimination was only the first step of what would be a long battle.126 The discussions of gender equality and the double shift surrounding the FMC’s II Congress and the legislation to come out of them kicked off a decade-long “struggle for the rights of women” beginning in 1975. This struggle

123 Heidy González Cabrera, “¿Qué opina usted? Proyecto del Código de la Familia,” Mujeres (Havana), Sept. 1974, p. 40-41.

124 FMC, Memoria II congreso, 283.

125 Ministerio de Justicia, “Código de la Familia,” 284.

126 This is not to say that racism truly disappeared from revolutionary society, far from it. What is relevant here is not that both racial and gender inequality persisted, but the difference in approach to these problems. While leadership had passed legislation and then declared racism to be a solved problem, public debates about gender equality continued and even intensified following the passage of the Family Code.

continued more than a decade, as the FMC repeatedly ran into the difficulty of convincing people to internalize these new norms. The difficulties of everyday life continued to be difficulties shouldered primarily by women, despite a state campaign backed by the force of law to get men to carry their share. While at first glance the Family Code appeared to be an unprecedented state incursion into the once private sphere of the family, the ineffectual nature of this legislation reveals considerable agency among the citizenry in establishing the boundaries of the revolutionary state’s power.

The Limits of State-Led Women’s Liberation

Expanding the consumer and service economies would have put control over the double shift, and therefore control over their own time, in women’s hands. It would have enabled them to decide to send their children to day care or boarding school, when and how to do the shopping, when and how to do the washing or whether or not to drop it off at a dry cleaner. Conversely, legislating that men should help with these tasks, in many ways, put control over the double shift and women’s time in their husband’s hands. Unsurprisingly, the double shift did not disappear despite the attempt to legislate it away through the Family Code. Though the Code legally made domestic labor the responsibility of every member of the family, in practice things changed little.

Those men who chose to help at home did so, and those who did not, did not, despite the social and political pressure brought to bear by the FMC throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that the FMC has been characterized as “antifeminist” in ideology.127 As

Second-Wave feminists in the capitalist world were challenging the patriarchy in all of its most sinister and insidious manifestations, the women’s liberation movement in Cuba was always focused on mobilizing women in service of the revolution, even as it radicalized and began to

127 Randall, To Change the World, 104.

push for a gender-neutral division of domestic labor. Many of the traditional expectations for women remained unchallenged, if not reaffirmed, by the Cuban state, despite its support for the

FMC-led women’s movement.

As evidenced by the difficulties posed by rationing and empty shop shelves, these old expectations were more onerous, in terms of the time and effort that was required to live up to them, in a context of material scarcity. This was true for issues of personal appearance as well as domestic labor. Women were still expected to be “bien arreglada,” despite the difficulties of obtaining cosmetics, hair dye, shoes, and clothing of any sort, let alone in fashionable and flattering styles. If anything reveals the complex importance of fashion to the revolutionary mission, it is the fact that the fifth and final resolution passed at the FMC’s II Congress centered on the importance of the FMC’s role in “spread[ing] the correct use of fashion, fomenting good taste and combatting extravagancy,” through the mass media, particularly through their magazine, Mujeres.128 In this case, both “good taste” and “extravagancy” are loaded terms that carry significant political and cultural baggage. A woman with “good taste” presented herself in flattering clothing, with her hair done neatly, but a woman who showed too much concern with the way that she looked, perhaps by complaining about the difficulties of acquiring all of the necessary supplies to show her “good taste,” flirted with “extravagancy” and ideological diversionism. Too much concern with living up to standards of beauty smacked of bourgeois values and could mark a woman as politically dissident, if she was not careful, while too little marked her as lazy or vulgar. Women needed to walk a fine line between appropriate and extravagant self-presentation, to care about fashion and their appearance, but not too much.

Luckily, Mujeres was there to guide women through this mine field.

128 FMC, Memoria II congreso, 192.

Figure 2-2. “Today is my day to buy,” This cartoon mocks a woman who has dressed in formal wear for her day to complete the shopping. Despite improvements in consumer conditions, consumers were still limited to assigned shopping days (Political cartoon published in Mujeres (Havana), May 1975, 65).

The cartoon above (Figure 2-2) was published in Mujeres in 1975. It illustrates the line between appropriate and extravagant self-presentation in hyperbolic terms. Two women are pictured in the cartoon, both holding shopping bags. One of the women is dressed in formal wear, including a floor-length gown, heels, and elaborate jewelry. She tells the other woman,

“today is my day to buy,” while the other woman, who is dressed simply but smartly, takes in the first woman’s outfit with a look of horror on her face. With its exaggerated contrast between the two women’s styles, the cartoon was intended to shame Cuban women who continued to ascribe to bourgeois mindsets and value ostentatious modes of self-presentation. In real life, however, these boundaries of appropriate self-presentation were much less clearly drawn.

Debates about the role of concepts like beauty and aesthetics in a socialist society were not confined to Cuba. In February 1974 Mujeres published a piece by the director of Bulgarian

fashion magazine, Lada, outlining the important role that the magazine played in educating its

Bulgarian, East German, and Russian readership about the importance of beauty and aesthetics.

The author justifies the magazine’s existence through the need to orient the taste of the working class as their options for consumption expanded. According to a directive issued by the Central

Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, “the more society approaches communism, the more the artist, capable of appreciating and creating beauty, awakens in the individual.”129 This same trend, an increased ability for the individual to distinguish him or herself through personal appearance, took place in Cuba, as the Sovieticization of the economy improved the prospects for consumption. In both cases, as the options facing consumers expanded, party leadership felt that they needed increased guidance on appropriate consumption in order to avoid the creeping,

“alien influence” of the capitalist world.130 The fact that Cuban leadership followed Soviet trends with regard to consumer education reflects not just a Sovieticization of the Cuban economy, but a Sovieticization of Cuban culture.

Expanding on these themes a year later, Mujeres published a second article, this time by

Cuban authors focused explicitly on Cuban concerns. Again, the fine line between caring too little and too much about one’s personal appearance is central. As Mujeres journalists explained, fashion can be a dangerous game. In capitalist countries, including Cuba prior to 1959, it was a central mechanism used by the wealthy to subjugate the poor, who were exploited economically and yet continuedd to toil in hopes of outfitting themselves in the bourgeois trifles found in fashion spreads. While Mujeres had always featured fashion spreads as well, the fashions that it advocated were somehow “rational” and devoid of the extravagance of capitalist fashion (despite

129 Nadia Gancheva, “La belleza y la estetica” Mujeres (Havana), Feb. 1974, p. 48.

130 Ibid.

the appearance of pieces from high fashion designers operating in the capitalist world). The authors encouraged readers to concern themselves with “personal care and the collective aesthetic,” but cautioned against extravagance. They explained that in a socialist society, the individual distinguishes herself through her principles and values, and in appearance “through simplicity, not by the quantity of clothing or accessories nor through trivial and absurd exoticisms.”131

The ambiguous suggestions made in these articles–care but not too much! Fashion is important but also dangerous!–seem disconnected, at best, from the realities faced by Cuban consumers, who often resorted to making their own clothing due to clothing shortages that persisted through the 1970s. While the authors argue that Cuban fashion operated independently from the “dictates of the international bourgeoisie,” review of Cuban fashion magazines reveals considerable overlap with the trends in the capitalist world.132 According to Lorna Burdsall, who through her ability to travel internationally and receive mail (including magazines) from the

United States was well-positioned to monitor both the Cuban and international fashion scenes,

Cuban fashion norms were quite similar to those in the capitalist world, only delayed by economic and informational exigencies. Upon receiving crop tops in a clothing shipment from her mother and sister, she wrote back that she would likely be wearing them at the beach but nowhere else, as the style had not yet hit the streets of Havana. “The styles get here,” she explained, “but later than in the states [sic].”133 While Mujeres insisted on the difference between the role of fashion in socialist and capitalist countries, this rhetoric rings hollow when nestled

131 Iris Davila y Maritza Cabrera, “Tambien la moda,” Mujeres (Havana), July 1975, p. 25.

132 Ibid.

133 Burdsall, CHC, Folder 3, 31 July and 1 August 1974, 2.

between fashion spreads and do-it-yourself tutorials aimed at teaching women to outfit themselves much as women in the capitalist world were; only in Cuba, living up to these spreads was not possible simply by buying clothing, but instead entailed hours of labor hunting down materials and a talented seamstress or doing the sewing oneself. Fashion, therefore, required all

Cuban women to become craftswomen or small-scale entrepreneurs, which ran counter to socialist values that emphasized collective and socially-productive labor.

Alongside these old expectations arose new expectations for ideal womanhood, which also demanded the commodity that Cuban women perhaps struggled the most to manage, their own time. Though the Cuban economy turned away from substantial dependence on volunteer labor following the fiasco of the Ten Million Ton Harvest, volunteer labor continued to be a crucial opportunity to prove one’s revolutionary chops. Shutting down claims that surfaced internationally that Cubans worked 44 hours plus an additional 30 for the government each week, Lorna Burdsall wrote to her family in the United States that this idea was laughable. “Any work for the gov[ernment] is purely voluntary and never amounts to more than a Sunday morning or Saturday afternoon in most cases,” and in any case, Cubans are “still Latins and always manage to mix work with pleasure.”134 Though she attempted to minimize the burden of volunteer labor, her remarks are telling. Burdsall characterized the loss of the morning or afternoon of a weekend day as nothing but setting aside half a day may not have been possible for women struggling to balance jobs and the domestic labor and still hoping to spend quality time with their loved ones during her time off.

In addition, terming this labor “purely voluntary” obscures the ways in which voluntary labor became mandatory for Cubans hoping to scale the political or professional ladders. The

134 Ibid., October 16, 1974, 4. Emphasis in original (“Latins” underlined twice).

case of Petra Almaguer, first woman to be awarded the distinction of National Work Hero, illustrates the crucial importance of extensive participation in such activities to achieving distinction and advancement within revolutionary society. Much of the Mujeres interview with

Petra and her husband was focused on her work in the cane fields and her role in the FMC, with the result that her manual labor in the cane fields and her voluntary labor in organizing the women in her community emerge as the factors that truly distinguish her as the symbol of revolutionary Cuban womanhood. Though the Cuban state pushed people always to contribute more, the option of increased participation was simply not available to all. Women especially were often cut off from the avenue of advancement created by volunteer labor because of the time constraints put on them by their responsibilities in running the household. As the case of

Petra and Miguel reveals, one partner always lost out, even if men did choose to take on their share, or more, of the domestic labor. While Petra traveled to the Soviet Union and distinguished herself on a national level, Miguel shouldered the thankless labor of running their household.

Margaret Randall references marginalized people or groups who “fell through the cracks,” the most pressing example of which are “women who worked outside the home, shouldered all the housework and childcare and yet were judged unenthusiastic, uncooperative or, worse, marginal to the revolution if they didn’t show up for weekend voluntary work.”135

Randall identified strongly with a feminist perspective that she bemoaned was not widespread throughout Cuba and even faced hostility from the FMC. She frequently voiced her skepticism that women, burdened by the double shift, could fairly be expected “to take on the extras–the political tasks or voluntary work–that would win her revolutionary distinction,” but was met with

135 Randall, To Change the World, 141.

an apathetic refrain, “It’s just the way it is.”136 Even her own husband, a progressive North

American, often dragged his feet when it came to doing his part, despite his recognition of the gendered division of household labor. “If it doesn’t bother me that it’s dirty why should I clean it up, was typical of the reasoning he and so many men of his generation used;” yet, sanitary conditions in the tropics had greater implications than personal preference.137 The importance of a clean home in stopping the spread of preventable disease lay at the heart of the FMC’s Mi Casa

Alegre y Bonita campaign, despite the class-based assumptions that undergirded it. Randall, in an attempt to expose the weakness of her husband’s reasoning, once left a sink of dirty dishes unwashed for a week. She eventually washed the dishes herself, after her youngest child was hospitalized for gastroenteritis.138

The Family Code proved impossible to enforce, and it was difficult to convince even dedicated and enlightened revolutionaries to adhere to it willingly. For the sake of their families’ well-being and their own sanity, Cuban women continued to put long hours into making their homes clean, comfortable, and stocked with the necessary food, clothing, and other goods. As was true in other aspects of the Cuban revolution, revolutionary leadership remained hopeful that the new gender roles that they struggled to convince older generations to accept would be second nature for a new generation raised under the revolution. By the time of the FMC’s II Congress, in

November 1974, the “new couple” was already emerging as yet another trope, like that of the

New Man, to dictate appropriate gender roles in revolutionary society. This new couple was

“united by love, by the pursuit of common objectives, by equal rights and responsibilities,” but

136 Ibid.

137 Ibid., 142.

138 Ibid.

most of all “by the commitment to participating with all of their forces in every labor of the revolution.”139 As with so many of the revolution’s grandest goals, the solution to the double shift and the obstacles that material scarcity placed particularly on women’s advancement within revolutionary society lay in the utopian future, not the problematic and combative present.

Conclusion

If the greatest everyday difficulties facing Cuban society in the early 1970s were material, then by the mid-1970s consumers had reason to rejoice. As the economic situation improved, the state began to listen to its exhausted and frustrated citizenry and pay more attention to consumer struggles. Supplies of foodstuffs and goods were improving and would continue to improve for another decade. Yet even as conditions improved, citizens demanded more. The consumer and service economies were a perpetual source of complaint due to limited investment, even though the period from 1976 to 1986, remembered fondly as the “era of the fat cows,” was the period in which the revolutionary state invested the most attention and resources into the consumer and service economies. The conflict between state economic and ideological goals and popular calls for greater agency and control over the conditions of daily life led to heated battles over the meaning of revolutionary citizenship and the appropriate role of consumer comforts a revolutionary society. The expansion of consumerism was inextricably tied to the question of gender equality in Cuba, and as a result, many of these battles were staged in contests over women’s roles and the double shift.

139 FMC, Tesis profundizado la accion revolucionaria,” 62.

CHAPTER 3 THINKING LIKE A THIN COW IN THE ERA OF THE FAT COWS, 1976-1985

In the late 1970s, as the capitalist world faced economic recession and oil crisis, Cuba was insulated by its relationship with the Soviet Union, which guaranteed both a market for

Cuban sugar and the flow of subsidized oil as sugar prices were plummeting and oil prices skyrocketing on the free market. Fidel Castro explained this Soviet lifejacket to the new Cuban parliament in December 1977, at the end of its first year of existence. In various Latin American countries and elsewhere, standards of living had been hit hard by uncontrolled inflation and desperate austerity measures. This led to mass discontent and dissent, leading to political instability. Fidel’s words read as almost prophetic of the ways in which these problems would spiral into the Latin American debt crisis that shook the global economy in the 1980s. For now, as left-leaning governments in Chile and Argentina fell to military coups, Cuba’s revolution was heading into a new institutional phase on a wave of economic growth bankrolled by the Soviet

Union.1

Despite this relative prosperity in a sea of misery, Fidel urged Cubans to maintain the mentality of “thin cows” even as Cuba entered an era of fat cows. He asked Cubans to willingly

“be more austere and more efficient than ever,” so that the nation could capitalize on its current advantages to shift the terms of global trade. The ultimate goal was to take on a new role in the global economy, to transform Cuba from a nation of importers to a nation of exporters. Rallying the people around this call for sacrifice, he asked them to forego improving standards of living and consumption levels for “seven or eight years” so that the country’s modest economic growth could be devoted to developing its export capabilities and reducing its dependence on the

1 Castro, II período, 13-16.

100

capitalist world, key to minimizing Cuba’s vulnerability in the face of future economic crisis.

Cuba should focus on maintaining its current levels of consumption and standard of living, which Castro pointed to as a sign of the revolution’s success in these areas: if people were suffering, he would never ask them to continue suffering.2 High on the economic growth and stability that resulted from the pragmatic, Soviet-inspired economic policies first implemented in

1972, the big dreams and idealism of the 1960s had begun to creep back in.

Yet Fidel admitted that he “kn[ew] very well what the people want[ed] to improve their situation.”3 With this speech as with so many others, Castro walked a tightrope, somehow acknowledging the shortcomings of the revolution even while trumpeting its triumphs. Asking people to sacrifice for another seven or eight years meant asking them to continue making the daily sacrifices that they had been making for almost twenty years in the name of a revolution that had always promised them more by some ever-receding future date. In an attempt to fend off the cynicism and exhaustion that must inevitably have resulted from this dynamic, Fidel returned to the militaristic language of revolution. After discussing the sacrifices made by his generation– emphasizing that the first generation of revolutionaries faced the largest problems and lived through the worst austerity–he challenged younger generations to do their part for the sake of development: “This generation must make sacrifices. It must make sacrifices!” With these comments about generational divides and the relationship between sacrifice and revolution, Fidel further articulated a framework in which the revolution remained in progress, even after the provisional structures created in the 1960s were replaced with institutions in the mid-1970s. In some ways, then, to sacrifice was the fundamental act of contributing to the revolution and

2 Ibid., 25-28.

3 Ibid., 31.

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therefore being a revolutionary citizen. While there were so many things that revolutionary leaders “would love to give the pueblo,” the immediate desires of individuals must be sacrificed for the collective good of the future.4

With the shadow of comforts withheld hanging over society, Cuba entered into a period of institutionalized revolution. At the state level, the 1976 Constitution provided a framework for a radical revision of gender norms and interpersonal relationships through the Family Code. The

Constitution also provided for some measure of democratic participation through the newly established legislative body, People’s Power. At the same time, increased but still imperfect opportunities for consumption unleashed society-wide debates about the relationship of the individual to the collective, the role of goods and services in a socialist society, and the meaning of desire.

Just as the Family Code proved to be more image than reality in terms of its effects on society, so too did state efforts to engage the desires of the population through People’s Power and Opina, a new magazine dedicated to Cuban consumerism. Instead of creating structures for meaningful democratic participation, power remained concentrated in few hands, and in Fidel

Castro’s hands most of all. The revolutionary state created institutions that were better suited to venting frustration than working productively towards solutions. In the process, they created a new but empty paradigm for active revolutionary citizenship: quejistología, or complaint-ology, which gave citizens a voice but one that would never be heard over that of revolutionary leadership. Yet, the confluence of oppositional voices against the thin cow mentality that was mandated from above reveal the limits of state intervention in everyday life.

4 Ibid., 42.

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Soviet Models and Cuban Realities: Rationalizing Consumption in the late 1970s

Throughout the late 1970s, ICOIDI helped expand the Sovietization of the economy that had begun with Cuba’s entrance in the Soviet Bloc in 1972. In 1976, the state debuted the New

System of Economic Direction and Planning, an attempt to apply the accumulated wisdom of the socialist world to the peculiarities of the Cuban economy in the form of five-year plans. ICOIDI completed systematic studies to identify local conditions and needs, and these conditions figured into the nation’s future five-year economic plans through trial and error.5 While this reflects the revolutionary state’s interest and willingness to reform the consumer economy, it also reveals the limitations of centralized economic planning. Each economic plan covered five years, so even as

ICOIDI acquired new information, there was a significant lag between the detection of problems and the implementation of solutions.

ICOIDI studied consumption and demand using various methods, including statistics, questionnaires conducted by phone and mail, focus groups, and even psychological evaluation.

They also developed an intricate web of “observers,” over 600 people living in fifty-three locations in Cuba, to report on local conditions.6 The information they gathered about the needs, demands, habits, and preferences of the population was then used to shape the structure, assortment, and quality of production.7 The very existence of ICOIDI and their on-going studies of consumerism was in itself a state effort to politically manage the unmet desires and pressing needs affecting society. It revealed that the state was attentive to the needs of citizens, if not

5As late as 1990, with economic collapse looming, the Revolutionary state’s efforts at centralized economic planning were still in the trial and error stage, even in the eyes of state representatives like Dr. Eugenio Balarí, the head of ICOIDI, Los consumidores, 15.

6 Lic. Enrique Nezvadovitz, “Red nacional de observadores,” Opina (Havana), July 1970, p. 34.

7 Lic. Wilfredo Benítez Álvarez, “Desarrollo y aplicación de métodos y técnicas en la investigación del mercado,” Demanda: Revista científica del ICOIDI (Havana), 1979, p. 6.

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necessarily accountable to the citizenry (as ICOIDI’s ability to impact the state’s economic priorities was limited by the low priority that upper leadership generally gave the consumer and service industries).

ICOIDI’s approach to consumption was always informed by the context of a socialist society, where goods were understood to be imbued with different, and often deeper, meanings than in a capitalist society: “objects, in addition to satisfying a functional necessity, communicate the new scale of values that govern the society in transition” to communism.8 While under capitalism the meaning of goods is limited to function and class expression, in Cuban socialism goods were considered an important tool in promoting certain values crucial to guiding society towards communism. As a result, the state closely managed consumption to help facilitate the transition to communism. State representatives anticipated that such oversight would no longer be necessary under communism because by the time Cuba transitioned from socialism to communism, the masses would have developed the appropriate social and political consciousness to manage consumption in a fair and rational manner on their own.9

In the meantime, as ICOIDI evaluated the revolutionary state’s satisfaction of the material and cultural needs of the population, the Institute focused not only on qualitative measures, which would certainly have indicated an insufficient or erratic supply of most goods.

It also examined the values that available goods embodied and these goods’ ability to fulfill a

“fundamental aspect of consumption” in the construction of the new society: “the full development of the character of all members of that society.”10 Character development through

8 Ibid., 8.

9 Balarí, “De la desigualdad a la justicia social: la Revolución cubana,” Demanda (Havana), 1980, p. 60.

10 Ibid., 8-9.

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consumption centered on equal access to goods, as well as on the kinds of goods available and the lessons that they conveyed.

This approach to consumption was central to the rationale behind legislation that expanded ICOIDI’s role in the nation. From collecting and communicating a unidirectional flow of information about consumer demand from society to state, the Institute’s role had developed to fostering a dialogue between state and citizen. In addition to collecting information about existing consumption, beginning in 1976, the state entrusted ICOIDI with disseminating information and orienting the public regarding “the problems in standard and style of living among the people and the specific conditions of our socialist society.”11 To better fulfill this role,

ICOIDI debuted Opina, its new magazine, in 1979. With Opina, ICOIDI hoped to teach the population more rational habits of consumption of both goods and services as well as inform it about its own material and spiritual demands. True to established patterns in revolutionary discourse, these problems were explicitly cast in terms of their imminent improvement. The magazine was designed to be an instrument of constructive criticism, education, transformation, and improvement of the individual and society, as well as an organ of mass communication, “an enthusiastic, vigorous, optimistic instrument of the revolution at the service of the people.”12

Despite this insistence on adhering to an optimistic party line that must have rung hollow or at least inflated after twenty years, the magazine resonated with the population. The first issue sold out in two hours. While shortages of paper and other printing supplies prevented them from

11 Established by Ley 1323 de la Organización de la Administación Central del Estado, Untitled editorial, Opina (Havana), July 1979, unnumbered pages.

12 Ibid.

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increasing print runs, the editorial board asked readers to take good care of their copies and share them with their neighbors so that each copy could be seen by at least four Cuban families.13

The press, including Opina, was a primary instrument in state efforts to inculcate “good taste” among the population.14 While the state’s understandings of “good taste” recognized the classist nature of the term in pre-revolutionary Cuba, they did not question the validity of such a classification altogether. Thus, while state representatives recognized that notions of “good taste” are shaped by a type of culture and education that only the middle and upper classes could access in capitalist Cuba, they accepted the value of “good taste” uncritically and sought to foster the development of taste among the masses. These efforts imbued a range of goods down to knickknacks with enormous meaning. For example, the continued high demand for garish and kitschy plaster figurines was understood as more than a popular desire to decorate homes with limited resources: it was considered a dangerous manifestation of pre-revolutionary values.

These figurines could be anything from small, cartoonish animals to the Buddha.

According to art critic Gerardo Mosquera, the plaster figurines sold in 1970s Cuba were copies of the ceramic figurines sold in the 1940s and 50s, which were mass produced and considered by many to be in poor taste even then. In the context of the Cuban revolution, though, the problem was not just that the plaster copies were cheap knockoffs. They were “out of style and alien to the aspirations of [revolutionary] cultural reality.”15 Their lack of cultural value and resonance was believed to spawn a shocking host of societal ills from the dusty corners of forgotten shelves, subtly eroding the political and ideological foundations of revolutionary identity. A fiery

13 Opina (Havana), Aug. 1979, p. 7.

14 Hubert Barrero, “Mal gusto . . . mala compania,” Opina (Havana), May 1982, pp. 10-11.

15 Maria del Carmen Mestas, “¿Hasta cuando el yeso propagara seudocultura?” Muchacha (Havana), July 1983, p. 32.

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editorial that appeared in Muchacha, a magazine put out by the FMC for girls aged 14 to 28, argued that the figurines undermined costly state efforts to educate the masses by promoting

“backwardness . . . capitalist pseudo culture, past habits, lags, the petty bourgeois, populism, bad taste, anachronism, and even means for superstition (Buddha figurines) and religious practice

(North American Indian figurines).”16 The solution? New figurines, produced by local artists to resonate with Cuban reality and values. The knickknack debates also point to another crucial difference in the approach to consumption under socialism versus capitalism. It was not figurines per se that were the problem, but the specific figurines then available in Cuba, which state representatives considered far removed from Cuban reality and lacking in artistic value. These calls for improved, or revolutionary figurines correspond to ICOIDI’s mission to educate consumers to buy according to their material and spiritual needs. Under capitalism, by contrast, the media of mass communication promoted consumption for consumption’s sake, creating “a homo consumens, alienated from society by wasteful and unconscious behavior.”17 These creatures’ shelves were presumably filled with knickknacks that were simultaneously meaningless and dangerous

ICOIDI’s mandate therefore involved listening to consumers and communicating their complaints to the state’s economic planners. It also included educating consumers about the very shortages that they were living daily, shortages about which consumers understandably considered themselves to already have intimate knowledge. Sometimes, as above, the divergence between consumer and state expectations centered on values and ideology and their intersections with subjective notions of taste. Other times, the experiential distance between state and

16 Ibid.

17 Balari, “De la disigualdad a la justicia social,” 60.

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consumer involved a direct denial of consumers’ reality, as when state representatives set out to correct misconceptions about the severity of the problems besetting the consumer and service industries. In 1979 the state commissioned a study of the consumer experience at the Offices for

Consumer Registry (ORC)–previously known as OFICODA, the organization responsible for the ration system–to investigate consumer complaints about long lines and the excessive documentation required to make changes to the household’s libreta. The most common changes were registering for a special diet or adding or removing someone from the libreta. The study involved questionnaires and interviews with forty-five ORC employees and administrators and

222 consumers in the city of Havana. The results of the study were revealing.

Despite widespread complaints, the systematic breakdown of how the ORCs functioned revealed the system to be working well. Almost all of the consumers (94percent) waited less than half an hour for service, and the consumers found the employees generally helpful and efficient, even while asserting that they could work a little faster. Just less than a third (32percent) of the participants in the study had to leave to acquire documentation required by the ORC, but the documentation was basic enough that a prepared consumer would likely have thought to bring it even without knowing in advance which specific documents were required. Most of these cases were people seeking a special medical diet, which required a letter from a doctor attesting to the medical need for such a diet. Medical dietary accommodations were highly sought after because they included privileged access to scarce goods like milk and fish. Requiring a doctor’s note was perhaps the least onerous way to document need and prevent industrious and self-interested people from scamming the system, something that undoubtedly happened anyway. Other cases involved identification cards or libretas, basic documentation that people had or should have had

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anyway.18 The experience seems to have been equivalent to, if not more convenient than, visiting the DMV, despite the notorious inefficiency of state employees and bureaucracy in a socialist system. The nature of the study indicates that the state was more interested in correcting these misconceptions than it was in investigating their roots and significance; however, it seems that austerity had been so common for so long that it had become expected in certain settings, particularly with regard to rationing. Referencing or discussing these hassles became not only a reliable topic for small talk, as everyone you encountered depended on the ration and could likely relate, but also a social shorthand for complaints about the inconveniences of revolutionary life.

Of course, there were very real problems in the consumer and service industries, too, which ICOIDI set out to fix. In some cases, this involved reversing missteps that the revolutionary state had made in the early years of fervor for change. The tiendas del pueblo were stores constructed by the revolutionary state in rural areas, and they were one of the first attempts to bridge the rural-urban divide that characterized pre-revolutionary Cuba by expanding rural access to consumer goods. Prior to the tiendas del pueblo, most isolated peasants supplied themselves through the cachurrero, a system of roving vendors. While the tiendas del pueblo align more closely with urban consumer practices, ultimately, they were not practical for rural dwellers because of the long distances that most had to travel to access the shops. As part of the transition to a rational, Soviet economic model, the state reinstated the cachurrero system in 1977 to overcome the shortcomings of its previous, idealistic attempt to integrate the peasant into national life through the tiendas del pueblo. As opportunities for consumption were expanding in

Cuba, the return to the cachurrero also prevented the lingering rural-urban divide from growing

18 Dirección de Orientación y Comportamiento del Mercado, “Encuesta sobre el trabajo.”

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any larger by expanding the opportunities for consumption of basic goods like shoes, clothing, and perfume among the rural population. This was a direct return to a pre-1959 system. Félix

José, one vendor who traveled four days a week with three mules of goods as part of the cachurrero system in the Escambray Mountains, had been a roving vendor from 1946 to 1960 before returning to the profession in the late 1970s.19

Other missteps that ICOIDI targeted through Opina arose organically as consumers and administrators alike responded to scarcity in ways that inadvertently created waste, thereby creating further scarcity. For example, in 1980, the state released small casserole dishes for purchase. This was a long time coming, as consumers had long been wondering how economic planning could go so wrong as to forget such a central cooking tool: “we are not requesting new- fangled dishes, just the scarred old brown dishes that our grandmothers and great grandmothers used,” a journalist pled in Opina.20 The dishes flew off the shelves because it had been years since they were available, leaving home cooks to rely on inappropriate tools. Large dishes make large servings, creating food waste in a society that could scant afford it. As Opina explained, smaller dishes met the needs of both state and citizen. In addition to meeting consumer demand, the dishes could contribute to on-going national campaigns to conserve scarce resources, like fats for cooking, and to combat obesity.21 Echoing a slogan from efforts to disarm the population in

19 See Zenaida Hernández, “Con Felix Jose: Escambray adentro,” La revista del comercio, (Havana), July 1984, p. 26-29, and “El comercio en nuestros campos,” La revista del comercio (Havana), Nov. 1985, pp. 30-31. The return of the cachurrero system is just one instance of the re-emergence of pre-revolutionary consumer patterns in rural areas in this period. The second is the re-introduction of farmers’ markets in 1980, a development discussed in Chapter 6. As noted there, the return of pre-revolutionary marketing systems was dependent on the pacification of rural areas and the integration of rural dwellers in the revolution, a process discussed at length in Swanger, Rebel Lands of Cuba. I argue that the return of these pre-revolutionary systems was dependent on a fundamentally new peasantry: in many cases, the same people made new by revolutionary life, or in more serious cases, re-education campaigns.

20 “Maria Luisa responde,” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1984, p. 13

21 Ibid.

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the early years of the revolution– “weapons, for what?”–Opina lauded industry’s strategic move:

“large dishes, for what?”22 Just as weapons were rendered unnecessary by the establishment of a government that responded to the people, large dishes were rendered unnecessary in a society that made rational use of scarce resources.

Waste could be created by sales practices as well as household practices. In a desperate attempt to get rid of merchandise that had been accumulating dust for years, stores began selling one item in high demand as part of a package deal with an item of low demand in the 1970s. The convoy, as the system was called, began with personal hygiene items, and quickly expanded into absurd combinations. Opina explored the rationale behind these combinations as follows:

There are no aluminum scouring pads? Well sell them with ashtrays! There is no Salfumante? Well sell it with toothpaste! There are no candies? Well sell them with bras! You did not find any chocolates? Well buy a bottle of Caney rum! You want to give Jaws, Serpico, or an Agatha Christie novel as a gift? Well buy a philosophy essay by Kant.23

The convoy not only wasted goods by forcing consumers to take home items that they did not want or need, but it also wasted consumers’ cash, forcing them to buy an additional item in order to access the one that they wanted. While this did serve state goals of reducing excess currency in circulation, it made for unhappy consumers. By the time Opina skewered the system in this article, the author was able to assure readers that the convoy was on its way out in 1980 as part of an ambitious wave of market reforms.

ICOIDI also sought to respond to persistent complaints in three primary areas of the consumer market, which along with food had regularly been the most common areas of complaint since 1959: the service industry, clothing, and footwear. Complaints in these areas

22 Bitmai, Opina (Havana), Dec. 1980, p. 39.

23 Sulfamante was a cleaning product used in Cuba. María Helena Capote, “Vida, pasión y muerte de convoyado,” Opina (Havana), May 1980, p. 16.

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were significant to how people experienced the revolution on a daily basis. A study conducted by

Poder Popular in 1978 found Commerce and Gastronomy to be the second most common area for citizen complaints in 1970s Cuba, behind the problems with construction, repair, and maintenance that contributed to the on-going housing shortage. This was a national finding, despite some regional variation (Villa Clara had the most complaints about Commerce and

Gastronomy, Pinar del Río the fewest). A separate study in the city of Havana found that both objective and subjective factors figured into complaints. The objective factors identified in the city of Havana study hinged on scarcity and included an insufficient number of restaurants as well as a lack of necessary resources and equipment

Subjective factors included a lack of hygiene in restaurants, poor quality of goods and services, misuse of resources, and poor performance by both workers and administrators.24 While the standards for what is poor as opposed to acceptable are subjective to a degree, they are not so outlandishly subjective as to provoke considerable debate: most people, given the choice, would prefer to eat high quality food in a clean and accommodating environment. This was such an elusive experience in Cuban restaurants that Opina even released an alternative dictionary for restaurant goers. It defined a croquetta as a “furnishing from a grandmother’s bedroom that the cook breaded by accident.”25 Traditionally a vehicle for leftovers, croquettas had exploded in popularity after the revolution because they could be used to stretch a small quantity of meat or fish into a more substantial offering. Cuban croquettas contain a mixture of meat or fish with bread crumbs, eggs, and spices, though scarcity had led people to alter traditional recipes to

24 Gabriel Molina, “Gastronomia: Experiencias de un usuario,” Opina (Havana), July 1979, pp. 12-14.

25 Gabriel Molina, “Otra cara del mal trato,” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1979, pp. 14-16.

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include whatever was available, including anything from corned beef to cream cheese.26 They are generally cylindrical, breaded, deep fried, and succulent, not hard and unappetizing as

Opina’s dictionary suggests. The dictionary for restaurant goers defined a number of other terms, too. For example, it defined impossible as “the response in a restaurant when a customer requests that cold items be served cold and hot items be served hot.”27 In evaluating these complaints,

ICOIDI sided with the people rather than attempting to correct their impressions with the results of systematic study. Opina concluded that “it might not be scientific,” but what mattered was the

“generalized consensus among the people that deficiencies are the rule,” not the exception, in the service industry.28

Complaints about clothing shifted focus from quantity to quality in this period. While the clothing industry had increased its output to much higher levels of domestic production than in the 1950s (in part due to a growing labor force, 45percent of which was female) the advances made in quantity were not matched by progress in quality.29 Sizing was not standardized, which made shopping confusing, and there were few quality controls in place: “you can find a size large shirt with one sleeve that is size medium and so on,” one consumer complained.30 As a result of errors like these, Cuban industry was wasting quality fabric to make poorly cut clothing that needed further alteration to be acceptable to the consumer, let alone delightful. Cuba’s economic progress was therefore hindered by waste in household practices, sales practices, and

26 Cary, “Unos 15 diferentes,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), June-July 1981, p. 37.

27 Ibid.

28 Gabriel Molina, “Gastronomía,” 14.

29 Interestingly, this mirrors developments in the exile community, where almost all Cuban women worked outside of the home (despite not having done so in Cuba). They often worked in textile factories. See Grenier and Pérez, Legacy of Exile, 61-67.

30 Solangel Alvarez, “Para nadie es un secreto,” Mujeres (Havana), Nov. 1979, p. 16.

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production patterns. The authors concluded that these difficulties were “based fundamentally in the bad quality of some articles of clothing and the lack of initiative” among the labor force.

Thus, the shortcomings in the quality of clothing produced in Cuba could not be attributed to the blockade, as so many economic difficulties had been, but only to inefficient practices in Cuban industry. Such problems could not be solved by “importing foreign fabrics or putting into practice any sort of mechanism that is not currently available in our country.”31 By explicitly stating that this problem was not beyond Cuba’s economic possibilities, the author preempts the trope of relegating difficulties to the future when the economic situation would presumably be better and demands a solution in the present. There was no acceptable political, ideological, or economic excuse for continued failure in the eyes of consumers. Cuba had human resources, and the problems besetting the clothing industry could and should be solved by worker initiative combined with greater administrative oversight. In other words, the buck stopped with the Cuban state.

Shoes presented similar practical and aesthetic issues from the 1960s through the 1980s.

In fact, shoes were so consistently scarce that one observer summarized the difference between

Soviet socialism and Cuban socialism by stating that in Moscow, there were always shoes.32 By the late 1970s, the difficulties facing Cuban consumers had less to do with finding shoes for sale and more to do with finding appropriate, functional shoes for sale. Consumers interviewed by

Mujeres reported taking brand new shoes to the cobbler to tweak them and make them more modern because what was available off-the-shelf was both unstylish and uncomfortable. This was especially the case for those with wide feet, since the Cuban industry did not even make

31 Ibid.

32 Veronica Proskurnina, whose mother was Russian and father was Cuban. Proskurnina lived in both Cuba and the Soviet Union as a child. Conversation with author, Moscow, Russia, June 2014.

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wide sizes. It should be no surprise that the shoes were considered out-of-style. In addition to the lag created by the five-year plans, some pairs had been sitting on the shelves for years! The stores had not reduced prices due to the rigid and hierarchical nature of the commercial system, which left many administrators unsure if they were even allowed to do so at their own initiative.33

Drawing on the experience of the socialist world, the Cuban shoe industry sought to combine two simultaneous production strategies by running large factories geared to producing for quantity alongside smaller factories devoted to variety and quality.34 In 1976, the state introduced high quality fabrics for home clothing production to the market, and the shoe industry responded with high quality shoes appropriate for accompanying the new fabrics.35 Mujeres optimistically reported on the new shoes: women’s sandals with a sensible plastic heel which were slated for official production beginning in 1976 after a year of experimental, small-scale production. The production plan incorporated four different designs as well as plans to change colors every ten days to avoid an unappealing and homogenous backlog from accumulating in stores alongside the other models rejected by consumers.36 The fate of these fancy plastic sandals epitomizes the revolutionary state’s approach to consumption in the late 1970s because it combines Soviet expertise with systematic evaluation of local conditions. The plan was rational and feasible given Cuba’s economic situation, but it had little impact. Consumers continued to

33 Solangel Alvarez, “Para nadie es un secreto,” 15.

34 The socialist countries had first shut down small factories to move everyone with shoe fabrication experience to larger factories capable of mass production. Not only did mass production fail to meet the needs of the population, but it created new complaints about variety. The combination of large and small factories that Cuba experimented with in this period was directly inspired by this experience. Fernando Miguel, “El calzado si tiene una solución,” Opina (Havana), Aug. 1979, pp. 3-4.

35 Ibid., 3.

36 D.M., “Zapatos nuevos,” Mujeres (Havana), Apr. 1976, pp. 26-27.

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find their footwear options ugly, uncomfortable, and difficult to access due to the erratic production and distribution of both models and sizes.

The plan for developing women’s sandals checked every box of the state’s approach to consumerism in the 1970s, which was considered the height of modernity due to the incorporation of Soviet economic modeling using computer technology. When it failed to meet consumer expectations, then, observers were left blaming the individuals responsible for implementing the plan, who must have failed somehow. As with clothing, the national stance in the 1970s and 1980s was that shortcomings could be eradicated by efficient administration and worker initiative. At the National Assembly of People’s Power in 1979 Fidel Castro intervened personally to draw attention to the lack of conciencia and work ethic among the population.

Rather than attempting to fix the system yet again, Castro argued that the system was no longer the problem, the individuals responsible for maintaining it were. Problems that had begun with the blockade (or, left unstated by Fidel, with some of the state’s more outlandish development schemes of the 1960s) could no longer be blamed on the blockade, because Cubans had made huge investments in the nation’s development in the intervening years. He called on individuals to fix the remaining problems, empowering the people to police themselves and those around them to the point of shaming people for poor performance. After all, all Cubans had to live with the results. Low quality bread disgusted everyone, low quality beer disappointed everyone, and shoes that broke soon after purchase made everyone feel cheated.37

Yet when Opina interviewed workers with decades of experience making shoes, they painted a more complex picture than those with only superficial knowledge of the industry had.

The workers acknowledged the shortcomings of production but were at a loss when it came to

37 See “Un problema de todos,” Opina (Havana), Aug. 1979, p. 8-9, and Bitmai, Opina (Havana), Sept. 1979, p. 41.

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solutions that they could implement. Defending themselves from the national discourse about lazy, inefficient workers and from specific accusations targeting the shoe industry that were leveled during the National Meeting of Light Industry, also in 1979, the workers insisted that they had fully developed consciousness of their role as workers in addition to the experience and technology necessary to succeed. The workers suggested instead that the real problem stemmed from the utilitarian way that the state framed the shoe issue. The state’s production goals were flawed, they argued, because they placed the focus on putting something on everyone’s feet rather than on providing quality options that appealed to the population. One result of this approach was that despite meeting production numbers, “latent necessity” lingered.38 From the workers’ perspective, the problem lay in the production goals themselves, which did not correspond to the reality of the problem facing Cuban consumers. There was not a literal shortage of shoes but a shortage of functional shoes: unless production plans were altered to account for variables like comfort and personal style, the workers could meet every production goal set by the state, expend considerable resources in the process, and still not make progress in addressing consumer discontent with shoes. The interpretation put forth by workers resonated with ICOIDI findings. In the provinces of Oriente, Las Villas, and Havana, researchers found that families with the worst shoe situations did not suffer from a literal lack of shoes. In fact, each family member often had multiple pairs. They simply would not or could not use them because they were ugly, deformed, or of poor quality.39

These workers, who had decades of experience in the industry, were best positioned to identify the on-going issues with shoe production, and given a voice by the Cuban press, they did

38 Fernando Miguel, “El calzado si tiene una solución,” 2.

39 Ibid.

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so. Yet even after decades of generalized complaint about the quality of shoes produced under revolutionary rule, the workers were powerless to detour the faceless grind of the centralized economy, unable to meaningfully change the production goals that guided the entire industry, including their own day-to-day work. Increasingly, the institutionalized revolution allowed space for oppositional voices, but the emptiness of a voice without power, as experienced by the shoe workers, is representative of the population as a whole in this period, despite the ostensible expansion of popular democracy through People’s Power.

Poder Popular: Female Legislators in a Popular Democracy

The 1976 Constitution introduced more than the Family Code into Cuban households. It also initiated the Poder Popular, or People’s Power, system. The adoption of a unique brand of democracy concluded the “historic process of the institutionalization of the revolution,” as Cuba finally transitioned out of a state-of-emergency national mindset in which Fidel Castro ruled

“dictatorially on behalf of the working pueblo.”40 At the most basic level, Poder Popular consisted of 169 municipal bodies comprised of delegates elected on the basis of their biographies, which were posted throughout the municipality, by eligible voters over the age of

16. The delegates were not professional politicians, as they were not paid for their service, though when their Poder Popular responsibilities took them away from their day jobs, they received unpaid leave supplemented by a daily stipend. The municipal bodies held public meetings every four months to discuss their progress and gather opinions, concerns, and suggestions from the population. The delegates were also responsible for electing representatives to the National Assembly of Poder Popular, a unicameral parliamentary body of officials that has

40 Barredo, Asamblea nacional, 65-66.

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met twice a year since October 1976.41 The national representatives then elect the Council of

State, which makes crucial decisions and does the day-to-day work of governing when the

National Assembly is not in session, which was most of the year. The Council of Ministers, the highest executive and administrative body in the country, is even further removed from direct election. Its members are named by the President of the Council of State and then approved by the national representatives.42

The FMC had high hopes that the democratic opening through Poder Popular would allow for the incorporation of women in politics to an unprecedented degree. Yet despite the hype around the possibilities created by the legislative body, a disappointingly low proportion of women were actually nominated and elected.43 In 1976, the first elections, 13.5percent of the candidates nominated and 8percent of those elected nationwide were women. These numbers remained fairly static in this period, remaining significantly below the proportion of women in society and peaking in 1980, when 16.3percent of the candidates nominated and 11.5percent of those elected were women.44 Vilma Espín interpreted these disappointing numbers as a result of the tendency of both men and women to associate childrearing and the burden of domestic labor with women, “or in even more retrograde cases: [the belief] that the work of a Poder Popular delegate is too difficult for a woman.”45 The endurance of traditional gender roles hampered

41 Article 87 of the 1976 Constitution names People’s Power as the highest body of state power in Cuba, though it is hard to get a sense of how much this is indirect democracy in practice or simply spectacle, as the smaller Council of State makes executive decisions in its place in between the two annual meetings, Constitution of the Republic of Cuba.

42 Barredo, 61-66.

43 Daisy Martin, “La mujer en el Poder Popular: Una delegada capaz,” Mujeres (Havana), Dec. 1978, p. 10. This article mentions six females to fifty-one males in Guanabacoa.

44 Espín Guillois, “La batalla por el ejercicio,” 98.

45 Ibid., 99.

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women’s opportunities for leadership in other arenas as well. While women increased their proportional representation in the mass organizations in these years, they struggled most to do so at the highest and most explicitly political levels. For example, between 1974 and 1984, the percentage of leadership positions in the CDRs at the municipal level occupied by women jumped dramatically from 7percent to 73.5percent. In that same period, the percentage of leadership positions in the CDR occupied by women at the national level grew significantly less, from 19 to 31.8percent, and even these numbers dwarf those from the Communist Party of Cuba

(PCC) in this period, which grew from 2.9percent to 18.9percent at the municipal level and

5.5percent to 12.8percent at the national level.46 The FMC was finding it easier to dictate new norms than to get them to take root in people’s minds. Women who limited themselves by thinking that they and their peers could or should not dig themselves out from under the domestic burden in order to take on new responsibilities in the political sphere were as guilty as men, in

Espín’s estimation.

Despite these disappointments, the FMC’s mouthpiece, Mujeres, presented the Poder

Popular local assemblies in ways that suggested that it was, or could be, a forum for women to deal with women’s problems. This indicates the continued connection between domestic concerns and traditional gender roles, despite the concurrent introduction of Poder Popular and the Family Code, which legally mandated that both men and women were responsible for the household. The municipal bodies of Poder Popular dealt with the quotidian problems and common complaints generated by centralized economic planning and scarcity in areas such as home repair, garbage collection, public transportation, and bread distribution. Drawing on their own experiences as well as those of their neighbors and constituents, representatives sought local

46 Ibid., 100-101.

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and national solutions to these problems. These solutions could be radical and have lasting repercussions: In 1978, Poder Popular introduced a network of experimental stores to sell items of limited or local production. These stores were first introduced through a pilot program in the city of Havana, but plans were drafted for the expansion of the experimental stores until there was one in each municipality.47 These stores so closely anticipated the rationale and approach behind the parallel market system, introduced in 1980, that they may well have been the model for the system, which completely remade consumer practices in Cuba.

Mujeres highlighted the connection between women’s problems and Poder Popular through a series of interviews with female representatives. The piece on María Elvira Aballí

Seijo, a representative from Guanabacoa in eastern Havana, highlights her work with her local

FMC chapter and CDR, as well her roles as a local high school teacher and university student studying chemistry. María Elvira discussed the strides that she and her colleagues had made in correcting poor administration and low worker morale in the local service industry. She also cited concrete improvements in the form of increased efficiency in the distribution of pop and chicken, the installation of a public telephone in the bodega, and repaired communal faucets.48

Like her colleague in Guanabacoa, Sonia Rodríguez Cardona, a representative from

Palma Soriano near Santiago de Cuba, was a superwoman. The profile published by Mujeres highlighted her years of leadership experience in her CDR and FMC chapter as well as her role as wife and mother. Sonia’s explanation of her work with Poder Popular echoes María Elvira’s in the sense that both women perceived themselves to be pushing for improvements in the consumer and service industries on behalf of women; however, Sonia drew on the state script

47 Nila Capetillo, “Tiendas experimentales,” Mujeres (Havana), May 1978, p. 74.

48 Martin, “La mujer en el poder popular,” 10-12.

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about the ideological dangers of pushing for too much in these areas in a way that María Elvira did not. She told Mujeres journalists that her role as a Poder Popular delegate was not just to address the complaints of the public, but also to lead by example and educate her constituents about the obstacles to state efforts to improve the conditions of daily life. This involved fortifying her constituents’ socialist morality so that they could understand that sometimes it was necessary to live with whatever was causing them to complain. “We cannot pressure the revolutionary leadership to give us things that we know they do not have. And the pueblo, when this is explained clearly, understands it perfectly,” she explained, obscuring the real discontent felt by many due to revolutionary leadership’s decisions about how to use the resources that it did have. She also preempted Fidel Castro’s speech calling for greater worker consciousness at the 1979 assembly of Poder Popular by pointing to a shortage of work ethic as the only shortage seriously holding back the consumer and service industries.49

As the gains made by women in the political sphere lagged behind revolutionary leadership’s expectations, so too did the gains made by women in their individual households.

Poder Popular provided the image of meaningful democratic participation, but in reality it functioned primarily as a venue for expressing frustration over everyday complaints. This echoes the divergence between image and reality behind the Family Code, another high-profile introduction to Cuban life that accompanied institutionalization. The Family Code was meant to completely remake gender relations, but it provided no steps for enactment or means of enforcement. As a result, it too painted a pretty picture that had little to do with Cubans’ lived reality.

49 Gladys Castano, “La mujer en el Poder Popular: Sonia, la diputada,” Mujeres (Havana), Nov. 1978, p. 13.

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I Now Pronounce You Husband, Wife, and Revolutionary State: The Impact of the Family Code

The Family Code legislated gender equality but provided no means for enforcement, thus leaving real change in the hands of individuals. Yet as with rationing before it, the Family Code was an unprecedented extension of state power from the public sphere into the private. While this extension of power did not include explicit measures for penalizing those who went against the principles established by the state, it is significant that the state saw fit to legislate intimate details of home life. Celebratory discourse directly contrasted the nature of this incursion into the private sphere with the rumors that circulated in the early years of the revolution that a communist state would destroy the family and take children from their parents to be brainwashed outside of the home in contexts entirely under state control. This celebratory line of thinking asserted that revolutionary reforms had strengthened the family by providing economic and political stability and extending education to both children and adults;50 however, reforms of education and childcare in revolutionary Cuba actually did create a greater role for the state as an alternate parent with particular authority on ideological matters. While the forms that the state’s incursion into parenthood ultimately took were not as dramatic as those widely feared in the

1960s, they did lead to clashes between authority figures as family and state battled over impressionable young minds.

The círculos infantiles were a common setting for such clashes. As with any childcare program, countless disagreements surfaced between how parents ran their households and desired to teach their children and how the childcare administrators chose to do so. Yet in the context of the Cuban revolution, the administrators in the círculos were invested with state

50 See, for example, Iris Davila, “Cuba tiene por primera vez un código de familia,” Mujeres (Havana), Mar. 1978, pp. 16-17.

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authority that, except in cases of negligence or abuse, legitimated their way of doing things over the parents’. Regarding gender roles, the círculos provided the state with a privileged space for teaching young people the vanguard ideas of gender equality encapsulated by the Family Code before their minds could be corrupted by the traditional gender roles that dominated amongst the older generations and therefore characterized most households. One concerned mother wrote to

Mujeres that her husband and other family members did not understand why it was acceptable for the círculo to allow both boys and girls to play with dolls and to play house, activities which often mimicked the domestic sphere and were therefore associated with girls. The response from the FMC’s editors recommended that the father participate in the joint FMC/CDR-run “Father

Schools,” to learn about how the heritage of machismo was hampering his parenting skills. The

Father Schools, the response stressed, would teach the concerned father that it is not only acceptable but good for little boys to play these games because they learned behaviors that would suit them in real life, like sharing domestic duties with their partners.51

Young people, raised in a revolutionary society and in part by the revolutionary state, were the state’s best hope for real and sustained change in gender roles. The educational trends on gender roles established in the círculo system extended even more forcefully into the escuelas en el campo, where boys and girls were separated from their parents for extended periods of time for revolutionary instruction in the classroom and the agricultural fields. In these boarding schools, far from the retrograde influence of family life in traditional households, one would expect to see the fullest incarnation of the values encapsulated in the Family Code. Separated by

51 “Conversemos,” Mujeres (Havana), Apr. 1980, p. 19. The piece goes on to stress that these activities were only dangerous if the child does not have the “correct sexual orientation,” indicating that even state advocates of gender equality continued to adhere on some level to traditional beliefs about femininity and masculinity, particularly with regard to non-heterosexuality.

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gender and in the absence of doting mothers, both young men and young women ostensibly learned how to perform basic domestic tasks like cleaning, washing clothes, ironing, and serving food while taking turns serving their peers in the cafeteria.52 In the young relationships that formed in this setting, revolutionary leadership expected to see the clearest manifestation of the

“new couple,” the nuclear unit for revolutionary society. Yet remnants of the past continued to worm their way into the revolutionary present. Despite the idealized vision of a non-gendered utopia, the reality was that students trying to navigate their entrance into adulthood often formed relationships that mirrored the division of labor in the average household. For example, it was regular practice for girls to wash boys’ clothes in addition to their own, often as a new form of courtship or “noviazgo” that went unsupervised and unknown to parents or teachers.

In a conversation with eleven students in an escuela en el campo, Muchacha found that few students saw a problem with these arrangements. Some of the students, both male and female, even tried to justify the arrangement using revolutionary discourse. Girls claimed that boys did not know how to iron or were less able to wash and iron than girls were, so leaving these chores in female hands cut down on waste of electricity and water. One boy claimed it was an expression of compañerismo, drawing on revolutionary notions of marriage as based in companionship. If he sometimes carried things and did other favors for a friend, how could it be inappropriate for her to do her part by washing his clothes? Some men would later remember the experience of finding a girlfriend to wash their clothes at the escuela en el campo as a coming- of-age experience that marked their transition into manhood.53 It is not surprising, then, that most of the boys drew on the same excuses that their fathers might have used to explain the status quo:

52 Bringuez Puente, “¿Cómo te las arreglas cuando ella no está en casa?” Opina (Havana), Aug. 1979, p. 50.

53 Conversation between author and Eileen Findlay at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Denver, CO, Jan. 2018.

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women traditionally wash clothes, men like to be well-dressed but do not have the skills to take care of their own clothing, it is not machista if the girl initiated the arrangement. And most of these arrangements were initiated by the girl, despite a more obvious awareness among some of the girls of the deep inequalities produced by such a seemingly innocuous arrangement.

One girl claimed she never washed any boy’s clothes because she thought it was unfair to expect her to take on additional domestic labor after the boys and the girls did the same work every day. Two others came to the same conclusion as the journalist, that arrangements like these established bad habits that stuck, and men’s constant need for support held women back. “If, from here, they get used to women resolving all of their problems, when they have a household of their own they will expect the same,” the journalist explained.54 The persistence of traditional gender roles even in privileged revolutionary spaces among especially revolutionary youth populations provoked widespread concern, which spread all the way to top leadership but found no solution. As late as 1988, Vilma Espín pointed to the practice as a key example of how traditional mindsets among male and female Cubans continued to limit the FMC’s fight for gender equality.55

This discrepancy between male and female understandings of the appropriate division of domestic labor extended beyond the boarding schools to create divergent understandings of what made a happy marriage. The state crafted an extensive educational apparatus in an attempt to transmit the values of gender equality to the population. In addition to the Father Schools mentioned above, the official wedding venues – los palacios de los matrimonios – hosted classes each Friday to prepare couples for marriage. These classes took the form of group discussions,

54 Maria del Carmen Mestas, “¿Por qué ellas si y ellos no?” Muchacha (Havana), May 1985, pp. 56-57.

55 Vilma Espín, “Entrevista concedida a la revista ‘Claudia,’” p. 160.

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and above all, they focused on the division of domestic labor and methods for translating the

Family Code into household reality.56 Many young women internalized these norms. These radical young women wanted to buck tradition by getting married in black, or riding off into the sunset on motorcycles with their new husbands, and increasingly, they would also buck tradition by citing revolutionary characteristics, such as a man’s political and cultural development, before other features when describing their ideal partners.57 Some would cite the “Family Code, the rights and responsibilities of each partner,” directly when describing the future they hoped to build.58

The press reinforced this radical female vision with stories of unhappy marriages made happy by a revision of gender roles. In one such story, Elena and Andrés were a happy couple until after their marriage, when Andrés convinced Elena to leave school and dedicate herself to being a wife and taking care of the home. When a friend convinced Elena to return to school despite Andrés’ doubts, the piece triumphantly concludes: “And they were much happier!”59

Stories like that of Elena and Andrés taught young Cubans, and young women especially, that both spouses working outside of the home made for a happier marriage, even if the man was initially blinded by traditional gender roles into thinking he wanted his wife to stay home. Such stories encouraged women to ignore what their husbands said and follow their dreams–so long as their dreams corresponded to the revolutionary state’s politically-driven feminism–secure in the notion that they, and not their husbands, knew the route to a happy marriage.

56 Iraida Campo Nodal, “Prepararse major para el matrimonio,” Muchacha (Havana), Dec. 1984, pp. 56-57.

57 Manuel Pereira and Guillermo Cabrera, “El Amor: Visto desde Las Estrellas,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Apr. 1976, pp. 26-37.

58 Ibid., 36.

59 T. Pulldo, “No has perdido toda tu vida,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Aug.-Sept. 1980, pp. 6-9.

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Despite the piecemeal adaptation of the Family Code to the reality of individual households, the legislation established an important framework for an increasingly progressive vision of gender equality and its relationship to the domestic sphere. In the years leading up to the passage of the Family Code, FMC rhetoric emphasized the non-threatening nature of the legislation, as discussed in Chapter 2. Yet by the mid-1980s, the discourse surrounding these changes had radicalized. Increasingly, the FMC encouraged women to change the terms of the daily argument. Rather than focusing on convincing their husbands to “help out” around the house, as if they were doing their wives a favor by doing so, the FMC pushed Cuban women to frame domestic labor as something to be “shared” equally. This shift in discourse corresponds to the Family Code’s conception of domestic labor as the equal responsibility of both partners, regardless of gender. Yet when Mujeres columnist Maria del Carmen Mestas attempted to interview passers-by on the street about how they understood they issue, she found that the majority of the population had not internalized the heart of the Family Code legislation. Even most women responded that men should “help with,” not “share,” the domestic labor.60 Many of the men would not even concede that, responding that they should not need to help because it was their wife’s responsibility or because they worked so much harder outside of the home.61

Vignettes like these reveal that despite the radical nature of the Family Code and the increasingly radical ways in which the FMC encouraged women to fight for its implementation, the most basic tenets of these legislative and discursive changes did not touch many households.

Even the fundamental effort to redefine domestic labor as not only work but hard work, and a burden that should not be shouldered by women alone, remained unfinished. Responding to the

60 Maria del Carmen Mestas, “¿Simple ayuda o división de tareas?” Muchacha (Havana), Apr. 1984, p. 46.

61 Maria del Carmen Mestas, “¿Ayudar o compartir? Ustedes tienen la palabra,” Muchacha (Havana), Nov. 1984, pp. 56-57.

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prevalent notion that men worked harder than women and therefore should not have to expend their time and energy on domestic labor, ICOIDI studies attempted to valorize domestic labor by comparing it directly to some of the physical jobs often performed by men, such as construction work. The report found that the average work day of a housewife or working women regularly extended from 6 AM to 9 PM.62 On domestic labor alone, housewives burned 2400 to 2800 calories a day, equivalent to the caloric expenditure of a mailman, mechanic, or cobbler during an average workday.63 The shortcomings of the Family Code as a response to gender inequality are revealed in these endless attempts to reason why men should take up their share of the domestic labor, which met with endless excuses for why they did not. Even the state’s long- trumpeted promises about the socialization of domestic labor made a handy excuse. As one lazy husband explained, “it’s not a question of if the husband should help or not, but instead of the insufficient círculos, boarding schools, domestic appliances . . . in a word: development.”64 This line of reasoning, in line with how the state had conceptualized domestic labor before switching gears in the 1970s, shifted responsibility from the individual to the state, and gave husbands carte blanche to rest in their rocking chairs until the state made good on its promises of a socialist utopic future.

In 1977 the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) produced a brief cartoon that lauded the egalitarian division of household labor stipulated by the Family

Code, while also commenting on the difficulty of such a profound transformation of gender roles even in households where the husband was generally sympathetic to gender equality. The

62 Jose Torres, “¿Y si las mujeres dijeran que ¡no!?” Opina (Havana), July 1979, p. 20.

63 Ibid., 19.

64 Iraida Campo y Ana Maria Rodriguez, “¿Estamos preparados para el matrimonio?” Muchacha (Havana), Mar. 1980, p. 53.

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intended audience was clearly Cuban children, given the cartoon format, the silly and exaggerated struggles the protagonist faces, and the simplistic nature of the piece, which includes no dialogue except for a happy song at the end. The continued frustrations faced by reformers attempting to encourage or coerce men into hefting their share of the domestic burden, however, signal that the lesson of the cartoon could resonate across generations. Titled Dad’s First Step, the cartoon turns childrearing on its head, depicting Cuban men like babies themselves taking their first steps through the lens of one man’s harrowing attempt to take charge of the domestic labor for just one day, International Women’s Day.65

The protagonist, husband and father to a baby girl, awakes at 7 AM to his alarm clock and a note on his pillow signaling that his wife had already left to do the shopping, perhaps hoping her early departure would save her a long wait in line. He sits in bed, scratching his chin with a sleepy smile, until it dawns on him that it is March 8, International Women’s Day, and

Sunday, a day off, to boot. This realization sparks a memory of himself comfortably watching a baseball game, in a rocking chair placed only a few feet from the TV, a bottle of beer in one hand and a pillow behind his head. Meanwhile, his wife is in the other room, surrounded by all the trappings of household labor. She holds a broom, a dust pan, and a Cuban mop. She slumps next to a sudsy metal tub of clothing she is in the process of hand washing and a stove with a pot and pan set on top, a line of clean clothes hanging above it. For some reason–perhaps as a comment on the sweaty and physical nature of domestic labor as well as how little time she has left to care for her own appearance–she is surrounded by buzzing flies, and for obvious reasons, she has bags under her eyes.

65 Raggi, El Primer Paso de Papá.

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The memory then shifts to a dramatized image of his wife in rags clutching their baby, himself a bloated tick attached to the top of her head. The real him, still sitting on the edge of the bed, is surrounded by the words “slaveholder” and “parasite,” each of which appear three times around his guilt-stricken face. The guilt he feels, and the terms in which it is expressed, speak to some measure of efficacy of the Family Code campaign, at least among some men. The protagonist has clearly absorbed the rhetoric that a good spouse helps his beleaguered wife, rather than leaching off her hard work while he himself enjoys the comforts of home. Setting his jaw, he wipes away the words, rubs his palms together, and gets to work, showing a willingness to change his woeful ways, despite the difficult road ahead of him. Their home, nothing like the hovel of his imagination, is spacious and well-lit, if a bit untidy. Though his wife had made coffee before she left for the day, he immediately runs into trouble while simply reheating a cup for himself. He runs off to grab the crying baby, holding her over a pot while she relieves herself, and, apparently forgetting about the coffee, begins to shave. The coffee begins to smoke, and he badly burns himself when removing it from the stovetop flame. The audience is then treated to a favorite cartoon trope of pain and rage, as his face turns red and swells and steam erupts from his ears.

He next appears with one hand heavily bandaged, disastrously juggling a tower of food from the refrigerator after running to hold the baby over the pot yet again. As the tower collapses around and even on him, he breaks more than a few eggs, but pushes on, marching through the house with a pile of laundry, descaling a fish, and ironing. The baby toddles behind him and helps with the ironing, emphasizing that children, too, must contribute to the household in order to ease the burden on women. As he begins serving the baby breakfast (luckily there were more eggs!), he forgets about the iron until the smoke from the hole that it is burning in his shirt

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forcefully reminds him. He successfully puts the small fire out with a bucket of water but electrocutes himself by dousing the still-plugged-in iron with water.

Up to this point, the cartoon is a clear comment on the demanding nature of the domestic burden on women. Anyone would have their hands full with so much household labor, especially while frequently running off to check on and toilet train a baby. In fact, the family portrayed in the cartoon is more fortunate than some, given their access to labor-saving appliances. They have a functioning refrigerator in their kitchen, a luxury enjoyed by less than half of Cuban households in 1977.66 Accidental electrocution aside, they also enjoy the convenience of an electric iron, which could simply be plugged in and expected to remain hot throughout the entire ironing process, no matter the size of the batch of clothing to ironed. By contrast, roughly a third of Cuban households in 1977 continued to heat decades-old metal irons over the stove in order to iron their laundry.67

In the confusion following the protagonist’s accidental electrocution, a large group of cats somehow enters the house. Just as he is breathing a sigh of relief upon surviving the incident and not burning down the house, the cats begin filing past with food in their mouths: a large fish, a T-bone steak, a whole chicken, and even a bottle that could contain anything from cooking oil to wine. In a matter of minutes, the hapless father lost food that should have fed his family for days. The severity of this loss is compounded by the fact that each of the lost items was highly

66 According to studies performed by ICOIDI, 30 of every 100 Cuban households had a refrigerator in 1974, while concerted efforts to increase appliance ownership in the mid-to-late-1970s increased that number to 58 out of every 100 by 1982.While exact statistics for 1977 are not available, it seems reasonable to estimate that refrigerator ownership numbers in 1977 would have been closer to the 30/100 households listed for 1974 than the 58/100 listed for 1982. Balari, Los consumidores, 24.

67 According to studies performed by ICOIDI, 67 of every 100 Cuban households had an electric iron in 1974, a number which rose to 86 out of 100 by 1982. As is the case with refrigerators, exact statistics for 1977 are not available, but it seems reasonable to estimate that rates of electric iron ownership for 1977 would be between the numbers provided for 1974 and 1982, given state efforts to increase appliance ownership in the mid-to-late-1970s. Balari, Los consumidores, 24.

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sought after and rationed in 1970s Cuba. Six more cats swarm over the kitchen table. A seventh perches on the baffled baby’s head, drinking from her bottle. Angry now, the father regains control, neatly pinning the yowling cats by their tails in order to hang them from the clothesline.

As he is dusting the walls and ceiling, powered by frustration and rage, he knocks the chandelier down. It shatters around him. As a final chore, to clean up the broken glass and the mess left by the cats, he washes the floor. The house fills with bubbles because he has added too much soap to the water, recklessly wasting yet another rationed resource.

By the time the bubbles are gone, the protagonist lies flat on the floor, panting as he drags himself to bed. The emotional strain of the difficult morning is washed away, however, when he hears his wife at the door. He smiles, and she fills the doorframe, holding two grocery bags. A song, the first words featured in the cartoon, begins to play, “my pretty and beautiful house / what a wonderful dad.”68 Her eyes widen and her jaw drops as she takes in the spotless house.

The happy couple embraces, his face covered in lipstick kisses, for a single blissful moment before the baby begins to cry. To their mutual surprise, the baby has also grown and matured in the course of a morning without mom, taking on more responsibility by conquering toilet training. She holds out her own little toilet, with a smile and a wink, as the song continues to play:

The table is already set What a wonderful dad! The clothing washed and put away What a wonderful dad! He can sweep and do the washing, He can iron and cook What a wonderful dad!

68 Raggi, El Primer Paso de Papá.

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Now we can go for a walk!69

The message is clear. The protagonist, who does not really know how to do anything, is a baby himself in terms of running a household. Still, with practice he could perhaps become adept. The hard work and frustration of the day were worth it, due to both the happiness and appreciation on his wife’s face, as well as the additional time they could now spend together as a family. Whether or not his efforts to do his share around the house would continue on a daily basis or be restricted to International Women’s Day–once a year–remains unclear. Rather than advocating for a radical revision of gender roles, the cartoon fosters empathy for the status quo, encouraging viewers to have patience as men took on unfamiliar roles and made mistakes in the process. The cartoon also reinforces the political aims of the Cuban women’s liberation movement. It is no coincidence that the cartoon is set on International Women’s Day. Rather than enjoying a day of leisure to herself, the protagonist’s wife likely spent the day at a political rally celebrating the holiday, at the Plaza of the Revolution if they lived in Havana, before picking up groceries on her way home.

Dad’s First Step is also indicative of two trends developing within efforts to reduce the domestic burden on women. One is the growing emphasis on how various family members, and not just husbands, could help women by taking on chores and other household responsibilities.

Here the baby’s efforts to help her father with the ironing and her mastery of toilet training foreshadow developing rhetoric that urged children of both genders to take up their fair share of domestic labor to keep the household running. This same principle also extended to grandparents, as many Cuban families lived in multigenerational households due to persistent

69 Ibid.

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housing shortages.70 The second trend is the introduction of a new argument that reducing the domestic burden on women was important not only to free them up to enter the workforce, run for office, or join the mass organizations, but also to give them leisure time to devote to themselves and their families, an emergent development in how the Cuban women’s movement conceived of itself, its members, and its goals.

The prevalence of multigenerational households hindered efforts to uncouple domestic labor from gender identity. While the pressure of living with either partner’s parents could put strain on fragile new marriages for obvious reasons, the multigenerational household could also work the opposite way, relieving stress and helping things to run smoothly. Grandpa and grandma could take on additional labor to free up women’s time without their husbands having to change their habits at all.71 Teaching children and husbands to help out around the house required a formal and informal education campaign mobilized through the Father Schools, marriage classes, endless press accounts, and cartoons like Dad’s First Step to teach (or convince) these family members to take up their share. This campaign could take on dire tones, warning, for example, that “he who does not learn to respect and help his mother, will not know how to help anyone later in life.”72 The labor of the older generation, on the other hand, often came naturally. Grandmothers were used to performing the domestic labor necessary to keep a

70 Shortages of adequate housing were a problem both before and after 1959. By the late 1970s, Fidel Castro openly acknowledged the on-going problem while pledging the state’s dedication to solving it in the coming years, a pledge made possible by projected improvements in economic conditions and development levels (Castro, II Período, 34- 45).

71 See Iraida Campo y Ana Maria Rodriguez, “¿Estamos preparados para el matrimonio?” Muchacha (Havana), Mar. 1980, pp. 52-53, and Iraida Campo Nodal, “Prepararse major para el matrimonio,” Muchacha (Havana), Dec. 1984, pp. 56-57, for examples.

72 “’Mamá trabaja en la calle’: La educación formal comienza en casa,” Opina (Havana), Mar. 1983, p. 43. For another example of the press trying to shame family members into helping out mom around the house, see Satirichacha, Muchacha (Havana), Mar. 1982, pp. 38-39.

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household running because they had been doing it for years. In the absence of fully socialized services, grandmothers often picked up the slack in ways that allowed their daughters or daughters-in-law to pursue their education and careers, political involvement, and volunteer labor. In fact, many grandmothers sacrificed their potential to have these things for themselves so that their daughters might. Many grandmothers sought early retirement, for example, to care for their grandchildren when they could not get spots in the insufficient círculos.73 This practice was so widespread and so central to the incorporation of the younger generation in “socially useful” work, that at its Second National Congress in 1975, the FMC advocated extending the spirit of and celebrations on International Women’s Day, August 23rd (the anniversary of the FMC’s foundation), and Mothers’ Day to include grandmothers more centrally.74 In so doing, the FMC did not push the state to socialize these familial responsibilities as it had long promised it would.

FMC celebration of grandmothers was an exercise in complicity, promoting the labor of grandmothers as a substitute for holding the state accountable to its own vision for the roles of female revolutionaries.

While traditional gender roles made it so that grandfathers may not have had the same long history with domestic labor as grandmothers, they were accustomed to leaving the house most days and performing productive labor to contribute to the household’s success. Leaving the house to do the shopping and secure the items necessary to keep the household running smoothed the transition to retirement, which might otherwise have left these men feeling old and useless. This line of thinking, which journalists developed in magazines like Mujeres and Opina in these years, fit well with official discourse about the role of individuals in revolutionary

73 Marilys Suárez Moreno, “Respeto y amor para nuestros ancianos,” Mujeres (Havana), Mar. 1982, p. 7.

74 FMC, Memoria II Congreso, 164.

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society–as the older generations retired, they continued performing socially productive labor by providing for their households, and revolutionary ideology preached that “a person is happy when they feel useful to someone.”75 Yet traditional gender roles made it so that this line of thinking also resonated with pre-revolutionary, capitalist understandings of masculinity and labor: men worked to provide for their families. What happened to this identity when they stopped doing so? Material shortages and the difficulties of shopping in revolutionary Cuba allowed grandfathers to become “the ultimate pinch hitters” of the family, rather than fading into obscurity with retirement.76 Conveniently, the wee hours of the morning were the near exclusive domain of the elderly and also the perfect time to line up for first access to scarce goods. “Day after day,” outside of supermarkets all over the country, these old men would gather to wait and to socialize, “jabas [grocery bags] of various designs clutched tightly in their gnarled hands.

They help their households so much!”77 By taking on the “unexpected setbacks” and small annoyances of everyday life, grandfathers kept their households running, performing crucial if underappreciated labor.78

Yet the prevalence of multigenerational households also hampered state efforts to build a revolutionary youth that would embody revolutionary values as understood by the state. With grandma and grandpa around, doing the shopping and running the household, it was inevitable that pre-revolutionary values, habits, and mindsets would be passed between generations. This resulted in children learning how to do these things in ways that sometimes clashed directly with

75 Ibid., 9.

76 Ana Maria Lujan, “Abuelo: el eterno bate emergente,” Opina (Havana), June 1981, p. 3.

77 Suárez Moreno, “Respeto y amor para nuestros ancianos,” 7.

78 Lujan, “Abuelo: el eterno bate emergente,” 3

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state campaigns. The housing shortage that caused the preponderance of multigenerational households is therefore another example of material difficulties undermining official goals for gender roles in a revolutionary society. Because both the state’s approach to consumption and the status of the consumer and service industries were not static, the same thing also happened with values, habits, and mindsets that were appropriate for earlier eras of running a revolutionary household but were no longer appropriate by the late 1970s.

As the consumer and service industries improved over the 1970s and early 1980s,

ICOIDI attempted to educate people about speculation and artificial shortages, pushing them to move beyond the mindset of scarcity to trust that whatever was at the store would continue to be available and purchase only what they needed when they needed it. Yet mothers and grandmothers burned out by two decades of scarcity and rationing were not so easily convinced.

Even as the state press mocked these practices–with political cartoons like one about a grandmother sending her beleaguered husband out to buy something called “Euconoform,” even though she had no idea what it was, simply because it was available “por la libre [off the ration]”– younger generations were adopting them.79 Almost one in five young people in this era felt that it was normal to buy whatever was available por la libre, even if they did not need it.

Their justifications for doing so were telling: “that is how we do things in my house,” one girl explained.80

79 “Hogar, dulce hogar,” Opina (Havana), Dec. 1980, p. 42. Similarly, in a political cartoon published in Opina, a female shopper asks the clerk for all the medicines that they have in stock and that are available por la libre. Given the unpredictable nature of scarcity, this was a forward-thinking way to prepare for when illness struck, Opina (Havana), Feb 1981.

80 Rafael Calvo, “Opinan los jovenes sobre . . . la amistad, el estudio, las ‘colas’ y los quince años,” Ellas en Romance (Havana), Jan. 1978, p. 56.

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Yet depending on the older generation’s socioeconomic background and level of revolutionary integration, this phenomenon could also function in reverse. Grandmothers who had grown up poor or had particular success in managing rationing and scarcity had learned crucial strategies for thriving under austerity. These strategies were compatible with state efforts to rationalize and minimize resource usage, which extended even into the revolution’s most abundant years due to state efforts to maintain the thin cow mentality. Grandmothers who saved the tiny slivers from bars of soap to later find a use for them or who mended old socks and repurposed old clothing fit right in with these efforts. One satirical press account contrasted the revolutionary integration of a thrifty grandmother with the indifference of her wasteful granddaughter. The grandmother saved old medicine bottles and empty tubes of toothpaste to contribute to the local CDR’s campaign collecting and recycling raw materials. She also followed her granddaughter around turning off lights and appliances in her wake, an effort that corresponded directly to the Brigadas CLICK, which sought to rationalize electricity consumption and reduce energy waste among the population.

These conscientious efforts stand in stark contrast with the granddaughter who tossed whole bars of soap in with the clothing to be washed and could never remember to close the refrigerator door behind her. Leaving no room for confusion, the piece ends with the grandmother moralizing a life without waste: “Saving is a human condition. It is respect for self and humanity.”81 Of course, the grandmother’s lifelong experience with saving was historically rooted much more in pre-revolutionary poverty than it was in post-revolutionary moralizing.

When she had conserved resources in the pre-revolutionary era, she had done so because there simply was not more to go around. Decades later, this situation had not changed so much: the

81 Pucha, “Satirichacha,” Muchacha (Havana), May 1983, pp. 30-31.

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revolutionary state undeniably provided a higher standard of living through its social safety net, but in the conditions of daily life the need to conserve scarce resources remained. A major difference was that the revolutionary state had developed a new ideological framework that encouraged citizens to value these sacrifices by understanding them as “respect for self and humanity.” This reality–that the Cuban revolution had created a population that was more equally poor than it was equally rich–was undeniable in the late 1970s, which made calls to conform to the thin cow mentality particularly onerous.

In many houses, grandmothers were the guardians of the home, a role that reflects the austerity that gripped everyday life even in the era of the fat cows: many families feared that what little they had would be stolen if they left the house unattended. So much of daily life took the other family members out of the house–grandfathers to run errands and do the shopping, fathers and mothers to work and attend political meetings, and children to go to school and after school activities. Grandmothers, on the other hand, often stayed home, caring for the youngest children and performing domestic labor, as the “does-it-all” of the family.82 Only, unlike the rest of the family, abuela never got a break from this role. Emerging trends within Cuba’s state-led women’s liberation campaign identified leisure time as a crucial element to women’s happiness, so long as it was spent fruitfully with family, sharing an enriching experience. The family walk at the end of Dad’s First Step is the perfect example of such an activity.

As the FMC began to incorporate grandmothers into celebrations of motherhood like

Mother’s Day, it sought to extend some of the benefits of the women’s liberation movement to grandmothers too. It was not only mothers who deserved to enjoy life, but grandmothers too.

Rather than staying home to avoid leaving the house empty when the family went to see a movie,

82 Yolanda Gómez, “¡Abuelita también debe ir al cine,” Opina (Havana), May 1983, p. 40.

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“grandma should get to go too!”83 Progress made toward gender equality in these years was generally limited to the younger generations, as grandmothers stayed home so that their daughters and daughters-in-law could pursue the opportunities created by revolutionary leadership in the workplace and politics. Encouraging Cuban families to include abuela in their wholesome and enriching family leisure activities was a way to extend some of the gender- oriented reforms to the older generation without disrupting the precarious childcare-housework- revolutionary participation nexus that grandmothers held together precisely by remaining in the home and denying themselves opportunities outside of the domestic sphere.

As the Cuban state refined its image of the “New Woman” through the 1970s and 1980s, many contradictions remained. Increasingly, this woman was a superwoman, who maintained aspects of traditional Cuban ideals of femininity even while taking on new roles in society. She received the support that she needed from the men in her life effortlessly–no nagging, no educating, leading only by example. And as opportunities for consumption improved, she looked good doing it by embracing a fashion sense that was in line with state expectations while steering clear of popular styles that blurred official notions of progress by projecting a backwards or vulgar image. The FMC used the press, especially its mouthpiece Mujeres, and number of national campaigns to transmit its expectations for Cuban women to the female population and encourage women to internalize them. Leadership urged women concerned about the impossibility of doing all that the FMC expected of them to have faith: Simply following the tenets put forth by the FMC was the path to success.

83 Ibid.

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The Self-Actualized Cuban Woman (or Superwoman)

The 1977 winner of the FMC’s “Woman in Revolution” writing contest begins with a startling statement of truth: “everything is so hard!”84 Surprisingly, this statement is not a reference to keeping a household running in the context of austerity, not really, nor about the difficulties of time management for the New Woman. Instead, the story centers on a woman who makes her difficult life less difficult by taking on all of the new responsibilities of revolutionary integration. The moral of the story is that it was not the pressures of revolutionary integration that made life difficult, but individuals who made their own lives difficult by resisting the wisdom in the path to happiness identified by the revolutionary state: participation in the revolutionary mission. Happiness lie in helping build something larger than oneself and the social assimilation that came with it.

When the story begins, Mariana is a twenty-eight-year-old mother of two. Her husband,

Raúl, is a model revolutionary in all but his attitude towards women: he’s very old fashioned and gets jealous easily, a trope which is repeated often in sources from the period. He believes a married woman’s place is in the house, a place Mariana leaves only to do the chores. The primary difficulty in her life is boredom, although she is also put out by the three flights of stairs that stand between her and the street and by the butcher, who closes at noon to take his lunch break even though customers have been waiting in line for two hours. Her life begins to change when a representative of her local FMC chapter comes to her door and asks her if she is available to work. Her excuses cannot stand up to the social pressure exerted by the FMC representative, and so she accepts a job at a factory. Her husband grudgingly agrees so long as nothing is disrupted at home, an unrealistic expectation that falls by the wayside as Mariana accepts more

84 Barbara Hernandez Tapanes, “Ya no se cae la puerta,” Mujeres (Havana), Dec.1978, pp. 60-61.

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responsibility at work, performing voluntary labor and eventually getting involved with the union and distinguishing herself as a model worker (trabajadora destacada).

In the process, Raúl somehow comes to his senses without any prompting from his wife beyond the positive example that she sets. He promises to “help” his wife, a progressive move on his part, but in the wider societal context, his language and sentiment would be out of date by the early 1980s as the FMC pushed men to share rather than help with the domestic duties. He jokes,

“if you win a washing machine, I will do the washing!” referring either to the common practice of awarding model workers appliances in the late 1970s or to the joint CTC-Ministry of Internal

Commerce sales plan that gave trabajadoras preferential access to washing machines in the same period.85 Note that he does not offer to do the washing without a washing machine, something

Mariana must be doing regularly. Also with no prompting or agitating on Mariana’s part, even the revolutionary state comes around despite the shortages of goods and services. While at the beginning of the story there were no spots in the círculo for Mariana and Raúl’s daughter Anita, by the end Anita is attending the círculo every day while the couple’s son spends Monday through Friday at a seminternado. For both husband and state to begin fulfilling Mariana’s needs, all she needed to do was what the FMC told her to do. The difficulties to which she had long pointed as obstacles to her integration fell away effortlessly in the process of that integration.

The story concludes two years after Mariana had declared everything “so difficult.” She considers herself a “new Mariana,” thanks to the FMC literally landing on her doorstep, and surveying her life she recognizes that “everything is still hard, but not so hard.”86 Her name is no coincidence. The name Mariana was associated with Mariana Grajales, who participated in the

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid.

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Cuban independence and antislavery struggles and was mother to famed Afro-Cuban general

Antonio Maceo. Even before the 1959 triumph of revolutionary forces, the 26th of July

Movement used Grajales as a symbol for female revolutionary activity: the 26th of July’s all- woman platoon was named the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon.87 Despite new worries and new pressures, the “new Mariana[‘s]” life was easier because she was no longer consumed by boredom and annoyance at the inconveniences of revolutionary life. This moral served dual purposes for the revolutionary state. On one hand, it encouraged women to perform labor for the revolution in both paid and unpaid contexts. The story teaches that even women who saw no way to reconcile their domestic pressures with revolutionary labor could find a way simply by doing.

On the other, it minimized the difficulties caused by the consumer and service industries by characterizing them as a matter of concern only for bored housewives, not dynamic revolutionaries like the new Mariana.

As the winner of the FMC’s “Women in Revolution” contest, Mariana’s story clearly resonated with revolutionary leadership and the lessons they sought to inculcate among the population. Just two years later, ICAIC released the major film Retrato de Teresa by director

Pastor Vega. There are striking similarities between Mariana’s story and the film, but it is unclear if the film is based on the story or if clashes between husbands and wives as wives took on more responsibilities in the public sphere were so common in this period as to be on everyone’s minds. The film is much more critical than the story published by the FMC, and it provides a more accurate and complex vision of the problems facing Cuban women in the context of late 1970s developments in domesticity and gender relations. In the film, revolutionary integration is key to both Teresa and her husband Ramón’s identities, and yet

87 Waters, Marianas in Combat.

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Ramón consistently finds shortcomings with Teresa’s commitment to the family without ever considering how his work for the revolution has also impacted their family. Ramón, does not come around on his own the way that Mariana’s husband Raúl did. In fact, he ultimately does not come around at all. Because Ramón continues to ascribe to outdated ideas about gender, particularly the impossible standard that women dedicate themselves full time to both the revolution and their families, the movie ends with their separation. This speaks to the real toll that clashes over changing gender roles took on marriages.88

The story and the film do share important messages about the acceptable roles for women in a revolutionary society, however. Most central to these was that being a housewife, even one with two young children to care for at home, was not a valid option for Cuban women, except in very specific cases when they could not work outside of the home. Even then, there were important tasks reserved for housewives, which included monitoring the distribution of goods and services to ensure their function and efficiency for society’s benefit, participating in the national campaign to save resources, especially electricity, and performing socially productive work from within the home by working towards a certificate of “corte y costura,” and making clothing by the piece.89 In addition, these women were expected to perform their revolutionary integration, if not in the workplace than through the various voluntary roles afforded through campaigns managed by the FMC and CDRs, as social workers, sanitary brigade members, mothers fighting for education, and militia members.90

88 Retrato de Teresa, directed by Pastor Vega (1979; Havana:ICAIC).

89 FMC, Memoria II Congreso, 163-164.

90 FMC, “Informe Central,” III Congreso, 70.

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By 1979, 80percent of the female population over the age of fourteen, the minimum age for participation, were members of the FMC. Yet almost two decades into the Cuban state’s campaign to get women out of the house and into the workforce, the majority of FMC members were housewives. This suggests that a large percentage of Cuban women chose to remain home, despite FMC rhetoric that placed sharp restrictions on who could legitimately claim the role of revolutionary housewife. Moreover, the FMC activists’ startling lack of enthusiastic activism makes it difficult to get a sense of what this 80percent membership statistic meant in terms of actual participation in FMC activities. While 90percent of delegations nation-wide met monthly in 1979, only 64percent of federadas [FMC members] actively attended these meetings. This left

5,287 delegations that did not meet regularly and 788,744 purported members who did not attend meetings.91 It is also unclear whether housewives, working women, or other groups took on a more active role in their local FMC chapters or whether this varied locally by chapter.

These revolutionary housewives were a key source of labor for efforts organized by

Poder Popular and the FMC to expand the quality and variety of clothing available to the population. The ultimate goal of the campaign was not only to make up for the shortcomings of the general clothing industry, but ultimately “to alleviate the difficulties faced by many women in making clothing for themselves and their families.”92 This campaign involved housewives, who “for one reason or another cannot work outside of the home” and had earned their certificate of “corte y costura,” sewing clothing using scraps and other leftovers from the mass produced clothing industry.93 In this way, the campaign capitalized on waste in two areas–the labor of

91 Ibid., 4-11.

92 FMC, Memoria II Congreso, 163.

93 Armando López, “6000 costureras para un solo cliente,” Opina (Havana), June 1982, p. 34.

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housewives and the material of the inefficient and long-maligned clothing industry. The goal of this program was to put housewives to work doing tasks they would normally do; however, the program sought to extend the result of this labor beyond housewives’ individual households.

Therefore, rather than sewing just for themselves and their families, the housewives’ labor would address societal needs by providing clothing to the larger population, thereby reducing the expectation that working women make clothing for themselves and their families. The program also offered flexible employment that allowed housewives to keep up with their domestic responsibilities and earn an income that they could control depending on their time availability, willingness to work, and financial need–all while remaining available to run out and snatch up whatever rare good might arrive at the bodega. Sewing three to four hours a day, a woman could make upwards of thirty pairs of pants and pull in 130 pesos a month.94 This was significantly higher than the minimum monthly salary allowed by the state, which was 95 pesos a month in

1980.95

Immediate need propelled the state’s creativity in implementing the corte y costura program. The start of the campaign coincided with the 11th World Festival of Youth and

Students, hosted in Havana in 1978 and attended by almost 20,000 young people from all over the world, putting Cuban youth and Cuba itself on the international stage.96 The FMC’s cottage industry of housewife seamstresses produced 10,300 pieces of clothing for the event, which

People’s Power sold for a profit of 50,000 pesos.97 This profit was reportedly used to fund some

94 Ibid., 35.

95 Balari, “De la desigualdad a la justicia social,” 58.

96 Krebs, “La Revolución Preparada,” 40.

97 FMC, “Informe Central,” III Congreso, 20-21.

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of the renovations made to the host cities of Havana and Santiago de Cuba in preparation for the event.98 By 1981, the housewife seamstresses’ business had grown exponentially. They made

13,700,000 pesos worth of clothing that year, including 262,360 pairs of men’s pants, 229,873 shirts, and 65,387 blouses.99 While these campaigns did impact the clothing market, they do not seem to have come anywhere close to fulfilling their ultimate goal of alleviating the demand that women make clothing for themselves and their families, at least not in these early years. In late

1979, 80percent of Cubans reported that someone they knew personally made their clothing.100

Housewives’ participation and oversight was also central to the savings campaigns started in the late 1970s and expanded in the early 1980s. In 1983, Vilma Espín gave a speech before the Central Committee of the PCC about FMC efforts to save resources in the household, particularly water and electricity. This was the thin cow mentality in action. Savings at the level of individual households would leave a greater share of scarce resources for the industrialization and other economic efforts crucial to Fidel’s plan to turn Cuba into a nation of exporters. At the base level, these efforts involved policing domestic labor and the way that it was performed in individual households, encouraging women to use only necessary lights, to plan out the use of electric appliances like washing machines and irons, to use pressure cookers to speed up cooking times, to keep refrigerators running at top efficiency through regular maintenance, and to fix dripping faucets.101 Yet many of these things were easier said than done. To perform household repair tasks at home required know-how and access to scarce resources. To have them done by a

98 Krebs, “La Revolución Preparada,” 41.

99 López, “6000 costureras,” 34.

100 “El vestuario y la moda, Resultado de una encuesta,” Opina (Havana), Jan. 1980, p. 4.

101 Vilma Espín, “Al llamado del VI pleno del Comite Central del PCC de las federadas cumpliran con más ahinco y tenacidad que nunca,” Mujeres (Havana), Apr. 1983, pp. 10-13.

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professional required patience and luck. Appliance repair in particular lagged in these years. This was a problem across the island but especially in Havana, where dense populations always complicated distribution of goods and services. In 1980, 8.8percent of televisions, 10.6percent of refrigerators, and 11.7percent of washing machines city-wide sat unused in repair shops, awaiting the uncertain arrival of necessary parts.102 In 1984, despite PCC-coordinated efforts to tackle the problem by opening new repair shops, it was still not uncommon to wait months for appliance repair because the state was never fully able to replace the private repair industry that it had abolished.103 One Opina piece discusses a man whose refrigerator broke in January, was finally picked up by the repair service in March, and then sat in the shop for months due to a lack of paint, again revealing how shortages of a single item (even a non-technologically specific item like paint) could gum up the works for extended periods.104

Fixing a dripping faucet could be an equally difficult task. Opina published a scathing satire on this topic that featured a couple too distracted by a dripping faucet to make love.

Motivated not out of revolutionary fervor to save scarce resources but instead an “erotic- sportsman spirit” to remove the distraction and get down to business, the husband in the story sets out Saturday morning to buy the necessary gasket to make the repair himself. First he scours the drawers in their home, and then he asks neighbors, both to no avail. At his local hardware store, they tell him that they have been out for a while and do not know when to expect them in.

It is the same story at other hardware stores in the municipality (Boyeros), and only then does he begin to fume. Even without reference to the on-going savings campaign, the situation is

102 María Helena Capote, “¿Tiene su televisor roto?” Opina (Havana), May 1980, p. 10.

103 Ibid.

104 Zayda Grinan, “La larga odisea de una refrigeradora en reparaciones,” Opina (Havana), Aug. 1984, p. 8.

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ludicrous. In a time of drought, when trucks were delivering water to peoples’ homes, “the logical” solution would be that gaskets be available everywhere, “even in the bodegas,” the protagonist seethes. Ultimately, after walking for miles, taking multiple bus trips, and talking to countless people, he finds the gasket, shocked that “a population of over 150,000 people, living in more than 33,000 households, can only find gaskets in two sales establishments.” Despite the inconvenience and strong critique of how distribution problems hindered revolutionary initiatives to save scarce resources, the story ends on a bright note that reveals much about love in revolutionary Cuba: “They did not make love, but in his search for gaskets, he gave her beautiful proof of his love.”105

Figure 3-1. Appropriate and inappropriate Cuban womanhood: On the left, a frugal approach to household energy use pairs well with an eye toward understated elegance (Mujeres (Havana), June 1983, inside cover). On the right, a creative eye and energetic spirit

105 V.H. Sureda, “Cuentos de amor y misterio,” Opina (Havana), Aug. 1987, back cover.

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combine with disastrous results (“Rolomania,” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1980, back cover).

In the months after Espín’s speech on saving resources, Mujeres ran a series of advertisements on its inside cover that featured excerpts of the speech paired with photographs of elegant, well-manicured hands plugging things in or turning off light switches (Figure 3-1). The combination of revolutionary activity with traditional norms regulating female appearance was a tension that ran throughout this period. A short story in the youth magazine Somos Jovenes framed the question of women’s liberation using precisely this lens. Ali, member of the UJC, officer of the student association, and president of the youth club of her local high school, and another member of the youth club, Marcia, got into a heated discussion during a dance put on by the club. Midway through the dance, Ali called an informal meeting of the club to decide where and when they would host their next event. During the meeting, Marcia voiced some concerns she had about the club, mainly that the rules requiring that members attend each meeting and pay dues infringed on the “freedom” of the club’s members. Ali and two of the club’s male members,

Reynaldo and Frank, immediately ganged up on Marcia in response.

Rather than addressing her concerns in a straightforward manner, they pointed to her footwear as a symbol of the backwards values to which she and her idea of freedom ascribed.

They used her black ankle boots as a sign that she was not a “free woman:” “in order to be fashionable, you wear shoes that cook your feet, you don’t know where or why they’re in style.

Freedom, Marcia, is knowing why one does things,” Reynaldo explained. The teens focused in on Marcia’s shoes because quality shoes were hard to come by in these years. The fact that

Marcia had ankle boots indicated that she had some degree of privileged access to goods, in and of itself a suspicious quality, particularly when viewed through the lens of the thin cow mentality. The story continues with Reynaldo, Frank, and Ali explaining why rules, order, and

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participation are necessary for society to function. It is easy to see how these lessons were as applicable to the mass organizations and the other spheres where the revolutionary state encouraged female participation as they were to Ali and Marcia’s high school youth club. By the end of the dance, Marcia had accepted the rights and responsibilities of club membership and the group had planned a beach excursion for the club. As Frank and Marcia conversed later in the night, Frank has become convinced that Marcia was “a free woman,” but “Marcia’s gaze followed Ali.”106

At first glance, the lesson in the story is clear. Marcia’s ideals of freedom, femininity, and fashion were out of fashion and disconnected from revolutionary reality, unlike the hyper- involved Ali, who became an object of veneration for Marcia by the end of the story. Yet when read in the broader cultural context of messages the state broadcast to women about the centrality of their appearance to their revolutionary identity, the message is less clear. Marcia’s sin was questioning the status quo and privileging a fashion that was out of line with Cuban reality. The problem was not that her boots were stylish because it was a good thing for women of all ages to be stylish, but instead that they were too warm for a night of sweaty dancing in a tropical climate.

As evidenced by Marcia’s boots, choosing to wear the wrong shoes could be a real faux pas. The implications of such a faux pas extended well beyond one’s popularity at school to the larger issue of one’s understanding of gender norms in a revolutionary context and level of revolutionary integration. Climatological considerations were not the only criteria for determining what were the wrong shoes; bourgeois notions of propriety survived in the classless society in important if conflicted ways. While women made daily decisions about their personal

106 Paquita, “Ella es una mujer ‘libre’” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Oct.-Nov. 1981, pp. 14-15.

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style and self-presentation based on the resources available to them and the considerations that came from balancing their other responsibilities, the revolutionary state held steadfast to fashion norms that sought to extend middle class affluence and propriety to all sectors of the population.

Debates about appropriate fashion were also rooted in ideas about national identity, which identified a certain awareness of fashion and appearance as central to both male and female

Cuban identity: “If anything characterizes the Cuban, it is his personal appearance.”107 These long-term connections between middle class affluence, self-presentation, and national identity made the triumph of the “chusma” (riffraff) hard to swallow, particularly for those who had belonged to or identified with the middle and upper class prior to 1959, which included most revolutionary leaders.108

As possibilities for consumption expanded, the press published various articles expressing shock at the styles one encountered on the street: women with their hair in rollers (in public!), women in flip-flops (in public!), women in appropriate sandals, but without a fresh pedicure (in public!).109 One such piece characterizes women wearing rollers in their hair as

“practically an endemic disease” on the island.110 The offensive practice was taken to the

107 Juan Opina, “Tintorias y lavanderias: Los templos de perdición,” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1985, pp. 12-13.

108 The triumph of the Revolution as the triumph of the “chusma” is a widely-discussed phenomenon, down to the present. See, for example, Erasmo Calzadilla, “La rebelión de la chusma,” Havana Times (Havana), 10 Mar. 2013, accessed online Aug. 2016 at http://www.havanatimes.org/sp/?p=88086, and Miriam Celaya, “La chusmería: hija bastada de la revolución,” Cubanet (Havana), 19 Jan. 2014, accessed online Aug. 2016 at https://www.cubanet.org/opiniones/la-chusmeria-de-los-cubanos-hija-de-la-revolucion/

109 For examples see Gladys, “Rolos solo en el hogar, Cabellos,” Muchacha (Havana), Mar. 1986, p. 49, and Gladys Egues, “Lo moderno: tela por donde cortar,” Muchacha (Havana), Mar. 1987, pp. 54-56.

110 Silvia Bota, “Reflexiones en torno a temas cotidianas,” Mujeres (Havana), May 1985, pp. 36-37. It is unclear why this practice comes under fire in the 1980s, as it was not new to the period but seems to be a manifestation of the cyclical nature of fashion, as trends from the 1960s came back into fashion in the 1980s. Fashion writer Isabel Fernández de Amado Blanco was writing to discourage this trend, which she saw everywhere from a Vedado restaurant to the “Ministries, offices, shops, and streets of Havana,” as early as 1964, I. de Amado Blanco, “Correo de Europa,” Mujeres (Havana), July 1964, p. 15. While fashion-minded observers like Amado Blanco were critical of the trend even in the 1960s, it had mass popular appeal. In that period, as Lillian Guerra has shown, young

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extreme by creative responses to material scarcity, which created an explosion of women making their own rollers out of literal garbage (Figure 3-1). These rollers were not used in their traditional manner, as a tool to achieve a nicely curled style, but instead served as a fashion statement all their own. The press in this period lampooned rollers made of old talcum powder boxes, toilet paper tubes, and deodorant containers.111 It was not the crafty response to scarcity that was so offensive; from the early 1960s the state encouraged women to get crafty in overcoming the various shortages impacting their lives. Instead, it was the emergence of a new trend over which the state had no control and which revolutionary leadership felt reflected poorly on Cuba and Cubans’ opportunities for consumption.112

The coexistence of traditional roles with new ones also resulted in tension and internal inconsistencies in the image of the New Woman. In a poem titled “Mujer Actual,” published in

Somos Jovenes, a young poet contrasts the revolutionary femininity of the 1980s with the femininity of the past. She claims that in the 1980s, when someone said “woman,” a whole range of women’s roles comes to mind. Woman could mean “a mother, cane cutter, revolutionary . . . student and worker.”113 Note the use of “and” rather than “or,” exhorting women to be superwomen in support of the revolution. Also interesting is that while a woman’s role as mother

women would wear their hair in rollers on a daily basis and even for special occasions. She cites an example of women wearing rollers while being “formally photographed for national publications,” Visions of Power, 225.

111 “Anuncios Declasificados,” Opina (Havana), June 1980, p. 9 and “Rolomania,” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1980, back cover.

112 These norms were internalized by many Cuban women, including the younger generations. In interviews with groups of students in Manzanillo, in the eastern province of Granma, 1981, many male and female students expressed concerns about the level of culture and decency among young Cubans with regard to table manners and clothing. Interestingly, these interviews reflect the idea that women of all ages have a specific responsibility to uphold the norms of propriety in society, a responsibility that many perceived Cuban women to be shirking given the prevalence of bad language, lack of hygiene, and disorderly behavior among women waiting in lines, Joaquín Ortega, “Manzanillo: no solo se baila,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Feb.-Mar. 1981, pp. 6-9.

113 Maricela, “Mujer Actual” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Jan. 1983, p. 33.

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remains celebrated as an important social role, the labor of being a mother and running a household are strikingly absent from this celebration of revolutionary womanhood. The poet contrasts this image with the woman of old, “that lady who entertained herself with knitting or lie next to her husband in bed.”114 Aside from the use of the word “lady” there is nothing to distinguish this woman from the revolutionary women of the 1980s, who ostensibly also shared beds with their husbands and knitted or otherwise made clothing for their families. The implicit demonization of knitting as a frivolous entertainment is puzzling in a society where consumption was so limited that women made clothing and other goods for themselves and their families not out of boredom, but necessity. The same year that the poem was published, Opina, a magazine devoted to consumption, published a do-it-yourself guide to using the rubber soles of an old pair of shoes as the base for a new pair of shoes that you could crochet yourself. The crochet shoes were presented as a unique twist on the very common practice of cutting off parts of the cloth body to make sandals out of an old pair of shoes.115 Thus what distinguished the New Woman from the old woman is the expansion of her roles in society, not the elimination of her traditional roles, her completion of which was so expected as to be left unstated.

Examination of the consumer sphere also reveals tension between traditional images of femininity, which the revolutionary state sought to maintain, and the everyday realities of life under socialism. An article bemoaning lipstick shortages in Santiago asserted that while lipstick was not an “indispensable” item, it was “of imperious need,” given the “traditional interest of

Cuban women in appearing well-groomed.”116 While all shades and categories of lipstick were

114 Ibid.

115 Lourdes, “Zapatos nuevos de tennis viejos,” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1983, p. 46.

116 ZG, “OPINA en Santiago,” Opina (Havana), Oct. 1980, p. 12.

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so well stocked in the city of Havana that they were available in unrationed quantities at the time of the article’s publication, there was not a single tube available in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city, revealing regional variation in consumer experiences and in the ease with which women could keep up appearances following either official or popular trends.

A profile on the work of the FMC in Pinar del Río also highlights these tensions. The piece casts Pinar del Río alongside the mountains of Oriente and Zapata Swamp as one of Cuba’s rural areas that was furthest behind as a result of the rural-urban divide that characterized pre-

1959 Cuba (and continued for decades afterwards, despite extensive intervention by the revolutionary state). Yet thanks to a decade and a half of revolutionary action, by 1976, the province had been transformed by the New Pinareña Women, many of whom are described by

Angelina Yáñez, Secretary General of her FMC chapter, as real life Marianas, who a decade before “when the FMC knocked, would not even dare to open the door without their husbands’ permission.”117 While the piece highlighted women’s work in the FMC as a mode of empowerment, much like the fictional piece about Mariana, the physical markers of this empowerment were much the same as the physical markers of female success in the pre- revolutionary era. The crux of change was not that the revolutionary state had redefined women’s roles to allow women to contribute to society in spaces that were previously dominated by men, although it had. Rather the emphasis in this piece on the physical markers of change emphasizes a different strain of revolutionary change: that the revolutionary state had placed bourgeois beauty norms within everyone’s grasp, regardless of class or physical location.

The New Woman of Pinar del Río was described as “active, ready, attentive to her wardrobe and style,” as someone “who works in every sector, studies, and participates in the

117 Maria Helena Capote, Ileana Alvarez, “La nueva imagen,” Mujeres (Havana), Sept. 1976, p. 27.

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mass organizations.”118 This ideal woman, who not only worked hard for a salary and as a volunteer, but looked good doing so, was linked to women of all ages, from teenagers to the elderly. The emphasis on fashion seems self-defeating for a revolutionary state that consistently struggled in this area, but not when viewed through the lens of the rural-urban divide. What was considered a disaster in Havana could be considered a triumph in isolated rural zones like Pinar del Río. After asking the journalists, both from Havana, where they were from, Méndez, “a heavy-set peasant woman with more than 70 springs in her eyes,” remarked that such a question would not have been necessary prior to the revolution. “Before, you could recognize the people from Havana from afar, based on nothing more than their style of clothing. But this doesn’t happen anymore. Today, everyone has the same possibilities.”119 What seemed like a death knell for Cuban fashion from one vantage point could be viewed as a triumph from another. It is important to note that this leveling of class differences was fundamentally different from the vision that revolutionary leadership had outlined decades prior. It was not an extension of middle-class abundance across the rural-urban divide, but instead an extension of material poverty.

If the state sent women contradictory messages in these years about the centrality of their appearance to their identity as revolutionary women, the transition to womanhood, traditionally marked by the lavish celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday, was also imbued with layers of meaning. In traditional celebrations, the occasion combined some measure of conspicuous consumption with a celebration of individual identity that ran contrary to revolutionary values that celebrated the collective good over the individual. Conspicuous consumption aside, even the

118 Ibid., 26.

119 Ibid., 27.

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ability to host a small, simple get-together was complicated by the persistence of rationing and shortages. As historian Michelle Chase has argued, the revolutionary state began to associate

“frivolous consumption” with young women, particularly of the urban middle and upper classes, as early as 1961. Through a series of “secular conversion narratives” published in this early period, the state provided “public templates” for how young women could overcome their frivolous natures and begin to embody revolutionary values by participating in revolutionary activities.120 Public campaigns to teach Cubans appropriate ways to celebrate quinceñeras in the era of the fat cows reveal similar trends at work. New public templates, which appeared as a series of morality tales published in women’s and youth magazines, encouraged teenage girls to celebrate their entrance into womanhood in ways that aligned with revolutionary values of austerity and collectivism.

Quinceñera Politics

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the quinceñera, the traditionally lavish celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday, was transformed into a generational battleground over revolutionary versus traditional values and appropriate modes of consumption and self-presentation. Since the early 1960s, the FMC had staked out a middle ground on quinceñeras that sought to balance austerity and necessity with culture and tradition. In their mouthpiece, Mujeres, they encouraged readers to continue the tradition of having quinceñeras but to alter how they approached and understood the celebrations. By cutting out unnecessary luxuries, “the parties keep their full meaning, but have lost (thank goodness!) the false glamour that often surrounded them.” They urged mothers to outfit their daughters in beautiful, but practical clothing that was appropriate for their age and lifestyle, promoting thriftiness by insinuating that the best dresses were ones

120 Chase, Revolution within the Revolution, 152.

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that could be worn for other occasions. The parties should be “fresh and spontaneous,” without

“artificial ceremony and useless, superfluous expenditure,” which the “youth do not need to be happy” anyway.121 In 1962, when the piece was published, such dictates served the dual purpose of encouraging people to cut out luxuries that were likely not available anyway, given the intense scarcity of the early years of the revolution and the impeding dawn of rationing, while also promoting a socialist consciousness that oriented people away from understanding material goods as resources for themselves and their comfort and toward understanding them as collective resources that fueled the economy instead.

Though the party line on parties was firmly drawn early on, quinces became a national obsession in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Editorials, public opinion polls, and morality tales plastered the press, particularly in magazines aimed at youth and women. It seems likely that stronger trade relations with the Eastern Bloc and, after 1980, the emergence of the parallel market had, for the first time since the early 1960s, expanded the possibilities for consumers and made defying the party line by returning to the lavish parties of an imagined past possible. Even as the lack of goods and foodstuffs improved, however, the consumer economy remained centrally-planned and calibrated to serving the everyday needs of individual families, so gathering the large quantities of foodstuffs, beverages, decorations, and clothing and personal items required to throw a lavish party of this type could still be difficult. Even if the goods were available, buying them in the bulk quantities necessary for a party through legal channels, including ration sites and parallel market stores, could throw the system out of whack, causing artificial shortages. Turning to the black market would have a similar effect, plus the state would be cut out of the transaction entirely, losing not only goods that it was counting on but also the

121 “Fiesta de 15,” Mujeres (Havana), Apr. 1962, p. 50.

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money that changed hands for those goods. Somewhat paradoxically it was a triumph of the revolution that made defying the revolution’s value system, and undermining it economically and ideologically, possible.

A short play published in Somos Jovenes sums up the dilemma facing parents who were caught between the desire–and the ability, thanks to the revolution--to give their children everything that they never had and the pressure to adhere to the revolutionary value of austerity, or at least modesty. The scene opens on Elena and Emilio, the parents of soon-to-be-fifteen-year- old Marinita, at their dining room table in Havana. Emilio’s brother Jorge sits with the couple and protests their plans to give Marinita the party “that she deserves,” despite the fact it would cost them roughly 2,000 pesos.122 Elena insists that by “tightening their belts,” the family could and should handle the mounting debt; Marinita’s peers Lourdes, Raquelita, Rosita, and Cristina had all recently had tremendous parties with “orchestras and everything,” and Lourdes’ mother had even figured out how to “resolver” that the invitations to her daughter’s celebration feature photographs of the girl.123 It was not only social pressure motivating Elena and Emilio’s desire to give their daughter a lavish celebration, however, but also their own impoverished childhoods.

Emilio explains that Elena’s quinceñera was likely a single dance in her family’s living room, her father in an old but clean guayabera, and that he himself was working by the age of fifteen.

By contrast, the only thing limiting the abundance of his own children’s childhoods was the distribution patterns of the central economy: “if they make a thousand dolls available for

122 While exact figures are not available for 1977 (the year the piece was written), in 1980 the minimum salary was 95 pesos per month and the maximum was 450, so 2,000 pesos would put significant strain on anyone but the most privileged members of the political upper class, Lic. Eugenio R. Balari, “De la desigualdad a la justicia social: la Revolución Cubana,” Demanda (Havana), 1980, p. 58.

123 Joaquín Ortega, “Los quince de la Marinita,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), no. 3, 1977, p. 39.

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purchase, we would buy them for her; if a thousand shoes, a thousand shoes.”124 This is how

Emilio understands the revolution: that the revolution was fought “for those who did not have and could not give a party like the one that I am going to give my daughter.”

Emilio’s brother Jorge, however, has a truly developed socialist consciousness and that allows him to see past the easy trappings of mass consumerism. He argues that the revolution was created for the happiness of the people, and that the family could better spend the money on something they would all enjoy for years to come, like a new television, or a labor-saving appliance like a washing machine. The logic behind this pragmatic approach to consumption is in line with state efforts to rationalize consumption and promote and expand appliance ownership in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “Do you think that happiness resides in the quantity of beer, pretty invitations, the trappings of a giant party for your daughter?” he asks his brother before insisting that “what is really important is that people do not have callouses on their souls.”125 Such calloused souls could be avoided by the mindful cultivation of calloused hands, through voluntary labor and the escuelas en el campo, further reinforcing the ideological values of austerity and physical labor. Jorge is also the one to propose a solution to the family’s predicament. Why not ask Marinita herself? As a young woman raised by the revolution, she could be trusted to have the right value system, and the older generation should look to the young for guidance, particularly with regard to areas where capitalist and socialist values clashed. “We are no longer in an age where the children are the only ones expected to be respectful,” Jorge

124 Ibid., 40.

125 Ibid., 40.

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chides his brother, who had not asked Marinita how she envisioned her approaching quinceñera.126

Of course, when Marinita hears of her parents’ planned expenditure, she tells them that she prefers a modest party. Normal invitations, a single dress made out of a pink fabric her mother had recently purchased, whatever quantity of beer her parents could manage, and a simple buffet were more in line with her value system and expectations. Her favorite birthday was one that she had celebrated in her first stay at an escuela en el campo, after all, with good friends, “kisses and hugs for everyone and enough sweet treats for everyone, even if the servings were small.”127 Marinita’s approach to birthday treats directly echoes the function that leadership had established rationing to perform: equitable distribution of scarce goods. The scene closes with Marinita dancing in her living room, first with her father and then with her uncle. The scene is reminiscent of her mother’s quinceñera as imagined by Emilio, only for Marinita it is a choice rather than a deprivation to celebrate modestly surrounded by loved ones. As she dances with her

Uncle Jorge, Marinita tells him, “you are my youngest uncle, and not only in age,” an affirmation of his youthful revolutionary values, which won the day.128

The story of Marinita and her parents is indicative of an emerging trope in this period in which youth resist their well-meaning but materialistic parents and, in the process, teach their parents what it means to be revolutionary.129 In some cases, the young girls’ opposition to a huge quinceñera is presented along the same lines as Marinita’s: why spend so much money for a

126 Ibid., 39.

127 Ibid., 41.

128 Ibid., 41.

129 See, for example, Cary, “¿Te divertiste Teresa?” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Aug.-Sept. 1980, p. 26-27; Gladys Egües Cantero, “El major regalo,” Mujeres (Havana), April 1982, p. 44-45; Pucha, “Satirichacha,” Muchacha (Havana), June 1982, p. 38.

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single, frivolous night? In these cases, the girls’ desire to sacrifice a party celebrating their individual passage into womanhood is framed as an unwillingness to put themselves above the collective good of their families. This understanding of the relationship between self and family is a microcosm for the mentality that all Cubans were supposed to cultivate about their own relationship to revolutionary society.

In other cases, the girls’ opposition revolves around the emptiness of a celebration based in material things, another moral value that was heavily promoted by the revolutionary state which also served to marginalize dissent based on very real austerity. For example, in another morality tale that appeared in Somos Jovenes, Teresa’s parents somehow secured the food and other trappings of a massive party, including a stylist and photographer, who were there to coordinate and record Teresa’s ten costume changes of the night. The party began at 9:00 PM, and by midnight, Teresa was only halfway through her five costumes. She had spent most of her own party changing outfits and being photographed. While her friends danced and had fun, she was reprimanded for laughing and dancing in a natural manner rather than a posed one that would look better in the pictures. Her friends “commented that this was not the Tere that they knew, but instead an ‘artificial’ version” that lacked all the charms of the “true” Teresa.130 It was only when her friends intervened to stop the costuming and photographs that Teresa was able to truly enjoy herself.

Teresa’s story is one of multiple stories that were published as public templates that modeled appropriate behavior for revolutionary teenage girls. These stories taught teens to understand lavish quinceñeras as selfish celebrations of a frivolous individuality. In Teresa’s case, the birthday girl felt isolated and had a bad time, which was commemorated forever in the

130 Cary, “¿Te divertiste Teresa?” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Aug.-Sept. 1980, p. 27.

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hundreds of forced pictures to which the evening was truly devoted. Stories like Teresa’s that featured daughters who did not successfully resist their well-meaning parents or, worse yet, enthusiastically aided in the party planning, were cast by the media as simply absurd.131 Nothing encapsulates this more than the stereotyped photographs these girls inevitably took in these stories. Most common was the practice of renting a hotel suite in which to take photographs.

Such photographs would showcase the girl in her birthday finery, but they were also meant to correspond to the initial purpose of the quinceñera, the debut of young girls on the social scene as women. As a result, the photographs were meant to showcase the beauty, and in some cases also the sensuality, of the girls. Morality tales, editorials, fashion spreads, and advice columnists all encouraged young girls to avoid over-the-top celebrations, and by the early 1980s the most common shorthand for such celebrations was reference to photographs of the birthday girl emerging from a hotel bathroom wrapped only a towel (Figure 3-2).

131See Aloyma Ravelo, Fotos: Julio Bello “No siempre quince es igual a quince,” Muchacha 3:2 (April 1982), unnumbered pages, analyzed below, for another example of a story that featured the trope of a girl disappointed by her lavish quinceñera.

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Figure 3-2. An example of the infamous towel quinceñera photographs (Aloyma Ravelo, Fotos: Julio Bello “No siempre quince es igual a quince,” Muchacha 3:2 (April 1982), unnumbered pages).

Though in the eyes of journalists, “nothing is more ridiculous than those photos of girls leaving the bathroom wrapped in a towel,” hundreds of young Cuban girls embraced the style as an available means of highlighting their luxe entry into the sensuality of womanhood.132

Following the 1959 revolution, Cuba’s well-developed tourist infrastructure was turned to the needs of the population, so a stay in even a fancy hotel was possible for most Cubans. The towel, most often a plain white bath towel, was also widely available. It was the application of these materials to the quinceñera photograph tradition that made them distinctive. While most girls’ outfit choices were constrained by the homogenous offerings of both premade dresses available for rent or purchase and material available on the domestic market, being photographed in a bath towel as opposed to a dress was fresh and unique. Of course, once the fad took off, it was anything but unique, though individual distinction remained the underlying goal, as evidenced by the satirical thought bubble that appeared with one such photo in Muchacha: “This is going to such a sensation! I am so original!”133 Here as elsewhere, state organs mocked the girls’ desire to showcase their individuality, but this was a widespread objective. Debates over popular efforts to showcase individual identity in a homogenous consumer context through creative means were not restricted to quinceñera celebrations. The rhetoric surrounding both the underlying impetus and the sometimes ridiculous final products transferred to social debates about the common practice of creatively altering school uniforms, thereby destroying the purpose of a uniform.

Satirical pieces poked fun at girls who personalized their uniforms, in the process creating gaudy,

132 Aloyma, “Para los 15 de Jacqueline,” Muchacha (Havana), July 1983, p. 53.

133 Aloyma Ravelo, Fotos: Julio Bello, “No siempre quince es igual a quince,” Muchacha (Havana), Apr. 1982, unnumbered pages.

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over-the-top, and even hypersexualized get-ups, with confused onlookers unable to distinguish girls with “onda [style]” from beggars.134

Though disdainful of many of the practices surrounding quinceñera celebration and commemoration, journalists were not dismissive of the practice as a whole. In fact, not a single article appeared encouraging girls to forgo celebration all together, and everyone seemed to agree that the occasion required something special. While appropriate modes of celebration were hotly debated, “what we all agree on is that it should be celebrated differently than all of the other birthdays that one has in the course of her life.”135 In general, the state media encouraged young women to turn away from frivolity and embrace more practical and fulfilling forms of celebration. The girls who star in these public templates as apprehensive about or disappointed in the huge parties their parents organized are often held up against their friends, who opted for more sensible celebrations and had a better time. A small, intimate party or a night on the town with good friends were common alternatives, as were camping or tourist trips around Cuba, which could be educational and also had the benefit of lasting much longer than a single night.

In one such tale, Rosana, pictured above in the bath towel (Figure 3-2), woke up the morning after her quinceñera exhausted after 18 wardrobe changes and 214 photographs. She had not danced a single number and her boyfriend, who was put off and bored by what amounted to a fashion show rather than a fun party, had broken up with her. The loss of the boyfriend is another common trope in these morality tales, signaling that appealing to teenage girls’ baser instincts and desire to be appealing to boys may have been more effective than calls to their lofty sense of revolutionary morality. Karelia, on the other hand, is held up as Rosana’s more satisfied

134 See, for example, Pucha, “Satirichacha,” Muchacha (Havana), Nov. 1980, pp. 38-39, and Pucha, “Satirichacha,” Muchacha (Havana), Oct. 1985, pp. 30-31.

135 Cary, “Los Quince,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), June 1984, pp. 16-17.

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counterpart. She had a small party where everyone had a great time and her boyfriend told her she was beautiful. Plus, she was able to cap the night off with a week of traveling around Cuba, hitting major tourist spots like the beach at Varadero and the beautiful colonial city of

Trinidad.136 The moral is clear: only a short-sighted and selfish fool would follow Rosana’s example over Karelia’s.

Alongside the morality tales that established public templates for appropriate behavior appeared tips on how to host practical and fulfilling quinceñera celebrations. Some of these suggestions were more realistic than others, but all of them required enlisting the time and energy of loved ones. Magazines encouraged young women to embrace their natural beauty over the false glamour of extravagant styling by choosing a simple dress that their mothers could sew.

While this is a clear reflection of scarcity and the paucity of pre-made clothing, the press presented it as a sensible choice rather than a lack of options: “your age, your youthful figure, do not need great resources to be showcased. At your quince your charms will shine through more the simpler your birthday dress is.”137

As Muchacha explained, even an ornate style could be easily achieved by mothers who saved old sheets, pillowcases, and bed clothes from their own mother’s era, which could be transformed into a very feminine and romantic dress.138 In this case, only hard work and the lingering resources of the pre-revolutionary past could make up for contemporary shortages. This example, in which the state encouraged girls to embrace quinceñera dresses made from thirty- year-old bed sheets illustrates the extent of on-going material scarcity. It also reveals why the

136 Aloyma Ravelo, “No siempre quince es igual a quince,” Muchacha (Havana), April 1982, unnumbered pages.

137 “Quince radiantes años,” Muchacha (Havana), Apr. 1982, p. 58.

138 “Quinceñera,” Muchacha (Havana), Aug. 1983, p. 18.

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public templates for wrongheaded quinceñera celebrations were so hyperbolic. In these stories,

Teresa had five costume changes and Rosana had eighteen! A story about a girl who wanted just one brand new dress in which to celebrate the occasion would have been much more difficult for state sources to mock. It would have served to highlight the shortcomings of the consumer economy rather than the lack of revolutionary consciousness among young women.

Of course, a fun and fulfilling party could also be hosted in such a way as to align with revolutionary values. Somos Jovenes ran a feature on one such party put on at an escuela en el campo in Quivacán, about 45 minutes outside of the city of Havana. Vilma Tomás, the birthday girl, gave a detailed picture of how she managed to host a celebration for 600 of her closest friends for only 320 pesos. The crucial aspect of the party was that it was a joint effort. Vilma maximized both the material and human resources of her school and her family’s extended social network. The school cafeteria provided the appetizers and desserts, and there was no need for invitations, since Vilma simply invited everyone over the school’s intercom. Her parents and friends of the family shouldered the cost for additional food and photography, but the piece is careful to stipulate that everything was acquired through legal and state-sponsored channels. Her father bought non-rationed goods like corned beef and cream cheese for the croquetas on the free market. Friends pooled their resources to acquire ingredients that could only be bought in limited quantities due to rationing and shortages to make cookies, coming up with 25 pounds of sugar and two cartons of eggs. The boys at the school cleaned up the next day. The party was such a success that Francis, a schoolmate of Vilma’s who had celebrated her quince four days prior, said “truthfully, I would have liked to have had a birthday like this.”139 For readers who felt the

139 Cary, “Unos 15 diferentes,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), June-July 1981, p. 37.

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same, Vilma provided her contact information and stated her willingness to share her expertise.140

Group interviews and opinion polls conducted by the press revealed that, in some cases, the tropes that appeared in these public templates did reflect the worldviews of young Cubans raised by the revolution. In a 1978 interview with a group of youths between 15 and 20, many cited the generational divide that surrounded money and how to spend it, and others thought the entire tradition was outdated, a “bourgeois custom [that] does not fit in the new society” that

Cubans had been building since 1959.141 Perhaps nothing highlights this perceived difference between the new and old Cuba than the fact that one person brings up a comparison between the

“ridiculous,” lavish celebrations among the Cuban American population in Miami, which they had read about in a book. Such parties, which cost upwards of $5000, were inherently capitalistic as they commodified young women by “introducing the women into society as a product.”142

These critiques even went so far as to question the legitimacy of the quinceñera as a Cuban tradition, with Francys saying that “I would argue that the name and style are a copy of the North

American party,” a manifestation of the neocolonial past that existed and continues to exist solely as a display of luxury.143 Except, of course, that Americans did not celebrate coming out parties for fifteen-year-olds. Sweet sixteen is not sweet fifteen.

140 Ibid.

141 Cristina Gonzalez, “Las fiestas de 15,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), 1978, p. 8.

142 Ibid., 6. As María Cristina García has argued, quinceñera celebrations in Miami did sometimes take on absurd proportions among exile families eager to show off their economic success in the United States. While smaller, more traditional celebrations were the norm, the lavish events described by the Cuban teenagers held a disproportionate place in public consciousness on the Florida side of the Florida Straits as well. The Cuban teenagers pose an economic critique of the practice here, but it was also “heavily satirizied in Cuban American theater and literature,” (García, Havana, USA, 96-97).

143 Gonzalez, “Las fiestas de 15,” 7. “Party” appears in the interview in English.

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Others, however, defended the practice as an important coming-of-age moment and an opportunity to have a good time with loved ones. 93 of 100 readers interviewed by Opina in

1980 stated that they liked quinceñeras and especially enjoyed the music. Most preferred a celebration in the home, and the most commonly disliked element was more human than the ideologically-centered critiques of consumption and expenditure that dominate the public templates developed in this period: when people fight was cited as the least pleasant aspect of the celebration, though “so many clothing changes,” was listed second.144 Even more radically, the majority of girls interviewed by Ellas in Romance in 1978 defended many of practices that were coming under attack by the state media campaign in this period. 54.9percent of girls thought it was normal, good, or very good to change clothes multiple times during a quinceñera party. The piece strongly critiques these beliefs due to their impact on economy and the counterrevolutionary beliefs and practices that they promote:

In the best-case scenarios, they put the entire family’s clothing ration at the disposition of the birthday girl, and with this they teach her to act for herself, to achieve her desires, preferences and objectives in life. In the worst cases, it leads us to consider crimes penalized by the law as something normal, because it foments the use of the black market and the purchase of products of unclear origin with the end of acquiring everything for the party.145

Despite these ramifications, the 54.9percent of girls who defended multiple clothing changes were largely clear-eyed in their support of the practice, and these attitudes bled into their approach to everyday fashion as well. In blatant defiance not only of revolutionary ideology but also of revolutionary law, 39percent of them believed that it was okay to dress themselves

144 “Que opinan los lectores sobre las fiestas de quince,” Opina (Havana), May 1980, p. 36.

145 Numbers based on interviews with 128 boys and 173 girls between the ages of 11 and 20 in the city of Havana. Rafael Calvo, “Opinan los jovenes sobre . . . la amistad, el estudio, las ‘colas’ y los quince años,” Ellas en romance (Havana), Jan. 1978, pp. 54-56

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according to international fashions, no matter how the clothing was acquired.146 These beliefs and their ramifications clearly identify the rationale behind the state’s decision to target quinceñeras with the public templates that journalists produced in this period. First, the parties allegedly encouraged ideas of individualism by teaching young women to feel that they were special and should be able to act according to their own desires, preferences, and goals, as opposed to focusing on the collective good of their family and society. Second, they undoubtedly spurred black market activity in a context where the consumer market was calibrated not to facilitating large events but to meeting the everyday needs of individual families; At times, the official consumer economy struggled to do even this.

The context of austerity tied into how Cubans thought about themselves and those around them. The generational divide and the way that Cuban media depicted it with regard to quinceñera celebrations reveals the vested interest of the Cuban state and revolutionary sectors of society in maintaining the values of austerity and sacrifice–the thin cow mentality–even in a moment of relative abundance. The public templates developed in these morality tales taught the lesson that those who valued material goods too much, and therefore felt burdened or inconvenienced by the decades of austerity, were relics of the pre-revolutionary past. This notion was embodied in these stories by the parents who were willing to resort to any means necessary– scrimping, saving, and engaging in black market transactions–to give their daughters the lavish quinceñera celebrations that state rhetoric linked to the capitalist past, presented through the lens of injustice rather than nostalgia. The parents, with good intentions but a lack of socialist consciousness, were simply attempting to give their daughters the kinds of parties that they themselves would have liked to have had, had capitalism not kept them in poverty.

146 Ibid., 56.

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The daughters in these morality tales, on the other hand, represent a youthful revolutionary spirit, their own consciousness well-developed by years in the revolutionary education system. They valued what was really important: strong interpersonal connections, true happiness, and the opportunity to grow and learn. It is no coincidence that all of these things could be achieved despite the scarcity of foodstuffs and consumer goods. State efforts to delineate appropriate modes of quinceñera celebration can be understood as implicit state efforts to define the New Woman. The quinceñera, as an important coming-of-age moment, set the stage for girls’ entrance into womanhood, and how a girl chose to celebrate that moment set the tone for the role that she would take on as a woman in Cuban society.

In the morality tales that appeared in the state-controlled media, the generational divide was always clear, with the youth representing an enlightened revolutionary perspective and their parents, never able to overcome the taint of the pre-revolutionary past, representing the backwards and selfish thinking characteristic of capitalism. Yet real life was never so simple.

Moré, the parent of a high school student in La Lisa, a municipality of Havana, explained to

Somos Jovenes that it was often the teenagers who pressured their parents for scarce fashions, which led some parents to spend more than they could afford or turn to the black market: “But it is important to be careful about this,” he continued. “In this way, we are inculcating values in our children that are not good politically or ideologically. We understand that youth would like jeans or a pretty blouse, but this cannot be, for our children, the center of their lives.”147 Moré’s lived reality goes directly against the message contained in the state’s morality tales, and it inverts the generational hierarchy used by the state to privilege the untainted revolutionary youth over their elders. High school students could be vain and easily swayed by the pressure to adhere to the

147 M. Santos Moray, “¿Podremos vencer la incomunicación?” Somos Jovenes (Havana), May 1984, p. 27.

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fashions popular with their peers, but it was a parent’s duty to promote the political and ideological values of the revolution: collective sacrifice and acquisition of goods through state- approved channels.

Just as the changes in the consumer context had implications for women’s roles and conceptions of femininity across generations, they also impacted modes of sociability, limiting or transforming traditional spaces for hospitality and celebration while at the same time creating new spaces for social interaction. Despite Fidel’s appeal to the population that they maintain a

“thin cow” mentality, fat cow expectations began creeping in. This was particularly the case among young Cubans, as the debates about appropriate modes of quinceñera celebration reveal.

Young people, figuring out who they were and what that meant in a revolutionary context, were empowered by their privileged space within the revolution’s consumption hierarchy to ask for more.

Conclusion

Debates about the era of the fat cows and the utility of the thin cow mentality are debates about the role of the individual in a collectivist society. While revolutionary leadership pushed for greater consciousness, initiative, and work ethic, decades of working to live up to these values to combat austerity, U.S. aggression, and the revolution’s various other enemies had taken their toll. By the late 1970s, as Cuba entered into a period of institutionalized revolution, these calls no longer carried the same moral or material imperative. 1979 was not 1959 or even 1969.

After two decades of waging daily battles for the revolution, many Cubans longed for a return to normalcy and the individual freedom to turn modest improvements in the consumer and service industries into expressions of identity and leisure that were meaningful on a personal level, and not a political level. It was the revolutionary state’s insistence that everything–from hair rollers

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to kids playing house at a daycare–be understood as part of a never-ending political battle that rendered these personal acts into political statements.

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CHAPTER 4 SOCIO-LISM: AUSTERITY AND A NEW CUBAN CULTURE, 1976-1985

Figure 4-1 The power of shopkeepers and the importance of having friends in a context of austerity (Cartoon printed in “Jaque a la delincuencia,” La revista del comercio (Havana), March 1984, p. 26).

Revolutionary socialism changed the value of goods and objects in Cuban society as well as the meaning, function, and value of interpersonal relationships. Figure 4-1, for example, speaks to the power that store employees held as gatekeepers of the consumer economy, in a context in which goods were harder to come by for most people than money was. It also speaks to the ways that adhering to the traditional standards of beauty encouraged by the state could serve women in this context. The state attempted to manage and guide new popular conceptions as they were emerging from the experience of life under socialism. It did so by defining the meaning of new socialist concepts, like shared property, in terms that emphasized the collective

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value of such property; however, this approach met resistance from individuals, who continued to understand their most basic needs in individual terms.

In an attempt to shore up the thin cow mentality and enforce cooperation using the threat of coercion, state representatives passed a new Penal Code, which redefined property crimes from a socialist perspective. Yet these reforms corresponded more to an idealized revolution than to the reality of the Cuban revolution: In fact, they related so little to people’s lived reality that the new Penal Code required a press campaign to explain and justify the changes that it wrought in daily life. Oppositional voices against the state-sanctioned thin cow mentality emerged as

Cubans attempted to assert their value as individuals as well as the value of their time, squandered by the revolution in endless lines and empty boredom. Cuban youth played a central role on both sides of these debates, both as actors and as subjects, as their parents and authorities from the local to the national levels debated what it meant to come of age in a revolutionary society beyond the quinceñera.

With the Penal Code and press accounts designed to teach people how to be effective members of a collective society, officials sought to redefine the fundamental bases of society, including concepts ranging from property ownership to the very hours in the day. With these redefinitions, which placed Cuba’s economic possibilities and the ideology undergirding revolutionary society at the center of the worldview Cuban citizens were supposed to internalize, officials hoped to discourage expressions of individualism and other behaviors that undermined state goals, particularly in the economic sphere. Cubans responded in ways that made sense to them not only ideologically, but economically and logically in the terms of their own lives. Many of the behaviors that officials sought to correct in this period were behaviors that state policies had inadvertently created, primarily stemming from on-going scarcity. To the annoyance of

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leadership, some of these behaviors had become central elements of Cuban culture, including the emergence of a line culture, or cola-cultura, and attitudes about work and time which persist to the present.

(Ab)normalizing Crime?: The Struggle to Legitimize Socialist Legality

In 1978, the National Assembly of Poder Popular passed a new penal code, which went into effect in November 1979. The new Penal Code was the next step in institutionalizing the revolution, as it sought to translate the values and norms of socialism into law, introducing socialist legality to the country. Policymakers designed it to clear up a number of grey areas, particularly with regard to collective and personal property in a socialist system, by defining which “socially dangerous acts” constituted crimes and establishing clear standards for identifying and punishing them. The new Penal Code focused on reeducation as opposed to incarceration and sought to eliminate what revolutionary leaders considered to be a counterproductive practice, as they believed that incarceration only served to isolate minor offenders from the positive influences of society and family. It took age heavily into consideration, with the maximum sentence for teens aged 16 to 18 limited to half the full penalty for their crime, and the maximum for people ages 18 to 20 set at two-thirds the full penalty.1

At first glance, these age-based considerations appear to be measures of leniency to account for offenders’ lack of life experience and knowledge, but patterns in the Code’s enforcement suggest otherwise. A 1987 study indicated that throughout the 1980s, provisions targeting social dangerousness–those that were explicitly criminalized by the 1979 Penal Code but had occupied a liminal space between legality and illegality prior–were disproportionately

1 Jaime Gravalosa, “Requiere la acción de todos,” Mujeres (Havana), Apr. 1980, p. 20.

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used to prosecute young people and Afro-Cubans.2 These patterns of enforcement indicate that revolutionary leadership designed the Penal Code intentionally to target young offenders for increased policing. The reduced sentences are crucial to the viability of such a system. They allow for mass enforcement of the measures without paralysis of national life. As discussed below, many of the sentences for these crimes were established at less than a year, which meant removing youthful offenders from society for mere months, long enough to impact an individual but not to throw the entire revolutionary project off track.

As historian Jennifer Lambe has argued, the 1979 Penal Code and its enforcement reflect the “criminalization and psychiatrization of inconformity” through “the rescripting of ‘personal’ problems as political ones,” a process that began in the 1960s with the creation of the category of ideological diversionism.3 Other scholars have focused on how measures targeting vagrancy, drug and alcohol abuse, and gay behavior enabled the state to police people’s lifestyles; however, the Code also had strong implications for policing everyday life through the realms of material culture and consumption.4 Contemporary press coverage cast the Penal Code in precisely these terms, by characterizing the Penal Code as “strong when it should be, rigorous with the antisocial elements that neither work nor study and dedicate themselves to robbery, black market trafficking, and other methods in order to live at the expense of the workers.”5 This explanation focused almost exclusively on crimes involving property and ownership, revealing the centrality

2 Study cited in Lambe, Madhouse, 195.

3 Lambe, Madhouse, 196.

4 See Salas, Social Control, Farber, Cuba since the Revolution.

5 Jaime Gravalosa, “Requiere la acción de todos,” Mujeres (Havana), Apr. 1980, p. 20.

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of material culture and consumption to the revolutionary state’s approach to monitoring and controlling its citizenry.

Just as the conditions of socialism were central to how revolutionary leadership conceptualized the functions and meanings of material goods in Cuban society, they were also central to leadership’s approach to property crimes. Revolutionary understandings of property crimes were heavily influenced by the state’s welfare apparatus and the way that it framed the rights and responsibilities of Cuban citizens. Beginning in the early years of the revolution, the state crafted an extensive welfare apparatus that enabled citizens to fulfill their basic needs and more at little or no cost. In addition, the state guaranteed employment. Thus, the economy was premised on avenues for accessing the material underpinnings of life that leadership understood to be equally available to all citizens (or at least all citizens who were willing to participate in revolutionary processes by the revolutionary state’s rules).6

As a result of these egalitarian social welfare measures, Fidel Castro considered the social and economic justifications for property crimes to be things of the past: “today, no one has to steal to eat, dress, or satisfy other needs,” he argued.7 Yet, consistent citizen complaints with regard to food, shelter, and clothing reveal widespread dissatisfaction with the state’s approach to providing for basic needs. This dissatisfaction was often ignored by revolutionary leadership using the logical framework encapsulated in Castro’s words. Revolutionary leadership considered individual desires to be invalid beyond what leaders characterized as needs, which they believed the state had already fulfilled. Thus individual desire could be the guiding motivation for criminal behavior but never the actions of upright citizens. Though the state

6 PCC, Los CDR y el delito, 3.

7 Ibid.

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insisted on turning a blind eye to the validity of individual desires, unfulfilled desire partially explained the persistence of property crimes decades into the revolutionary process.

The prevalence of shared property and the revolutionary state’s purported dedication to building an economy and society in which all employed Cubans were both contributors and beneficiaries also imbued property crimes with heavy moral significance. Within this collective framework, revolutionary leadership considered property crimes to be crimes against the entire population. In the words of Fidel Castro, “he who robs today, robs our workers, our peasants; robs the person who works, the person who produces.”8 This formulation encouraged the population to conceptualize property crimes as crimes against their best interest, and therefore consider themselves the victims of such crimes, regardless of what was actually stolen and from where. When considered in light of the widespread practice of pilfering from state-owned workplaces—the primary source of black market goods in a command economy where the state was almost the exclusive property owner—then the statement can be read as encouraging citizens to conceptualize state property as collective property but only in a very narrow sense.

Far from encouraging citizens to treat this property as somehow belonging to both everyone and no one, and therefore ripe for the taking in what would be a seemingly victimless crime, this formulation encouraged citizens to conceptualize this property as everyone’s property that only the state could be trusted to put to the best possible collective purpose. Pilfering put such property to individual purposes, thereby robbing the collective population of workers, peasants, and producers of its potential benefits.

This framework in which all upstanding, revolutionary Cubans–political qualifiers that

Fidel implied by referencing their social and economic role as producers–were victims of all

8 Ibid.

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property crimes was central to state efforts to rally the population to combat property crimes, which were always widespread and difficult to root out. The surveillance function of the CDRs, which brought the eyes of the state down to the level of individual blocks, played a crucial role in this process. In 1972 the state released a guidebook entitled The CDRs and Crimes against

Property to teach members of neighborhood CDRs how to intensify and be more effective in their fight against property crimes.9 The document begins with an explanation of the moral and social significance of property crimes in a socialist society, which is outlined above. It then continues to the specific role played by the CDRs, whose “number one . . . reason for being” was

“revolutionary vigilance,” a politicized euphemism for surveillance of neighborhood and neighbors.10 It was clearly intended to be an educational document. It explains what a CDR member should look for to help prevent crime in their neighborhood, as well as the processes they should go follow in reporting a crime and assisting in a police investigation. It even concludes with a ten-question quiz to help CDR members evaluate their understanding of the material.

A section of the booklet titled “Control of Criminal Potential” encouraged CDR members to pay special attention to the lifestyles of suspicious characters in their neighborhoods in order to prevent future criminal behavior. What made a neighbor an appropriate object of heightened surveillance? The document pointed to people who had already committed a crime and thereby marked themselves as objects of social scrutiny, as well as people who were identified as “prone to crime,” due to elements of their “behavior” or “lifestyle” that might indicate their involvement

9 1972 was also the year that Cuba entered COMECON. As discussed in Chapter 2, it seems likely that this booklet was released at the same time in anticipation of the increased availability of consumer goods–and therefore increased opportunities for black market activity and property crimes–made possible through this new trade network.

10 PCC, Los CDR y el delito, 5.

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in black market activity. Behavioral markers included working independently of the state (“por cuenta propia”), particularly in fields that involved the purchase and sale of goods or in repair services. These entrepreneurial activities often did rely on stolen goods: the fact that most goods produced or imported by the state were designated for state industries left them little alternative.

Interestingly, excess was the most significant lifestyle marker. The guide encouraged CDR members to keep a close eye on people who consumed at rates that exceeded their income or the pertinent patterns of distribution in the consumer realm.11 In this way, the state created new means of enforcing the revolutionary values of austere lifestyle and material abnegation.

In addition to teaching CDR members how to monitor their neighbors’ lifestyles, the guide identified four other areas on which cederistas should focus to prevent criminal activity on their block or, in cases where crimes had been committed, aid with the subsequent investigation.

Many of these tips centered on the comings and goings of the person in question and encouraged close surveillance of seemingly mundane activities. For example, the guidebook recommended that CDR members keep track of anyone who visited potential criminal elements in the neighborhood and record their names, physical characteristics, and license plate numbers, when appropriate. It also instructed CDR members to keep track of the quantity, size, and content of any packages entering or leaving potential criminals’ homes. As the few remaining entrepreneurs who worked independently of the state were particular cause for concern, the guidebook instructed CDR members to keep detailed notes on the nature of these businesses and identities of their clientele.12 Cause to suspect these entrepreneurs of criminal behavior was not necessary;

11 Ibid., 10.

12 Ibid.

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the mere fact that they existed outside of the command economy marked them as objects of suspicion, leading their neighbors to surveil both them and their customers.

These mandates politicized consumption and took the concept of “keeping up with the

Joneses” to strange new heights. Unlike in the capitalist context, where the neighbor with the most markers of affluence was considered the winner of such neighborhood one-upmanship, in the context of Cuban socialism, markers of affluence were considered suspicious markers of counterrevolutionary behavior and identity. This CDR instruction manual encouraged people to not only obsessively keep track of the lifestyles and consumer patterns of their neighbors, but then to put this information at the service of the state’s surveillance apparatus with the aim of jailing their neighbors.

Mandates of surveillance and the politicization of property crimes were central elements of the 1979 Penal Code. With its emphasis on reeducation and integration into revolutionary society, the Penal Code clearly sought to convert people to a mindset about consumption that lined up with how the state conceptualized both the economy and the role of citizens within it.

The Penal Code codified into law on-going discussions about quality in the consumer and service industries and the responsibility of individual workers, due to laziness, incompetence, or treasonous behavior, for the shortcomings of the economy. The creation of subpar goods–from bread to beer and shoes to milk–was defined as a crime against the economy in an effort to literally police the lack of workplace consciousness that Fidel Castro denounced in front of

People’s Power the same year that the Penal Code went into effect.13

Shopkeepers and administrators who attempted to take advantage of the ability that their positions gave them to pocket extra cash by “alter[ing] prices, weight, or size” of merchandise

13 “Un problema de todos,” Opina (Havana), Aug. 1979, p. 8-9.

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were also subject to criminal charges under the new Code. For example, in 1985, a butcher,

Venancio Ripres Cárdenas, received a prison sentence of nine months for cheating his customers by mis-weighing cuts of beef. The butcher received an additional sentence of two years of

“privation of liberty” for appropriating the extra to sell on the black market. When specified

“without internment,” privation of liberty usually indicated a labor-based punishment that would have required the butcher to complete specific tasks for the good of the community in his spare time. His accomplice, who specialized in the black-market sales side of their side business, was sentenced to nine months of “privation of liberty.”14 The nature of these sentences corresponds to the ideological framework of the new Penal Code. The butcher received the harshest punishments for cheating the Cuban people, while he and his accomplice received lighter sentences for the personal enrichment that they had achieved through black market sales. These sentences also indicate the state’s uneasy relationship with the black market. While the state was heavily invested in eliminating the widespread pilfering that supplied the black market and undermined the efficiency of the command economy, leadership often tolerated black market sales and purchases because they mitigated discontent with the shortcomings of the consumer economy.15

Crimes like the butcher’s were widespread, and they had been undercutting the efficiency of the national economy since the early 1960s. In fact, Ripres Cárdenas, the butcher who was finally caught in 1985, had been running his scam using tricks he first learned from his father,

14 Ramón Sánchez de la Cruz, “El carnicero es un bárbaro,” Opina (Havana), October 1985, p. 14-15. Discussion of the meaning of “privación de libertad,” based on Berman’s analysis of the Popular Tribunal system as it functioned in the late 1960s (Berman, “The Cuban Popular Tribunals”).

15 See Chapter 6 for further discussion of the black market’s murky legality, even after the new Penal Code went into effect, and function as a safety valve for mitigating discontent.

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also a butcher, since his father emigrated to the United States almost twenty years prior.16 The

Code sought to put an end to these activities once and for all, but their widespread and routine nature made it so that the success of the socialist legality outlined in the Penal Code was dependent “not only on the action of agents of the judicial system, but also on that of all citizens, who should be active in denouncing crimes,” as one press piece explaining the Code specified.17

The 1979 Penal Code therefore went beyond the CDRs’ mandate for surveillance by enlisting all citizens in its enforcement. Effective enforcement of the Code relied on the cooperation of average citizens, all of whom were considered responsible for monitoring the actions of those around them for illegal behavior.

Subsequent media coverage of the Penal Code glorified this mandate of surveillance with stories that elevated meddling neighbors to heroes taking down unscrupulous villains who sought to take advantage of the collective system for their individual gain. Since the purpose of the punishment in a socialist justice system was education, magazines published exposés on individual criminals in the name of shedding light on the law. The case of Aurelio Gaspar

González was covered by Muchacha. Before he was brought to justice by his neighbors,

González made a living buying antiques to fix up and resell for a profit. In a capitalist system,

González would be considered an antiques dealer who restored his own pieces. Under the new

Penal Code, González was considered a speculator engaged in criminal acts, and apparently he did quite well for himself, as the journalist described him as “living and spending without measure: restaurants, cabarets, hotels, clothing . . .”18 Alongside the heroics of meddling

16 Ibid., 14.

17 Gravalosa, “Requiere la acción de todos,” 20.

18 Aloyma Ravelo, “El que mucho abarca . . . Legaldad socialista,” Muchacha (Havana), Aug.-Nov. 1982, p. 39.

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neighbors, the media coverage of the Code often focused on the lavish lifestyles afforded by criminal activity, which hinged precisely on the markers of affluence that the 1972 CDR guidebook identified as indicators of potential criminal activity. For example, the piece on Ripres

Cárdenas, the jailed butcher, specifically highlighted his high-rolling lifestyle, which included dinner in restaurants, nights out at cabarets, “the best VW [Volkswagon] in all of Havana,” and enough foreign clothing to fill a “storefront display case.”19

Unlike the butcher, whose actions constituted a crime both before and after the revolution, González’s case offers a clear illustration of why, in addition to self-interest and widespread reliance on the black market, socialist legality was difficult for the population to accept. Its logic was at times unclear. For example, restoring antiques adds value to them, and therefore reselling them for a profit seems less like speculation and more like fair compensation for the hard work and resources that went into the restoration. In addition, ICOIDI’s 1981 Plan

Garbage, discussed below, called for the state to invest resources to facilitate furniture repair to offset the on-going furniture shortage, revealing the clear need for services like that offered by

González. However, if González was living more comfortably than his peers through profits from a side business completely outside of the state’s control, then his actions could destabilize an entire system in which the state ensured social control through economic control by positioning itself as the sole source of jobs, food, and the other goods necessary for life. Thus, for situating his hard work and initiative outside of the state system, “the barbarian” González was sentenced to privation of liberty, which he was serving at the time of the piece’s publication.

Section 8 of the new Penal Code was dedicated to Speculation and Hoarding, and Article 560.7 specified that crimes like González’s could be penalized by privation of liberty of one to six

19 Sánchez de la Cruz, “El carnicero es un bárbaro,” 14.

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months and/or a substantial fine. González’s punishment under Article 560.7 was made possible only by the active participation of his neighbors. After his constant comings and goings with furniture items made one neighbor suspicious, the CDR collectively surveilled him day and night, gathering sufficient evidence to denounce him to the tribunal.20 The real-life case of

Aurelio Gáspar González thus illustrates the lessons of the 1972 CDR guidebook in action, revealing the document’s impact on lived reality.

Like González, Ernesto Socarrás Estévez was sentenced to privation of liberty under

Article 560.7, in this case for buying shoes that were available on venta libre (unrestricted sale) and reselling them at higher prices, assumedly to people who were willing to pay extra to save themselves the time and hassle of hunting down the shoes themselves. In this case as with

González’s, it seems that he was providing a necessary service for which there was clear demand, as the success of his business attests. But again, this service was outside of the state’s control and, in this case, clearly outside of its realm of moral acceptability, due to the fact that scarcity allowed him to abuse his power for greater profits: He specialized in children’s and tennis shoes and made his largest profits when certain styles or sizes were scarce. He was denounced by a friend, and authorities found eighty pairs of shoes in his home, opening him up to successful prosecution under the portion of Article 560.7 that criminalized “maintaining in one’s possession merchandise or products in quantities clearly and unjustifiably superior to those required for one’s normal needs.”21 Hoarding and speculation like that practiced by Socarrás

Estévez not only allowed some individuals to profit from conditions of scarcity at the expense of others, but also had a ripple effect throughout the local economy by artificially creating further

20 Ravelo, “El que mucho abarca . . . Legaldad socialista,” 39.

21 Ibid.

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scarcity. While it might have been convenient for friends and neighbors of Socarrás Estévez’s to drop in and take a look at his selection rather than traveling from shop to shop doing the same– something that Socarrás Estévez had taken on as a full-time job–the practice disadvantaged others who were unaware of or unwilling to use the avenues for consumption offered by interpersonal networks and the black market.

Socialist legality was foreign to many, who struggled to internalize new prohibitions that outlawed what had been perfectly legal and acceptable behaviors in pre-revolutionary society and widespread if questionable behaviors since 1959. The very existence of articles explaining what was now officially illegal behavior that could be sanctioned by authorities is evidence of this. One such piece was published in response to a phone conversation that the author casually overheard in which a young woman openly discussed the details of her new boom box, which she had purchased from a man she met through a friend: “I don’t know who he is, and I don’t care either,” the young woman explained over the phone. When her concerned friend asked about the provenance of the boom box, she said she did not know or need to know for any reason; the boom box worked fine and the price was right.22 That these kinds of conversations were taking place publicly and without any effort at concealment is clear evidence of how socially acceptable participating in crimes against socialist legality was, particularly as a consumer. Consumers did not have to take on the risk of stealing material from their workplace or elsewhere, housing it, and then engaging in repeated encounters with customers who could expose the whole system and the seller with it. Compared to selling black market goods, consuming them required minimal risk. After a brief exchange, the consumer owned the item

22 Aloyma Ravelo, “Es tan culpable quien . . .” Muchacha (Havana), Apr. 1984, p. 33.

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outright and could plausibly deny any wrongdoing or knowledge of wrongdoing committed by the seller.

In an effort to combat this, the article explained that it was also a crime to participate in these activities as a consumer. The piece emphasized that consumers were the key to the system: they made the crimes profitable and thereby fostered them. The author went so far as to specify that it was a crime to buy something that was stolen even if the buyer purposely did not ask where it came from in an attempt to maintain ignorance. This clarification cast the boom box owner’s denial of having any information about its seller or origin in a different light, as a shrewd tactic in defense of both self and system, rather than an oversight by a vapid girl obsessed with material goods. The piece ends with a small list of things one should not buy through black market channels, which can be read as a list of the most sought-after items at the time: boom boxes, clothing, and color TVs.23

Participating in the black market as a consumer did not necessarily mark a person as morally or even politically suspect, despite intensified efforts to combat the black market through the 1979 Penal Code. Sources from the period did not remark on the kinds of daily, informal economic transactions and exchanges of rationed goods that were fundamental to keeping many kitchens stocked, for example, though the practice was so widespread in earlier periods that it is hard to imagine it went away. References to interpersonal transactions tend to focus on the actions of shopkeepers, the unfairness of the system, and the disruptions to centralized planning and economic efficiency, rather than shaming consumers for the immorality of their actions. It seems that the type of consumption was the deciding factor, with excessive consumption of lavish, luxury goods that stood in stark contrast to the austere lifestyles that the state encouraged

23 Ibid.

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as the kind most likely to be stigmatized as morally wrong. On the other hand, breaking socialist legality as a provider of goods seems to have been uniformly viewed as a different category of crime, and was classified as such from the early days of the revolution.24 This kind of criminal activity could mark a person as morally-suspect for years, despite the Penal Code’s emphasis on reeducation and rehabilitation.

A brief story published in Somos Jovenes is indicative of many of these themes. The story, “The Theft of the Watch,” is meant to reinforce the value of reeducation as a tool for helping people leave their criminal pasts behind and integrate themselves into revolutionary society. The piece aimed to remove the stigma associated with the process, which could hinder social reintegration. The story begins with a young man being accused by his brother of stealing his watch. The young man does not know anything about a watch, but he does know why his brother immediately suspected him: two years prior, at the age of fifteen, he had gotten into trouble with a bad crowd, and the shadow lingered over this reputation even within his own family. The story is only a single page long, so it draws on familiar tropes to make its point quickly. For example, the author uses material markers like boom boxes, stylish pants and t- shirts, and access to a car to illustrate the bad crowd’s high-rolling lifestyle, which is the key to the group’s allure for the narrator, and to mark them as morally-suspect. These same markers were used by the press to describe the butcher and antiques dealer’s black market-supported lifestyles, thus revealing a widely-shared perception of clothing and leisure technologies (the cars in these cases used for leisurely outings) as morally-suspect goods. The teen was swept up in this lifestyle and the access it granted him to these goods through the black market. The group

24 See Chase, Revolution within the Revolution, especially Chapter 5, “From the Consumer’s Revolution to the Economic War, 1959-62.”

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roped him into stealing from a dry cleaner, where he was caught in the act by the CDR, which the story frames as an inevitability. After all, “you can’t sneak anything past the CDR [con los

CDR no hay quien pueda].”25 After completing his sentence of reeducation, the teen returned home a new man, a good worker with a nice girlfriend. The story reinforces the value of reeducation when the teen’s brother had to apologize, ashamed, at the end of the story: he himself had moved the watch and forgotten all about it.

Due to its emphasis on the value of reeducation, which locates the teen as the protagonist of the story, the piece is marked by its empathetic tone towards the teen’s struggle. The reader gets the sense that the whole thing could have happened to anyone. For example, when discussing the allure of the clothing and other goods that characterized the bad crowd’s lifestyle, the teen’s message is measured. He states, “who doesn’t like to dress stylishly!” and “It’s not that one should not be en la ‘onda’ [hip], it’s that style [‘onda’] should not come first . . . [because] the end does not justify the means,” a lesson he learned in reeducation.26 These are messages that would have resonated with a teen population both intrigued by and concerned about what it meant to be a fashionable young person in a revolutionary context. Perhaps therein lies the value of the story. If all young people could relate to the temptations of illegal consumption, then perhaps the narrator’s tale of regret and redemption could dissuade them from succumbing to those temptations.

The cases of the butcher, the antiques dealer, and the reeducated wayward teen share significant commonalities that appear in many tales from the period, both fictional and non. One such commonality in these stories is the demonization of the ostentatious and materialistic nature

25 Paquita Armas, “El robe del reloj” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Feb.-Mar. 1981, p. 42.

26 Ibid.

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of criminal lifestyles. The implication is that display of markers of wealth–cars, stylish clothing, even frequent use of the state’s own entertainment and leisure apparatus–was immediately suspect, which further reveals the charged meanings of material goods in revolutionary contexts.

A second commonality is the role of neighbors in bringing property crimes and their perpetrators to the attention to local authorities, sometimes going so far as to conduct organized investigations and extensive surveillance before involving the authorities. This illustrates the centrality of citizen participation as the key means of enforcement in translating revolutionary leadership’s moral and legal vision into a reality.

The role of friends and neighbors in denouncing property crimes also speaks to the how scarcity of consumer goods shaped interpersonal relations in revolutionary society. Mandates of surveillance and stories of black market entrepreneurs betrayed by friends and neighbors indicate the importance of risk and trust in accessing consumer goods. The swirling mélange of goods and (dis)trust and their connotations with political identity also reveal a significant double standard with regard to black market transactions that resulted in a social stigmatization of black marker sellers that did not extend to black market consumers. Many if not most citizens maintained this double standard and continued to buy on the black market when it suited them, despite state efforts to combat this by demonizing black market consumption. Building trusting relationships was crucial to black market activity as well as to accessing goods in the official consumer economy because it was common for shopkeepers to reserve scarce goods for friends and loved ones. However, as the context of scarcity transformed the value and function of interpersonal relationships, it also made it more difficult to form and maintain these bonds by disrupting traditional expressions of hospitality and modes of social interaction.

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Socio-lism: The Importance of Having Friends in a Socialist Society

Scarcity was central to social dynamics, both within the household and beyond. It complicated traditional methods of cementing and reinforcing social bonds. In addition to the standard social niceties of guest etiquette–bringing a gift and any toiletries or other resources necessary in the event of an overnight stay, being polite and courteous, offering to help around the house in the event of a long-term stay–guests had to consider the complications of scarcity to avoid putting their hosts in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between denying something to their guests or themselves. Scarcity of food meant that even inviting someone for a meal could involve sacrifice. One etiquette guide for teens emphasized “never show up empty handed, and less so if it will be a long stay, as you are already one more mouth to feed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”27 The same guide encouraged teens not to take it personally if they did not receive an invitation to visit a friend at home. It did not necessarily have implications for the closeness of the friendship, after all “not all households are always in the proper condition to have guests,” a reference to scarcity of all kinds, from food and household goods to the materials necessary to make household repairs.28

Despite the complications of maintaining friendships in an era of scarcity, it was well worth it as a survival strategy. As Soviet historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown for 1930s Russia, friendship took on enormous economic importance in the context of socialism, as a well-placed contact was often the key to securing privileged access to scarce goods.29 In an interview with 28 high school students in the Havana neighborhood of Marianao, Somos Jovenes journalists

27 Paquita, “¿Por qué no la invitan?” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Oct.-Nov. 1979, pp. 14-15.

28 Ibid.

29 See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, especially Chapter 2, “Hard Times.”

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explored the meaning of friendship among teenagers. The discussion of what qualities to value in a friend was explicitly political from the outset, with students discussing the social values of cooperation and strong interpersonal connections as well as the importance of excluding non- revolutionaries and people who were too self-sufficient or individualist.30 These values line up with the collectivist mindset encouraged by the revolutionary state, but interpersonal reliance turned to the wrong ends could pervert socialism to socio-lism: a system in which connections to corrupt but useful socios who could facilitate access to material goods were more significant for material acquisition than the state’s own economic system. Among the population, the value of a socio was fiercely debated, with many viewing these relationships as a necessary evil at worst. In the eyes of the state, however, these relationships were unvaryingly counterrevolutionary, running counter to the values and, due to the disruption of central planning and distribution, the practical goals and capabilities of the revolutionary state.

These divergent views run throughout the Somos Jovenes interview and the controversy it provoked among readers. During the interview, one student described a socio as someone “who resolves” life’s problems, “sometimes faster than a friend. I think a socio is the best kind of friend to have,” he concluded, while various students immediately protested this view of friendship as cynical, self-serving, and superficial.31 The question was so divisive that multiple readers wrote to the magazine with their thoughts on the issue, their responses condemning the lighthearted discussion of these taboo relationships. In addition to echoing the critiques leveled by the anti-socio contingent of the Marianao high school students, letters from readers connected even more forcefully to state rhetoric than the students had. While the Somos Jovenes

30 “Amigo esa palabra que significa tanto,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Apr.-May 1979, p. 13.

31 Ibid.

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interviewers had pointed out that when a socio acts to help their contact, they work against the interests of someone else also interested in the scarce good, the letters to the editor took it one step further, explicitly condemning the practice for “acting against the interests of the state.”32

Another letter argued that the practice was “bad and an ideological deviation that demonstrates a lack of [the] consciousness” expected to be embodied by all of the New Men and Women in formation in Cuba’s high schools.33 It is difficult to gauge the authenticity of these and other letters to the editor: were they truly written by zealous high school students or by the editors themselves? Either way, the decision to publish these letters hinged on their utility as educational documents to teach readers to perhaps reconsider some elements of their own lives and further identify with the revolutionary mission.

Despite this lofty rhetoric and the inherent truth in the critique that one person’s benefit came at the cost of another’s loss, the reality was that having a friend in certain places could be the deciding factor with regard to one’s access to goods. These certain places were not necessarily even high places–the shortages and unpredictability of the consumer market imbued employees in the consumer sector with enormous power. One satirical piece on the power of salesclerks in revolutionary Cuba frames them as “goddesses from Greek mythology, distant, elusive, omnipotent, pardoning the lives of poor buyers or denying their mercy, according to their mood swings.”34 As keepers of the goods, shopkeepers could circumvent the egalitarian impulse behind economic controls like rationing to determine who could access scarce goods.

The on-going context of scarcity offered a convenient and believable ruse to mask these

32 “Mi Carta,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Apr.-Mar. 1980, p. 10.

33 Ibid.

34 Isolina Triay, “Como el viajero en el desierto,” Mujeres (Havana), Jan. 1984, p. 57

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practices; shopkeepers could hide merchandise for preferred customers, turning away others with the common refrain: “all out [no hay].”35 Some PCC officials suggested increased salaries and salary differentiation dependent on the type of sales venue as a reform to eliminate these frustrating practices. The press echoed these calls, pointing to “a lack of interest in selling” as the motivation behind bad service: “No one feels it in their wallet if the customer is or is not satisfied with the service they have received.”36

But the problem was actually more complex. Shopkeepers were motivated to sell in certain contexts precisely because they could feel it in their wallets. If they saved merchandise to sell to certain customers through backdoor arrangements, they generally received some sort of compensation for their trouble. Thus, these arrangements had an economic component, but the social component was equally important because initiating such arrangements involved risk. A foundational measure of familiarity and trust was necessary since it seems likely that a person would only initiate such an arrangement if they were relatively certain that the other person would agree. This required insight into the person’s economic situation, revolutionary integration, and willingness to embrace the doble moral [dual morality], the practice of presenting a revolutionary face in public but engaging in counterrevolutionary behaviors like black market activity in private. A well-known and widely-discussed secret at the time, state efforts to combat under-the-table transactions inadvertently revealed their prevalence. The complaints of citizens excluded from this “second economy,” primarily in the letter to the editor

35 Gabriel Molina, “Gastronomia: Experiencias de un usuario,” Opina (Havana), July 1979, pp. 12-14.

36 Gabriel Molina, “Otra cara del mal trato,” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1979, pp. 14-16.

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sections of FMC magazines Mujeres and Muchacha, provide further evidence of how and to whose benefit these transactions functioned.37

The extent of discussion between readers and editors about these practices reveals a divergence between state understandings of how the consumer economy did and should work and citizen understandings of the same. The state did not take these practices lightly. After all, they were officially illegal: shopkeepers who reserved merchandise, gave their friends advance warning of when certain goods would be available, or engaged in any other kind of preferential treatment could be sanctioned by 3 to 9 months of privation of liberty and/or a fine of 270 pesos under a charge of “abuse in the exercise of their office.” Yet this was largely unclear to the population. In order to publish this clarification, Mujeres editor Daisy Martin had to research these offenses in response to a reader query of whether the practice, undeniably “incorrect,” was officially illegal or punishable by law.38 The lack of clarity regarding the law among the population, including educated revolutionary taste-makers like the Mujeres editorial team, indicates that the practice was widespread, not actively prosecuted, and morally-permissible in the eyes of participants who struggled to accept the validity or even the clarity of socialist law.

For readers to access such educational elucidations of socialist legality, first they had to access the magazines, which ironically were themselves hot (and profitable) items for second economy exchanges. Magazine print runs were limited by resource availability, so disorganized lines would form to acquire newly-arrived magazines, inevitably causing supplies to run out early. Often, the only way to secure a copy was through a socio. A reader from Pinar del Río

37 I use this term following Sheila Fitzpatrick to describe goods which “leaked out of every state production and distribution unit at every stage from the factory assembly line to the rural cooperative store,” and were sold or bartered by private citizens outside of the official commercial network set up and managed by the state (Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 59).

38 Daisy Martin, “Conversemos,” Mujeres (Havana), May 1985, pp. 46-47.

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explained that she got her copy of Muchacha through her neighbor Juana, who traded coffee with the magazine stand worker in exchange for three copies each month.39 Other accounts from readers point to even larger profits for magazine stand workers who distributed their wares wisely–from two boxes of cigarettes a copy to 70 cents a copy (for workers who sold the magazine for a peso, rather than the listed price of 30 cents).40

Socio-lism rewarded people who were willing and able to seek out the transactional relationships that comprised the system. This ability required access to resources worth trading as well as time. A well-placed socio could potentially save their friends considerable time otherwise spent seeking out goods and waiting in line, but these long-term time savings were dependent on an initial investment of time to cultivate the relationship. Working women were particularly vulnerable to exclusion from socio-based networks due to demands at both home and work. Even if they had a well-placed socio to give them advance warning when something good was going to be available for purchase, their work schedules impeded their ability to act on the tip in a timely fashion.

Working women’s time deficit affected their ability to shop, despite state-crafted solutions such as Plan Jaba and assigned shopping days, starting in the 1960s and extending into the 1980s. Socio-lism, however, undermined socialism’s best attempts to level the shopping field. Rumor networks tipped some women off in advance about what was going to be sold on certain days. These insider tips allowed them to put their names on the list of who could buy that day, thereby undermining the egalitarian rationale behind luck-of-the-draw assigned shopping

39 Aloyma, “¿Qué trae la golondrina,” Muchacha (Havana), May 1983, pp. 54-55.

40 Aloyma, “¿Qué trae la golondrina,” Muchacha (Havana), July 1983, pp. 52-54.

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days. Women who worked closest to the stores were able to get there first, claiming the best merchandise and sometimes leaving nothing for women who worked farther away.41

The prevalence of socio-based transactions elevated cultivating and maintaining tactical interpersonal connections to a strategy for making everyday life easier and more comfortable.

The persistence of such practices, despite state efforts to combat them through denunciation and law, made it difficult for individual consumers to resist their allure, even if they opposed them on moral or political grounds. Such lofty ideals were nice, but they would not get you the goods and services that you wanted and needed. Ultimately, playing by the rules established by the state garnered few practical rewards, as socios and doble moral undermined state efforts at fairness and efficiency at every turn. Accessing the consumer and service industries via trusted socios, then, became a game of “everyone is doing it,” with individuals choosing to go along or miss out, which was really no choice at all.

Time and Lines: from Coca-Cola to Cola-Cultura

The revolution’s impact on the consumer and service economies changed the way that

Cubans thought about and approached interpersonal relationships and even the concept of friendship. The same is true with regard to time and lines. After Opina published a critical account of Poder Popular’s inefficiency in Altahabana, the beleaguered local delegate wrote back defending his record as a public servant despite the persistence of lines in the municipality: “I would like for someone to tell me one place or activity in our country that does not require waiting in line,” he demanded.42 By the 1980s, state representatives, at least at the local level, had resigned themselves to lines as a way of life, rather than a problem to be solved; yet these

41 Daisy Martin, “Conversemos” Mujeres (Havana), Dec. 1984, p. 47. These specific examples were submitted in a letter to the editor by a reader from Holguín but appear to have been common and widespread.

42 “Carta del delegado del Poder Popular de Altahabana,” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1984, p. 17.

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lines impeded people’s ability to use their time efficiently and contribute to national economic goals as workers. The propensity of revolutionary life to waste people’s time through long lines and delays in the availability of necessary goods and services also impacted how people conceptualized the value of their time, with devastating results for national production.

I argue that the revolution created a cola-cultura, or line culture, that it did not expect and could not control, as decades of standing in line for everything taught people that standing in line was the route to anything worth having. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, many expected economic improvements to render the lines obsolete, but shopping continued to be a deeply unpredictable and often frustrating experience that tested the limits of reality, venturing into the surreal. While “the lines [did] not always correspond to a real urgency” in this period, they continued to form, and they continued to be vibrant and sometimes volatile social spaces. The pressures of trying to ensure one’s access to scarce goods could result in physical altercations, leading to “public scandals, broken windows, [and] police patrols stationed in front of stores.”

All of this hubbub could stem from even minor changes in the availability of goods, including

“irrelevant offers that [we]re not destined to solve any vital problem and whose only value [was] in their novelty.”43

The fact that people were willing to resort to physical violence to access something new at the expense of someone else’s access, even if it was not an item of basic necessity, speaks to the psychological toll of austerity. One manifestation of the psychological impact of decades of scarcity was widespread willingness to join lines such as those described above, seeking relief from homogeneity through the possibility of novelty, even at the expense of time, emotion, and the potential of failure. These psychological tolls also included a propensity to buy whatever was

43. Isolina Triay, “¿El ultimo . . .?” Mujeres (Havana), Nov. 1981, p. 70.

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available on venta libre, regardless of one’s need, and hoard goods due to the uncertainty of when or if they would be available again, practices that ICOIDI tried actively to combat throughout the 1970s. While the revolutionary state was meeting people’s basic needs, it was bordering boring them to death with its basic, homogenous, and repetitive offerings.

The psychological tolls of scarcity also led individuals to make irrational economic decisions that disrupted the command economy. In addition to hoarding and distorted purchasing practices, scarcity and the prevalence of lines led many individuals to regularly leave work for hours at a time to resolve personal needs. Situations like these pitted individual need against collective need, in the sense that leaving work could be the key to completing the shopping and securing access to the best goods available, but it reduced the individual’s contribution to collective goals by limiting his or her productivity at work. In an example of the thin cow mentality in action, the state encouraged people to forego individual need in light of the impact that practices like leaving work had on the collective good. An examination of how people chose to spend their time, however, reveals that many rejected the revolutionary state’s value system and the thin cow mentality by insisting on the importance of individual needs and desires, even when they came at the expense of the collective good. A fictional and instructional parable published in Opina uncovered the considerations involved in such decisions through the lens of one woman’s odyssey in search of a Mother’s Day gift.

One day, Xiomara asked her boss, Wilfredo, if she could leave work for a few hours because it was her assigned shopping day and she had a number of things to pick up. At first,

Wilfredo was hesitant to allow her to leave. He explained that the common practice of taking time off to go shopping rippled throughout the national economy, creating a plague of lost hours

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of productivity. Eventually, though, he let her go because it seemed a necessary evil.44 The impact on the economy was regrettable, but in this standoff between the good of the individual and the good of the collective, the individual always won out. A few hours spent shopping could noticeably impact the happiness and well-being of an individual household, while the impact of those lost work hours was noticeable only at a macro level, present in the newspapers and Fidel’s fiery speeches but not felt at the same, visceral level that a much-needed new pair of underwear might be.

Among other things, Xiomara hoped to buy a Mother’s Day gift. After a thirty-minute commute (most of it spent waiting for the bus), she arrived at La Época, the famous department store in Havana, located on Avenida Galiano in the heart of the city’s pre-1959 shopping district.

Upon entering the store, she immediately saw a line of twenty people. Her curiosity piqued, she asked what the line was for and ended up joining. After all, she reasoned, she could always use soap, the line was only twenty people long, and there were two workers behind the counter. After

“only an hour,” she “left satisfied” with a few bars of soap thanks to the “diligent” work of the one of the employees–the other chatted with a friend for ten minutes and inexplicably disappeared.

Xiomara next waited an hour and a half to buy the Mother’s Day present, the original goal of her shopping trip; however, her attempts to get the present wrapped were stymied, once again for inexplicable reasons. The wrapping process required a whole different line, and when

Xiomara asked the girl working behind the counter if she could pay–full price! –for a sheet of wrapping paper to take home and do the wrapping herself, the girl refused, telling Xiomara to

44 Gabriel Molina, “En el socialismo ¿El tiempo no es dinero? Aventura, venturas y desventuras de un consumidor,” Opina (Havana), June 1981, pp. 13-14.

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wait like everyone else. If she started handing out pieces of wrapping paper to people who cut the line, she would run out of paper, she explained. “But if there’s not enough paper for everyone, won’t it run out either way?” Xiomara asked. The employee responded that she was just following orders. Xiomara left the wrapping counter feeling “ashamed,” because the obvious disdain in the employee’s response had made her feel “as if she had asked for something immoral,” despite the logic in her reasoning. However, her subsequent attempts to complain also got her nowhere. She traversed the various floors of La Época, climbing higher and higher, but the upper level where the head administrator worked was not accessible to the public. She spoke instead to a middle manager, who simply confirmed that the employee was following her training.45 Apparently, there was no room for logic or efficiency in the rigid socialist commercial system.

By then, it had been three hours since Xiomara left work, and she had only managed to buy a few bars of soap and a Mother’s Day present that she would have to improvise a way to wrap. Passing by the men’s department, she decided to peek in to see what was available for her husband. The area had been roped off so that only two shoppers could enter at a time. Xiomara bypassed the line to try and stick her head in, but the employee who had been assigned to manage the line called her back and told her to wait like everyone else. “This is absurd,”

Xiomara protested, “it’s like buying blindly. If I wait two hours to enter and then there’s nothing inside that I want to buy, it will be a miserable waste of time,” which impacted not only

Xiomara but also her work center, since she had already missed a half day of work for what should have been a quick errand. While this statement seemed both “logical” and “true” to

Xiomara, her arguments fell on deaf ears. By abandoning the lines for both the wrapping service

45 Ibid.

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and the men’s department, Xiomara showed greater concern for the value of her time, both to herself and the national economy, than the countless others who remained in the lines even with uncertain prospects for success.

After leaving La Época, she walked up San Rafael Boulevard to Fin de Siglo, Central

Havana’s other famous department store, hoping to have better luck. Upon arriving at Fin de

Siglo, she saw multiple employees sorting men’s underwear. Her excitement was short-lived, however; the underwear would not officially go on sale until Monday, meaning that Xiomara or her spouse would have to miss work again to make the purchase. Her shopping trip took up half of her workday, and she only managed to buy a few items, barely making a dent in her list. The author of the story, Gabriel Molina, editor of Opina and occasional contributor on the shortcomings of the service industry, framed the moral of Xiomara’s story in terms of its impact on the collective good and the revolutionary state’s economic goals: “There is a consistent lack of respect for people’s time. It’s like a chain reaction that conspires against workplace discipline.

Against the best use of the working day. It is such a generalized practice that it constitutes an attack on the national economy” from within.46

To the careful reader, however, Molina’s summary of the relationship between the demands that scarcity imposed on people’s time, absenteeism, and the shortcomings in the national economy would have appeared redundant. Molina’s characters, Xiomara and her boss,

Wilfredo, had already acknowledged the practice’s impact on the national economy at the story’s outset. The fact that both protagonists surrendered to the inevitable plotline, familiar to any island reader at the time, reflects how state economic controls and ideological imperatives transformed the twenty-four-hour day into a battleground. On this battleground, Cubans were

46 Ibid.

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pulled between the immediate needs of their individual households and the distant needs of the revolutionary state. The three hours that Xiomara spent waiting and her frustrated attempts to take control of her time by offering to wrap the gift herself and peeking into the men’s department also reflect the ways that the revolutionary state both intentionally and inadvertently managed and reshaped its citizens’ relationship with time.

As evidenced by the obstacles that fictional protagonist Xiomara encountered while trying to purchase a Mother’s Day gift, austerity transformed shopping from a chore to a survival skill, with emphasis on the word skill, as navigating the revolutionary state’s commercial network required practice, patience, knowledge, finesse, and, above all, time. In addition to cultivating socios, shoppers had to master new modes of customer service and a cola-cultura that had been developing since the early days of the revolution. Social commentator Isolina Triay described the ever-shifting terrain and the lines that occupied it like living organisms: “To purchase something or receive a service, we must be familiar with the mechanisms in place, be up to date; to dominate the structures of the lines, their ebb and flow, their adaption to spaces, the relativity of their limits, their internal phenomena of contradiction and expansion, and so on.”47

Within this fluid terrain, even the lines in revolutionary Cuba were not always so linear as the name might suggest. The flexible “último" system allowed shoppers to claim a place in line while maintaining some mobility to browse the merchandise or find a shady, comfortable seat to wait things out. Under this system, the first step in joining a line was to ask who was the último, or last in line. Once one located the último, the next step was to take one’s place behind them, thereby becoming the ultimo oneself. A person would then manage their place in line by keeping an eye on the person who was último before they were, and whoever arrived later would do the

47 Triay, “Como el viajero,” 57.

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same, becoming the último as they joined the line. Some sources suggest that improvements in the consumer and service economies during the era of the fat cow improvements did reduce the lines somewhat. For example, social commenter Triay claimed that the lines in Havana were not a manifestation of scarcity but instead similar to those for goods and services in any large city in the world.48 However in the Cuban case, decades of lining up for scarce goods had spawned a cola-cultura along with other mentalities of scarcity that fundamentally shaped how people understood the value of their time and therefore how it was best spent. Most significantly for the country’s economic output was the conviction that the uncertain rewards of lining up, even for something that was not a basic need, outweighed the negative consequences of dipping out of work, even for hours at a time.

Figure 4-2 The socialist service industry’s daily schedule (Cartoon by Aristide (Aristides Miguel Pumeriega), printed in Gabriel Molina, “En el socialismo ¿El tiempo no es dinero? Aventura, venturas y desventuras de un consumidor,” Opina (Havana), June 1981, p. 13).

48 Triay, “¿El ultimo . . .?” 70.

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As in the epic tale of Xiomara’s odyssey, the emergence of a cola-cultura stymied state economic efforts on both the consumption and production end. Cubans juggled their roles as workers and consumers in an effort to capitalize on the twenty-four hours in the day in whatever manner worked best for them, their loved ones, their workplace, and the nation. Despite the return to material incentives under the pragmatic economic approach of the 1970s and 1980s, money had less significance in a context where citizens enjoyed extensive economic protections and encountered little to buy. The Cuban state guaranteed a minimum salary and subsidized necessary items and services, offering them for free or at greatly reduced cost. These economic protections reshaped how people approached their work hours. One conceptualization of the socialist work day showed only two hours dedicated to actual work: the hour before lunch and the hour before quitting time. There was also an hour reserved in the afternoon for running errands (Figure 4-2). With limited economic impetus or reward for diligent hard work, the state relied on moral pressure to encourage workers towards quality and efficiency, much like the moral pressure that Wilfredo, Xiomara’s boss, exerted in attempting to talk her out of her shopping trip at the outset of the story. These calls for consciousness and work ethic had little concrete impact and glossed over the real material difficulties that complicated production, distribution, and consumption, not least by tacitly encouraging absenteeism. In a socialist context, time was still money, but it was overwhelmingly the state that lost.

A primary issue that complicated the delicate balance between individual and collective needs that shaped the state economy was that most workers worked the same hours. Therefore, when a store or service locale was open, customers with jobs tended to be at work. The same was true for government and administrative offices. For example, in households where all adults held jobs, someone had to leave work for an hour or two to pay the electric bill each month–the

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duration dependent on the lengths of the wait for the bus and the line at the utilities office. This was further complicated by the fact that stores, offices, and other businesses could and did close for various reasons with no prior warning or explanation given to consumers, thus creating a ripple effect of absenteeism throughout the economy. If someone left to pay their electric bill only to find the utilities office with a “closed” sign on the door, they would lose productive hours not only that day, but also the next when they left to try again.49 While this impacted both men and women, women’s professional lives were more likely to be significantly limited for two reasons, both related to traditional gender roles: 1) their primary responsibility for the domestic sphere including the errands that kept it running, and 2) the tendency of even ambitious working women to put their careers second to their husbands’, so they were more likely to miss work and risk the charge of absenteeism or labor indiscipline than their husbands when someone absolutely had to do so.50

Beginning in the fall of 1980, the state attempted to remedy this recurring problem by extending the business hours of certain establishments in Havana as late as 9 or 11 PM to give people ample time to complete their shopping after work.51 To help working women, in particular, businesses set aside certain hours for them and would require that they present their

CTC worker identification card at the door.52 Building on this experience in Havana and adjusting for what worked and did not work, the Ministry of Internal Commerce, along with

Poder Popular, the FMC, and the CTC, hoped to extend business hours across the country, but

49 Molina, “¿El tiempo no es dinero?” 13.

50 FMC, “Informe Central,” 54.

51 “Ampliados los horarios en centros comerciales,” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1980, p. 13.

52 Ibid., and MECA, “Nuevos horarios de servicios a mujeres trabajadores,” Opina (Havana), May 1980, p. 50.

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the results of the trial program were disappointing. Workers at a beauty parlor, supermarket, and department store all confirmed that almost no one came in after 7 or 8 PM; two of the three suggested that this was because people were simply accustomed to coming in earlier. Framing his implicit critique through the national savings campaigns (perhaps in the hopes of not having to work anymore evening shifts), the manager at the department store also mentioned that they wasted a lot of electricity during the extended evening hours.53

It seems likely that people had become accustomed to the personal adaptations to austerity that gave them some measure of control over their everyday lives, such as leaving work to do the shopping. Years of managing unpredictable shortages had taught people to shop early when possible in hopes of accessing a wider variety of goods, and perhaps they had come to enjoy breaking up their workday with errands. This suggests that decades of consumer experience in a revolutionary society had inculcated habits and preferences among the population that would prove difficult to break, even when those habits were no longer strictly necessary.

Without popular cooperation, state attempts to streamline the consumer and service industries and make them more pragmatic were left to flounder.

Killing Time: Free Time and Boredom in a Collective Society

In a society that placed so many demands on its citizens’ time, it seems strange that boredom would be a widespread social problem, but this was the case in revolutionary Cuba, particularly among students. Despite social values encouraging students to be hyper involved in revolutionary activities and organizations, primarily through their schools, complaints emerged again and again from even the most revolutionary groups of students about the lack of resources available to combat boredom. These complaints were so common in the 1980s that the editor of

53 Gladys Castaño, “Nuevo horario para la trabajadora,” Mujeres (Havana), n.d., late 1980, pp. 7-9.

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the youth magazine Somos Jovenes prounounced “we’re bored to death of boredom,” in response to yet another letter to the editor about this rampant social problem.54 The exchanges about free time and boredom in Somos Jovenes, both in the form of group conversations between journalists and students and in the form of letters to the editor, can be understood as a means for young citizens to petition the state. One student on the Isle of Youth used the presence of Somos

Jovenes journalists explicitly for this purpose. She argued that while the students themselves could do more to alleviate the lack of recreational outlets for weekend activities, they were “not entirely at fault. Those in the Culture sector, the FEEM [Federation of Secondary Education

Students], the UJC, and Poder Popular, among others” shared the responsibility for “all of these problems and more.” She concluded with a challenge: “the magazine should ask them [about the situation] also,” rather than concentrating solely on the limited solutions that students and school administrators could enact.55

Somos Jovenes journalists and editors often responded to petitions like these in ways that acknowledged the validity of these critiques, if only tepidly. The articles published in the magazine consistently encouraged students to take measures into their own hands, occasionally in strong terms meant to chastise presumptuous youth whose expectations had risen too high. Yet even in cases where the magazine blamed the youth themselves for not being proactive in seeking solutions, the vast amount of print space dedicated to the topic in these years was an implicit recognition of the widespread commonality of the problem, at the very least. State responses to youth boredom emphasized the privileged role of young Cubans as participants in and, especially, beneficiaries of revolution. At the same time, they echoed calls for

54 Guillermo Cabrera, “Mi Carta,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Mar. 1982, pp. 10-11.

55 “Una batalla contra bostezos,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Jan. 1983, p. 15.

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consciousness and exigency in the consumer and service industries by encouraging youth to find their own solutions to the boredom epidemic.

While Havana had problems with scarcity, many resources were concentrated there. The situation in the countryside and smaller cities was often worse.56 This was particularly the case with recreational activities due to the city’s longstanding status as a major cultural center. One young reader in Cienfuegos contrasted his city’s industrial development under the revolution with the lagging development of the city’s cultural and recreational apparatuses. He emphasized the contributions of Cienfueguero youth to the city’s economic growth, thereby establishing not only the group’s merit and political chops but also implying that because they had invested in the revolution, they had earned a forthcoming investment from the revolution. He went on to complain that “almost 90percent” of the cultural and activity centers constructed since 1959 were built in Havana, a disparity that maintained the cultural divide between the capital and the rest of the country.57 Similar complaints from bored teens in Santa Clara, Baracoa, Guantanamo, and

Holguín poured into the Somos Jovenes offices.58 Invariably, the responses from the editor,

Guillermo Cabrera, as well as the responses that sometimes appeared from teens eager to climb up on their soapboxes and criticize their peers, encouraged readers to organize and mobilize to take control of their own free time.59 These prescriptions were much more ambitious than encouraging students to get a group together for a potluck or other afternoon activity. If students were going to begin to counteract the lack of leisure materials and activities, they would need to

56 Interview with Nancy Hernández Smith, Santiago de Cuba, July 2015.

57 “Mi Carta” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Dec.-Jan. 1980-81, p. 11.

58Respectively, Cary, “Para divertirse en Santa Clara,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Oct.-Nov. 1980, pp. 2-5, Guillermo Cabrera, “Mi Carta,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), July 1982, pp. 8-9, Guillermo Cabrera, “Mi Carta,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Nov.-Dec. 1983, p. 19, Guillermo Cabrera, “Mi Carta,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Aug. 1982, p. 11.

59 See, for example, the letter to the editor and the editor’s response in Cabrera, “Mi Carta,” Aug. 1982, p. 11.

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seek ambitious and lasting solutions. Effectively capitalizing on free time in a context of austerity required students to petition and coordinate with the mass organizations active in their schools and local communities to pool resources and access necessary funding.60

When funding and other material resources were not available, state representatives encouraged youth to meet material shortages with human capital, at least in the short-term. This approach could facilitate some improvement while awaiting long-term solutions dependent on material improvements. Thus, as with the shortcomings in the consumer and service industries, shortcomings in recreational facilities were cast as problems to be fixed by initiative and hard work. For example, a discussion between Somos Jovenes journalists and students at a teacher’s college in Cienfuegos concluded with one student stating, “we must always think to seek solutions rather than crossing our arms when material conditions are deficient.”61 The final minutes of the discussion centered on how, with little more than initiative and planning, students could organize film or book clubs. The students were on board with these solutions, admitting that they had not shown sufficient initiative, but their acquiescence seems based in an alternate, ideal reality rather than the lived reality in Cienfuegos; even the bare bones resources necessary for a film or book club were limited! In fact, the students had spent the first half of the article discussing the difficulties of accessing even shared resources like publicly-shown films and library books. When one student complained that the films shown in the city were “old and infantile. They don’t say anything,” another student responded, “What are they going to say? If they never bring them and no one sees them!” Another student mentioned that in her

60 Cary, “Para divertirse in Santa Clara,” 4.

61 Paquita Armas, “¿Quién tiene la responsibilidad?” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Apr.-Mar. 1981, p. 4.

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municipality, Abreu, there was not even a public library.62 Yet at the end of the article, there was no attempt to discuss the discrepancies between real problem and revolutionary solution. Instead the students were caught up in the enthusiasm of Somos Jovenes’ suggestions. In the moment, in a context of subtle pressure exerted by journalists, the students were willing and eager to embrace revolutionary reasoning, whether it corresponded to their reality or not.

Cubans looked to the political context at home and abroad to understand, discuss, and propose solutions to the boredom epidemic. In another conversation with Somos Jovenes journalists, two parents of high-school-aged teenagers referenced their own experiences as students in the Soviet Union and East Germany decades earlier to critique the cultural and educational opportunities available to Cuban youth. The parents praised the advanced development of recreational opportunities for youth in both places, which included theater and sports groups, organized activities, and in the East German case, student groups that organized dances and other social events under the supervision of an adult.63 This reference to socialist contexts created a framework for acceptable comparison–while the Soviet Union and East

Germany had a head start on socialism as compared to Cuba, they were appropriate models for comparison in the spheres of recreation, goods, and consumer services, unlike the capitalist world. It was politically and ideologically appropriate to hold Cuba up to their examples and find it lacking.

In a similar vein, youth who were considered especially revolutionary were also considered to be the most pressing victims of boredom. An article about the material difficulties restricting the leisure activities of youth in Santiago de Cuba begins by listing the impressive

62 Ibid., 3.

63 M. Santos Moray, “¿Podremos vencer la incomunicación?” Somos Jovenes (Havana), May 1984, p. 27.

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credentials of the students at Cuqui Bosch High School–including a 99.86percent school retention rate and 100percent incorporation in the escuela en el campo, cane-cutting trips during school vacations, and the combat-ready militia unit–as if to prove that these students deserved more. The problems facing these model students were varied: there were swimming pools but no water; the Casa de Estudiante that hosted youth activities did not even have water to drink, let alone snacks; and the students could not visit nearby beaches due to a lack of transportation.

Many of these problems could be solved with minimal funding and help from an adult to coordinate filling the pools or providing transportation, but the article predictably puts the responsibility for improvement on the students’ shoulders by suggesting that they organize weekend activities in the city’s central square, Céspedes Park.64

In at least one case, the proposed alliance between student and youth groups, the mass organizations, and local political structures bore fruit. In early 1983, Somos Jovenes ran a three- piece series on recreation on the Island of Youth. In 1970, the state began constructing the first escuela en el campo on the island, which graduated its first class of 243 students the following year.65 Thirteen years later there were 25,000 students from across the nation studying on the

Island of Youth, in addition to international students and the permanent population on the island, all of whom were using the same recreational infrastructure that existed in 1970, before the population boom that accompanied the development of the boarding school system.66 While the

64 Mercedes Santos Moray, “Un interés de todos ¡tiempo libre!” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Jan. 1982, pp. 2-3. Gasoline shortages appear to have been a problem that limited transportation in the early 1980s (see, for example, “Diversión sin telaranas” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Mar. 1983, pp. 12-15). This material difficulty–along perhaps with prioritization of clean water for other purposes, which may have complicated efforts to fill the pools–makes it uncertain if these solutions were so simple after all. This reading puts Somos Jovenes’ suggestion about parque Céspedes, which does not specifically address the problems raised by the students, in a different light.

65 “Educación en la Isla de la Juventud,” EcuRed.

66 “Una batalla contra bostezos,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Jan. 1983, pp. 12-15.

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schools covered their students’ recreational needs during the week, the students flooded the town’s limited recreational opportunities on weekends. Students who were from provinces in eastern Cuba went home only for long vacations due to the distance, so they faced the prospect of fighting over scarce space at the beach or movie theater every weekend. The limited recreational opportunities within the school read like a parody of socialist austerity: the students formed theater and dance groups, only to be thwarted by a lack of recorded music and instruments; they organized themselves into baseball, soccer, volleyball, and basketball teams, but sports equipment was unavailable, despite petitions to the local office of the Ministry of

Education; and they organized off-site activities that had to be canceled due to transportation difficulties. In addition, the students celebrated their birthdays collectively, so even opportunities for celebration were scarce.67

By the time that Somos Jovenes arrived to document the woeful situation on the Island of

Youth, the PCC and Poder Popular had already begun crafting a solution. The previous year, a group of architectural students from the University of Havana had completed a survey of recreational opportunities on the island and suggested transforming over 3,000 acres into Julio

Antonio Mella Park, which capitalized on one resource that was bountifully available for free on the Island of Youth: its natural beauty. The park would provide opportunities for camping as well as various recreational activities. In coordination with the local bodies of the PCC and People’s

Power, the park was built to include a zoo, botanical garden, areas for educational and sporting events, and an amphitheater that could seat 4,000. In addition, the park provided opportunities for local students to organize horseback riding, motocross races, dances, and spelunking

67 Ibid.

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excursions . . . if they could find the necessary materials.68 The case of Julio Antonio Mella Park reveals that the ambitious course of action so often proposed by journalists could have impressive effects; however, it seems likely that the unique situation on the Island of Youth was the decisive factor in the project, not the initiative and teamwork displayed by the students and mass organizations.

The concentration of 25,000 students on the Island of Youth transformed youth boredom in this context from an annoyance that leadership could afford to ignore to a potentially explosive situation. Leaving the students to their own devices created a dangerous concentration of bored teenagers en masse with limited adult supervision. By contrast, investing in recreational improvements on the island defused this situation while showcasing the revolution’s commitment to youth. It is doubtful that smaller, isolated groups of teens would have received the same consideration and aid from their local chapters of the mass organizations simply because the pay off on investment, both in terms of avoiding negative consequences and promoting pro-revolutionary sentiment, was not the same. The response to the students at Cuqui

Bosch High School–get creative and find a way to get over it–was much more common than that accorded to the Island of Youth.

The boredom epidemic prompted many to look to Cuba’s natural charms, and camping was frequently suggested as a cure-all for bored teenagers. In the early 1980s, Cuba went camping crazy, as a series of “Popular Camping” installations opened across the country, beginning in Pinar del Río in May 1981.69 Camping was lauded as the perfect activity for Cuban

68 Carrobello, “¡No al club de los aburridos!” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Feb. 1983, pp 12-15, “Diversión sin telaranas” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Mar. 1983, pp. 12-15.

69 Fidel Castro, “Discurso Pronunciado por Fidel Castro Ruz, Presidente de la República de Cuba, en el Acto Nacional por el Dia de los Niños, celebrado en la loma del Taburete, municipio Candelaria, provincia Pinar del Rio,

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youth because it incorporated many of the aspects of the escuelas en el campo that were considered beneficial into a recreational rather than an educational and labor-based context. It was considered “a magnificent expression of recreation and education for the youth, something very healthy.”70 It was also a recreational goldmine that required little investment from the state in terms of precious construction resources and labor. In fact, while some Popular Camping sites were ultimately developed into comprehensive tourist sites–featuring comforts like restaurants, swimming pools, medical personnel, and buildings to house guests–rustic camping capitalized on the beauty of Cuba’s natural landscapes, required minimal infrastructure, and encouraged guests to bring everything they might need with them.71

Yet many youth struggled to access these newly-formed recreational opportunities due to material shortages in their own homes. If families lacked essentials like extra bed sheets for regular use, camping-specific items such as tents and sleeping bags were in even shorter supply.

The fact that camping was not a traditional Cuban activity meant that there were no pre-1959 reserves of supplies, further compounding the problem. The growing popularity of camping made even common items, like backpacks, difficult to access, which complicated the scholastic as well as recreational lives of students.72 Specialized items, like tents or portable stoves, were

el 18 de julio de 1982,” accessed online 2 Mar. 2018 at http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1982/esp/f180782e.html

70 Moray, “¿Podremos vencer la incomunicación?” 25.

71 “Guia del campismo,” El Campismo Popular. These appear to be later developments. In a July 18, 1982 speech about the popular camping program Fidel Castro specified multiple times that the popular camping sites were not and would not be like “traditional tourist” sites, which was apparently a source of disappointment for some: “It is not easy, to break with the conceptual schema of those who would reduce the practice of camping to the experience of camping in a well-known tourist facility or at the beach, to please those who lose patience with the mosquitos, or those who were put off the plan because it rained and the water levels were high, so the river was not inviting for swimming, or those who seek comforts that are more at home in cities and seem strange and have nothing to do with camping,” Castro, “Discurso pronunciado . . . en el Acto Nacional por el Dia de los Niños.”

72 Mayra Beatriz, “Estar a la moda es . . .” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Nov. 1984, p. 21.

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almost impossible to access. In contrast to the impression of widespread enthusiasm for camping that press coverage conveyed in the period, when Lorna Burdsall’s dance students set up a tent sent by her family in the United States during a beach weekend, they were delighted, indicating that access to the item was something special.73 While the Cuban Institute of Sports, Physical

Education, and Recreation (INDER) rented backpacks, tents, and other materials, accessing them required navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy and relying on political capital amassed at work or school. Groups hoping to rent camping equipment first filled out an application at their work or school. If the group members went to different schools, they filled out the application at the municipal office of the UJC. Then either the school or workplace committee or the municipal office of the UJC would coordinate with INDER to facilitate the rental.74 The timeframe and rates of successful resolution of such requests are unclear.

The crisis of boredom reveals the extent to which austerity shaped everyday life, even for privileged groups like students, who were insulated from the struggles of household maintenance by their youth and by the amount of time they spent in state-run facilities, like the escuelas en el campo. The triumphs and shortcomings of the revolutionary state with regard to keeping youth happy and busy at work and in recreation, reveal that the era of “fat cows” was limited by on- going austerity, though it was experienced as an improvement from the lean 1960s and remembered fondly after the even leaner 1990s. Julio Antonio Mella Park and the rise of Popular

Camping reveals state efforts to guide leisure time into healthy and constructive channels using the fewest possible resources. The responses of youth, particularly those of youth eager to take advantage of these opportunities to commune with nature but prevented from doing so by

73 Burdsall, CHC, Box No 1, Folder No 1, June 11, 1982.

74 “Mi Carta,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Feb.-Mar. 1980, p. 8.

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material shortages, illustrate a frustrating impasse. The state pushed citizens to privilege notions of collaboration and the collective good over their individual wants and needs. Yet when lasting and collective solutions to social problems were limited by austerity, it abandoned citizens to rely on themselves by crafting creative solutions out of ingenuity, hard work, and little else. As a result, the idea that ingenuity was a key facet of Cuban identity was deployed by state and citizen alike, but often to competing ends.

To Invent or to Resolve?: Cuban Ingenuity as a Marker of National Identity

In another piece on creative responses to boredom, Somos Jovenes profiled a cooking club formed by six men and women between the ages of fourteen and twenty-seven in Vega de

Palma, a small town in Villa Clara province. They started the club to overcome their boredom because “in general few recreational opportunities existed” in Vega de Palma, which did not even have a movie theater or park. The cooking club was the perfect example of the kind of creative response to recreational austerity that the magazine encouraged readers to embrace. It required few if any additional resources and encouraged comradery and a collective mindset:

The kids met weekly to cook a meal together, taking turns hosting. They contributed the ingredients collectively. There article makes no direct reference to how food scarcity or rationing might have complicated the club’s activities beyond mention that “a través de los patios muchas veces se van trasladando los ingredientes que faltan [a lot of times any missing ingredients would move through the courtyards],” perhaps a coded reference to securing items through second economy transactions. In addition, the profile highlighted the club’s educational components regarding both cultural heritage and gender. The club prepared Cuban dishes and was interested in exchanging recipes with readers to learn more about “traditional regional dishes.” The membership had a balanced male to female ratio, which helped the male members

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learn important skills that could help them “make themselves useful” to their mothers and future wives, because “the kitchen is not exclusive to women.”75

The praise for the club’s ingenuity paired with the evasive reference to the origin of certain materials is indicative of the complex relationship between revolutionary state and citizen and their dueling notions of Cuban identity, both of which included ingenuity but with important differences. Revolutionary leadership was deeply invested in an official notion of Cuban identity that emphasized the ability of the Cuban populace to make do in difficult situations, particularly if those situations were caused by enemies of the revolution, like the economic blockade imposed by the United States. For example, research into fibrous plants grown in Cuba and their potential as a source of material for shoes was explicitly framed in these terms with a hint of nostalgia, despite the shoe industry’s homegrown problems discussed earlier in this chapter:

“They say the Cuban is a natural creator. Much has been born of necessity in these times of blockade: all but the youngest of us remember how we managed to replace articles of basic necessity with popular inventiveness in the 1960s.”76

This kind of ingenuity, used in support of the revolution, was praised and fostered by the state, to the extent that it approached glorifying austerity which did complicate and even limit people’s lives. A portrait of a model revolutionary that appeared in Somos Jovenes highlighted the woman’s maximum use of the goods available to her, including her creative repurposing of, essentially, trash. FiFi is described as a “seventy-two-year-old youth,” drawing on the perceived connection between revolution and youth, who founded her block’s CDR and never missed a militia guard shift or opportunity to do voluntary Sunday labor on her block. Her dedication to

75 Cary, “Para chuparse los dedos,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Oct. 1982, pp. 2-3.

76 Cary, “Investigar no es sacar conejos del sombrero,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Apr. 1982, p. 13.

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the revolution permeated her home, which “look[ed] like a dollhouse,” due to her creative decorations. These decorations included a table cloth made from an old jute sack, little black and white kitten figurines made of bottle caps, and “a thousand other ingenious forms of using discarded materials to make useful or decorative objects.”77 Ingenuity was thus framed as an expression of patriotism, which in the context of revolution showcased one’s revolutionary integration. Celebration of this national trait served state ends by encouraging average Cubans to take actions in their everyday lives to mitigate the crises of scarcity created by state inefficiency and the unplanned outcomes of state economic planning.

Official ingenuity received new impetus with the deadly outbreak of hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981, which unleashed a wave of sanitation efforts that summer. Public Health officials visited individual homes to ensure the destruction of breeding areas for the disease’s vector mosquito. This process brought newfound attention to the trash that had been accumulating in people’s homes for years. The mindset of scarcity led people to save anything they could imagine needing again or someday being able to fix-up or reuse because it was uncertain if or when the object or something similar would be available again for purchase. Large projects, like home repair, often entailed a long process of acquiring permits, materials, and labor. In the meantime, construction materials stacked in forgotten corners of yards collected dust, water, and a host of vermin.78

As sanitation crews swept through homes, overseeing garbage disposal and collection,

ICOIDI officials could not help but notice the enormous quantity of potentially valuable material going to waste. The idea that “garbage . . . is money if you process it effectively,” inspired the

77 Paquita, “Una joven de 72 años,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), no. 8, n.d., 1978, p. 37.

78 Marta, “Las tres caras del plan basura,” Opina (Havana), Oct. 1981, p. 37.

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magazine’s call for Plan Garbage, in which each block would organize trash collection to recycle the average 15percent of garbage that could be still be used and the additional 25percent that could be stripped for valuable primary materials. The former category included furniture in need of basic repairs, and ICOIDI argued that this furniture could help mitigate the on-going furniture shortage if the state would prioritize making the services and resources necessary for repair available. Repair required investment, but it would be cheaper than constructing all of the furniture currently needed by the population from scratch, ICOIDI officials reasoned. Plan

Garbage, therefore, called on the Cuban state to get involved in order to facilitate efforts at recycling and repurposing that had been going on at the individual level for years. Rather than allowing stockpiled items to go to waste in people’s yards, housing potentially deadly mosquitos, the state could transform garbage into gold. Most directly, this process would involve harvesting primary materials to sell or stockpile to prevent Cuba from having to buy them on the international market. This process worked indirectly at the domestic level as well, by giving the people what they needed to make their “little everyday illusions of walking through the house” into realities that made their lives easier and more comfortable.79

Garbage could be used creatively to save the state currency for exchange on the international market, and so too could local alternatives discovered or created by inventive workers. A profile on three such inventors, all members of the Brigadas Técnicas Juveniles

(Youth Technical Brigades), featured large photographs of the three wearing the various medals they had been awarded for their service to the nation. The profile also mentioned the precise amount of money they were able to save the nation. Mirna Ramírez invented a physical therapy machine in Guantánamo using a wheel from a wheelchair and a washing machine motor. Each

79 Marta, “Las tres caras del plan basura,” Opina (Havana), Oct. 1981, p. 37.

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machine that was produced locally using her method saved the state $1,000, the cost of a similar machine on the international market. Through various inventions to repair or replace machinery in their job sites, Manuel Torres saved the country 1.5 million pesos and Augusto Romeo

273,000 pesos. The youths’ contributions fit the official definition of inventiveness as a national trait perfectly. As Augusto explained, their “fundamental muse is the necessity of defeating the difficulties caused by underdevelopment and the economic blockade.”80 Cuba’s prerevolutionary past and the hostility of its northern neighbor were acceptable obstacles to identify and combat, in fact they were the two primary enemies in the state’s economic battle for development.

Yet ingenuity could be taken too far, into second economy transactions which undermined state economic goals because they relied on theft of crucial resources from workplaces across the nation, like the missing ingredients that arrived on the Vega de Palma’s youth cooking club’s doorsteps, their origins elided by the celebratory tone of the article. These kinds of transactions were understood by the state as expressly counterrevolutionary, yet the continued existence of the doble moral rendered them harmless, if necessary, survival skills in the popular imagination. They were crucial to a popular understanding of national identity and socialism as socio-lism that incorporated the ability to “resolve” everyday problems by any means necessary. Part of the problem was that the on-going local complications in production and distribution that perpetuated socio-lism and the doble moral were not state-sanctioned enemies in the way that historical underdevelopment and the blockade were. They were visible yet poorly understood enemies, in part due to the leadership’s unwillingness or inability to discuss them at the systemic level. Instead, discussions of economic difficulties whose root causes were domestic were inevitably blamed on individuals rather than the system. The

80 Caridad Carro, “Innovadores de lo cotidiano,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Jan. 1984, pp. 4-7.

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difficulties caused by absenteeism and other individual consciousness problems could be overcome by official understandings of the Cuban penchant for initiative and inventiveness.

Consciousness problems were internal to individual workers, and the prescribed solution was an attitude adjustment. With only the “desire to do something more to contribute . . . without the need to make large investments,” the national inclination toward inventiveness would take over to find new, better ways of doing things.81 On the other hand, popular understandings of ingenuity as a national trait which incorporated socios and the doble moral emerged to weather systemic problems which could only be fixed with top-down reforms. They were survival skills that should have been temporary, but which contributed to maintaining the very problems that they endeavored to solve.

With time, austerity and the official and popular mindsets that it fostered contributed to new ideas about what it meant to be Cuban. Whether one was inventing to help advance the revolution or simply to help oneself survive it, ingenuity took on new practical and ideological significance. The state’s elevation of ingenuity to new political heights reveals how central austerity was to living the Cuban revolution, both at the individual and national levels. Saving and repurposing scarce resources were central to this elevation of ingenuity, but many state- owned and managed spaces, especially schools and student and worker cafeterias, were sites of enormous waste. The complexity of property ownership under socialist legality was a central cause of this waste. Without an economic impetus to care for property beyond the state’s moral appeals to consciousness, individuals often contributed to waste through careless behavior; however, the state’s utilitarian approach to constructing schools and feeding its student and worker populations was also to blame. As with shoe production plans that prioritized quantity

81 Alfredo Carralero Hernández, “Tamale en lata,” Opina (Havana), Dec. 1983, p. 55

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over quality, the state often provided resources that were unsuitable to the needs and desires of certain populations, which led to needless waste.

Socialist Ownership and Shared Property in a Context of Austerity

In a socialist context where so much property was shared, caring for that property took on political and economic implications. This is evident in the debate between students, professors, and construction workers over who was responsible for the disrepair of the Flavio Alvarez Galán

Sports School on the Island of Youth. Ideally, shared property meant communal responsibility.

In reality, however, it often meant that no one felt sufficient sense of ownership and responsibility to motivate them to take care of items to prevent damage or fix minor damage before it spiraled into a need for major repairs. Students blamed construction workers for shoddy construction, citing windows that stuck so that they needed to force them open, easily damaging them in the process. The construction workers fired back that social property was the shared property of everyone: “when windows get stuck, you have to help them, not force them. Do you force stuck windows at your house?” they asked, implying that shared property deserved the same care and respect as individual property.82 Ultimately, it appears that austerity once again had a cyclical effect, creating further austerity. Unrealistic demands in terms of the time and resources allotted to construction crews led to an imperfect building which disappointed students. This disappointment with the subpar quality of their surroundings reinforced destructive tendencies among young people who were still learning to consider the consequences of their actions before acting and simply could not be supervised by an adult twenty-four hours a day.

82 Cristina Gonzalez, “Por el mal cuidado de mi escuela, ¿A quién culpamos?” Somos Jovenes, (Havana), Feb.-Mar. 1980, pp. 2-5.

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With shared responsibility thus established, the debate turned to how administrators could prevent further damage. The proposed solutions are interesting in that they relied more heavily on shame and on moralizing political incentives than on finding material solutions to the destruction caused by students. The suggestion that parents be held financially responsible for damages committed by their child was listed as a last resort, to be used only for considerable damages caused by a repeat offender.83 This in itself can be understood as evidence of how widespread vandalism and property damage caused by youth was. Punitive measures were saved as a last resort because they could only be effective and sustainable when taken against a minority.

Before reaching that stage, destructive students were first subject to a demerit on their permanent record. Then, repeat offenders were required to make a public confession of fault in front of the student body. Administrators also informed their parents by phone in addition to sending warning cards to the parents’ workplaces, “so that their children be made to care for what is property of everyone and has cost so much.” Since the parents would have been informed of the offense by phone already, the workplace cards were clearly intended as a form of social shaming. This was also the case with the consequence for a third offense, which was that a letter be sent to the students’ CDR at home to be read aloud in front of the assembled group of neighbors.84 As we have seen, the schools on the Island of Youth were isolated, particularly from eastern Cuba. Publicly shaming students did more to stigmatize family members who lived at home and had to interact with the neighbors who had heard the card at the CDR meeting than it did students, who could be away at school for months. Thus, while the state took on important

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid.

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parenting functions through the boarding school system, when problems arose, state representatives like school administrators shifted the onus back to parents. In publicizing children’s lack of consciousness through letters sent to parents’ workplaces and CDRs, administrators used this disciplinary system to publicly question the entire family’s political commitment in front of the parents’ colleagues and neighbors.

These moralizing tendencies extended to individual property as well. A comic strip that appeared in Somos Jovenes urged students to care for their identification cards as they would for a relationship “so that it does not deteriorate.”85 A public service campaign managed by the

Ministry of the Electric Industry used similar tactics of guilt and shame to urge Cubans to care for their irons as they would a child: “treat it like a child . . . with care . . . if you do not take care of it, if you do not treat it with care, you will take the life of the iron that is at the service of your home.”86 Just as socialism imbued goods with ideological significance to be carefully managed by the state, austerity imbued goods with practical, political, and economic significance unparalleled in mass consumer contexts. Waste–of resources, goods, productive hours, and even personal property–was a loss that the revolutionary state was unwilling to write off.

Efforts to combat disrepair of shared property and the abuse of personal property extended into worker and school cafeterias, as ICOIDI and school administrators worked together to reform cafeteria practices. The cafeterias were an important ideological element of the revolution, socializing the midday meal and providing 3.1 million meals a day at little or no cost.87 These cafeterias were also enormous sites of food waste due to students and workers

85 Fran Valdés, “Quien bien te quiere te ha de cuidar,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Aug. 1984, pp. 38-39.

86 Opina (Havana), Dec. 1979, p. 40.

87 Balarí, “De la desigualdad a la justicia social: la Revolución cubana,” Demanda (Havana), 1980, p. 60.

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throwing away massive amounts of food, a phenomenon one Opina article called a “social crime.”88 An ICOIDI study of seminternado primary schools in the city of Havana found that

60percent of the students did not eat in the cafeteria because they did not like the food available.89 Because of the partial boarding function of the seminternados–students stayed at the school Monday through Friday, returning home on the weekends–the cafeterias made enough food for each student, assuming that they had no other source of food, and the ICOIDI study indicates that over half of that food was going to waste.

A survey of adult workers painted them only slightly less picky than their young counterparts. In a separate ICOIDI study, 40percent of 650 workers assigned to 135 different workplace cafeterias also said that they disliked the cafeteria food. Of these, roughly a third identified the problem to be the way that the food was prepared, specifically pinpointing a lack of seasoning as the culprit.90 This points to the fact that food scarcity in Cuba must be understood in specific ways in order to comprehend the divergence between state triumphalism regarding the eradication of hunger through rationing and socialized cafeterias and citizen pessimism regarding the lack of options that hindered the ability to cater to personal taste. The state itself would come to recognize this divergence only in the 1980s. In a 1982 interview, Vice President Carlos Rafael

Rodríguez referred to “the importance of the unimportant” to discuss the crucial role that onions and garlic played in transforming meals into something people enjoyed and actually wanted to eat.91

88 María Helena Capote, “En los comedores escolares: Botar la comida, un crimen social,” Opina (Havana), Aug. 1980, p. 3.

89 Ibid.

90 María Helena Capote, “Gustos y disgustos del comer en los comedores obreros,” Opina (Havana), Oct. 1980, p. 3.

91 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 64.

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State efforts to reduce waste and increase efficiency in the cafeterias were a microcosm of efforts to rationalize and reform the national economy in this period. The first step was opening lines of communication between producers and consumers to line production up with consumers’ needs and desires. The city of Havana used food production centers to provide processed foods to the cafeterias across the city, so opening up lines of communication between where the food was processed and where it was consumed was a crucial step in this process. Yet modes of communication between chef and consumer, even on-site, also required extensive reform. The schools in Havana took this to the extreme, instituting quality control methods based on daily written reports prepared by both students and teachers on the quality of the food. These reports were then shared with administrators and kitchen staff, who met to discuss them daily.

Administrators called this “the simple method of opinions,” but the daily system of reports and meetings seems very time-consuming, if simple.

Using these reports as a foundation, administrators implemented wide-ranging reforms in the cafeterias. “With the same food, we obtain[ed] a notable improvement in the quality” of the cafeterias’ offerings, one administrator explained, by creating student brigades to overcome staff shortages, varying the style and presentation of common items to add interest, and doing fundamental things–like cooking rice to an appetizing texture–right. When explained by one of the cafeteria’s chefs, though, it really does seem simple. He explained that he simply did not know what the students thought before, but after this new system empowered students to speak up, the students began to seek him out to tell him every day. Many of them began telling him

“directly in the kitchen,” bypassing the complicated chain of communication described above.

The feedback, positive and negative, motivated him to seek out new recipes to try and ultimately

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made him feel more invested in his job.92 The key to improvements therefore seemed to be creating human connections between kitchen staff and students, which transformed the cafeteria from a transactional space to a human one.

In worker cafeterias, the solution also hinged on communication. By offering workers choices from a list of what was available each day, workplace administrators were able to save literal tons of food from being cooked only to be thrown away. The system allowed workers to choose the day before what they wanted for lunch each day and pay only for what they ate, thereby saving workers money, saving the state money in subsidized meals going to waste, and saving the kitchen staff wasted effort. The results of such a system could be striking. One cafeteria that served 300 workers saved 476 servings of rice, 2,669 of grains, 10,433 of vegetables, 4,533 of corn flour, and 1,588 servings of fish over the course of 15 days. These numbers represented a reduction of 87percent in soup production, 81percent in rice with fish,

80percent in split peas, 72percent of sweets, and a 63percent reduction of white rice production.93

Examination of disrepair in schools and food waste in student and worker cafeterias reveals a central problem with the command economy and the revolutionary state’s collective approach to economic and social problems. The collective society was made up of individuals with unique tastes and preferences. Mandating a diet from on high for all workers or all students simply led to waste. The same could be said for prioritizing quantity over quality in the construction of schools, or really the production of anything. The state made moral appeals to convince individuals to reduce waste by defining throwing food away as “a social crime” or

92 Capote, “En los comedores escolares,” 3.

93 Capote, “Gustos y disgustos,” 3.

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elevating an iron to the status of a child, something precious to be cared for. Yet it was pragmatic approaches that allowed room for individual preference, such as the reforms to worker and student cafeterias, that had real concrete effects.

Conclusion

In practice, the collective ethos that the Cuban state sought to foster within society created more problems than solutions. As we have seen, individuals liked the idea of a collective society when and if it served their individual needs. When individual and collective needs clashed, however, individual needs almost always won out, even among people who self- identified with the revolutionary mission. Cuban teenagers who wanted to leverage their privileged position in society into a material privilege, through the development of recreational centers or resources, for example, ran into the same kinds of material and political obstacles that

Cuban women did in seeking socialized solutions for their domestic dilemmas. While the state sought to moralize and cajole the population into taking collective ownership of collective property, few among the citizenry were able to internalize these foreign norms and translate them into action. The result was that the investments that the state did make into solving these problems, such as reforming business’ hours of operation, were often undermined by individuals acting unpredictably as individuals, rather than conscientious citizens of the collective society.

In the late 1970s, the Cuban state embraced a new policy of openness to the western world and particularly the United States. This policy injected new urgency into debates about the role of the individual and the importance of consumerism in a revolutionary society in ways unanticipated by leadership. For much of the 1970s, the orbit of comparison for Cubans was the

Soviet world, which suffered from some of the same political and material difficulties experienced by Cuba, though to varying degrees. In 1978, however, the Cuban state briefly opened relations with the United States, allowing over 120,000 exiles to return to the island and

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swap stories and experiences with their families, friends, and neighbors who had stayed. The sudden introduction of new realities about the United States into the collective Cuban consciousness further inflamed debates about the rights and responsibilities of the individual in society. In 1980, in part as a response to this new knowledge, a wave of over 125,000 new exiles joined their counterparts in South Florida and beyond, provoking a crisis of legitimacy for the revolutionary state much like that it had experienced in the wake of the failed Ten Million Ton

Harvest.

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CHAPTER 5 SHOWDOWNS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, 1972-1980

In the late 1970s, Cubans had greater access to the outside world than at any time since the triumph of the revolution. This access came primarily in the form of visitors from both the socialist and capitalist worlds who brought with them very different worldviews and experiences.

By offering new frames for comparison, these encounters injected new life into on-going debates about the rights and responsibilities of the individual in society and the role of consumer goods and services in everyday life. While the Cuban state sought to guide these encounters by dramatically expanding the state media and its mission, their lasting impact varied widely on an individual basis. People were forced to reconcile their own worldviews with new realities that sometimes shook their confidence, if not in the revolution itself, then in revolutionary leadership whose inconsistencies were laid bare by self-serving policy reversals and increasingly visible inequality in a supposedly classless society. Ultimately, 1980 can be understood as a flashpoint for dissatisfaction simmering in everyday life, despite improvements in the consumer and service industries from 1972 on. Over 125,000 Cubans rejected the legitimacy of the revolutionary state, seeking exile in the United States as part of the Mariel Boat Lift.1 For those who remained, the terms of the debate would never be the same.

Cuban Realities Collide: The American Dream in Exile

As María de los Angeles Torres and others have argued, the 1970s represent a sort of détente for Cuban-U.S. relations, as both Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter made inroads toward facilitating diplomatic relations.2 While these attempts were ultimately derailed in 1980 by the

1 Martínez-Fernández gives the figure of 125,266. Luis Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 159.

2 See de los Angeles Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, Levine, Secret Missions, Leogrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel.

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Mariel Boat Lift, for a brief period beginning in the mid-1970s, increased diplomacy translated into real and transformative contact between average Cubans and average “Americans” in the form of Cubans who had lived in the United States for over a decade.3 The family visits established as part of this diplomatic opening allowed Cuban exiles and their children to return to the island for the first time since the mass exodus that began in the early days of the Revolution.

By establishing contact between the citizenries of both countries that was not mediated by state- sponsored vitriol, these visits destabilized the popular image of the United States held by average

Cubans. The visits took place in the context of the societal debates over the value of the thin-cow mentality discussed in previous chapters and thereby exacerbated pre-existing tensions regarding the meaning of the revolution. This was true especially in terms of what the revolution meant for the opportunities available to and responsibilities shouldered by citizens, the role of consumer goods and services in everyday life, and the value of individual freedoms as opposed to collective guarantees.

Initially, the family visits were open exclusively to young Cubans whose parents had taken them out of the country as children. The process of securing legal authorization for the visits was spearheaded by politicized young Cubans in the United States who expressed ideological sympathy with or at least openness to the revolution. The generational difference between these visitors and their parents, who had sought exile in the United States, was crucial to the youths’ desire to visit. The young visitors had lived most of their lives in the United States, an experience that shaped both their ethnic and political identities as well as their understanding

3 María de los Angeles Torres, In the Land of Mirrors. While most Cuban exiles continued to consider themselves Cuban as opposed to American or even Cuban-American through the 1970s, I use the term “American” here to refer to the ways that these returning exiles embodied a lifestyle associated with the United States in the eyes of those with whom they had contact on the island.

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of and curiosity about the Cuban Revolution. The visits developed from organizational efforts on

U.S. college campuses, which created space for debates about Cuba that diverged from the hardline perspective that had come to dominate the concentrated centers of the exile community in South Florida and New Jersey. This perspective accepted nothing less than the complete isolation of Cuba until the overthrow of the Castro regime and opposed visiting the island on principle due to the potential that tourist dollars had to shore up the Castro government.4

As a result of the efforts of these organized young Cubans, those who were under 18 in

1959 were allowed to visit in small numbers beginning in the mid-1970s, and in 1977, the Cuban state authorized the first large group visit. Known over the course of repeat visits as the Antonio

Maceo Brigades, the young people who took part in these group visits had a “tremendous influence on the government and people of Cuba, who previously had been unwilling to communicate with Cubans who had left.” As in exile, hardliners had long dominated debates on the island, where distorted images of the exile community as enemies of the revolution were disseminated by the revolutionary state to “publicly encourage” people to “despise those who had left.”5 The arrival of the Antonio Maceo Brigades, composed of young people who were willing to engage with the revolution and excited to reconnect with lost loved ones and homeland, humanized the exile community among average Cubans. The impact of the Brigades spread beyond those with whom the visitors had direct contact as part of their state-planned trip through the Jesus Diaz documentary 55 Hermanos (55 Brothers), which was shown across the island.

4 See Nuevos Rumbos, the official publication of the Federation of Cuban Students at the University of Florida, for examples of students exploring their identities in relation to both the United States and Cuba. See also Contra viento y marea, a testimonial on these themes released by Grupo Areíto, a group of Cuban and Cuban American students, which won the Cuban Casa de las Americas literary prize in 1978 (Krebs, La Revolución Preparada).

5 de los Angeles Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, 90-93.

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Beginning with preparations for the first visit of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, the revolutionary state began to cast the exile community in a positive light, a trend that dominated official discourse from 1977 to 1979. This was a huge divergence from the official stance both before and after this two-year period, which emphasized the counterrevolutionary intentions and actions of the exiles.6 A sympathetic piece on the 1978 visit of the “little Maceos,” the children of Antonio Maceo Brigade members, that was published in Mujeres in this period is indicative of this rhetorical shift. It paints those who left Cuba in the early 1960s as cowards, perhaps, but not traitors or counterrevolutionaries. The parents of the Antonio Maceo Brigade members, the grandparents of the “little Maceos,” the piece explains, had been motivated by “fear of the loss of parental rights [‘patria potestad’], of communism, and in many cases, the sacrifices” necessary in building a revolution.7 The little Maceos, fifteen children between the ages of six and fourteen, came from all over the United States and Puerto Rico. The goal of the trip, at least from the perspective of the Cuban state, was to plant “fruitful seeds in their hearts” that they “would not forget” due to the “call of the authentic Cubanness” that lived inside of them, no matter their place of birth. This aligned with their parents’ motivations in creating and joining the Antonio

Maceo Brigades and presumably also in sending their children to the island: to reconnect with estranged loved ones and better understand their roots, an experience that they had been denied by the hostile relationship between Cuba and the United States.

In interviews, most of the little Maceos painted rosy pictures of their time in Cuba, emphasizing the island’s beauty and the warm welcome they received from their Cuban counterparts. The interviews are also characterized by an extensive and often heartrending focus

6 Ibid., 98.

7 Heidy Rodriguez Rey, “Estos niños nuestros,” Mujeres (Havana), Oct. 1978, p 8.

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on the children’s experiences of racial discrimination in the United States. While the interviewer capitalized on this turn of the conversation, calling the United States the “cradle of racial discrimination,” and perhaps even steered the children there herself, the state press’ use of U.S. race relations as propaganda did not make it less true that painful experiences of exclusion on the basis of race were a lived reality for many of the children.8 While white Cubans faced discrimination in exile, black Cubans were doubly disadvantaged. Luisa Castillo, a twelve-year- old who lived in Boston, described being restricted to certain restaurants and bathrooms throughout the city and forced to ride at the back of the bus.9 Considering this experience, it is no wonder that Luisa was one of the two children who expressed a desire to remain in Cuba or to return to live in Cuba after turning eighteen. While the revolutionary state had not eliminated racism in the early 1960s as Fidel Castro famously claimed, it had outlawed segregation and made substantial strides in reducing racial disparities in education, employment, and other significant sectors of society.10

Race was not the only area where both visitors to Cuba and those with whom they had contact on the island noted significant differences between life in the United States and that in

Cuba. After discussing the experiences of his black friends who attended segregated schools in

8 Ibid.

9 While the interview took place thirteen years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – federal legislation outlawing discrimination – was passed, Boston was still home to considerable racial segregation, to the extent that Boston Public Schools were under court control from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s to facilitate desegregation through busing. Busing aimed to reverse the systematic exclusion of both black and Latino students, but the decade-long process exacerbated racial tensions in the city due to its deep unpopularity with white residents. Delmont and Theoharis, “Rethinking the Boston ‘Busing Crisis,’” pp. 191-203.

10 For a long history of race in twentieth century Cuba, including balanced analysis of the achievements and shortcomings of the revolutionary state regarding racial discrimination and inequality, see de la Fuente, A Nation for All.

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the United States, six-year-old Carlitos Pérez shocked the interviewer by responding negatively when asked if he would like to live in Cuba:

– But why, if you just said that you like Cuba and that it’s your homeland?

– It’s that there are no Corn Flakes here!

– Carlitos, did you say that you don’t like that there are schools for black children and different schools for white children?

Carlitos nods his head, vehemently.

– Well, there are no Corn Flakes here, but in our schools black and white children are brothers . . . What do you think is better?

Carlitos scratches his head, and with a spontaneous and impetuous gesture, he throws his arms around [the interviewer’s] neck and answers:

– There are no Corn Flakes, auntie, there are no Corn Flakes!11

Corn Flakes, first developed by the U.S.-based Kellogg’s corporation in 1898, are an iconic product associated with the American way of life.12 The cereal, like many other foodstuffs, had been imported into Cuba in the pre-revolutionary era.13 In this article, Mujeres used the cereal as shorthand for U.S. imperialism and mass consumerism. This exaggerated encounter took the moral one-upmanship of state media to new heights in emphasizing the frightening, contagious nature of materialistic values. As evidenced by Carlitos’ desire to return to the United States for

Corn Flakes despite rampant racial prejudice, the temptations of mass consumerism were sufficient to turn even an innocent child away from an innate value system that recognized the humanity and equality of others.

11 Ibid., 9.

12 History of Corn Flakes from Kellogg’s official website, accessed online 5 March 2018: https://www.kelloggs.com/en_US/who-we-are/our-history.html.

13 See Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, for a history of U.S. economic and cultural influence in Cuba from the mid- nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.

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While a six-year-old’s devotion to Corn Flakes was perhaps in a league of its own,

Carlitos was not the only one to notice the significant material divergence between lifestyles in

Cuba and lifestyles in the United States as a result of the growing openness in U.S.-Cuban relations. With the success of the Maceo Brigades, the U.S. and Cuban governments agreed to open travel to the wider exile population. As U.S.-based Cubans’ ability to visit the island expanded, families were reunited, and friends and relatives saw each other for the first time in perhaps twenty years. Though there were many in the exile community who continued to view the visits as an implicit sanction of Castro’s rule, and therefore refused the opportunity, in the words of historian María Cristina García, “after years of loneliness and separation, family now took precedence over political ideologies” for those who flooded the island beginning in

December 1978.14

The visitors from the United States brought necessities as well as the newest consumer goods, sometimes straining their budgets to do so, and inundated the island with goods from the capitalist world for the first time in decades. As people caught up with one another and took stock of their lives, a new frame of comparison emerged. Restrictive travel policies and state control over the media had long limited Cubans’ horizons to the socialist world. Films, TV shows, and magazines imported from the Soviet bloc as well as Cuban media’s preferential coverage of the second world painted pictures of life in the heart of communism. Suddenly, these pictures were accompanied by new, living, breathing images of life in the United States, transmitted by Cubans who shared a culture, despite the enormous cultural changes wrought by the revolution, and a history with those who had remained on the island. People could not help but compare their lives in Cuba with those of their loved ones in the United States, and some

14 García, Havana USA, 52.

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began to question the value of the revolution. Seemingly frivolous concerns over Corn Flakes or cars can be understood as individual rejections of core ideological tenets of the revolutionary state’s value system, including its emphasis on shared sacrifice and the collective over the rights and opportunities of the individual.

In a roughly one-year period in 1978 and 1979, 120,000 Cubans visited Cuba.15 A

December 1978 article in The Washington Post highlighted the material influx that accompanied the first of these visitors: “hundreds of exiles, most with pockets and suitcases bulging, visit

[Cuba] monthly.”16 The article errs on the side of the sudden goodwill between Cuba and the

United States and presents Cuba in a positive light, minimizing austerity on the island by presenting it as if it applied only to luxury goods, not necessities. After identifying the goods most desired in Cuba as “medicines, leather shoes, stylish clothing, and small appliances,” the author emphasizes the Cuban government’s commitment to providing “food, clothing, and shelter” to its population without mention of the extent to which on-going scarcity negatively impacted the government’s ability to live up to these ideological commitments. The article also indicates that ideological tensions on the island, like those within the exile community, were thrown into sharp relief by the visits, as “hardline revolutionaries” refused the goods provided through familial connections with the United States.17

Yet the relationship between the revolutionary state and the goods brought in by its newly-embraced former enemies was more complex than the fairly clear-cut distinction between hardline and average revolutionary individuals. While individual revolutionaries may have felt

15 de los Angeles Torres, 97.

16 Karen DeYoung, “Cuban Exiles Visit Home with Gifts ‘Made in USA,’” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), 21 December 1978.

17 Ibid.

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an ideological compulsion to reject the goods, the state itself welcomed the influx of resources with open arms by implementing a number of measures to facilitate the process, including establishing minimal duties on goods brought into the country and expanding a system of stores that catered to foreigners. These stores, named diplotiendas for the diplomats that they were ostensibly created to serve, were sites were non-Cubans could acquire consumer goods that were either unavailable or available only in rationed quantities to Cubans. With the advent of the family visits, the state expanded the system, and Cuban exiles buying goods for their family members became its primary customers.18 It is certainly possible, and perhaps likely, that some state representatives harbored an ideological aversion to the goods then arriving from the capitalist world as did the individual hardline revolutionaries cited in the article above; however, at the level of policy, economic concerns trumped ideological ones. The revolutionary state embraced and sought to maximize the influx of cold, hard cash.

Thus, segments of the Cuban population gained indirect access to the diplotiendas through the family visits. An unintentional result of this policy was the expansion of material inequality in Cuba, a phenomenon that up to this point had been largely confined to the gap between members of the privileged political class and everyone else. From the perspective of the state, the expansion of the diplotiendas in this period was less about fomenting inequality, which ran contrary to the egalitarian ideals that guided domestic economic policy, than it was about providing the Cuban state with much-needed hard currency to make purchases on the international market to supplement their preferential trade deals with COMECON. Shoppers made purchases at the diplotiendas with Cuban pesos, yet to do so they were required to present a document stating that the pesos had been acquired through the exchange of hard currency.

18 Ibid.

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These documents attested at the point of purchase to the infusion of hard currency into the Cuban economy.19 The exchange rate that visitors paid for pesos was downright predatory: $100 U.S. dollars netted $75 Cuban pesos in this period.20 Even members of the privileged political class stood to gain from access to the diplotiendas through visiting family members. Despite the other material advantages that she acquired through her status, the law barred Lorna Burdsall along with all other Cubans then living on the island from the diplotiendas. When her mother took advantage of the new travel opportunities to visit her daughter in 1978, she used the “foreigner’s store” to purchase two high demand items that were characteristic of the system’s offerings: a

$70 Japanese vacuum cleaner and jeans for her grandson, who struggled to find clothing that fit him at the stores accessible to Cubans.21 For the politically privileged like Burdsall who gained even greater access to goods through the family visits, inequality compounded inequality.

The Cuban government’s heavy-handed attempts to leverage family visits into a source of much-needed hard currency were no secret to the visiting exiles, many of whom felt exploited by the practice and left embittered, as María de los Angeles Torres has argued. In addition to being subject to the inflated exchange rate, exiles were required to travel under the aegis of the state tourism apparatus and to purchase package deals that they rarely used because they preferred to spend time in the homes of loved ones.22 A weeklong visit from Miami could cost up to $1,500 for exiles staying in the private homes of family members, over four times the cost of a weeklong stay at comparable Caribbean tourist destinations.23 Thus, the Cuban state’s temporary embrace

19 Ibid.

20 Burdsall, CHC, Box No 1, Folder No 13, February 1, 1978.

21 Ibid.

22 García, Havana USA, 52.

23 de los Angeles Torres, 97.

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of the exile community must be understood in terms of the “new, more cynical function” that the community acquired “for the Cuban state [in this period,] as bearer of hard currency.”24 This approach paid off, at least in the short term. María Cristina García cites a figure published by the

Miami Herald claiming that by April 1979 the exile visitors had already injected $150 million in hard currency into the Cuban economy.25

This cash infusion was the primary short-term benefit of the détente between Cuba and the United States and the revolutionary state’s policies surrounding it. By contrast, the long-term effects of this short-lived opening were uniformly negative, at least from the perspective of revolutionary leadership. The brief interlude of comradery across the Florida Straits greatly reduced the legitimacy of the Cuban state in the eyes of many of its citizens. The experience of interacting with the exiles and observing through them what life was like in the United States played a decisive role in the considerations of many of the 125,000 Cubans who chose to leave

Cuba as part of the 1980 Mariel Boat Lift. Osvaldo Ramírez, himself a Mariel refugee, later remembered how the family visits shook reality as he knew it. Though the revolutionary state had spent years claiming that the exiles lived in poverty in the United States and that they did not love the families they had left behind in Cuba, the reality that these family members presented in the flesh was quite different. As Ramírez remembered, it was the first time in decades that the

Cuban people had first-hand knowledge about life in the United States, and many marveled not only over the material things that characterized such a life but also over the freedom to travel:

Within himself, for the first time, the Cuban started to think ‘if these are common workers, and they travel and can spend money bringing us things, then it is because things are not so bad there. What’s bad is what we have here, because we can’t travel anywhere. Sometimes we can’t even move even within Cuba from one

24 Ibid., 98.

25 García, Havana USA, 52.

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province to another, and they don’t give us permission to encounter different places. And these Cubans, who until yesterday were gusanos, are taking us practically to the subsoil.’26

As a result of these visits, Cubans began to feel like “prisoners in their own country,” as Ramírez explained, an apt analogy given that the Boat Lift began with the drama of a prison break, a bus plowing down the fence at the Peruvian embassy.27

As Ramírez noted, it was significant that on the whole, the comparisons facilitated by the family visits were comparisons between working class lifestyles in Cuba and those in the United

States, and not comparisons between the Cuban proletariat and an exile bourgeoisie who were living some hackneyed and inflated American Dream. Despite the popular stereotype that Cuban exiles were an exceptionally successful immigrant group – the “golden exiles” – socioeconomic data indicate that their experience in the United States was similar to that to that of Puerto Rican and Mexican immigrants, who along with Cubans comprised the three largest Latinx immigrant groups in the United States. The conditions of exile meant that some Cubans were quite well-off, especially those who brought wealth, skills, or connections from their lives in Cuba, but the exile population was anything but monolithic.

In 1979, as the family visits were on-going, Metropolitan Dade County prepared a report objecting to the U.S. federal government’s plan to eliminate the Cuban Refugee Assistance

Program, a program created in 1961 to aid Cubans fleeing the revolution. As argued in the report, the Cuban population in South Florida “represent[ed] a microcosm of the Cuban nation” because by the late 1970s people from diverse socioeconomic strata had entered exile. The report

26 José García, Voces del Mariel, 117. Gusano, which literally means worm, was used so often to describe Cubans who did not support the Cuban revolution that it became synonymous with such, which is why the shift in official rhetoric from terms like “worm” or “scum” to “exile community” in this brief period is so notable.

27 Ibid., 118.

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continued that “the generally accepted fact that all Cubans and Cuban-Americans are ‘well-off’ is totally fallacious,” especially given increased immigration from the middle and lower classes after 1964. Income levels among the exile population remained below the national average in the

United States during the 1970s. As the report detailed, in 1976, just two years before the start of the family visits, the median income of Non-Hispanic individuals in the United States was

$6,064, while that of Cuban individuals was $4,975, only slightly higher than that of Puerto

Rican ($4,890) and Mexican ($4,873) individuals and well below average income of the non-

Hispanic population.28

These numbers, however, are deliberately misleading. Given the purpose of the report to illustrate the need for continued federal assistance, these statistics were presented in terms of individual earnings rather than family earnings. Due to the tendency of Cuban women living in the United States to work outside of the home and the prevalence of multigenerational households in the exile community, family income levels among Cuban exiles were actually much closer to non-Hispanic family income levels than those of other Latin American immigrant families. In 1979, for example, median family income among U.S. families was $19,917. For

Cuban families it was $18,245, whereas the median income for other “Spanish-origin” families was considerably lower: $14,712. Therefore, even though individual incomes remained below national averages, there was some truth to the stereotype that Cuban exiles had found unique socioeconomic success. Economic success within the Cuban exile community tended to be built

28 Metropolitan Dade County, Florida, in conjunction with Dade County Public Schools and the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, The Cuban Refugee in 1979: A Rebuttal, Series 3, Box 298, “Cuban Refugee Assistance, 1978,” Lawton Chiles Senate Collection, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. The report cites U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports March 1976 for these numbers.

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on family strategies for socioeconomic advancement as opposed to individual success.29

Interestingly, the primary factors contributing to that success, women working outside of the home and the prevalence of multigenerational households, mimicked trends that had developed on the island, though for very different reasons.

Yet even family incomes lagged behind the median income for non-Hispanic families, and many Cuban exiles, particularly vulnerable groups like the elderly, lived in poverty in the

United States.30 Perhaps what is most striking about the impact of the family visits is that this less-than-perfect truth did not dim the allure of the limited American Dream embodied by the visiting exiles but rather quite the opposite. It reinforced connections between island Cubans and their visitors. The visitors’ lifestyles seemed to attest that Cuban workers could do similar jobs in the United States with the education and training that they already had and be better off by a number of measures than they were in Cuba. This was a damning assessment of a revolution meant to be building a socialist workers’ paradise.

As Cubans took stock of their lives and found the revolution lacking, the family visits became a source of discontent for many on the island. As María Cristina García has argued, these encounters and the shift in official rhetoric surrounding them were eye-opening for all Cubans, who had long lived with uniformly negative portrayals of exile life. They were especially disconcerting for Cubans born and raised by the revolution, whose contact with the rest of the world had largely been limited to the socialist bloc. This limited window on the world shaped expectations about material lifestyles and the rights and responsibilities of individuals vis-à-vis the state in important ways, and the exiles’ visits disrupted these expectations and the norms they

29 Pérez, “Cubans in the United States,” 134-35. 1979 numbers compiled and computed from 1980 U.S. Census data.

30 García, Havana USA, 110.

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engendered. The revolutionary state’s abrupt and self-serving shift in rhetoric towards the exiles was disconcerting for many, and undermined faith in the reliability of the revolutionary state as the sole source of information and guidance in Cuba. Together, new awareness of how life could be in the United States and new skepticism of the revolutionary state’s intentions and abilities led many to consider exile with fresh eyes. This fresh perspective undoubtedly contributed to the

Mariel Boat Lift.

For those who did not have family in the United States and had no intention of leaving

Cuba, the visits produced discontent of a slightly different kind. Many were excluded from the exiles’ gift-giving tours because they did not have family or friends in exile. As they watched their neighbors and friends accumulate goods that were out of their reach, those with no connection to exiles felt that the consumer benefits experienced by their better-connected peers were unfair.31 These critiques aligned with what Cubans had been taught to think about consumerism since the onset of austerity in the early 1960s, especially the egalitarian rationale that undergirded the revolutionary state’s approach to consumption, which revolved around the idea that there may not be much, but what there was should be shared equally by everyone. The five-year-plan for the economy introduced in 1976 stated a desire to increase quantity and quality of production so that all Cubans – with or without high standing in the PCC or one of the mass organizations and, after 1978, with or without family or friends living abroad – could have better access to consumer goods.32 This gesture towards future equality indicates state recognition of the inequality produced by on-going practices and state policies even before the family visits accentuated it.

31 de los Angeles Torres, 98.

32 DeYoung, “Cuban Exiles Visit Home with Gifts ‘Made in USA.’”

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Yet the Cuban state had been unable to translate this ideological commitment to egalitarian consumption into reality; in fact, they were never able to do so. This phenomenon was especially troubling because disparities produced by the revolutionary state’s policies compounded certain historic inequalities supposedly eliminated by its social justice-oriented approach. For example, the inequalities that grew out of some Cubans’ preferential access to goods in 1978 and 1979 actually exacerbated racial inequalities whose roots extended back centuries. Black Cubans were more likely to be left out of the flow of goods coming from the

United States in these years due to the simple fact that black Cubans were underrepresented in exile. In fact, black Cubans did not seek exile in the United States in significant numbers until

1980 with the Mariel Boat Lift.33 Their experience in exile was also marked by inequality, which limited their subsequent ability to contribute economically to family that remained on the island.

Black Cubans in the exile community were the least likely to have expendable income. If white

Cubans’ incomes were lower than those of non-immigrant Americans, black Cubans were doubly disadvantaged: black Cubans’ income in the United States lagged behind that of their white peers as much as 40percent as late as 1990.34 Thus, even those willing to evaluate the material conditions of their everyday lives under the Cuban revolution on the revolution’s own egalitarian terms would have found the revolution lacking, especially after the family visits began to exacerbate pre-existing inequality.

In the spring of 1980, groups of discontented Cubans desperate enough to leave that they were willing to risk prison time by seeking exile in various Latin American embassies, sometimes using force, created a new type of opening. This opening grew when Fidel Castro

33 Grenier and Pérez, The Legacy of Exile, 24.

34 García, Havana USA, 110.

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announced that Cuban forces would not stop any Cuban who wished to leave from doing so.35

María Cristina García has written that “what began, then, as an economic campaign to alleviate

Cuba's sagging economy resulted in what some emigres jokingly called the blue-jean revolution.”36 Yet this joke, like many, contains a kernel of truth about the relationship of consumer and material culture to the decision of 125,000 Cubans to leave Cuba in 1980. Seeking exile involved sacrificing everything one had in Cuba – an entire life, including family and community relationships as well as guaranteed access to employment, healthcare, education, and the basic goods necessary for survival – for an uncertain future in the United States, a place marked by racial discrimination and the ills of modern capitalism, as the Cuban press never passed up an opportunity to point out. It involved facing a dangerous maritime journey on overloaded ships and the prospect of never again seeing loved ones left behind. To do so for a pair of blue jeans does seem like the absurd set-up to an elaborate joke; however, examination of blue jeans as a symbol, deployed by both the Cuban state and populace, often to different ends, reveals that, to the Mariel refugees, blue jeans represented much more than the cheap temptations of life under mass consumerism.

By 1980, as exiles began making this joke, blue jeans had become shorthand for the individual freedoms enshrined in the capitalist world, most centrally the innate value of self- expression. The explosion of discontent leading up to the Mariel Boatlift was a direct result of the reorientation of the lens through which Cubans understood their everyday lives, away from the socialist world coupled with a distorted vision of life in the United States toward the limited

35 Fidel Castro, “May Day Rally,” Speech by Cuban President Fidel Castro at International Workers Day rally held at Jose Marti Revolution Square, Havana, May 1, 1980. Accessed online 18 Jan. 2018 at Castro Speech Database, Latin American Network Information Center, University of Texas: http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1980/19800501-1.html.

36 García, Havana USA, 53-54.

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but compelling American Dream showcased by the visits of their estranged friends and family members. This process compounded social debates about the value of consumer goods that were already taking place due to the revolutionary state’s efforts to exhort the population into maintaining a thin cow mentality in the era of the fat cows. These debates centered on the relationship of the individual to the collective. The family visits introduced new terms to the debate by highlighting alternative approaches to consumerism and the role of goods and services in daily life. The contact between Cuban worker and exiled Cuban worker led many to question the value of their hard work and its dividends for their daily lives. Individuals began to reconsider what they were working for, the future good of the collective, promised by the Cuban state, or the working-class lifestyles of modest single-family homes, personal vehicles, and the ability to travel and consume exhibited by the U.S.-based lifestyles of their peers.

The revolutionary state miscalculated the impact of the family visits, ultimately trading a short-term cash infusion for the radical destabilization of the social contract of sacrifice that they had crafted with citizens in the early 1960s and revised in the wake of the failed 10 Million Ton

Harvest. Yet no one could have foreseen the Mariel boat lift; It was not an automatic response to the family visits. Instead, the family visits must be understood as one of many events in revolutionary history that sparked renewed debate about the role of material and consumer cultures in the pursuit of communism. As the material traces of mass consumerism flooded the island in the late 1970s, various sectors of Cuban society sought to understand these goods and assign them value within the contexts of their individual lives and worldviews. As revolutionary leadership attempted to shape the outcome of these debates, the concept of ideological diversionism, repeatedly deployed by the revolutionary state to help navigate and control periods

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of change in the material and consumer realms, was again reinvigorated and contested from all sides.

Ideological Diversionism and the Temptations of Mass Consumerism

The revolutionary state re-conceptualized the role of consumerism in Cuba after the failure of the 10 Million Ton Harvest, taking into account the growing opportunities for consumption engendered by Cuba’s integration into COMECON. At the same time, revolutionary leaders like Raúl Castro began refining an understanding of material goods as powerful Cold War weapons. As Lillian Guerra’s work has shown, Raúl Castro first defined ideological diversionism as a political crime in 1968. The charge could be ambiguously interpreted to enforce standards of masculinity and femininity as well as discourage individualism and interpretations of socialism, the revolutionary mission, or the nature of the imperialist threat that diverged from those offered by the revolutionary leadership.37 As early as

1972, revolutionary leaders had begun revising definitions of ideological diversionism to incorporate concerns about the temptations of capitalism and the wily ways that the revolution’s enemies could use these temptations – including the allure of blue jeans – to recruit counterrevolutionaries. That June, Raúl Castro gave a speech to commemorate the eleventh anniversary of the Ministry of the Interior. His speech was published in 1985 in honor of the III

Congress of the PCC and distributed under the name “Ideological diversionism: the subtle weapon brandished against the Revolution by its enemies,” an early manifestation of the ideological doubling-down with regard to consumption that accompanied the 1986 Rectification of Errors campaign and its rejection of market reforms.38

37 Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 228-30.

38 Raúl Castro, “El diversionismo ideológico.”

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In his 1972 speech to Ministry of the Interior employees, Castro argued that exposure to capitalist culture was being used as a weapon against the Revolution. He characterized ideological diversionism as a particularly insidious enemy because of the ways that certain aspects of physical appearance or types of material goods could somehow worm their way into people’s consciousness, turning them away from socialism and the value system and obligations that it entailed. Too much contact with the capitalist world was especially threatening for Cuba’s youth, whose malleable minds would easily be swayed by the sparkle, glamour, and affluence of capitalist society and culture. The implication seemed to be that if Cubans liked anything about capitalism–even its seemingly benign manifestations like clothing or music styles–then they could easily be turned against the Cuban revolution. It certainly does not speak highly of the confidence that revolutionary leaders like Raúl had in their people and their mission that they were convinced that too much awareness of how life was lived in the capitalist world would lead

Cubans to choose capitalism over socialism.39

According to Raúl Castro, the vehicle for capitalist temptation ranged widely from efforts by foreign governments and the foreign media to interpersonal interactions between individuals, even among family members. This threat was always framed as an external threat infringing on

Cuban culture and reality, rather than what it truly was: an external threat, perhaps, but one that found fertile soil in the material conditions of Cuban reality. Castro cited radio programs developed by the United States to defame Cuba and the revolutionary government and “incite the youth to acquire extravagant lifestyles and not participate actively in the revolutionary process,”

39 It is worth nothing that multiple historians of the socialist bloc point to growing awareness of capitalist lifestyles, spread through TV signals which stretched beyond national borders or socialist states’ selective embrace of western shows deemed politically-non-threatening, as a source of discontent that contributed to the eventual rejection of socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. See, for example, Stephen Kotkin, Amageddon Averted.

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all with the aim of breeding discontent, frustration, and confusion within the population.40 One such show, El show de la nueva ola, began to broadcast in 1968 and encouraged Cuban youth to get together in groups to listen. These groups adopted names like “the Psychedelic Rockets” and

“The Boys of the Flower,” and Castro attributed the rise in antisocial behavior, particularly among groups of young people, to the show.41

Later, the press would repeatedly point to the publication Vanidades Continental, published in Miami but distributed throughout Latin America, as an arm of the counterrevolutionary effort waged by Cuban exiles concentrated in that city.42 The temptations that the trappings of a capitalist lifestyle posed to Cuban youth were not confined to the deliberate efforts of Cuba’s ideological enemies, however. Castro continued to state that magazines from capitalist countries also posed a risk of fomenting ideological diversionism simply by showcasing the lifestyles enjoyed by young people in capitalist countries, including sections on news, music, art, and films. He even lists specific magazines, such as Mundo Joven, a

Brazilian publication, Diez Minutos (Spanish), and Onda (Chilean).43 These magazines were produced with a national and perhaps an international audience in mind, but they certainly were not produced with the express aim of attacking Cuban socialism. They did not even necessarily come from Cuba’s ideological opponents, as the Chilean government was headed by Marxist

President Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973. The implication here seemed to be that these magazines posed a risk to the Cuban state simply because youth culture in capitalist countries

40 Castro, “El diversionismo ideológico,” 17.

41 Ibid., 23. It’s unclear if this show is affiliated with the “nueva ola” music movement, popular in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in Puerto Rico and the Southern Cone.

42 See “En el XV aniversario de Mujeres,” Mujeres (Havana), Nov. 1976, p. 4, and Teresa Díaz Lago, “Lo que ocultan esas bellas páginas,” Mujeres (Havana), Dec. 1982, p. 46.

43 Castro, “El diversionismo ideológico,” 23.

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appealed greatly to Cuban youth, sometimes, depending on individual experiences and value systems, more than the Cuban revolution did.

The dangerous temptations of a capitalist lifestyle could also be spread through all manner of interpersonal relationships. For example, in the speech Castro discussed foreigners inciting important Cubans who had access to the outside world, such as athletes and diplomats, to defect by highlighting the benefits of capitalist society through parties, lavish dinners and even informal conversations “where they experienced the benefits of a consumer society.”44 Castro also addressed the issue of correspondence between Cuban exiles and their friends and family still living on the island. Interestingly, he grouped this correspondence together with resources employed “by the enemy of our country,” referencing the United States and implying that such letters were written as part of a campaign directed by Cuba’s enemies specifically to generate discontent.45 These letters, he explained, were a breeding ground for counterrevolutionary jokes and rumors. Plus, “it is not accidental or isolated that in this correspondence they send newspaper clippings, magazine advertisements, post cards and family photos, that all present the supposed ‘benefits’ of the North American consumer society, with the end of influencing the recipients.” Perhaps the most damning part of this practice, according to Raúl, is that these letters showcased an American Dream lifestyle that the senders were “far from enjoying” themselves.46

As discussed above, this statement is both true and untrue. While many in the exile community did struggle economically and might have benefitted from the collective rights enjoyed by island

44 Ibid., 22.

45 Ibid., 17. As Michelle Chase has argued, the exile community and U.S. government forces did use rationing and the on-going shortages of food and consumer goods in counterrevolutionary propaganda, a practice which began almost concurrently with the beginning of such shortages, Revolution within the Revolution, see especially Chapter 5.

46 Castro, “El diversionismo ideológico,” 18.

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Cubans in the forms of universal health care and education, the life of an average worker in the

United States included better access to the benefits of consumerism as well as greater individual freedom, advantages that stuck with many following the family visits.

Of course, the family visits took interpersonal contact across the Florida Straits to a new level, from sporadic letters and phone calls to face-to-face interaction. Interestingly, the contact between socialist and capitalist working communities that came in the form of the family visits had precisely the opposite effect of what socialist theory predicted. Such theory suggested that as result of contact between the two groups, it would be clear to working class capitalist audiences that the protections offered to workers and their families under socialism outweighed the easy comforts of capitalism. In June 1980 the PCC published a teachers’ manual on ideological diversionism for lecturers and leaders of political orientation groups in rural zones. The document is indicative of this view, despite the on-going Mariel exodus, which belied the manual’s insistence on the clear superiority of socialism, at least in the minds of over 120,000

Cubans. To aid teachers in explaining the sticky and ambiguous concept of ideological diversionism and the role of propaganda within it, the guide argues that socialist countries were forced to engage in propaganda to counter capitalist propaganda, in order to contain the spread of ideological diversionism.47 In contrast to capitalist propaganda, which focused exclusively on the benefits of mass consumerism, socialist propaganda should highlight the socialist way of life and the programs in existence that worked to continually improve the well-being of the people, emphasizing the ways in which salary, housing, and social security were structured to benefit the

47 PCC, Algunas consideraciones. 41.

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working class. More amorphous but equally important were the mental and spiritual benefits, such as the fulfilling sense of satisfaction, that came from living in a socialist society.48

The guide posits that the influence of each revolutionary in preaching the benefits of socialism to his family, neighbors, and fellow workers was the oldest and most reliable form of propaganda.49 In so doing, it implicitly deputized the average Cubans who studied it as part of their on-going ideological instruction (or perhaps Cubans who were sentenced to reeducation due to some misstep, more on this below) as the revolution’s most important source of propaganda.

Yet over the course of 1978 and 1979, as revolutionaries came into contact with family, neighbors, and fellow workers who had spent fifteen to twenty years across the Florida Straits, many came up short. Perhaps early perceptions of these shortcomings sparked the publication of the document in the first place, as a guide for Cubans seeking to reconcile the vast divergences between their lives in Cuba with the distorted images that had previously dominated their conception of life in the United States and the new images presented by the visiting exiles.50 If that was its intent, the guide was too little, too late. No wave of return to Cuba from the United

States matched the Cuban flow toward Miami.

The ambiguous nature of diversionism rendered the charge a useful catch-all for revolutionary leadership attempting to vilify worldviews or even interpretations of Marxism that ran counter to their social, political, and economic imperatives at any given moment. It also made the problem particularly difficult to root out. Diversionism centered on the tricky tactic of

48 Ibid., 44-45.

49 Ibid., 41-42.

50 For a publication date of June 1980, the document was likely in the late stages of editing during the embassy confrontations that presaged the Mariel Boat Lift in the spring of 1980. To some extent, then, the writing was on the wall at this point, though the extreme consequences with regard to migration patterns and U.S.-Cuban relations were not yet clear.

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undermining Marxism from within by attacking it from apparently Marxist positions.51 The ambiguity between legitimate Marxism and false Marxism used for diversionist aims gave leadership the authority to determine what was and was not an authentic Marxist position of critique, relying overall on their own personal interpretations of Marxism as it applied to the

Cuban case. For example, voices of opposition to the enforced thin-cow mentality could be vilified as diversionist forces, even if their critiques came from a deep-rooted loyalty to the revolution and a desire to make it better, despite a conflicting understanding of the most pressing problems facing the population and expedient solutions to those problems. The 1980 guide implicitly references such voices by stating that “ideological diversionism also proposes to detract from the principal objectives of the economy.”52 Under this category, anyone who criticized the emphasis on defense and other economic goals promoted by the thin-cow mentality and its toll on the promised improvements in the consumer and service industries was vulnerable to charges of ideological diversionism.

As in Raúl Castro’s speech almost a decade earlier, the 1980 instructional manual also identified youth as a primary target of both capitalist and socialist propaganda due to the belief that they could be easily swayed by the promises of mass consumption because they had not yet committed to true socialist ideals.53 At the same time, youth occupied a privileged space in the revolutionary hierarchy as blank canvases, beneficiaries of the revolution who were untainted by the prerevolutionary past. Many adopted revolutionary ideals and rhetoric in extreme forms, perhaps as a form of exploring and solidifying their identities in relation to their families, peers,

51 PCC, Algunas consideraciones, 13.

52 Ibid., 14.

53 Ibid., 35.

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and the overbearing state. The ambiguity of ideological diversionism which could be so handy for revolutionary leadership was a source of confusion and contention for many Cubans, particularly young people caught between the personal desire and peer pressure to embrace new fashions and the uncertainty of the political and ideological significance of doing so. Letters to the editor of Muchacha, the FMC’s youth magazine, in response to a piece published on societal debates about the value of fashion illustrate how some young Cubans attempted to define themselves as revolutionaries by taking the state script on diversionism with regard to youth fashions and running with it. Yet these young readers also express deep-rooted confusion, often unintentionally, thereby undermining the political and ideological stance that they seek so fiercely to defend. Much like with socialist legality in general, the lack of clarity with regard to the crime of ideological diversionism must have undermined its legitimacy in the eyes of citizens.

For example, one reader, Tania Amador wrote editors from Cienfuegos to offer her strong and considered opinions on everything from skirt length to the appropriate uses of jeans and tall boots in Cuban contexts. It is clear from the letter that fashion was a favorite topic of hers, and that she had thought deeply about the applicability of suspect international styles, like jeans and boots, to the revolutionary context; however, her letter is most significant for its lack of clarity about the relationship between ideological diversionism and fashion. Tania ends the letter by questioning whether the two were, in fact, the same thing. The response from editor Silvia

Bota clarified that the two were not necessarily the same, but that fashion is one of the “very subtle means” used by “reactionary sectors of contemporary society” to “penetrate the minds of those who are not sufficiently prepared in the political-ideological order.” Following the official stance of revolutionary leadership since the 1960s, Bota thus characterized fashion as a powerful

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force that must be carefully harnessed. She offered an example that was meant to clarify but actually obscured more than it revealed. After discussing how inappropriate it would be for a

Cuban to wear a U.S. Army t-shirt, given the history of U.S. interventionism in the island’s affairs and the anti-imperialist stance of the revolution, she then extends this comparison to all t- shirts with logos promoting transnational corporations in the capitalist world, as “symbols of consumer society.”54 No wonder young Cubans like Tania Amador were deeply confused about the political and ideological implications of their fashion choices: this comparison equates t- shirts with U.S. foreign policy in a way that simply did not align with the realities of international fashion or concurrent trends in Cuban youth fashions.

Due to the World Youth Festival, hosted in Havana in 1978, and the family visits, youth in Cuba were exposed to international styles more extensively in the late 1970s than perhaps in any other period since the triumph of the Revolution. Visitors made international styles available to some Cubans, and the prestige of their foreign origins coupled with their novelty to exacerbate demand among the rest of the youth population. One Cuban remembers feeling proud to strut down Obispo Street in Old Havana in the fall of 1979 wearing a “Manhattan” shirt–a loudly- patterned, short-sleeved, button-down–that his great aunt had brought him on her visit from West

Palm Beach, Florida, despite the polyester’s unsuitability for the Cuban climate.55 The trends established in these years showed serious staying power. In 1980, t-shirts were exploding in popularity among young men and women, with one of Cuba’s most prestigious youth publications going so far as to declare it the year the t-shirt.56

54 Letters to the Editor, Muchacha. (Havana), Nov. 1980, pp. 68-69.

55 Jorge Ignacio Domínguez, “La camisa es Manhattan, el resto es selva,” Tersites, blog accessed online 15 Nov. 2017: http://tersitesexcathedra.blogspot.com/2011/09/la-camisa-es-manhattan-el-resto-es.html.

56 Caimán Barbudo, 1980, cover. Thank you to Mike Bustamante for the source suggestion.

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In the midst of this social clamor for t-shirts, editor Bota’s response to Tania’s letter conflates the desire for this new, hip, and comfortable style with implicit support for U.S. imperialism through the embrace of consumerist values. This leap in logic was unlikely to have been on the minds of teenagers actively seeking the styles, except as a result of the efforts of state representatives like Bota, which publicly cast t-shirts as questionable. The use of foreign logos, which is at the heart of Bota’s rejection, remained controversial and debated; however, given the short-comings of the domestic fashion industry, particularly with regard to keeping up with youth fashions, the variability of individual tastes, and the widespread desire for a less homogenous clothing supply, it is likely that the decision to wear a shirt with a foreign logo had more to do with access to a t-shirt – all the better if it was somehow unique – than a desire to make a political statement. Through the early 1980s, Cuban youth and organizations like ICOIDI sought to reconcile the demand for t-shirts with state-sanctioned ideological values by calling for

Cuban-produced t-shirts with slogans specific to Cuban youth and revolutionary identity.57 The impact of these initiatives on consumer reality was severely limited, however: a national survey found that in the first half of 1985, a full five years into the national t-shirt craze, 81percent of people were unable to purchase women’s t-shirts, despite continued mass demand.58

A second letter to the editor published in response to the Muchacha piece on fashion cast further light on the confusing issue of how capitalist fashions could somehow be both ideologically suspect and not. In this letter, written by a seventeen-year-old student from Pinar del Río on behalf of herself and some friends, the student argued that fashion is political precisely because of the ways that imperialist forces could deploy it “to destroy a revolution.”

57 See, for example, Armando López, “A lo cubano: la gradica en la ropa: solución joven,” Opina (Havana), June 1980, pp. 13-15, and Lic. Clara Rey Mena, “¡Nuevo! Opina de modas,” Opina (Havana), July 1984, pp. 46-47.

58 Juan Opina, Opina (Havana), Nov. 1985, p. 3.

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Despite the fact that this argument is perfectly in line with how revolutionary leadership like

Raúl Castro had explained the dangers of capitalist lifestyles, including fashion as a lifestyle marker, as forces of ideological diversionism, Bota writes that the student takes this line of argument too far when she argues that Cubans should reject international fashions in favor of their own typical styles. All of Cuba’s typical clothing comes from somewhere else, Bota argues.

That is the nature of the fashion industry, and it is not only normal but acceptable to look to

“international fashion” for inspiration. Plus, in an effort to reconcile definitions of ideological diversionism with Cuban reality, she argues that all of the magazine’s readership likely already uses North American-style clothing without a problem, referencing “jeans, sandals and tennis shoes, comfortable t-shirts, blouses, and ‘Manhattan’ style shirts,” specifically.59

These two letters and the editor’s responses to them reveal the extent to which teen fashions were politically-charged, a field sprinkled with mines of ideological diversionism waiting for anyone who stepped off the beaten path. Yet they also reveal change over time within the context of the Cuban revolution, a political system and historical period too often seen as static, frozen in time. In the 1960s, trends associated with youth culture in the United States, particularly the use of sandals and form-fitting pants by men and mini-skirts by women, were considered serious political crimes that could land male offenders in labor camps under charges of homosexuality or intellectualism.60 These extreme associations between clothing styles, gender and sexuality, and social and criminal malaise persisted into the early 1970s. In his 1972 speech before MININT, Raúl referenced a speech given by Fidel Castro at the XII Congress of the Dimitrov Communist Youth League of Bulgaria just months before to explain why the

59 Letters to the Editor, Muchacha (Havana), Dec. 1980, pp. 68-69.

60 Guerra, Visions of Power, 227-230.

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temptations of ideological diversionism must be resisted. As Fidel had explained, while capitalist countries offer much materially, they offer nothing in the spiritual and moral realms, nor do they outline a “path” for their youth. The only possible result, therefore, is the annual rise in crime, hopelessness, drug addiction, and mental disturbance in societies centered on meaningless material pursuits. These perversions among the youth were even physically visible in the styles of dress and footwear popular in the capitalist countries, which were so extreme in defying the natural order of things that “in many of these cases you cannot even distinguish between boy and girl,” Fidel argued.61 Yet by the early 1980s, less than ten years later, the international tide of casual, unisex youth clothing in the form of t-shirts, jeans, and tennis shoes had arrived in Cuba to stay. It was welcomed with enthusiasm tempered by suspicion. Debates about these styles, and even the propriety of young people desiring to be fashionable in the first place, continued, but they were increasingly debates about how to reconcile the fashions to Cuban reality and values rather than official mandates to eliminate them altogether.

Revolutionary leadership found ideological diversionism spread through the temptations of capitalism so threatening precisely because it found a ripe audience among a Cuban population exhausted by over a decade of material sacrifice. This was especially true in 1972, when Raúl Castro made the speech, because of the exacerbated scarcity caused by the Ten

Million Ton Harvest in 1970. Yet, Raúl framed the issue differently, obscuring any state role in fomenting austerity and discontent and alleging that it was only the morally-corrupted elements of Cuban society that might find appeal in the material comforts of a consumer society. These people – “the discontent, the nonconformists, the loud mouth critics, the vain, the indiscrete, those that have a morally-disordered personal life, those that seek out goods from the capitalist

61 Raúl Castro, “El diversionismo ideológico,” 25.

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world, the ambitious, the vacillating, and the weak spirited” – were always being pursued by the enemy, regardless of the Cuban leadership’s policies, in Castro’s self-serving estimation.62

Many of these characterizations work together and could be easily applied to anyone who grumbled about austerity, rationing, and the continued difficulties of everyday life, as well as those who sought out a personal aesthetic that varied from the homogenous offerings at state-run clothing stores out of a sense of individualism or personal taste. All of these categories, but especially the latter, could be applied to most Cubans, as a result of widely-perceived national characteristics related to the idea that Cubans were innately creative. As remembered by one observer, the problems in the consumer realm during this period were less about scarcity of food or clothing, though items were often scarce, and more about the absence of control and choice in the realm of everyday life, which is something that people wanted in part because they were accustomed to it: As she explained during an oral history interview, “the Cuban is [defined] by the idea of getting what I want [el Cubano es ‘a lo que yo quiera’].”63 Yet it was precisely these notions of individual desire and power that were the problem. While the state celebrated Cuban ingenuity when it served state economic goals, it condemned the same impulse when put to the service of the individual. It was not the jeans or even the theoretical U.S. Army t-shirts that were so problematic for the revolutionary leadership, but the notion that individual desire and self- expression were meaningful and acceptable loci of decision-making that was the true diversionist element in a collective society. It stood in stark contrast to the ideological and moral positions that the revolutionary leadership encouraged in speeches, the educational systems, and, most notably, the media.

62 Raúl Castro, “El diversionismo ideológico,” 31.

63 Interview with Nancy Hernández Smith, Santiago de Cuba, July 2015.

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As we have seen, the 1970s was a decade of great change with regard to the opportunities for and attitudes about consumer and material cultures in Cuba. To ensure that citizens navigated this change along paths that revolutionary leadership found ideologically acceptable, the state expanded its media platforms for reaching and communicating with citizens in the mid-1970s.

These media outlets, particularly the expanded and revamped press, were on the front lines of increasingly nuanced debates about the role of consumerism in Cuba’s pursuit of communism.

The Cuban Press as Ideological Handbook

The revolutionary state sought to completely remake Cuban society. This revolution extended well beyond transformations in institutions and governance. In starts and fits, the state transformed all of the bases of daily life, including property ownership and exchange, the consumer and service economies, employment and payment, and the law and its enforcement.

They even attempted to transform the gender relations that served as foundation for the basic unit of society, the nuclear family and home economy. Analysis of the press in this period illustrates that journalists assumed a central role as mediators between state and citizen in the midst of this radical change. In many ways, the press served as a guide to revolutionary life, as journalists explained the law and revolutionary ideology and how they affected citizens’ lives. As we have seen, these press accounts were rarely traditional news pieces dedicated to documenting and communicating reality and current events. Instead, they were more often instructional or aspirational, guides to a future in the making. In addition to other facets of revolutionary life, the press also explained the consumer economy, orienting people to new ways of accessing goods and services, an important function in this period when the consumer economy was a site for experimentation and reform.

As Raúl Castro warned in 1972, the foreign press could be a tool for the spread of ideological diversionism. He charged the domestic press with counteracting this subversive

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influence. Journalists, among other cultural producers like artists and writers, were therefore responsible for educating the populace to be resistant to diversionism.64 Fashion was a central temptation used by the foreign press to tout the benefits of life under capitalist mass consumption and cultivate a desire to consume. It could also be a site for the creative expression of individual identity and desire. In the ideological and economic context of the Cuban revolution, it was a minefield. Yet fashion also had a basic function: people needed to clothe themselves, and simply put, the means with which the state provided them to do so were a consistent source of complaint and discontent. It is also significant that clothing styles have social meanings and can serve as important markers of modernity or cultural and economic stagnation, measuring sticks for the

Cuban revolution’s performance from both a domestic and an international perspective, and maintaining the revolution’s international reputation was a central goal for leadership. Given the impossibility of eliminating fashion altogether, the state entrusted the press with helping citizens navigate the minefield. This involved teaching people how to be fashionable in appropriate ways as well as emphasizing the relative unimportance of fashion generally in order to marginalize the state’s shortcomings. Again, the state sent mixed messages about fashion as both socially important and unimportant, depending on what best suited its needs.

To help it fulfill its role in ideological orientation, the press expanded alongside Cuba’s economic possibilities in the 1970s. At the first Congress of the Communist Party in 1975, revolutionary leadership approved the “thesis concerning the methods of mass diffusion,” which centered on the claim that “strengthening the organs of mass communication [was] indispensable to the education of the new generations.” The projected fortification of the press included the development of new specialized publications dealing with key topics including youth and

64 Raúl Castro, “El diversionismo ideológico,” 32.

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children, as well as the latest developments in art, science, technology, and sports.65 As a direct result of this initiative, Opina first appeared in the late 1970s, as did youth magazines like Somos

Jovenes, which began circulating in 1977. In addition to the development of new magazines, the state’s commitment to “strengthening the organs of mass communication” included establishing firmer ideological control over the content of existing magazines, a process facilitated by the mass organizations. In January 1978, all magazines targeting women were consolidated under the control of the Federation of Cuban Women.66

Given revolutionary leadership’s belief that youth were particularly prone to the allure of ideological diversionism, magazines like Somos Jovenes or Muchacha that translated revolutionary initiatives and mindsets for a young audience were of primary importance in combatting this elusive threat. By 1982, Somos Jovenes’ success was clearly illustrated by widespread and unmet demand, which led the editorial board to expand its circulation to 200,000 copies and increase its publication schedule from bi-monthly to monthly.67 However, the erratic publication record of the magazine reveals that the team found this goal difficult to fulfill throughout the 1980s due to ongoing paper scarcity and competition for scarce resources at the publishers, apparently more acute in some periods than in others.68 Material scarcity thus continued to impede state representatives in their pursuit of the goals mandated by leadership, even in the era of the fat cows.

65 Glabrera, “Tres éxitos y todos contentos,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Jan. 1982, p. 1.

66 Antonio López Sánchez, “Gladys Egües Cantero: Soy una periodista de temas menores,” La Jiribilla (Havana), Dec. 17-23 2011, accessed online 18 Nov. 2017: http://epoca2.lajiribilla.cu/2011/n554_12/554_17.html.

67 Ibid.

68 Somos Jovenes was far from the only magazine to have its publication schedule impacted by such difficulties. For example, the August-November 1982 issue of Muchacha began with an explanation that due to problems with their press, they had to cancel the August, September, and October issues, and reduce the size of each issue to 64 pages.

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Of course, the revolutionary state had always recognized the importance of the media, including magazines, in shaping attitudes about and perceptions of its performance. The Cuban revolution was a media savvy revolution that carefully crafted its image even before 1959, beginning with New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews’ visit to the Sierra Maestra and his subsequent coverage of the dashing barbudos. Mujeres, the official magazine of the FMC, was first introduced in 1961 to replace Vanidades, a Cuban publication that was widely distributed throughout the Caribbean and Latin America prior to 1959. The revolutionary state nationalized

Vanidades in 1960 due to the belief that the magazine spread values that undermined the revolutionary mission. At that point, Vanidades began to publish from exile, eventually as

Vanidades Continental. As a fifteenth anniversary retrospective on Mujeres put it, “with an attractive and seemingly harmless wrapper, the magazine Vanidades constituted a dose of counterrevolutionary poison.”69 The demonization and nationalization of Vanidades and its subsequent replacement with Mujeres aligns with the shift in revolutionary attitudes about consumption that took place in 1961 as identified by historian Michelle Chase: As it became clear to revolutionary leadership that political and economic obstacles would make attainment of the consumer paradise that they had initially promised impossible, at least in the immediate future, they shifted rhetorical gears from social justice through shared abundance to social justice through shared austerity.70

In the new atmosphere of collective sacrifice, the state simply could not tolerate a magazine like Vanidades, which Mujeres claimed dedicated 31percent of its content to advertisements for beauty, food, and home goods produced in the United States. Even the

69 “En el XV aniversario de Mujeres,” Mujeres (Havana), Nov. 1976, p. 4.

70 See Chase, Revolution within the Revolution, especially Chapter 5.

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minimal sections dedicated to practical advice on cooking, childrearing, gardening, and home upkeep “had the aim of transmitting the tastes, habits, and patterns of North American society, thereby idealizing and propagandizing its institutions and cultural values. That is to say, they tried to impose their ‘American way of life.’”71 In addition, unlike Mujeres, which aimed to appeal broadly to all Cuban women, the pre-revolutionary press targeted only the upper strata of

Cuban society. This was illustrated by the exclusive representation of white, fair-haired women and the fact that just 1percent of the magazine was devoted to cooking and 1.2percent devoted to childrearing.72 These tasks were completed by domestic workers, often women of color, rather than mothers in upper- and indeed many middle-class homes prior to the revolution.

After establishing the problems with Vanidades, the Mujeres retrospective continued to explain Mujeres’ superiority to its predecessor. The editorial board’s explanation of the magazine’s role in Cuban society can be understood to encompass the role of the press more generally, though different magazines targeted different sectors of the population. Both the revolutionary state and the press itself understood the press to be a central tool in building a revolutionary society through the guidance of a proportionately small vanguard of political leaders and cultural tastemakers. The press sought to orient people politically, call them to contribute to society economically and socially, and represent Cuban reality through concrete and clear examples that could teach people how to better confront the obstacles of daily life. The press promoted certain activities while discouraging others, and overall sought to translate

Marxist-Leninist ideology, as interpreted by revolutionary leadership, to the citizenry.

71 “En el XV aniversario de Mujeres,” 4.

72 Ibid.

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In the case of women specifically, Mujeres taught women “socialist patriotism.” It encouraged readers to see the world through a scientific lens, promoting the most up-to-date housekeeping and childrearing practices whose efficiency had been tested through the various scientific entities run by the Cuban and Soviet states. It also sought to aid women in confronting their material reality by orienting them toward a rational use of the goods available, exhorting them to turn their backs on the deformed vestiges of the past, which were characterized by “old myths, prejudices, extravagances, and incorrect habits,” depending on the class status of the reader. The press politicized the basic tasks of everyday life by using militaristic language. In this extended metaphor, used for decades by the Cuban state, Cuban homes, and kitchens especially, were battlegrounds, and journalists played the role of generals. Scientific rationality, as commanded by the press, was a Cuban woman’s key resource in running her kitchen and household in a way that contributed to the on-going war to overcome the difficulties caused by

Cuba’s underdevelopment and the blockade imposed by the United States.73

In addition to the expansion of the press in this period, the international context of the

1970s introduced new considerations into the role of the press, particularly with regard to the growing threat of ideological diversionism. The Cuban Revolution proved to be on the right side of history with many of its core values. Social justice made significant progress in the United

States in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of civil rights, feminist, Chicano, and student activism.

This led to elemental shifts in ethics and norms among the U.S. population, and the American press reflected these shifts. Thus, in the 1960s it was relatively easy for the Cuban government and revolutionary segments of the Cuban populace to dismiss U.S. magazines as backwards and inconsequential in light of the moral content of the revolution. The magazines reflected old

73 Ibid.

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values, casting women as inferior to men, incapable of more than maintaining the home, which undermined their appeal among a Cuban audience caught up in the humanistic fervor of the revolution. By the 1970s, however, the threat of ideological diversion contained in these magazines grew enormously as they incorporated new values that aligned with the moral compass of the revolution, emphasizing, for example, racial and gender equality.74 Magazines like Vanidades Continental, Cosmopolitan, and Buen Hogar, published in Miami for a Spanish speaking audience and distributed throughout Latin America, became more threatening to the revolution precisely as they incorporated some of the moral elements of the revolution’s foundational and justifying ideology.

Unlike the Cuban context, in which the state was the ultimate source and guardian of these advances in social justice, these magazines cast capitalism as the ultimate equalizer, guaranteeing equal opportunity to all, regardless of race or gender.75 As a rebuttal in the Cuban press fairly points out, this explanation ignores structural inequalities and the lasting impact of historical discrimination.76 Gender norms and the best path to gender equality, however, are complex issues. While neither the capitalist or socialist world had solved them, they had developed competing approaches to doing so. Unsurprisingly, the relationship of the individual to the state and various collectives (from family to society) lay at the heart of the debates about these competing approaches. That there was some overlap in methods and goals between U.S. second-wave feminism and the revolutionary state’s unique women’s liberation movement only made the risk of ideological diversionism greater.

74 Díaz Lago, “Lo que ocultan esas bellas páginas,” 46-47.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid.

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The most notable commonality was the aim of alleviating the burden of household work to free women’s time and energy for other pursuits. In the United States, household appliances and the service industry meant that the battle for women of many classes was less about getting this work done and more about establishing the social recognition that women were individuals with the right to choose how to spend their time, in or outside of the home. Indeed, as many came to lament by the 1980s, the successes of the 1960s and 1970s combined with the growing need for two incomes to support a middle-class family to establish a sort of “Superwoman” curse: women had achieved not the right to choose how to spend their time and energy but instead the obligation to “have it all,” and therefore do it all. Interestingly, the Cuban state’s women’s liberation movement also left women feeling the pressures of doing it all. As we have seen, without the benefit of mass-produced appliances and an effective service industry, women were left to rely on unreliable partners to alleviate the burden of domestic work. The most notable difference between the two approaches was the underlying goal. In U.S. second-wave feminism, this goal centered on women as equal individuals with equal rights, whereas in the eyes of revolutionary leadership, the goal centered on the revolutionary mission and the good it could bring to the Cuban nation. Therefore, in the Cuban case, the revolutionary state sought to unleash women’s time and energy to do the work of the revolution through volunteer and wage labor and activism in politics and the mass organizations.

As a result of this central difference between the two approaches, the Cuban press in this period cast western feminism as ideologically diversionist. While the state had championed women’s liberation from the early years of the revolution, a precocious stance in the 1960s, it had done so for completely different reasons than those then guiding second-wave feminism.

According to the FMC’s mouthpiece, Mujeres, western feminism encouraged women to blame

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men for their problems and abandon their interpersonal relationships with men and the traditional family structure in order to obtain a better life for themselves as individuals.77 As we have seen, in the 1970s the Cuban state was increasingly invested in a solution to gender inequality and ongoing austerity that was rooted in the family, as epitomized by the Family Code, which rendered the individualist strain of western feminism threatening. In this context, even notwithstanding the collectivist ideology which underlay the revolutionary project, feminist thought which encouraged women to pursue goals and identities as individuals rather than wives and mothers could bring the whole project tumbling down.

Thus, as a result of a changing world, the press played an important, and increasingly nuanced and difficult, role in revolutionary Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s. In the case of fashion specifically, this meant orienting women’s tastes to align with Cuba’s economic, climactic, and political situation as well as its cultural traditions, or at least, that was how the editorial boards of magazines like Mujeres conceptualized their role in society with regard to clothing.78 This role was complicated by contradictions within the ideology surrounding consumerism in this period.

While the shared austerity or thin cow mentality remained a consistent emphasis of revolutionary leadership, the press also sought to highlight improvements in the consumer realm, in the process harkening back to early promises of shared abundance in the form of the expansion of middle- class lifestyles. For example, a profile on a fashion show in Pinar del Rio trumpeted the fashion show itself as an expansion of elite privilege across class strata: “what was once the privilege of

77 Ibid.

78 “En el XV aniversario de Mujeres,” 4.

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the bourgeois elite is today one of many forms of elevating the taste and culture of all,” the author wrote.79

Fashion shows, alongside expositions showcasing home goods, were especially marked by the contradictions in the state’s approach to consumerism. The press lauded these events as opportunities to “elevate” the tastes of everyone. As Mujeres explained using the terms of underdevelopment, so often invoked as a battle cry in the Cuban economic context, “the

Revolution aspire[d] to shape the integral formation of the men and women of the country.” By naming “peasants, workers, students, [and] housewives” specifically, the piece speaks to the state’s ideological commitment to erasing the rural-urban divide and class divisions that had characterized Cuba before 1959 and, though the state press was less likely to comment to this effect, continued to mark revolutionary society into the 1980s. Thus, revolutionary leaders and tastemakers sought to use events like these to “develop, like something living, good taste and the culture of being well-dressed” within the nation, an on-going project even twenty years into revolutionary rule.80

This was a losing battle, however, one that simply did not make sense in Cuba’s continually fraught economic context. The press was ostensibly committed to presenting useful advice rooted in Cuba’s economic reality. As the editor of Somos Jovenes’ put it, they only published styles that could be achieved “with national resources.”81 In a similar vein, prominent journalist Gladys Egües Cantero, who wrote for Romances, Muchacha, and Mujeres, later remembered the 1980s as “an important moment,” in which the press truly “achieved something

79 Gladys Egües Cantero, “Buen gusto y elegencia en la tierra pinareña,” Mujeres (Havana), May 1982, pp. 44-45.

80 Ibid.

81 Guillermo Cabrera, “Mi Carta” Somos Jovenes (Havana), July 1983, p. 11

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within Cuba.” By presenting Cuban youth and fashion in a realistic manner, they taught readers to cultivate “a balanced and beautiful appearance with what was in the storefronts.”82 It is possible that the quality of the press as a practical guide to real life problems did improve in this period; however, the changes were insignificant enough that many young people seem not to have noticed them at all.

In March 1982, Juan Carlos Rangel, social psychologist and researcher with the Bureau for Fashion Orientation, sat down with thirty-eight young people to interview them about the state of fashion in Cuba. The group of interviewees included twenty-five students from universities in Villa Clara, Guantánamo, Havana province, and the city of Havana, as well as thirteen workers from the province of Matanzas. A student from Villa Clara criticized the fashions published in Muchacha, which sometimes featured cloth that was not available for purchase in Cuba either through the ration or por la libre. By doing so, she argued, Muchacha was setting unrealistic expectations that required creative substitutions to achieve rather than orienting tastes in line with reality. As the student herself put it, “the people invent,” out of necessity, inspired by material poverty and not desire or some deep-seated Cuban predilection for creativity.83 A trabajadora from Matanzas mentioned an even more damning difficulty, at least in terms of the state’s initiatives to better orient the population using the state press.

Journalists could spout practical advice until they were blue in the face, but it would not make a difference because Cubans struggled to access the magazines themselves: Fashion “orientation is scarce,” she explained to Rangel. “Muchacha does not arrive frequently; Somos Jovenes either; you see Mujeres sometimes, but not much. Some of us buy Opina, but there is only one page on

82 López Sánchez, “Gladys Egües Cantero.”

83 Cary, “Saber vestir es importante,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Mar. 1982, p. 2.

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fashion.”84 The statistics back her perception up: by 1980, just 10 percent of Cuban consumers reported using the Cuban media as a source of fashion inspiration, compared to 28 percent who reported turning to foreign magazines.85

It appears that late 1970s state initiatives to expand and improve mass media were off to a slow start, as this assertion was seconded by her peers. They complained about this common practice of counteracting the scarcity of the Cuban press by substituting international magazines.

They explained that the practice led to an impractical reliance on Eurocentric fashions that did not fit Cuba’s cultural and climactic reality. This tendency toward Eurocentrism was also present in Cuban magazines, which the young interview subjects found off-putting. Revealing the complexity of popular attitudes about Cuba’s culture of creativity, the students insisted that the press should prioritize uniquely Cuban fashion, claiming that “it’s necessary to create.”86 Yet rather than leaving the onus for creation to a Cuban populace working with limited resources,

Rangel’s interview subjects called on the press to perform the role that revolutionary leadership had designated it effectively. They insisted that it was the state’s responsibility, via the press, to get creative and guide Cubans in their efforts to dress practically and stylishly.

Clearly, the high expectations for Cuban fashion held by both state and citizens were a source of disappointment to both producers and consumers because they created standards that

Cuban industry could not meet. So why did the state continue to cultivate such expectations through press pieces, fashion spreads, and expositions that prescribed bourgeois tenets of good taste? Why not attempt to shape a new revolutionary ideology around clothing, one that was

84 Ibid., 3.

85 “El vestuario e la moda,” Opina (Havana), Jan. 1980, pp. 3-4.

86 Cary, “Saber vestir es importante,” 3.

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divorced from class-based notions of taste and emphasized functionality over all? Given the

Cuban exceptionalism that the state embraced on many other fronts, including lauding its own political efforts at home and abroad as vanguard expressions of a future world, it does not seem farfetched to wonder why the state did not try to build a future fashion for itself, one that would remove some of the pressure to devote scarce resources to the production of clothing and accessories, pressure that the state itself created by maintaining a pre-revolutionary approach to clothing.

To some extent, the state did attempt to do this, by emphasizing domestically-produced uniforms for students and workers in some professions. However, the state’s ability to dictate a utilitarian uniform of the proletariat to replace fashion as such was sharply limited by the fact that Cuba may have been an island but it did not exist in a vacuum. Cubans were aware of international fashions, brought by visiting relatives or foreign magazines. A desire to access these fashions drove ideological diversionism and its physical manifestation – ostentatiously trendy styles – which in turn motivated the press’s crusade to foment a singular version of good taste among the population. The desire to distinguish oneself from one’s peers was a primary motive for many of the most creative (and bemoaned, by some factions of society) fashion developments in this period, from the bath towel quinceñera photos to homemade hair rollers.

This was also a key motivation for accessing foreign clothing in order to circumvent the homogenous offerings in Cuban stores. Thus, the role of guidance assigned to the press in teaching the population about politically and morally appropriate approaches to self-presentation extended to educating about the emptiness of such an approach.

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Figure 5-1 A cartoon published during the family visits poking fun at outlandish foreign styles and their prestige among Cuban audiences. The tags on the man’s sunglasses and belt say, “from outside,” and his shoes say, “not made here.” The quotation reads “you were right to leave the tags visible, so people know that it is all foreign clothing, otherwise you would look ridiculous” (Opina (Havana), Dec. 1979, p. 21).

“Pants from Outside the Island and Mindset from Outside as Well”: Debates over International Youth Culture in Cuba87

As illustrated by the political cartoon above (Figure 5-1), foreign clothing items held immense prestige in Cuba, especially as access expanded due to clothing brought by the returning exiles via the family visits. Even clothing items that might be considered excessive or ridiculous in the context of Cuban fashion norms could be perceived as stylish when their international origins were well and clearly established. Revolutionary dictates about appropriate

87 Political cartoon, Opina (Havana), Nov. 1984, p. 63.

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male fashion had, since the 1960s, centered on reinforcing traditional images of masculinity by rejecting styles that were considered effeminate or markers of homosexuality, such as sandals or form-fitting pants.88 The skin-tight pants, platform shoes, and ostentatious belt and sunglasses worn by the figure in the cartoon above all clearly showcase their foreign precedence, either through the tags, which the wearer has left attached for precisely this reason, or, in the case of the pants, by the small figure of Mickey Mouse. If they did not, as the commenter notes, the wearer would look ridiculous. Even more than that, because all of those styles had associations with homosexuality in the Cuban revolutionary context, he might face political condemnation as well as other forms of social or even legal censure. The foreign origins of the clothing, clearly on display, seemingly removed the association with gay identity, however, because it was assumed that the wearer was motivated by the prestige of foreign styles rather than his own underlying gender or sexual identity. Thus, his outfit was considered appropriate only because of its foreign pedigree.

The appropriateness of embracing foreign styles, particularly those from the United

States, was certainly questionable and widely debated in this period, as we shall see, but it was not automatically a cause for censure. Therefore, we might understand the embrace of foreign styles in this period as an opening for the performance and display of self-identity outside of the narrow bounds of appropriate revolutionary masculinity. This opening was constricted by the fiercely-debated question of whether or not the embrace of foreign styles was a sign of counterrevolutionary identity. In effect, those who advocated on behalf of international fashion, a position which included many everyday acts of self-presentation in addition to more formal participation in the debates through engagement with the press, attempted to carve out a third

88 Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba.

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space in between the two core identities recognized by the Cuban state since the 1960s: revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. For many, an embrace of international fashions and especially fashions from the United States was an apolitical act rooted in self-identification and presentation, a formulation which challenged the state’s insistence that even everyday acts were political statements in which Cubans performed their allegiance to or against the revolution.

While the late 1970s provided an opening for engagement with the non-communist world via the family visits and the greater availability and acceptability of foreign styles, the 1980 Mariel exodus, which threw U.S.-Cuban relations back into a hostile standoff, snapped this opening shut.

In the late 1970s, debates about the association between international fashion and revolutionary allegiance took different forms at different times, as self-identified revolutionary spokesmen recognized the very real prestige of international styles and attempted to reconcile that reality with the ideological tenets of revolutionary identity. The shortcomings of the national clothing industry limited revolutionary leadership’s willingness to automatically condemn the fetishization of foreign styles. Just like the family visits filled an economic need by flooding the island with hard currency, so too did the influx of foreign clothing fulfill an economic need for a population long frustrated by the limited and low-quality offerings of the national market. Of course, these debates took on greater urgency in the wake of the family visits, as the inequality highlighted and produced by the visits fostered discontent among both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary sectors of the population. As blue jeans flooded the island, they did so only to the hands of those with access to visiting family or the currency to buy a pair on the black market.89 Those left out of these markets felt the impact on their social prestige and identity, as

89 DeYoung, “Exiles Visit Cuba with Gifts ‘Made in USA.’”

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illustrated by the narrator in Fiebre de Caballos, Cuban author Leonardo Padura’s semi- autobiographical first novel. Written between 1983 and 1984, the coming-of-age story details the high-school-aged narrator’s attempts to reconcile long-term goals and the sacrifices necessary to reach them with the short-term joys of sex and young love, cigarettes, and blue jeans, a clothing item that he longs for but is unable to access.90

The prevalence of U.S.-produced jeans on the island in these years is illustrated by a joke about a young man standing on a street corner in Vedado, a Havana neighborhood, conducting an informal study of the English-language brand names and slogans spotted on the clothing of passersby. The joke’s location in Vedado is significant–Vedado was a primarily white, middle- and upper-class neighborhood prior to the revolution. By the late 1970s, it was a place where residents who continued to live in homes that their families owned prior to the revolution were likely to have family in the United States due to the prevalence of white, middle- and upper-class

Havana residents in the early waves of exile. When the young man attempts to explain to a friend what he is doing, the friend downplays the significance of the “walking propaganda” worn by some habaneros by quipping “I’ve noticed that some pants have a little tag on the back that says

‘Lee’ [an American brand of jeans whose name translates to ‘read’ in Spanish], but, in general, there isn’t anything to read (it’s true that in many cases there’s a lot to see, but not a single letter to read).”91 The joke is about more than a young man checking out the backsides of female passersby. It hinges on the incompatibility of the English language with Cuban daily life and speaks to the perception among some that American clothing styles, like jeans, were incompatible with Cuban revolutionary reality. At the same time, the fact that one of the story’s

90 Leonardo Padura, Fiebre de caballos (La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 2003).

91 Valdes Val, “¿Propaganda ambulante o . . . ?” Opina (Havana), Mar. 1980, p. 51.

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protagonists finds the prevalence of foreign clothing on Havana’s streets an object worthy of study and the other dismisses the phenomenon so handily indicates the interpersonal variation in responding to the trend, an ambiguity that mirrors that of the state’s uncertain response in these years.

Another press piece went to great lengths to prove the opposite point by illustrating that the history of blue jeans had origins beyond the United States and even roots in Cuba. Titled

“Jeans Don’t Come from the West,” the piece details the history of blue jeans, including Levi

Strauss’ role in popularizing the style, as well as the forgotten origins of denim and jeans-like pants in both France and Spain, before turning to the style’s unique history in Cuba. As the author explains, jeans were well known in Cuba even before they exploded in international popularity due to their use in the 1960s youth counterculture in the United States. Prior to the

1960s, “they used them” in Cuba, “particularly among the least prejudiced sectors of the population,” as they were “looked upon with a certain suspicion,” in part due to their not-so- glamorous name: “mechanic’s pants.” In addition to insisting on jeans’ long history in Cuba, the author indicates some uniquely Cuban aspects to how the pants had been incorporated into local culture. For example, the name for blue jeans most commonly used in Cuba, “pitusa,” came from the name of a local factory that produced them prior to the revolution. There is a note of pride in the author’s emphasis on the fact that Cubans use the word pitusa for all jeans, no matter their brand or where they come from.92

Thus, one approach to reconciling the popularity of international styles with Cuban revolutionary reality and identity was cooptation. This often took the form of reframing the matter entirely by moving the lens away from the association with the United States and the

92 Luis M. Sáez, “El pitusa no vino del oeste,” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1982, pp. 14-15.

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capitalist West in general and towards an understanding rooted in Cuba itself. Interestingly, and likely tactically, the author does not make any reference to the neocolonial relationship between

Cuba and the United States prior to 1959, a relationship that largely determined patterns of production and consumption, as well as the formation of national identity, in Cuba, as historian

Louis Pérez has argued.93 Deeper analysis of this past would have undermined his argument that jeans had their own Cuban origins because the neocolonial context of their development compromised their true Cubanness. Similarly, jeans imported from the Soviet Bloc, and East

Germany in particular, were considered preferable alternatives to American-produced jeans by both state and consumer alike, so long as they matched their American rivals in key aspects; “the determining factor [was] quality.”94

One cannot help but wonder if the Mariel exodus was a rejection, in part, of this politicization of the small details of everyday life, a desire for normalcy outside of political dictates. Against these endless circles of ideological reasoning and logic, it is possible to read a desire for blue jeans to simply be blue jeans, a comfortable, versatile, and flattering style of clothing that existed outside of debates about national identity, the Cold War, and the ongoing battle between communism and capitalism, reflecting nothing more than a sense of personal style and comfort. The group interview conducted by Bureau for Fashion Orientation investigator Juan

Carlos Rangel reveals that while many young revolutionaries denied the desire to emulate foreign trends, they did seek to compete with them. The revolutionary response to the popularity of foreign trends, at least among youth who supported the revolution and understood fashion to be a political matter, was a call to action. These young people placed pressure on the press much

93 See Pérez, On Becoming Cuban.

94 Cary, “Saber vestir es importante,” 4.

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as the state did. This line of reasoning asserted that if foreign fashions were outside the realm of economic possibility and climactic practicality in Cuba, then the Cuban press must create new fashions that aligned with Cuban reality and surpassed the international allure of the dominant fashions coming from the capitalist world.

Socialist alternatives to goods produced in the capitalist world were always preferable from an ideological standpoint as well as an economic one. U.S.-produced goods were ideologically suspect due to the United States’ oppositional stance to the Cuban Revolution and purchasing goods from other nations in the capitalist world required hard currency, unlike acquiring goods from the socialist world. In addition, items from top fashion houses in France and Italy maintained a negative association with pre-revolutionary class inequality. A poem published in Mujeres captures the economic and ideological imperatives to buy socialist:

This woman never knew

if Christian Dior

was better than Moscow Red

but she knew that Moscow was a friendly name.95

While by 1980, the year that the poem was published, Christian Dior must have been very hard to come by in Havana, let alone elsewhere on the island, the poem implies that a patriotic woman would always choose a Soviet-produced item over an alternative produced in the capitalist world, even if it meant sacrificing style and quality.

After joining COMECON in 1972, Cuba coordinated its clothing industry with the Soviet

Bloc countries. This involved cooperation through trade and information exchange through training programs. Throughout the early 1980s, for example, over 6,000 Cubans girls were sent

95 “Ella en la poesía,” Mujeres (Havana), Feb. 1980, pp. 20-21.

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to Czechoslovakia and an additional 200 to Hungary for two-year programs in which they could earn certificates in weaving, spinning, or machine repair. After the two-year course, which included language instruction as a first step, the girls spent two years working in a Czech or

Hungarian factory to translate knowledge into experience.96 Beginning in 1970, the COMECON countries also participated in annual fashion shows known as The Culture of Dress and Costumes

(La cultura del vestir y el vestuario) which fashion experts from each country attended to showcase new designs and determine what would be mass produced in the coming years. Each country presented a central collection and an accessory, usually surrounding a gender-specific age group, and the results of the meeting were a guiding force for the scientific-technical and economic collaboration that established fashion norms throughout the socialist world. Cuba began participating in 1979.97 Each country had a specialty which contributed to trade cooperation through COMECON: Hungary and Romania specialized in female accessories,

Poland in youth clothing, Bulgaria in men’s suits, and Cuba in beach and summer clothing, of course.98

Cuba performed well at these events, winning international recognition for its achievements in fashion within the socialist world. Despite rampant complaints about the poor quality and design of the clothing available to Cuban buyers, particularly with regard to youth fashions, the Cuban collection dedicated to youth fashions for the ages 13-17 was so well received that it was chosen for international representation after the event.99 The coexistence of

96 “La música de los telares,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), July 1983, pp. 36-37.

97 Untitled, Muchacha (Havana), Oct. 1984, p. 8.

98 Hugo L. Sarduy, “En 1984 estará de moda,” Mujeres (Havana), Apr. 1983, pp. 36-37.

99 “Tradición y armonia,” Muchacha (Havana), Nov. 1984, p. 3.

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international acclaim for Cuban youth fashion with widespread discontent among Cuban youth resulted from the fact that these fashion shows were significantly removed from Cubans’ daily reality. A major mitigating force was the lag built into the economic system. The Culture of

Dress and Costumes event for 1984 set norms to guide production of items that would not arrive in stores until 1986 – a full two years away – leaving no flexibility to incorporate citizen input or fashion trends that might emerge in the intervening years.100 This delay was not due to the complexities of international cooperation and trade. The lag between fashion design and production on the domestic level was also two years. Due to the coordination involved in a planned economy, clothing production schedules had to factor in every step from cotton harvests to cloth production, resulting in an inflexible system of production in which state responses to citizen complaints, when they did come, could not possibly have a concrete effect on what was available in stores for a full two years.101 This gap between economic planning and actual production and distribution rendered it impossible for the centrally planned economy to ever respond to consumer demand effectively.

In addition, it was one thing to produce high quality clothing items in limited numbers for international exposition and another to mass produce these items and make them available to the population in the quantities necessary to satisfy demand. As a result, the products that were exhibited to international acclaim at the Culture of Dress and Costumes events had very little to do with the products available in Cuban stores and closets, beyond perhaps serving as inspiration for homemade clothing. In 1982, the Culture of Dress and Costumes event was held in Budapest,

100 Untitled, Muchacha (Havana), Oct. 1984, p. 8.

101 See Esther, “Tendencias para 1986,” Muchacha (Havana), Jan. 1985, pp. 4-5 and Daisy Martin, “Más a la moda,” Mujeres (Havana), Apr. 1981, pp. 66-67.

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and the Cuban delegation brought guayaberas of various designs.102 A guayabera is a short- sleeved, button-down shirt with collar, usually decorated with stylized pleats or pockets on either side of the buttons. The style is traditionally worn by men and has been popular in the Spanish- speaking Caribbean for centuries. Regardless of the style’s deep roots in tradition and association with Cuban identity, guayaberas were not widely available for purchase in Cuba in this period.

Guayabera scarcity continued despite attempts to revitalize the style and create variations that suited both men and women in the mid-1970s, attempts that must have been reinvigorated by the decision to dress both male and female members of the Cuban delegation to the 1978 World

Festival of Youth and Students in guayaberas.103 Yet the very same year that the Cuban delegation highlighted this traditional garb on the socialist stage, Cuban youth were still suggesting that the fashion industry “should revitalize the guayabera,” reflecting that the fashions the Cuban fashion industry exhibited to the socialist world for display were not the same ones that they presented to the nation for purchase.104

Debates about fashion in the 1970s took place in an undeniably international context. As

Cuba increased its economic and cultural ties to COMECON, Cuban fashion earned a privileged place within the socialist world that did not correspond to the dismal reality confronted by Cuban shoppers, a continued source of complaint and discontent. This reality collided with the opportunities for consumption, individual choice, and self-expression embodied by the visiting exiles in 1978 and 1979, resulting in dramatically increased access to foreign styles. These styles were increasingly present on Cuban streets, as the exiles made gifts of them to friends and family

102 Sarduy, “En 1984 estará de moda.”

103 Chaley Reyes, “Variaciones sobre la guayabera,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), Apr 1976), 22-23 and Cristina, “Asi viste nuestra delegación,” Somos Jovenes (Havana), No. 8, undated, 1978, pp. 30-31.

104 Cary, “Saber vestir es importante,” 4.

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and the Cuban cottage industry of homemade clothing drew from and mimicked the styles. The explosive combination of socialist shortcomings and American Dreams significantly shaped the

Cuban 1980s as a result of the decisive role it played in two pivotal moments in 1980: the Mariel

Boatlift, an exodus of over 125,000 Cubans for the United States, and the introduction of the parallel market, extensive market reforms of the Cuban consumer and service economies intended to quell the deep discontent that had been simmering for decades.

Exile in Blue Jeans: The Mariel Boatlift as Blue Jean Revolution

The impact of the family visits as a catalyst for discontent and rebellion was visible as early as 1979, just months after the visits began. In 1979 and 1980, a number of Cubans desperate to leave the island attempted to flee in creative and illegal ways that included seeking asylum in foreign embassies and hijacking boats and planes. This stalemate of isolated and largely unsuccessful attempts to emigrate boiled over on April 1, 1980, when a bus driver carrying five passengers crashed his bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy in Havana.

The Peruvian ambassador granted asylum to the driver and his passengers, and three days later, an angry Fidel Castro withdrew police protection from the embassy, creating conditions for a mad rush of asylum-seekers: almost 11,000 quickly gathered.105 The embassy was neither designed nor prepared to host an influx of this size, and the asylum-seekers – determined to take advantage of the opening created by the bus driver and his passengers before the government shut it down – had little time to gather supplies before leaving their homes. Those who gathered at the embassy suffered from a lack of food, water, and adequate sanitation supplies, as well as systematic denigration from groups of their friends and neighbors, whom the CDRs mobilized to march, chant, and even throw things in repudiation of this extremely visible and dramatic

105 “Havana Removes Guard from Peruvian Embassy,” The New York Times (New York), Apr. 5, 1980.

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manifestation of discontentment with revolutionary rule. On April 20, the day after an enormous repudiation rally attended by almost one million habaneros, Fidel Castro announced that he would open the port of Mariel to anyone who wished to leave. In South Florida, hundreds of individuals organized “a ragtag flotilla” to travel to Mariel and bring friends, relatives, and others back to the United States.106

Almost a decade earlier, the termination of the U.S.-sponsored Freedom Flights program had cut off legal avenues for Cubans to seek exile in the United States. While Cuban authorities had picked up refugees at sea throughout the 1970s, these people were primarily artists or intellectuals attempting to escape state censorship, which extended to imprisoning those whose work the state found ideologically threatening.107 The Mariel refugees were fundamentally different. They were average people whose departure was not motivated by a desire for artistic freedom and a political voice, but instead a yearning for a different kind of life, one with more room for individual choice. They were younger and less white than earlier exiles, and the group was dominated by single men, a divergence from earlier groups of exile which were comprised primarily of family groups, especially women, children, and the elderly, and white Cubans from the professional and upper classes. In the wake of the Peruvian embassy confrontation, Cuban musician Rey Montesinos denounced these defectors as “deluded adorers of the ‘American Way of Life.’”108 As with official statements made by revolutionary representatives in the weeks and

106 See Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 157-159, for an overview of these events.

107 For example, Roberto Ponciano fled the island on a homemade raft in 1975 after the state labeled him a “problematical writer.” He was picked up at sea and sentenced to seven years in jail: three for the escape attempt and four for the content of the manuscripts he had brought with him. Similarly, on March 21, 1978, prior to the family visits, young Afro-Cuban writers Luis Cardenas Junquera and Reinaldo Colas Pineda sought asylum in the Argentine embassy in Havana. Both writers received a seven-year sentence for the escape attempt, but Cardenas Junquera was sentenced to an additional seven years for the content of the manuscripts that he had with him at the time of his arrest. Carlos Ripoll, “Dissent in Cuba,” The New York Times (New York), Nov. 11, 1979.

108 “Intelectuales y artistas opinan” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1980, p. 27.

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months following Mariel, Montesinos’ characterization dismisses the Mariel refugees as fools, neocolonial traitors, or both; however, the economic and social policies of the revolutionary state were much larger factors in the Mariel refugees’ decisions to leave than visions of life in the

United States either accurate or imagined. The family visits played a central role in this process, but they did so by throwing everyday life in Cuba into relief, emphasizing the limitations that revolutionary policy placed on individuals’ lives.

The Mariel Boat Lift was deeply tied to society-wide debates about appropriate consumption. The narratives that emerged among those eager to explain away the rush of people anxious to leave centered on the perceived character flaws of the Mariel refugees, most egregious of which was their desire for more but unwillingness to work for it. This primary narrative–that the refugees were lazy parasites, interested in consumption above all else–emerged almost simultaneously with the embassy confrontations that began the Boat Lift. The April 1980 issue of Opina featured the opinions of various social groups on the refugees, from artists and intellectuals to cane cutters and housewives. The cane cutters, distinguished as trimillionarios for having harvested three million pounds of sugar cane, were most vocal in their condemnation, with Fermin Cárdenas saying, “I support Fidel, they can fuck off! It is a lot of work to feed these people who eat without working.”109 As ninety-two-year-old housewife Amparo Hernández

Fernández put it, “those who are now selling their homeland for material things are making slaves of themselves. They are already crying for all that they have lost.”110 Ironically, or perhaps as proof that consumer shortages did not bother true revolutionaries, some of the housewives that

109 “Los machateros opinan” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1980, p. 19.

110 “Opinan amas de casa” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1980), p. 37.

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Opina interviewed were waiting in line to buy tomatoes. Not one of those whom the magazine quoted expressed anything less than total condemnation for the refugees.

Many of the artists and intellectuals drew on their own experience abroad, seemingly to reassure the public that the refugees were wrong to choose an uncertain fate in an unfamiliar land over their lives in Cuba. In fact, the vast majority of the population would have had to rely on secondhand accounts in order to evaluate what life was like in another country: as discussed earlier in this chapter, the revolutionary state significantly curtailed international travel, a restriction of which many were acutely aware as their friends and relatives made the trip to Cuba during the family visits. Singer Elena Burke was quoted as saying, “they cannot tell me any stories. I’ve been abroad many times and I do not know what they think they will find there.”

Actress Deisy Granados, fresh off her starring role in Portrait of Teresa, echoed this sentiment, saying “I have had the experience of various trips to capitalist countries and I have been able to verify that emigres are treated miserably. Those people [the refugees] simply have not valued what they are losing, but given their attitude, the best thing is that they leave.”111

Granados’ statement insinuated both that Cuba was better off without the refugees and that the refugees had a hard lesson to learn and the only way to learn it was by making the, perhaps irreversible, mistake of leaving Cuba. Over time, statements like Granados’ solidified into a primary narrative about the Mariel refugees. This narrative cast the refugees as morally corrupt and motivated by a facile understanding of life in the United States that was tied exclusively to issues of consumption. The 1983 political cartoon below captures this characterization perfectly (Figure 5-2). The cartoon shows two Cuban criminals (marked by their shaved heads, known as prison haircuts in Cuba down to the present), each crushed under a

111 “Intelectuales y artistas opinan” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1980, p. 26.

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soldier’s boot. The first asks, “Dude, are you sure that we have come to the ‘free world?’” and the second reassures him, “of course, compadre, look at these shoes. They’re ‘yuma!,’” Cuban slang used to describe all manner of people and things from the United States.

Figure 5-2 Two Marielitos, drawn with shaved, “prisoner haircuts” and facial scars to indicate their status as criminal elements, arrive in the United States. On the left, the caption reads, “Dude, are you sure that we have come to the ‘free world?’” while the figure on the right answers, “Definitely, man! Check out these shoes, they are so ‘yuma.’” Yuma is common Cuban slang for the United States (HZ, “Con el pincel también se dispara,” Opina (Havana), July 1983, p. 53).

In addition to solidifying new narratives about the moral ills of consumerism, the Mariel

Boat Lift seemingly transported revolutionary segments of the population back in time nearly two decades, as many viewed the Boat Lift as an act of aggression by the United States, a second

Bay of Pigs invasion that would require Cubans to defend their homeland, perhaps to the death.

This was particularly true as exiles began arriving at the port of Mariel with boats to transport those hoping to leave back to South Florida. One of the housewives that Opina interviewed in line for tomatoes used precisely the language of defending the nation from imperial aggression when she assured the reporter that “we are ready to do another Girón if it is necessary, and the

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Yankee maneuvering does not intimidate us.”112 Carmen Olivera Pedroso, a sixty-eight-year-old retiree who lived in Playa, took an even stronger stance, telling the reporter, “listen up, put it in

Opina, the old ladies are ready to sow cane in May while the men are on military alert. Put it there, tell it to Fidel.”113

In their statements of condemnation for the Mariel refugees, many made an association between U.S. imperial aggression, consumer desire, and material abundance, which reflects that state efforts to impart the moral and material ideals of the revolution did take hold among many in the population. This association harkens back to how ideological diversionism was theorized and explained to the population throughout the 1970s, with the fundamental ideas being that the

United States used material abundance and mass consumerism as a counterrevolutionary tool and that Cubans should resist these temptations as empty and meaningless in light of the revolution’s higher aims and ideals. Yet the Boat Lift raised the stakes considerably. It ended a brief period of detente between the United States and Cuba and communal feeling between Cubans on the island and in the exile community. In addition, the frequent comparisons to the Bay of Pigs Invasion tied dangers of ideological diversionism to a context of life or death. It is one thing to fear the subtle temptation of youth through capitalist fashions and music and another entirely to believe one may be called upon to give one’s life in that same on-going battle.

In April 1981, Opina published a political cartoon that is indicative of these connections and how they impacted collective memory of both the Bay of Pigs invasion and Mariel, connecting the two in a larger narrative of U.S. imperialist aggression towards revolutionary

112 “Opinan amas de casa,” 37.

113 Ibid.

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Cuba in which consumer culture played a fundamental role.114 The cartoon shows a Cuban farmer facing four armed aggressors across a small body of water. The farmer appears to be leaping off his tractor and into action, a mirror image of the famed picture of Fidel Castro leaping off a tank during the Bay of Pigs invasion, a rough sketch of which appears in a thought bubble above the farmers’ head. The farmer says “si vuelven a venir vuelven a quedar [if they come again, they come to stay],” a threat that next time, Cuba’s enemies would face death or imprisonment. The four aggressors look wide-eyed and nervous: one is Uncle Sam, a second a

U.S. soldier, and a third a soldier wearing a helmet emblazoned with a swastika. In addition to the timing of the memorial cartoon (both the Bay of Pigs Invasion and Mariel occurred in April), it is the fourth figure that solidifies the connection between 1961 and 1980. He alone is not armed or dressed for battle. Instead, he wears a Coca-Cola hat and sports a large moustache, a symbolic counterpart to the farmer’s revolutionary beard. Such overtly stylized moustaches were common shorthand for the kind of trendy individual that was stereotyped into official narratives which marginalized the Mariel refugees as lazy, vain, and motivated solely by the desire to consume (Figure 5-3).115

114 Opina (Havana), Apr. 1981, p. 4.

115 See also Figure 5-1.

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Figure 5-3 Demonstration against those who sought to leave Cuba as part of the Mariel boatlift. The stylized cartoon of two male defectors reflects common stereotypes perpetuated by the revolutionary state that equated ideological diversionism and counterrevolutionary behavior with extravagantly styled clothing, interest in styles and products from the capitalist world (especially the United States), and transgression of gender and sexual norms (Muchacha (Havana), Apr. 1980, p. 29).

As we have seen, youth played a fundamental role both in the revolutionary hierarchy and in revolutionary leadership’s fears of ideological diversionism. Cuban youth had long been understood as the primary beneficiaries of the Cuban Revolution, and as a result, their presence among those seeking exile in the Peruvian embassy was particularly appalling for some revolutionary critics, like Cuban painter Servando Cabrera Moreno. When he was interviewed about his opinions on the emerging refugee crisis in April 1980 he said, “It is painful to think that some young people, rather than defending all of the benefits that the Revolution has given them, are there. The revolution has given them its best; it’s outrageous that there are young people there.”116 Truly, the revolution had given them its best; while Cuban students did feel the

116 “Intelectuales y artistas opinan,” 27.

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sting of material shortages, particularly with regard to clothing, recreation, and leisure, they did not have to worry about the daily trials involved in stocking a household with food and other everyday items. Due to a mixture of revolutionary policy privileging youth and their mixed agricultural-educational function, many boarding schools were sites of relative abundance and diversity with regard to food.117

Yet this very inequality in access, which runs counter to the revolutionary emphasis on egalitarianism, was central to the decision of some young people to leave. The opportunity created by the confrontation at the Peruvian embassy forced individuals to evaluate their loyalties not only to the Cuban revolution, but also to their own family members. Despite educational policies which attempted to substitute state for parent, encouraging young people to identify primarily with the state and only secondarily with their family units, many young people chose to leave in search of a better life for themselves and their families. The case of Mariel refugee Minerva de la Arena reveals that the boarding school experience continued to create generational divides between young people who had preferential access to goods and were educated in ways that cast their lifestyle as a triumph of the revolution and their parents, who dealt with frequent shortages and were often disillusioned with the revolution. Yet it also reveals that those divides could be bridged by greater awareness among students of the daily challenges that their parents faced. Minerva gained just such awareness after she was injured in a bus accident in January 1980. She required three surgeries on her arm, and during the recovery period, she stayed home rather than returning to her boarding school. At home all week rather than just on the weekends, for the first time she realized that food shortages were a regular

117 See Chapter 3 for a longer discussion of this phenomenon and the generational tensions that it created between students and their parents.

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reality, and for the first time she realized that she enjoyed a privileged existence at the school for

Pioneers.118

Figure 5-4 Political cartoon depicting the U.S. president meeting with his military planners. The map of Cuba is labeled “maneuvers,” and the caption reads “President, Cuba is producing more eggs than ever!” referring to the practice of throwing eggs at defectors during the Mariel crisis, (Opina (Havana), Apr. 1980, p. 6).

This was an eye-opening experience for Minerva, one that deeply disillusioned her about life in revolutionary Cuba. Upon returning to school, she “could not stop thinking about how her parents had to struggle to find food to survive.” The only food they always had was eggs. In fact, eggs were so abundant in early 1980 that they were used not only as a food source, but also as a tool for terrorizing and humiliating those seeking to leave through the infamous “acts of repudiation” (Figure 5-4). These protests were choreographed by the primary vehicles for organizing and mobilizing people in Cuba, schools, workplaces, and the mass organizations, and

118 García, Voces del Mariel, 76-78.

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they turned neighbors and friends against those seeking to leave. Anyone who requested authorization to leave could be targeted by such groups hurling insults, eggs, and even stones.

One boy, eight years old when he left Cuba with his family in 1980, vividly remembers several frightening nights when his sister’s classmates surrounded their home “throwing stones at the windows, shouting, and spray painting insults about [his] family.”119

As Minerva remembers, her rehabilitation at home after the bus accident was her first experience of the inconsistencies of Cuban revolutionary life and the ways in which survival could hinge on illegal acts: “I finally was able to see that many of the foods that we had in the house were bought on the black market, and we had to eat them clandestinely, because they were illegal.” Minerva’s sustained presence at home and growing disillusionment with the revolution led to a number of disagreements in the house, as she struggled to reconcile her parents’ reality with the picture of the Revolution that her life and education in the boarding school system had painted for her. Her father accused her of being brainwashed, saying sarcastically, “you love

Castro even though he forces you to eat on the sly.” The inconsistency and absurdity that

Minerva encountered in her parents’ daily reality ultimately wore down the revolutionary fervor that her education had instilled in her. Despite her status as the revolution’s most vocal supporter in her household, when her father and brother decided to seek asylum at the Peruvian embassy, her mother offered to stay with her, but Minerva too chose to leave.120

Conclusion

Minerva’s experience reveals how material things factored into many Mariel refugees’ decisions to seek exile in the United States more as principles and values rather than actual

119 Margarita Vargas-Betancourt and Alexis Baldacci, Portrait of Roniel Cabrera, The Cuban American Dream, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, 2017.

120 García, Voces del Mariel, 76-78.

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goods. Her disillusionment came less from an unwillingness to make material sacrifices and live with austerity than from a rejection of the inconsistency between what she had been taught to believe about the revolution and the reality she encountered during her long recovery at home.

This reality was not one where the state upheld its stated responsibilities by meeting the basic needs of its citizenry. It was not a reality where even if goods where scarce, everyone was guaranteed equal access. Instead, it was a reality where her family struggled in Havana while she enjoyed taking part in the revolution, away at school. It was a reality where the state passed laws to punish informal and black-market food transactions without guaranteeing access to food through official distribution networks. Ultimately, it was a reality in which her parents were forced to defy the state by breaking its laws just to survive, even in a time of relative abundance like the era of the fat cows.

It is easy to scoff at the idea of a blue jean revolution, and state representatives often did, establishing and reinforcing an official narrative that interpreted the Mariel Boat Lift as a positive development for revolutionary Cuba, cleansing the nation of the morally-corrupt, selfish, vain, and materialistic. However, when placed in the international context of the family visits and debates about the meaning of everyday acts of self-presentation, it is clear that Mariel was a statement about much more than access to trendy clothing. Instead, the Mariel Boat Lift was a flashpoint for the on-going debates that we have been examining about the meaning of material and consumer culture in people’s lives, a rejection by many of central aspects of the Cuban state’s foundational ideology. The discontentment enacted by the Mariel refugees also simmered among many who stayed, pushing the revolutionary state to reform the economy. With the introduction of the parallel market, the Cuban state sought to respond to the simmering

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discontent wrought by the thin cow mentality by expanding access and options in the consumer and service economies.

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CHAPTER 6 SOCIALIST CONSUMERISM: EXPERIMENTS IN MARKET REFORM, 1980-1986

Prior to 1980, there were two state-sanctioned internal markets in Cuba: goods and foodstuffs were either available in rationed quantities or “por la libre.” This situation changed in

1980, when the state sought to improve the consumer sector by introducing goods of greater quality and variety through what they called a “parallel market” system, which coexisted with rationing and venta libre. State sources explain these initiatives as the next logical step in the on- going economic recovery facilitated by Cuba’s economic partnership with the Soviet Union. By

1980, they explain, recovery had reached the point where it was possible to begin expanding the internal economy, starting with the consumer economy.1 It is beyond doubt that the Cuban economy had vastly improved during the 1970s. Yet just three years before these market reforms went into effect, Fidel Castro had exhorted the population to think like thin cows, even amidst the abundance of the Era of the Fat Cows. The decision to invest in expanding the internal economy ran directly counter to the economic strategy outlined by Fidel in that 1977 speech.

That strategy had centered on continued savings and sacrifices at home for the sake of internal investment, in the hopes of developing an export-based economy, whereas by 1980, Cuba had committed not only to re-directing resources into producing goods for internal consumption but also importing goods for internal consumption. This about-face in economic policy can only be explained by concern among leadership about mounting pressure from below in the context of greater openness to the world during the family visits.2

1 See, for example, MECA, “Veinte años de comercio,” Opina (Havana), Feb. 1981, p. 16.

2 See interview with ICOIDI Director Balari in Cuba Update, June and September 1980.

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Exposure to Western lifestyles as a result of these visits unleashed a dynamic of desire and discontent that sparked the Mariel Boat Lift, as historians of the U.S.-based Cuban exile community have argued; historians, however, have overlooked the effects of this dynamic at home.3 In this chapter, I argue that the family visits also resulted in significant reforms to Cuba’s internal economy, as state leaders endeavored to show that they valued and were responsive to the needs of their citizens. To shore up their hegemony, revolutionary leaders were forced to respond to the allure exerted across the Florida Straits by middle- and working-class lifestyles in the United States. They did so by embracing the long withheld promises of choice and luxury in the consumer market. These reforms began to impact the daily lives of Cubans in the spring of

1980, as the Mariel Boat Lift was underway, poignantly framing the options facing Cubans: a dangerous trip across uncertain waters to uncertain lands or the safety, yet indeterminate promise, of a changing revolutionary landscape. A popular joke from the era framed these options in explicit, and humorous, terms that reveal the centrality of food to on-going debates about standard of living and the meaning of consumption in a revolutionary society: In the spring of 1980, a man stood waiting at the port of Mariel to board a boat to the United States. A communist party leader approached him and said, “You think that things are so good over there, but the United States is in a recession. They don’t even have toilet paper!” Without missing a beat, the Marielito responded, “then I’ll wipe my ass with a slice of ham [con una lasca de jamón].”4

The introduction of new markets and commerce mechanisms can also be understood as an attempt by revolutionary leadership to reconcile themselves to a reality in which people were

3 See García, Havana, USA, and arguments put forth in Chapter 5.

4 Thank you to Daniel Fernández for this joke.

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tired of either doing without life’s small pleasures or going to great lengths—breaking the law or even seeking exile—to acquire them. Black and grey market transactions had always existed.

The establishment of the parallel market as a state-sanctioned alternative for accessing scarce goods that were in high demand reflects that the state had finally recognized that the black market was not going anywhere.5 With the new parallel market system, the state came to terms with the continued existence of the individual desires that had driven such illicit and sometimes illegal transactions. Rather than continue attempting to root out these transactions and the desire that drove them entirely, the state changed tactics in 1980 with the economic reforms. The parallel market was an effort to redirect these desires to state-controlled venues, thereby redirecting some of the capital flow that fueled the black market back to state coffers. State representatives, in the form of administrators and other officials, would oversee the markets in order to constrain the worst abuses by speculators and middlemen.6

I argue that with these reforms the state unleashed forces that it could not control. One such force was the increased autonomy of economic actors who previously had been dependent on the state. During some of the most difficult periods of revolutionary rule this dependency had proved an effective form of social and political control. Ironically, in its efforts to mitigate the simmering discontent of unmet individual desires, by undertaking economic reform the leadership had inadvertently validated those desires. By validating individual desire as a legitimate locus of decision-making, the state undermined the ideological foundation that it had

5 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott reference a Granma article published to explain the logic behind raising wages and food prices in 1980 and 1981, respectively, that “hinted that if the government did not raise prices, the excess money would go instead to nongovernmental channels,” such as the black market. See No Free Lunch, 80.

6 These actors, who used scarcity to seek personal enrichment, had been considered not just criminals, but enemies of the revolution since the spring of 1961, when Fidel Castro and other leaders began to discuss these crimes as “generalized efforts to subvert the entire revolution; in other words, they formed part of a counterrevolutionary movement,” Chase, Revolution within the Revolution, 151.

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established in the early years of the revolution, which emphasized the importance of collective sacrifice in the process of building socialism. This became a slippery slope: the state could not identify and enforce an end point for its citizens’ desires, and therefore in its tepid embrace of consumerism the state was playing a losing game. As the Soviet Union would discover by the end of the decade, existing socialism could not achieve consumption on par with the United

States. For his part Fidel Castro recognized this early on. As their Soviet allies embraced glasnost and perestroika, Cuban revolutionary leaders took the opposite course by embarking on the Rectification of Errors Campaign in 1986. This campaign abandoned Cuba’s early 1980s experiments with market-liberalization and increased openness to the models of the capitalist world as errors that needed to be corrected before the nation could make further progress toward a communist utopia. With dwindling Soviet subsidies and economic hardship on the horizon,

Cuban leaders doubled down on the rhetoric of collective sacrifice that had characterized the revolution’s difficult first decade.

Shared Needs, Collaborative Solutions

As Cuba’s economic leaders restructured mechanisms for distribution and consumption, they also sought to reform the methods of production to incorporate greater awareness of and attention to existing demands among the population. In 1981 the Ministry for Light Industry was completely restructured. As part of this process, smaller sub-units called “companies” were created and tasked with producing certain types of clothing. One such company, the National

Company of Youth Apparel, aimed to breath fresh life into the clothing produced for young people in Cuba, which youth had long complained was out-of-date, poorly made, and impractical. The company’s board of directors included hip young people who in today’s marketing milieu would today be considered "influencers,” including representatives from the

Union of Young Communists (UJC), the University Student Federation (FEU) and its

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counterpart for high school students (FEEM), as well as two of the most popular periodicals among young audiences: Juventud Rebelde and Muchacha. The press cast these, along with other projected improvements in the consumer realm stemming from the 1980 economic reforms, as citizens’ just reward for their decades of hard work and sacrifice. This stands in stark contrast to

Fidel Castro’s 1977 speech in which he exhorted Cubans to maintain a thin cow mentality and continue to make sacrifices as consumers. These discussions frame a new sort of compact between state and citizen, one which promised that those who worked for the revolution would see the revolution work for them in more and more facets of their lives, including their ability to express themselves through their clothing: “our youth, who study, work, and also prepare themselves for the defense of their country, can now count on a specialized company that will enable them to dress better,” one Mujeres journalist explained.7

While Opina, first released in 1979, predates the 1980 wave of economic reforms, the magazine played a central role in the state’s efforts to collect citizen input more effectively and incorporate it into the economy. ICOIDI, Opina’s parent institution, was first formed in 1971 to do precisely that, though as discussed in Chapter 3 ICOIDI ultimately functioned both ways, both conducting research among citizens and transmitting state initiatives back to the population in its efforts to “orient” its consumption. One of Opina’s most important functions in Cuban society was to facilitate person-to-person barter and sales through its classified advertisements section, which allowed people to list goods and services that they needed or could offer, so that others could easily contact them directly to arrange an exchange. Each month, the magazine published an average of 200 advertisements of this type, plus an additional 300 focused solely on permutas, or housing swaps. In July 1980, one year after they began publication, Opina

7 Daisy Martin, “Moda joven,” Mujeres (Havana), June 1981, pp. 23-24.

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conducted an informal survey of people who had placed classifieds to evaluate the efficacy of the service. The results are revealing of the extreme material scarcity in Cuba: even in the midst of the era of the fat cows, people were desperate for a more effective way to meet their needs. One woman, Raquel, advertised a lamp that she wanted to sell in their first issue. She sold the lamp the same day that the magazine hit the shelves, but a full year later she continued to receive calls from parties interested in the lamp frequently and at all hours, likely due to the fact that many readers only received a copy of Opina after it had first passed through the hands of another family (or three). The intense interest in what Raquel described unremarkably as a “living room lamp” reveals widespread unmet demand, and not just for lamps.8

Opina’s classified ads also allowed amateur handymen to advertise their services, often to stunning success because, as we have seen, repair services lagged considerably. For those fortunate enough to own them in the first place, daily life often depended on functioning appliances. Given the shortcomings of state-run repair services, people had little choice but to turn to informal channels to avoid long delays. In some cases, the rigidity of the socialist system left literally no choice but to look to unofficial channels, particularly in cases of scarce appliances or appliances produced before 1959, which were often imported from the United

States and required parts that the economic embargo made difficult to acquire.9 One man woke up early on two different days to bring his broken blender to two different appliance repair shops in Havana. In both cases, he waited in line for hours before being told that the repairshop could not accept his blender because it was a model produced in 1959. This left him to wonder in good humor if perhaps his blender was something special: the “Stradivarius” of blenders, which only a

8 Armando López, “Un millon de ojos durante 30 días,” Opina (Havana), July 1980, p. 52.

9 For more on creative solutions to shortages caused by the embargo, see the 2003 Judith Grey documentary, Sin Embargo.

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master could touch. His wife, somewhat less amused by the situation, encouraged him to reach out to a friend of a friend who was the handy type. After dropping the blender off and walking home, the man almost immediately received a phone call that the acquaintance had fixed the blender. The problem was a loose part, repaired by an amateur in just a few minutes, meaning that the blender was “not the eighth wonder of the world,” but instead just a broken blender that did not fit into the inflexible, inefficient, and illogical system of appliance repair.10 There were many such goods that the system did not accommodate, at least not until Opina expanded such private, interpersonal solutions beyond an individual’s network to the city and even country itself.

One repairman who advertised in the magazine, Willy, specialized in radios and record players. During Opina’s informal survey he reported that, in the year since the magazine had first run his ad, he had repaired an average of 30 to 40 machines a month simply by fixing whatever parts were broken or defective. While record players do not fall under the category of necessity, some of Opina’s other amateur repairmen could solve pressing problems in everyday life that would otherwise linger for months, if not years. After three months of visiting her local refrigerator repair shop, where staff told her that it was impossible to fix her fridge because the small shop was already full of machines waiting for repair, Opina reader Marisela finally called a refrigerator repairman who advertised his services in the magazine.11 The repairman was able to fix it right away, though one cannot help but wonder if the efficiency of this budding private market came at the cost of even greater inefficiency in the state-run facilities. A trained repairperson may have worked on side projects on her own time at no cost to the state, but where

10 Marcelino FEAC, untitled, Opina (Havana), Feb. 1981, p. 8.

11 Ibid.

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would she have acquired the required specialty parts if not by pilfering them from state-run industries and businesses?12

Interestingly, there is evidence that Opina was not the only magazine that Cubans used as a medium for forging interpersonal connections in the search for solutions to austerity. Opina was based in Havana. While the magazine often received information on the situation facing consumers in other parts of the country by sending reporters out into the field for its “the eye of

Opina” series and by maintaining relationships with its “network of observers,” who operated throughout the island, the majority of the magazine’s content, including the classifieds, centered on the city; yet the conditions facing consumers could and did vary widely, not only within

Havana itself but also across rural areas, provincial capitals, and small towns nationwide.

Maritza González, cursed with larger than normal feet, wrote to Muchacha wondering why girls with big feet were so “incredibly ignored” by the Cuban shoe industry: while the stores she had visited in Havana were full of “heaps” of shoes, they were all in sizes two, three, and four, which would never fit her size eight feet. In the letter, she mentions her hope that the magazine would publish her complaints, and they did. Journalist Aloyma Ravelo even validated those complaints in her response, by writing that Maritza “had every right to complain,” before agreeing to publish the letter in the hopes it would help Maritza to find a solution.13 Incredibly, four months after publishing Maritza’s letter, the magazine published a response from Yolanda Frontera, a reader in Mantua, Pinar del Río, Cuba’s westernmost province. Yolanda wrote to let Martiza know that

12 By the early 1980s, the command economy and scarcity had persisted for so long that it seems unlikely that formal junk or resale shops existed. As discussed with regard to Plan Garbage in Chapter 4, when something broke people almost always held on to it in the hopes that it would be useful again someday, so piles of trash that might one day be useful accumulated in people’s homes and yards. Those in the repair industries may have had such piles, full of potential parts, in their yards, but as Plan Garbage revealed, the state sought to regain ownership and control over this kind of trash to oversee efforts to put it to use.

13 Aloyma, “¿Qué trae la golondrina?” Muchacha (Havana), Oct. 1984, pp. 58-59.

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while there were not “many stores in Mantua,” those that did exist were full of “pretty” shoes in larger sizes, including Maritza’s size. The journalist who responded on behalf of the magazine, thanked Yolanda for her “gesture” of “solidarity” and published the letter.14 It is unclear, however, how all the shoes in Mantua could solve Maritza’s problem in Havana: even if Maritza had access to a car and gas, a rationed commodity prone to shortages, particularly as Soviet subsidies began to dry up, the trip to Mantua was over three hours by highway.15

Perhaps most significantly, Opina’s classified ads effectively streamlined the process of permutas, or housing swaps. Prior to the existence of Opina, Cubans wishing to move to another area or into a smaller or larger dwelling often spent years locating an acceptable home with owners willing to swap. This process involved posting flyers, making many, many phone calls, and traveling often to the bolsa de permutas in Old Havana, which brokered such transactions.16

By contrast, with a simple phone call and payment of a small fee, those hoping to move could publish a classified ad in Opina that would be seen by upwards of 500,000 people, thereby expanding the poster’s web of influence far beyond what word-of-mouth or a flyer posted in the neighborhood could reach.17 Through its classified advertisements section, Opina empowered

Cubans, providing a significant new tool enabling them to collaborate to meet their most pressing needs amongst themselves. In addition, the consolidation of these advertisements from random telephone poles and bus stops to the magazine’s advertisement section moved one

14 Iraida, “¿Qué trae la golondrina?” Muchacha (Havana), Feb. 1985, pp. 58-59.

15 Based on Google Maps directions between Havana and Mantua, accessed January 24, 2018.

16 For an explanation of revolutionary housing policy, see the forthcoming dissertation by William Kelly, Rutgers University. My thanks to Billy for a thorough and informative explanation of the processes involved in a permuta.

17 López, “Un millon de ojos durante 30 días,” 52.

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element of these interpersonal grey market transactions into a state-sanctioned venue that allowed for more efficient oversight from state representatives.

At the same time, the magazine vastly expanded the scale of such transactions, rendering existing systems obsolete. According to Consuelo Cazón, who headed the Department of

Housing Control and Urban Reform for Poder Popular for the city of Havana, within three months of the magazine’s debut they decided to shut down the city’s bolsa de permutas because it was no longer necessary. This runs counter to other trends in the period, like the establishment of the parallel market, which increased state oversight of interpersonal economic transactions; while the ads consolidated the early stages of the process within a state organ, closing the bolsa de permutas removed the state broker from the equation, at least in the city of Havana.

Unsurprisingly, removing the state from the equation made these transactions easier and more effective. According to Cazón, in the nine months following the bolsa’s closure the rate of housing swaps had increased: Opina had facilitated the process considerably by giving people the means to connect directly to one another, thereby diminishing the need for “chain” deals involving multiple swaps, each dependent on the success of the last, a process that often dragged on for years.18 Opina’s significance in facilitating housing swaps was immortalized in Cuban director Juan Carlos Tabío’s 1980 play, La Permuta, and his 1983 film, Se Permuta, both of which feature scenes in which the vendor selling the magazine is “virtually assaulted by the furious permutantes,” desperate to get first access to the best deals.19 Both the play and the film met with enthusiasm from laughing Cuban audiences who appreciated their accurate portrayal of the difficulties and absurdities of everyday life in revolutionary Cuba: on the night that a

18 Ibid.

19 Armando López, “A teatro lleno: la permuta,” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1980, pp. 17-18.

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reviewer was present, the play received a ten minute standing ovation. That same reviewer also overheard a group of young people commenting on the hilarity of the play. The group concluded that “there should be many more plays like this, that deal with current problems.”20

Increasingly, as even the revolutionary state embraced consumerism, austerity and material difficulties were addressed openly and critically in the press and other public spaces.

This dialogue was limited, however, by conceptions of appropriate and inappropriate critiques: appropriate critiques were always well-contextualized, couched in state-approved ideological conceptions of the role of material goods in a communist society. Despite the widespread popularity of the play and later the film, released by the state film industry, ICAIC, even La

Permuta came under fire from some audiences for not providing sufficient contextual information about the “economic and social causes” of the difficulties faced by the characters, many of whom were perceived to have ideologically-problematic motivations. Gloria, the main character, is one such example: after her daughter begins dating a local mechanic, Gloria becomes obsessed with moving to a swankier part of town so that her daughter can meet the right kind of man, a decision which reflected pre-revolutionary biases regarding work and socioeconomic class. Pepe, a dedicated student and young revolutionary, is another example. As explained in Armando López’s review of the play, in the course of the narrative, Pepe

“cowardly” abandons the notions of hard work and collective sacrifice in favor of “comfort, embourgeoisement.”21 Class difference and material comfort, therefore, continued to be ideologically-fraught goals, even as market liberalization brought realizing those goals into the realm of possibility for more people.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

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Appropriate critiques of the material difficulties that Cubans continued to face in the

1980s increasingly targeted individuals and hinged on the notion that average citizens were responsible for surveilling, evaluating, and even enforcing revolutionary consciousness and action in the individuals around them. This echoes the process that occurred in the early 1970s, as Cuba’s economic condition improved and the situation facing Cuban consumers improved along with it. Improvements in the consumer economy in 1980, as in the early 1970s, unleashed official concerns about increased opportunities for black market activity. To combat this, in the early 1980s the press staged a war on “crimes against the economy” committed by administrators and workers in the consumer and service economies. The outcome of this war hinged on the participation of average citizens. In a context of widespread “tolerance” for shortcomings in these arenas, the journalists reasoned, all Cubans must participate in denouncing bad behavior when they see it. While the press attributed such tolerance to moral shortcomings among the population and the cronyism characteristic of socio-lismo, it is beyond a doubt that the state also contributed to pervasive resignation in the face of consumer difficulties.22 After all, twenty years of revolutionary rule had effectively trained Cubans to expect inefficiency and disappointment when they entered a store, restaurant, or other locale. Actively denouncing such things day in and day out would have been an exhausting way to live.

While the press called on all citizens to denounce crimes against the economy as they witnessed them, the Ministry of the Interior spearheaded a new initiative to deputize certain citizens, empowering them to take this campaign one step further. With Law 1323, Decree 100, the Ministry of the Interior gave “inspectores populares,” or people’s inspectors, the ability to undertake surprise inspections and issue denunciations to the National Police (PNR). The

22 Armando López, “Los inspectores populares,” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1983, p. 16.

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inspectores populares were comprised of “workers, retirees, housewives, and students,” who were chosen through the mass organizations on the basis of their “impeccable conduct, level of education, and revolutionary attitude.” These criteria were similar to those for seemingly any post or position in revolutionary Cuba, where knowledge or expertise was consistently undervalued in comparison to overt displays of political loyalty.23 The inspectors performed this service on a voluntary basis and were not compensated monetarily. The initiative was overseen by local branches of Poder Popular, each of which had the power either to promote it or let it languish, so the impact of the popular inspectors varied widely by municipality.24 The inspectores populares system was streamlined over the course of 1983 and 1984. By November

1984, local branches of Poder Popular assigned businesses in their municipality to individual inspectors, who were required to make a certain number of surprise inspections each trimester at the businesses for which they were responsible. Poder Popular helped the inspectores populares to regularly rotate the businesses that they were assigned to prevent inspectors from developing friendships with workers and administrators that would have complicated their ability to do their job fairly and effectively. In addition, the inspectors began reporting violations directly to the

State Pricing Committee, rather than the National Police. The State Pricing Committee took over after the denunciation, so that the inspectores populares themselves did not have to worry about participating in the prosecution and sentencing processes.25

An early report on the popular inspectors in action reveals the way that this system empowered women, who were often appointed to these posts and particularly well-versed in the

23 Ibid.

24 Maria Helena Capote, “En beneficio del consumidor: los inspectores populares,” Opina (Havana), Nov. 1984, p. 54.

25 Ibid.

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consumer economy, given predominant gender roles, as well as the seeming frivolity of its goals:

“a beautiful girl” surprised the workers of a shop that sold maltas, a type of soft drink, in the

Havana municipality of October 10th when she, a popular inpector, denounced them to the

National Police for underfilling patrons’ glasses.26 By failing to meet the norm established in the gastronomic code, the shop workers were able to skim a bit of malta off the top of each sale, likely for resale through back channels at higher prices, which went into their pockets rather than state coffers. Considering the criminal repercussions that could result from a denunciation to the

National Police, these crimes against the economy were clearly taken very seriously, although for whose benefit? This campaign was cast as a defense of consumers, but a slightly underfilled malta hurt individual consumers much less than the continued existence of the black market hurt state efforts to establish economic control and efficiency. Even though they were participants in a well-publicized campaign to improve the shortcomings of the consumer economy, the inspectores populares seem more like a dramatized placebo for a fed-up population than a step towards comprehensive solutions to the problems facing consumers. Stopping a couple of scammers from underfilling maltas was a drop in the bucket compared to the widespread economic inefficiency that continued to take place on the systemic, rather than individual, level.27

26 López, “Los inspectores populares.”

27 That said, these small inconveniences did grate on a population fed-up with material sacrifice. The 1979 film Retrato de Teresa includes a scene in which Teresa’s husband Ramón, a television repairman, takes his girlfriend to the beach and ineffectively scolds the person working at a small refreshment stand for underfilling their beers. While the inspectores populares’ mission was framed as a defense of the right of the Cuban people to fair and effective service, in the context of the film, given that Ramón is such an unsympathetic character, the implication seems to be that only a person of questionable revolutionary credentials would protest such a small inconvenience. During the scene in question, Ramón is out enjoying a day at the beach with his girlfriend, who lives in an upscale neighborhood and throughout the film is pictured lounging and reading magazines (and decidedly not working and contributing to the revolution the way that Teresa, Ramón’s wife, did day in and day out).

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The press’s efforts in orienting and facilitating consumerism in this period often focused on interpersonal solutions from which the state was notably absent, except perhaps as a broker or middleman to provide venues for people to connect with one another, like Opina’s classified ads or, less successfully, Muchacha’s letter to the editor section. As journalists were empowering people to seek their own solutions and, along with the Ministry of the Interior, enlisting them to wage war against corrupt workers and administrators in the consumer and service economies, the state was also forging structural solutions to consumer woes by developing a whole new market system, the parallel market. One element of these reforms was the establishment of farmers’ markets, which created state-sanctioned spaces for private farmers to sell their produce directly to individual consumers. Although only one aspect of the parallel market, the farmers’ markets proved to be far and away the most controversial of these reforms.

Farmers’ Markets

The state did not have the economic means to introduce new, better-quality goods through the existing market systems because they could only afford to produce or import these goods in quantities insufficient to meet demand. The resultant scarcity made these goods incompatible with both rationing and venta libre. In addition, leadership had always considered rationing to be a temporary solution to scarcity, destined for eradication, rather than expansion, as material conditions improved. Consumers, however, understood rationing very differently, and they used rationing as a framework for articulating new rights as revolutionary citizens.

Consumers relied on rationing: the food that each individual acquired at artificially-low prices through the ration provided the basic foundation for his or her daily life. Over the course of the

1960s and 1970s, Cubans came to see the ration as “a perpetual right to buy goods at prices that ha[d] nothing to do with costs,” which would have made eliminating it outright a deeply jarring

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and unpopular decision.28 To reform consumer conditions in 1980, economic planners therefore decided to introduce the parallel market to coexist with the ration and venta libre, thereby conserving egalitarianism in consumption of basic goods while creating spaces for uneven consumption of scarcer goods.

The parallel market was shut down with the Rectification of Errors Campaign, beginning in 1986, at which point it was denounced by leadership as an error, a deviation from Cuba’s true path to socialism; however, when the system was first introduced, it was understood as the next step in socialism, an intermediary step that would guarantee people’s basic needs even as Cuba moved toward what would ultimately be a “totally liberated market” which did not require such massive state intervention in the form of subsidies and consumer controls.29 A press celebration of Centro, a three-story grocery store that debuted in Havana as part of the parallel market, outlined this temporal framework: “Centro is much more than a place to buy jam and canned pineapple juice; you all must understand that Centro is also a laboratory to experiment with solutions to problems related to consumption . . . Centro is dream and reality, because it is present and future at the same time.”

The parallel market was first introduced in February 1980.30 It was characterized by higher prices, better quality, and greater selection than the existing, state-subsidized markets. The products were generally in high demand and limited supply.31 Prices were established through market mechanisms using this supply-demand dynamic, and there was no expectation that all

28 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 81.

29 Lic. Wilfredo Benítez, “¿Qué es el mercado paralelo?” Opina (Havana), Aug. 1980, p. 14.

30 MECA, “Veinte años de comercio.”

31 Balari, Los consumidores y el desarrollo del Sistema de abastecimiento en Cuba, 16.

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Cuban citizens be able to access goods equally through the parallel market. As the availability of goods expanded, Cubans who could afford to do so began buying on the parallel market, which reduced strain on the rationing system. Just one year after the introduction of the parallel market system, by February 1981, 80 percent of products that had been rationed at some point in the revolution’s history were available in unrationed quantities through venta libre, indicating that economic planners no longer felt these goods were sufficiently scarce to necessitate state oversight of equitable distribution.32

As a part of these reforms, in the spring of 1980 the state also introduced a new mechanism for marketing agricultural goods: the mercado libre estatal agropecuario. As with the parallel market more broadly, the goods marketed through this system were generally in high demand and of high quality; many were specialty items or items with exceptionally short shelf- lives which complicated their production and distribution through the slow and clunky rationing system to the point that many of these goods, including tropical fruits native to Cuba, had practically disappeared from Cubans’ kitchens prior to the market reforms. Like the parallel market, the mercado libre estatal agropecuario was governed by market mechanisms and was therefore marked by higher prices than the subsidized rationing and venta libre markets. The farmers’ markets, introduced in April 1980 as part of this new system for marketing agricultural goods, operated throughout the island until they were closed by the state in 1986.33

32 MECA, “Veinte años de comercio.”

33 The farmers’ markets were called the Mercado Libre Campesino, in Spanish, often abbreviated as MLC. I’ve also seen these markets referred to using variations of the name Mercado Libre Estatal Agropecuario, but in conversation it seems they were commonly referred to, perhaps in conjunction with other venues opened as part of the parallel market system, as the “Mercado Libre,” or free market. The nomenclature is a bit unclear, due both to the coexistence of multiple names as well as the back-and-forth reforms of the Cuban market system in the 1980s and 1990s: In this iteration, the farmers’ markets were only open from 1980 to 1986, but in 1994 a reformed version of these markets that allowed for the greater participation of state farms was introduced in response to the economic crisis. These continue to exist and are known by variations of the name Mercado Estatal Agropecuario. MFV, “¡La

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Of the 1980 economic reforms, the farmers’ markets were the most radical and indeed the most controversial. Aside from the introduction of unequal consumption, other parallel market mechanisms stayed true to state patterns in the consumer and service realm: the stores were government-owned and managed, with the state determining what goods to market and at what prices. These initiatives, including the development of new American-style grocery and even department stores, were slow to get off the ground, delayed by the same factors that contributed to inefficiency elsewhere in the consumer and service economies: the inflexibility of the central command economy and the limited resources that the state was willing to invest in expanding consumerism. The farmers’ markets, by contrast, were quick to get off the ground, as many private farmers were already producing more than what they sold to the state and were therefore able to redirect these goods to the new markets fairly quickly and easily. In addition, the farmers’ markets exhibited unique levels of state non-intervention. The most controversial element of the farmers’ markets was that the producers of the goods, Cuba’s farmers, were able to set the prices themselves, unleashing fears that the farmers would reap enormous profits that would foster unacceptable autonomy and inequality in society.

Often conversationally called the “Free Market,” the farmers’ markets more so than any other parallel market reform in these years represented a dramatic reversal of state policies that governed distribution and the ability of individuals to work autonomously and profit from their work. Small business had been almost entirely absent in Cuba since the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968 nationalized remaining private enterprises.34 However, leadership had identified the production and sale of agricultural products by individual producers as problematic well before

invasión de los vegetales!” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1980, p. 40, for the date that the MLC were introduced, and R.C. Longworth, “Castro Ends Farmers Markets,” Chicago Tribune (Chicago), 21 May 1986, for the markets’ closure.

34 For an in-depth discussion of the Revolutionary Offensive see Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 290-304.

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the Revolutionary Offensive, beginning with the onset of armed resistance to agrarian reform by peasants and landholders in the Escambray Mountains in 1960.

Peasants were the ostensible beneficiaries of the revolution, and they were celebrated as such in the first years of revolutionary rule with some of the state’s most dramatic spectacles and policies, including its controversial agrarian reform laws, revolving around the redemption of the

Cuban nation from its pre-1959 past through the “extension of the prosperity of urban citizens to their peasant brothers.”35 The island’s peasantry was not the monolithic group that leadership imagined them to be, however: traditional modes of agricultural production varied by region in pre-revolutionary Cuba. As historian Joanna Swanger has argued, the cooperative solutions that the Cuban state forged through land reform and nationalization of individually-owned property were best-suited to traditional modes of cultivation in Oriente. They clashed with those in the

Escambray Mountains, where peasants were influenced by the visions of larger landholders and dominant hierarchies of gender and class to favor autonomy and individual ownership over cooperativism. As a result, beginning in 1960, landowners and campesinos in Escambray banded together to mount the most sustained, armed counterrevolutionary struggle in the revolution’s history. Labeled the “War against the Bandits” by the revolutionary state, the struggle lasted until

1965. It left leadership with the strong conviction that peasants could not be trusted as autonomous actors and that their gradual integration into the revolution required close guidance and surveillance by the state.36

35 Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 50, emphasis in original. See Guerra for an extensive discussion of the role of the peasantry in the revolutionary state’s ideology and the narratives it used to explain and justify its rule from 1959 to 1971.

36 For a detailed discussion of land struggles in Oriente and Escambray, see Joanna Swanger, Rebel Lands of Cuba.

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This distrust and desire for control guided state policy toward small agricultural producers until 1980, when the introduction of the farmers markets reinstituted some measure of peasant autonomy over the sale and distribution of their harvests. Two factors were influential in the reversal of this long-standing policy. The first was the status of on-going attempts to re- educate and integrate the rebel farmers of Escambray into the revolutionary project. By 1980 leadership considered this process largely complete, as imprisonment, relocation, and reeducation projects aimed at teaching peasants “to grasp the irrationality of individualism, of excessive attachment to particular pieces of land, and of the very concept of private property and the desire to possess” had run their course for over a decade.37 In some ways, then, the decision to return to old methods of production and distribution through the introduction of farmers’ markets was dependent on the participation of a fundamentally new peasantry. While the individual participants may have been the same on the outside (though aged by the intervening years), they were different on the inside, having benefitted from the guidance of the revolution.

For some, like the participants in the Escambray counterrevolution, this meant participation in formal state rehabilitation programs. For others, this guidance was less formal and rooted primarily in the experience of deeply-politicized daily life under the revolution.

The second factor in the decision to introduce farmers’ markets in 1980 was government willingness to prioritize and respond to widespread discontent about the difficulties that citizens faced in their daily lives, which in 1980 was the highest it had been since the period of extreme scarcity leading up to and immediately following the 10 Million Ton Harvest.38 The international context of the family visits and the Mariel Boat Lift injected a new urgency into citizen

37 Ibid., 254.

38 See Balarí interview in Cuba Update, June and September 1980.

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complaints about the consumer and service industries, jumpstarting a period of unprecedented state responsiveness to people’s everyday needs as they perceived them, rather than as the state perceived them. As the pressure of discontent mounted over the course of 1979 and early 1980, the long unmet demand for greater variety and accessibility of fresh produce finally became a priority for significant reform. The farmers’ markets are therefore representative of a political opening in this period that allowed average citizens greater agency in shaping the economic policies of the state.

By June 1980, just two months after the farmers markets were first introduced on a trial basis in select cities, local leadership began organizing markets in every city and major population center in the country. Early experiments had concentrated on Havana, where dense populations had long complicated distribution and supply, especially of perishable goods like meat and produce. The city was soon home to four farmers markets located in the neighborhoods of Marianao, Cotorro, Alamar, and Guanabacoa. These early trials were a stunning success, leading to the rapid expansion of the system throughout the island.39 Observers trumpeted that habaneros, who had long resorted to “always bring[ing] a jaba [grocery bag] and visit[ing] local stores to see what they could carry off” any time they visited other provinces, were now not only self-sufficient in many farm goods but actually exporting thousands of potatoes to other

39 María Helena Capote, “Del campesino directo al consumidor,” Opina (Havana), June 1980, p. 11. It is logical that pilot programs were focused on Havana because the city’s dense population and strained infrastructure complicated supply and distribution more than anywhere else; however, I have not found any explanation of why these particular municipalities were chosen for the pilot program. Alamar, Guanabacoa, and Cotorro together form the outermost municipalities of the city from its eastern edge (Alamar) clockwise through Guanabacoa to Cotorro, which is southeast of Old Havana. Marianao, on the other hand, is slightly more centrally located, but still southwest of the city’s central districts of Central and Old Havana. Perhaps the idea was that the geographic distribution around the city’s center made the markets easy to access both from anywhere in the city and from the hinterland surrounding the city, and given their dispersion, that taken together, the results from the four municipalities would give a comprehensive picture of how the program would work on a large scale.

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provinces.40 Most impressively, they were able to do so in the most densely populated province

“without affecting any others,” and early observers were optimistic that if such positive results could be achieved where distribution was most complicated, then the farmers markets would easily change people’s lives everywhere for the better.41

Figure 6-1 Pipo, Mima, and the rest of the neighborhood try out the MLC (Aristide, “Pipo y Mima,” Opina (Havana), May 1981, p. 32).

In its initial coverage of the farmers’ markets, the press was uniformly optimistic about the ways that the markets could improve the conditions of daily life. A political cartoon published in May 1981, just under a year after the farmers’ market system began expanding

40 MFV, “¡La invasión de los vegetales!” 40.

41 Ibid.

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nationwide, captures this sense of improvement by positioning the farmers’ markets as superior to the standard mode of acquisition through the bodegas, with their long lines and unappealing lack of options. In the cartoon a wife sends her husband, Pipo, to the farmers’ market to pick up some produce so that they can host his work friends for dinner. Impressed by the quality and variety of produce that he finds at the market, Pipo comments to himself that “onions, plantains, and green onions,” were now available “year round!”42 While happily heading home with three grocery bags stuffed to their brims, Pipo encounters some friends, who are so impressed by his haul that they pressure him to sell his extra produce to them, with one friend looking over his shoulder to urge Pipo to “hurry,” because the whole line from the grocery store was headed his way. In the final two panels, Pipo returns home to explain to his wife, Mima, busy at work over a steaming pot on the stove, that their friends and neighbors had “left [him] skinned,” and when she sees that a single head of garlic is all that remains from his trip to the farmers’ market, she runs him out of the house.43 Despite the final note of marital discord, the cartoon presents the farmers’ markets as a stunning success; the overwhelming success of the initiative in responding to unmet needs among the population is, in fact, the reason that Pipo returned home nearly empty handed. The characters’ names–Pipo and Mima, which are common diminutives used for father and mother or grandfather and grandmother–indicate that they represent a Cuban everyman and everywoman, and the rush of friends and neighbors from the line at the bodega to buy from Pipo indicates that his positive experience with the farmers’ markets was universal. The message is clear: the farmers’ markets exceeded expectations and improved on the existing consumer economy.

42 Aristide, “Pipo y Mima,” Opina (Havana), May 1981, p. 32.

43 Ibid.

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Evidence of consumer response, at least initially, indicates the cartoon’s accuracy. In a survey of numerous farmers’ markets throughout Cuba during the period from 1980 to 1982, food researchers Madea Benjamin, Joseph Collins, and Michael Scott found that the products that Pipo picked up were standard “favorites” of the MLC, alongside garlic, rice, beans, and assorted viandas [tubers or root vegetables] and seasonal produce. All of these were favorites precisely because they were “difficult to find in the government stores”: there simply had not been a place for them in the consumer economy prior to the introduction of the farmers’ markets, or at least not in the official consumer economy. As one smiling shopper confided in Benjamin,

Collins, and Scott, “These are things you used to be able to get only on the black market.”44

As eager consumers rushed to the markets, Opina, Cuba’s magazine dedicated to consumer guidance, described the markets as the latest craze. It was “fashionable to go to the farmers’ market. To be savvy about pricing, know how to buy, [and] know how to negotiate with the guajiro [peasant farmer],” were common goals and the hot topics of conversation everywhere, ranging from small talk with strangers to discussions with friends.45 There is no doubt that navigating this new arena for consumption did require a certain degree of know-how, which drew on both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary knowledge and skill sets. Negotiating fair prices required general awareness of the availability and pricing of specific foodstuffs as well as familiarity with the etiquette of price negotiation, or bartering. While the former rested on knowledge of the consumer landscape in revolutionary Cuba, the latter was a pre- revolutionary skill that anyone who regularly purchased food would have finely honed over the course of regular practice. By 1980 this would have been a rusty old skill for many, particularly

44 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 61.

45 Capote, “Del campesino directo al consumidor,” 11.

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those born in the mid-1940s or earlier, made relevant once more by the farmers’ markets. In addition, there was significant variability in when specific markets opened and closed, even within the same metropolitan area. For example, despite the fact that both markets were located in Havana, the best time to buy at the market in Marianao was between 12:00 and 5:00 PM, whereas in Alamar the farmers began arriving as early as 6:30 AM and often ran out of produce before 10:00 AM.46 The most efficient use of the farmers’ markets, in terms of acquiring the best products at the best prices, therefore required familiarity and experience with a specific market’s daily rhythms of operation.

Amidst the widespread optimism that characterized public discourse, the creation and continued existence of the system rested atop an uncertain foundation of caution and distrust between state and citizen. The very establishment of the system was jeopardized by the history of collectivization in Cuba, which, in regions like Escambray, at least, pitted state programs and peasants against one another. In agriculture and beyond, the inconsistency of state economic policy made private producers wary of embracing new programs due to fears that their investments would be lost and their participation leveraged against them if and when the state chose to change course. As one peasant confided in an interview with journalists at the farmers’ market in Marianao: “Look, there are peasants who are still afraid” as a result of false rumors and past experience, despite the near immediate success of the initiative. Farmers’ concerns focused specifically on their ability to set prices, make reasonable profits, and continue to feed their own families with their production. They feared that the state would charge unreasonably high rates for spaces at the market, fix prices, or keep any merchandise leftover at the end of the day. Some also worried that the success of the markets would lead the state to reduce the quota

46 Ibid.

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that they set on production for self-consumption or raise the quota that they required agricultural producers to sell at fixed prices to the state, the acopio. Peasants were particularly concerned that the state would leverage the new opportunities available through the farmers’ markets to chip away at strategies peasants had used to ensure high standards of living for their families since the early 1960s. These included saving large quantities of produce for self-consumption and marketing excess to urban consumers who traveled directly to farms. Despite these widespread concerns, happy peasants and happy consumers were living proof of the success of the initiative, which put many farmers’ fears to rest: “every day more guajiros show up. And more products,” the peasant explained.47

More and more peasants were attracted to the program because the reality of the farmers’ markets far surpassed the bleak picture painted by radio bemba.48 Vendor stalls generally cost less than 5 pesos a day to rent, with the rate determined by the size of the space. In theory each peasant individually determined the prices of the goods for sale with an eye toward demand, supply, and time of day, with deep discounts on any remaining merchandise at the end of each day being the norm. In reality, however, prices were set in a collective spirit. To reduce competition and promote fairness, the peasants at a given market charged the same prices for the same items, until someone started packing up to head home and chose to reduce prices to get rid of their remaining merchandise.49 This indicates that farmers and/or consumers, and likely both, had internalized expectations over the course of two decades of life under revolutionary economic policies, under which prices did not vary because they were determined in a

47 Ibid.

48 Radio bemba, or lip radio, is the Cuban rumor mill. To hear something through radio bemba is equivalent to hearing it through the grapevine.

49 Capote, “Del campesino directo al consumidor,” 10-11.

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centralized, top-down fashion. These expectations shaped farmers’ behavior in this new market arena. Whether the farmers thought collectively determining prices was the fairest approach or they were anticipating consumer expectations for price uniformity, this seems to be an example of socialism from below, in which individuals acted according to socialist ideals.50

Surprising especially to critics who anticipated that the markets, like other aspects of the

Cuban economy, would be limited by the rigidity of central planning, there was even considerable flexibility built into the system that allowed individual producers to seek out better markets for their goods. Peasants from other provinces could travel to the markets in Havana so long as they presented authorization from their municipal branch of Poder Popular, a measure intended to prevent too many farmers from converging on Havana, where prices were bound to be highest, to the detriment of their local markets.51 Just as the peasant producers had been made new by the revolution, the peasant interviewed by Opina at the market in Marianao cast the introduction of the farmers’ markets not as a return to the past, but as an improvement on the past made possible by the revolution. “Before the Revolution, I was a placero,” meaning that he worked in an outdoor market similar to the farmers’ markets introduced in 1980. “I know something about how things work. But here there are no problems . . . nobody obliges anyone,” pointing to peasant autonomy under revolutionary rule and implying that despite the limited state intervention under capitalism, the pre-revolutionary market-system had been characterized by a lack of individual autonomy and freedom due to other factors.52

50 Thanks to Daniel Fernández, for the suggestion of “socialism from below” as a conceptual framework.

51 Capote, “Del campesino directo al consumidor,” 10-11.

52 Ibid.

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While the success of the farmers’ markets slowly wore down peasant distrust of the state, the state continued to distrust individual consumers and set strict limits on how consumers could use the farmers’ markets. Thus while the farmers’ markets provided an opening for greater economic agency on the part of the individual, tight control over the sale of agricultural products in state-controlled venues continued, encouraging some to continue to rely on the black market.

INRA Resolution 129-73, which was passed to regulate the new consumer conditions created by the 1980 economic reforms, limited the quantities of agricultural products that individual consumers could acquire or transport, even if they were obtained through legal channels like the farmers’ markets. The limits were set at ten pounds of rice, plantains, and root vegetables like malanga and potatoes. The resolution also established a limit of one pound for garlic and five pounds for beans.53 Transporting agricultural goods in quantities greater than those set by

Resolution 129-73 was a sanctionable crime. Since the early years of the revolution, city dwellers with cars had traveled to the countryside to stock up on agricultural goods that were scarce in urban settings. While the state was generally willing to turn a blind eye to this practice when done on a small, individual scale, they had long relied on traffic stops to catch entrepreneurial middlemen attempting to bring larger quantities of meat, cheese, and produce into the cities to sell at a profit. As the introduction of the farmers’ markets breathed new life into peasant agriculture in Cuba, new opportunities for trafficking agricultural products emerged, and the state was anxious to delineate the boundaries of the market opening represented by the

53 Aloyma Ravelo, “El que mucho abarca . . . “ Muchacha (Havana), Aug.-Nov. 1982, p. 39. For comparative purposes, a source from the late 1980s indicates that individuals were entitled to 2.3 kg (or just over 5 pounds) of rice and .575 kg (1.3 pounds) of beans through the ration, per month, indicating that the limits set on transporting agricultural goods were quite high in terms of an individual’s monthly food consumption, Balarí, Los consumidores y el desarrollo del sistema de abastacimiento en Cuba, 7.

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farmers’ markets and use the legal system to reinforce its control over the conditions of daily life.

An article published in Muchacha a few years after the farmers’ markets opened reflects official anxieties unleashed by the farmers’ markets and state efforts to restrain consumer autonomy in the new market landscape. The piece profiles Orestes Rivera León, who was caught transporting agricultural goods from the countryside to the city in illegal quantities. It is part of a series of articles that appeared in the magazine to explain “Socialist Legality,” a term for new laws introduced by the revolutionary state.54 That such a piece would appear in a magazine targeting young women seems strange; however, as discussed previously, the state had determined at the first Congress of the Communist Party in 1975 that the press would be a primary instrument for education and political orientation of the masses, a social role that included inculcating new norms in the population through lengthy explanations of the laws and values that undergirded revolutionary life. In addition, women, as the primary chefs in most households, were major consumers of food items, and an illegal flow of goods from the countryside would have made their role in the kitchen much easier to fulfill.

As Muchacha journalist Aloyma Ravelo explained, Rivera León owned a 1956 Ford, which he used to transport agricultural goods illegally to the city from the countryside. Rivera

León fabricated medical ailments and picky children to play on peasant sympathies in order to acquire the goods: “so that some peasants would sell to him, especially malangas and plantains, he claimed to have an ulcer. He also acquired some chickens on the grounds that he had a very big problem at home, as his children would not eat anything else.”55 Ravelo’s coverage thus casts

54 See Chapter 4 for a longer discussion of Socialist Legality and the 1979 Penal Code.

55 Ravelo, “El que mucho abarca . . .”

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the peasant participants in Rivera León’s crimes as unwitting dupes of his predatory scheme and not willing participants seeking personal enrichment, which reflects the official goodwill extended to peasants beginning in 1980. The article on Rivera León concludes with an explanation of INRA Resolution 129-73 and, given that Rivera León was tried by a Popular

Tribunal and sanctioned for his crimes, an implicit warning to others who may have been tempted to take on-going market liberalization too far by taking matters into their own hands.

It is not surprising that this piece was published in late 1982; by that point, the vast problems created by injecting a small, capitalist market into a centralized command economy had emerged clearly. In February 1982, the police conducted a coordinated raid on all twelve farmers’ markets in Havana, as well as others in various cities. The raid uncovered numerous abuses—from the falsification of documents to the participation of middlemen, something that was explicitly prohibited from the start of the farmers’ market experiment—but most concerning to state officials was the prevalence of goods stolen from state distribution centers and farms. In the Havana markets, police “found sacks of rice which were obviously stolen from state warehouses,” as well as chickens from state farms in four different markets.56 Because of abuses like these the farmers’ markets undermined the projected improvements in other realms of the consumer and service economies that were state-run and therefore more compatible with revolutionary goals of a classless society. These included other parallel market initiatives, like stores developed by the Cuban state to market food and other goods in which the state, rather than individual farmers, set prices and reaped the profits.

Throughout 1982 and into 1983, the farmers markets “stood virtually empty,” as even legitimate farmers chose not to market their goods out of fear of government persecution. During

56 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 72.

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this period, however, farmers and government officials negotiated a way forward for the farmers’ markets, negotiations which culminated in the ANAP congress in May 1983. As a result of these conversations, the state issued new farmers’ market regulations in October 1983 to curb abuses and allow for greater government oversight, and market activity began to pick back up.57 As discussed in the conclusion to this chapter, significant tensions remained, and these tensions would ultimately led to the downfall of the farmers’ market system. Yet in their six years of existence, the farmers’ markets briefly changed the way that Cubans ate by providing the material backdrop for new developments in nutrition and public health.

Vegetable Invasions: “The Only Invasion That We Would Welcome with Open Arms”

As both peasants and farmers’ markets had been made new by the revolution, so too had agriculture itself. Consumer magazines often framed advances in agricultural production through the lenses of science and modernity to explicitly cast them as the results of revolutionary investment and advancement, triumphs that linked seamlessly to the major triumphs touted most consistently by the state as example of the expansion of education and healthcare. In fact, one press piece went so far as to discuss “this revolution within the Revolution, and not that of women nor that in education: we refer to the scientific-technical revolution in our agriculture,” which rested on a unique socialist modernity made possible by collective hard work and state investment.58 The piece details the recovery of Cuban agriculture in the wake of Hurricane

Frederick, which hit both eastern and western Cuba in October 1979 and left the western half of the island, which was hit harder, facing shortages of lettuce, tomatoes, and other basic agricultural goods. Yet less than six months later, the same region was facing an “invasion of

57 Ibid., 72-77.

58 MVF, “¡La invasión de los vegetales!”

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vegetables!” a triumph of modern agriculture (just so Cuba’s imperialist northern neighbors did not get any big ideas, the article is sure to specify that “the only invasion that we would welcome with open arms is an invasion of vegetables”).59 The central argument of the article is that this friendly agricultural invasion was made possible by organization, hard work, and most of all, science: with sun, seed, and dirt alone, the island would still be importing all of their foodstuffs, down to the ever-reliable cabbage.60 This emphasis on science and progress was critical to the ability of the public to celebrate advances in agriculture. Without the focus on the role of science, articles celebrating the return of fruits and vegetables rarely seen since the onset of collectivization of agriculture in 1959 could come dangerously close to criticizing the revolution and identifying a return to the pre-revolutionary past as a goal. This would have been deeply problematic, as the revolutionary state staked its continued existence and legitimacy on its superiority to pre-revolutionary governance, not only in terms of social justice, but also in terms of Cuba’s modernity and role in the world.

Scientific gains in food production were tempered by the uncontrollable factors that have governed agriculture for centuries, mainly the weather. In Opina’s efforts to create hype and thereby ensure local markets for booming agricultural production, they occasionally forecast abundant harvests that did not pan out. For example, the “colossal harvest” that the magazine predicted for the spring of 1982 was stunted by drought and unusually warm weather, which had particularly detrimental effects on crops that feature prominently in the Cuban diet: potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and peppers.61 Yet, advances in agricultural science did occasionally work to

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 MVF, “Los campeones del 82,” Opina (Havana), Jan. 1983, p. 48.

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mitigate losses, even in cases of poor weather. Of particular importance during these years were new developments in a breed of tomatoes that were sown in the spring and produced during

Cuba’s hot, humid summers, extending the growing season of what had been a cooler season crop potentially up to eight months of the year. Popularly known as the “summer tomato,” it was developed at the Cuban-Bulgarian Experimental Farm established in 1971 for cooperation in agricultural research and named for Liliana Dmitrova, a famous Bulgarian guerilla.62 In 1983 excessive rain decimated the spring tomato harvest, leading the state to ration tomatoes, a crop that had so rarely seen rationing in the past that tomatoes had assumed increased importance in the revolutionary Cuban diet. The tomato “ha[d] become the principal ingredient in [Cuban] cooked dishes and [was], of course, the preferred vegetable to eat raw in a salad” by 1983, and, as a result, the poor harvests that year hit Cuban kitchens hard. Raw tomatoes were not available for months, while rationing provided families with a single can a month, a situation that changed only when the new bounty of summer tomatoes began to arrive.63 These brief months of tomato shortage could have taken a disastrous turn without the on-going scientific and technical revolution in agriculture: as one of the engineers responsible for the summer tomato put it bluntly, “I don’t know how to cook without tomato.”64

Left unspoken in the press coverage of the summer tomato was the fact that diminished agricultural production since 1959–most striking in terms of variety of production–was responsible for the increased centrality of the tomato in the Cuban diet. As the farmers’ markets made a wide variety of fresh produce available for the first time in decades, public discourse

62 Marta Vesa, “Historia del tomate de verano,” Opina (Havana), Feb. 1984, p. 40.

63 MVF, “Campeon del 83: el tomate de verano,” Opina (Havana), Jan. 1984, p. 40.

64 Vesa, “Historia del tomate de verano,” 40.

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about the havoc wrought by the Revolution on Cuban culinary tradition expanded. It became politically and socially acceptable not only for average citizens but also for journalists in state publications to speak frankly and openly about the decline of culinary traditions. Such open debate was made possible by the fact that the state had already identified a solution by introducing the farmers’ markets. Following a major meeting on quality in agriculture in 1979,

Opina published an optimistic, if slightly tongue-in-cheek, political cartoon in which they asserted, “we are sure that it will not take many years for the traditional ajiaco to return.”65

Ajiaco is a hearty stew traditionally served in Cuba: it is a flexible formula, but generally involves a variety of root vegetables and some meat in a broth flavored by sofrito, a mixture of sautéed onions, garlic, and bell peppers that serves as the base of many Cuban dishes. The idea that ajiaco, a staple in the diets of poor, rural Cubans in the pre-revolutionary era, had been out of reach for most is shocking, but state agriculture struggled to produce sufficient quantities of items like onions and garlic, despite the centrality of sofrito to Cuban cuisine.66 In addition to the tendency for these small items to be lost in the shuffle by economic planners responsible for creating production plans, they were also better suited to small production than mechanized large-scale agriculture, so their availability expanded with the introduction of the farmers’ markets, and as did the possibility of ajiaco.

The same is true for traditional fruits and vegetables with short shelf-lives that led them to rot before they could be distributed effectively through the rigid mechanisms of central planning. In response to the farmers’ markets opening Opina began running a series of

65 Bitimai, untitled, Opina (Havana), Dec. 1979, p. 47.

66 There is ample evidence that onions were consistently in high demand and particularly prone to scarcity into the 1980s. A piece published in Opina in the month that the farmers’ markets opened expressed pleasant surprise that onions had been available “por la libre” even in Havana, despite the destruction caused to the western provinces by Hurricane Frederick the previous October. MVF, “¡La invasión de los vegetales!”

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educational items on fruits and vegetables that had been largely absent from island life since

1959. These articles included descriptions of the fruits and vegetables, their nutritional value, and suggestions for how to prepare them. Okra, an item that younger city-dwellers had likely never seen or prepared, is one such vegetable.67 In the case of ñame, a type of Caribbean yam with which “Cubans older than 40” were generally familiar, Opina published an article entitled

“Ñame, the Disappeared,” a celebration of the starchy tuber that was more aspirational than reality. Their illustrator struggled to find even one to use as a model for the illustration to accompany the article, and the article actually invited readers to write in with information about where, “or more concretely, in which Farmers’ Market,” it was possible to buy it. With a nod to regional variation in eating habits, Opina used ñame as a rallying cry to push the farmers’ markets to be even better, calling for greater availability of yams especially “on behalf of the orientales and camagueyanos who cry out for yams each time we visit.”68

Tropical fruits are a particularly interesting case study, because while they had largely disappeared from state-sanctioned markets, the trees, and therefore the fruits that they produced, remained and continued to flourish in the environmental conditions for which they were well suited.69 The issue, then, lay not in production but rather distribution and acquisition; the fruits did not fit into existing structures and were therefore left to go to waste. The farmers’ markets created a space for these fruits to change hands. The case of a tobacco farmer that Benjamin,

Collins, and Scott met on their travels across the island is illustrative. While tobacco was his

67 María Luisa, “Quimbombo en el mercado,” Opina (Havana), June 1980, p. 45.

68 MVF, “El ñame, ese desaparecido,” Opina (Havana), May 1981, p. 38.

69 In the early 1980s, Benjamin, Collins, and Scott found that tropical fruits like mamey, anon, chirimoya, and tamarindo were not marketed at all by the Cuban state and were available exclusively through sales at the farmers’ markets or other private transactions, No Free Lunch, 64.

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primary crop, the farmer also had a half-dozen fruit trees on his property. “For years, he and his family would eat their fill, give some away to friends and relatives, and let the rest rot on the ground,” a situation which changed with the introduction of the farmers’ markets.70 The farmers’ markets created not only a space to distribute the fruits beyond his family’s social and familial network, but also a financial incentive for doing so, which made it worthwhile to do the work of collecting the fruits rather than allowing them to rot. Many small farmers began marketing goods that they had previously used for self-consumption, barter, or gifting at the farmers’ markets. For those rural-dwellers who had grown accustomed to receiving these items cheaply or gratis from their small farmer neighbors, this negatively impacted standards of living in the countryside, which, at least in terms of food acquisition and dietary variety, had been higher than those in the cities since the early days of the revolution. In contrast to rural settings where many produced at least a portion of their own food, in cities people did not generally garden or produce their own food in any capacity because, to urban dwellers, “urban vegetable gardens smack[ed] of underdevelopment.”71

In contrast to okra or tropical fruits, Opina journalists were hard-pressed to make a case for the place of cauliflower and celery in Cuban culinary tradition. They attempted to do so, however, as a first step in orienting the public to new eating habits that maximized changing patterns of production in this period. In the spring of 1982, Cuban farmers were in the process of cultivating celery and cauliflower on a limited basis. Before expanding production to make these vegetables available to everyone, the production plan focused first on establishing limited availability through a network of stores that generally catered to “foreigners” and specialized in

70 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 66.

71 Ibid., 43.

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vegetables that were not native to Cuba or suited to the climate, thereby rendering their cultivation extremely labor intensive. The piece explains that “for the masses, celery and cauliflower seem like exotic vegetables, and in a certain way they are; but the truth is that they have been cultivated in Cuba for many years,” though their consumption was limited to the middle and upper classes.72

To illustrate the long Cuban history of these vegetables, the article includes testimonials from two middle-aged Cuban women that the journalist caught buying cauliflower in Havana. In her choice of testimonials as well as her introduction to them, the journalist, María Luisa, pays particular attention to the fraught class connotations of specialty vegetables like cauliflower and celery. She introduces the women by saying that “neither of them were a marquis or anything like that” before the revolution, before comparing them to herself, an average Cuban “who simply had a father who loved vegetables” and would regularly bring home new things for the family to try. Despite this effort to smooth over the class connotations of cauliflower and celery, the content of the two testimonials brings class stratification and the historical connections between race and domestic service to the forefront. Romelia García, a thin white woman who appears alone, simply and elegantly dressed in the photograph accompanying her quote, described her love for cauliflower and joy at being able to purchase it again. She critiqued the way that the state had taken over parental functions in society, however, by mentioning her difficulty convincing her own children to eat new vegetables and blaming their eating habits on their experiences in state schools. At the escuelas en el campo and other boarding schools, she explained, “they do not teach them to eat vegetables, and that should worry all of us,” she argued. In the second testimonial, Mercedes Sierra Calzadilla, an Afro-Cuban woman pictured

72 María Luisa, “Coliflor y apio . . . ¿vegetales nuevos?” Opina (Havana), Apr. 1982, pp. 38-39.

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holding her smiling granddaughter, explained that despite her family’s humble background, she was exposed to cauliflower because her “mother was a cook in a rich family’s house, and she taught us to eat all of the good things that they ate.” She explained that her goal was to follow her mother’s example with her granddaughter: “I teach her to eat everything,” she concluded.73

State-run education was not the only factor that contributed to the lack of vegetables in young people’s diets. Austerity caused by the revolution itself was the primary factor, as evidenced by the generational difference in familiarity with certain foods, including fruits and vegetables that grew well in Cuba’s climate, like okra and yams. In fact, Opina pointed directly to this generational difference to justify the existence of its columns dedicated to vegetables, and to push agricultural producers to provide a greater variety of produce, from brussels sprouts to lima beans, fondly remembered in Oriente as “the gentleman bean [frijol caballero].” They identified a need for an “intensive and extensive campaign targeting nutritional culture” in order to improve the health of Cubans and ensure that state efforts to increase and diversify agricultural production would be met by informed and amenable consumers, so that the anticipated bounty would not go to waste. The first step was to introduce new products, especially to the younger generations, and cultivate desire for them: “It is easy to understand that there are generations who are not familiar with many vegetables because they began to be short in supply in the same period that [these generations’] eating habits were formed.”74

While some of the generational changes in eating habits reflect the everyday austerity of life under the Cuban revolution, others conform to broader global patterns in the move away from farm-fresh foods toward mass produced and processed foods, which, in contrast to

73 Ibid.

74 MVF, “¡La invasión de los vegetales!” 40.

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agricultural goods, were more widely available in Cuban cities than in the countryside.75 The examples highlighted in another Opina article illustrate this:

Among the youth, in particular, there are new ways to eat. For example, now it is ‘natural’ that a child consume a pint of ice cream in a single sitting; young people eat tomatoes as if they were fruits to snack on. Do we not sometimes see people peeling cucumbers and eating them like bananas? Twenty years ago it was not like this.76

These examples illustrate a greater tolerance and reliance on processed foods, like the pints of ice cream eaten by the children; however, the tendency to eat the entire pint in one sitting may indicate the scarcity of these processed foods in lived reality. In that case, access to a pint of ice cream can be understood as a special occasion of which children took full advantage. The increased consumption of tomatoes and cucumbers, in particular, can be attributed to the wide and reliable availability of these products, which along with the equally reliable cabbage are the primary components of the small salad that accompanies most Cuban meals. As the variety of agricultural production declined as a result of the collectivization and mechanization of agriculture, the population began to rely more centrally on dependable products like cucumbers and tomatoes, transforming them into snack foods to replace the products, like fruits, that had largely disappeared.

Interestingly, the generational divide was not always as clear cut as it initially appeared.

The Revolution had staked out new connections between Cuba and the Soviet Union and its

Eastern European satellites, connections that reshaped Cuban dietary habits due to trade arrangements as well as programs that sent thousands of Cubans abroad for education and technical training. Younger generations, educated and trained for careers under the revolution,

75 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 44.

76 MVF, “¿Regresarán los pimientos morrones?” Opina (Havana), May 1980, p. 42.

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were more likely than their older counterparts to have had experience of life under Eastern

European socialism. Thus while Cubans who were born in the 1940s or before were most likely to be familiar with, and miss, the greater variety of vegetables once available on the island, there was also a market for these vegetables among younger Cubans who had learned to eat them abroad. For example, Opina journalists were shocked when a young worker at a printing press, who “would have been raised without knowing an asparagus, given his humble social proletarian extraction,” asked them when cauliflower would be available for purchase: he had developed a taste for the “exotic” vegetable while studying in East Germany.77 Demand for certain vegetables, then, was shaped by such diverse factors as socioeconomic background and opportunities to live abroad for educational and technical training, variables which made it particularly difficult to identify a steady market for these vegetables.

Therefore, despite fervent demand among some sectors of the population, when these vegetables arrived at farmers’ markets, most consumers were unsure of how to use the unfamiliar ingredients or shocked by the high price point of such labor-intensive offerings.78 Consumer response to these new vegetables was inevitably shaped by lived experience of the revolution. As a result of state policies that heavily subsidized food costs, “Cubans have consequently become accustomed to cheap food and many have come to consider it a right.”79 Rising food costs, or even fluctuations in prices in response to factors like supply and demand, par for the course for consumers in capitalist settings, were unfamiliar and unnatural to many Cuban consumers. As a result, some felt cheated and looked on these new agricultural offerings and their purveyors with

77 Marta, “¿Donde comprar vegetales exoticos?” Opina (Havana), Jan. 1983, p. 46.

78 Ibid.

79 Emphasis in original. Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 67.

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suspicion. In contrast to the triumphalist early press coverage of the farmers’ markets, state periodicals began to critique the markets for exorbitant pricing, echoing these consumer complaints.80 Efforts to increase production of these vegetables were therefore doomed to fail.

Even when they were available at market, they rarely made it into the appropriate hands, leaving discontent to simmer on both sides, among Cubans who longed for a greater variety of produce but struggled to access new offerings as well as those who were baffled and outraged by expensive new products suddenly appearing in the market.

Processed foods saw similar changes in this period. Relative prosperity and the reshuffling of economic priorities sparked by the family visits and the Mariel Boat Lift, in addition to revolutionary advances in food science and technology, made it possible to return

“disappeared” foods to the markets and introduce Cuban consumers to new, quick-to-prepare and nutritionally-dense products as well. In the spring of 1980, as the farmers’ markets were expanding across the island and the Mariel Boat Lift was underway, the press announced the imminent return of the Truheart pepper to the Cuban market with much fanfare. The Truheart, known as pimiento morrón in Cuba, is a red bell pepper that was to be roasted and sold in small cans as it had been prior to the revolution.81 The pepper is “essential for arroz con pollo and the delicious ropa vieja,” two quintessential Cuban dishes, and while consumption rates varied prior to the Revolution, a middle class family would have been expected to buy between 14 and 20 cans a year to make these traditional dishes.82 Yet the pepper had been unavailable in Cuba since

80 See, for example, political cartoons in Opina (Havana), Feb. 1982, pp. 8-9, one of which features man lugging an entire safe to the farmers’ market in the hopes of buying a pound of pork.

81 The article refers to these as “pimientos morrones” or “Truhearth” peppers, a misspelling of TruHeart, a type of red bell pepper.

82 MVF, “¿Regresarán los pimientos morrones?”

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1965.83 The triumphant tone of the press coverage of the pimiento morrón stumbled only over the issue of rates of availability, with a long explanation of the difficulty of gauging demand due to the changes in the Cuban population wrought by the Revolution, many of them positive: the population had grown, as had people’s purchasing power and their access to chicken, which by

1980 was consumed at 3-4 times the pre-revolutionary rate. On the negative side, consumption habits had changed due to the years of unavailability, and over a decade of a total lack of supply made demand impossible to gauge. As a result of all these factors, the article cautioned that the peppers would arrive to the markets in small quantities at first, and perhaps not in every market.84 As the press sought both to build and temper anticipation among Cuban home chefs, the reality, when it came that fall, was even more disappointing than anyone expected: when the cans arrived at the market, the contents were grey and unappetizing. Even Opina had to admit:

“What a disappointment!”85

In addition to restoring lost foods to the market, the scientific and technical revolution in agriculture pioneered new products for the modern Cuban kitchen. One such product was trigo integral pre-cocido, or bulgur, a form of whole wheat that is parboiled to reduce preparation time. In a series of articles published in late 1983, Opina hyped the new product, abbreviated for the Cuban market as TIP. These articles presented recipes featuring TIP for Cuban cooks, who were likely unfamiliar with bulgur, which originated in Middle Eastern cuisine and was not marketed in Cuba historically.86 They promised that this “new food . . . will in a few years

83 “Tina Poca-Pulga,” Opina (Havana), Oct. 1980, p. 41.

84 MVF, “¿Regresarán los pimientos morrones?”

85 “Tina Poca-Pulga,” Oct 1980, p. 41.

86 See for example, “Trigo integral pre-cocido ¿Qué nuevo alimento es ese?” and “Recetas con TIP,” Opina (Havana), Nov. 1983, pp. 40-42, and Maria Luisa, “Recetas con TIP,” Opina (Havana), Dec. 1983, p. 40.

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revolutionize Cubans’ diet to the benefit of our health” due to its high concentration of fiber and vitamins B and E and ease of preparation due to the reduced cooking time, a perk for both busy home cooks and the neverending national campaigns to reduce electricity consumption.87

Despite the incongruity of bulgur to the traditional Cuban diet, there is evidence that this campaign was effective at capturing the imaginations of home cooks worn down by years of monotonous ingredients. Irma Rodríguez Santíesteban wrote to the magazine from Banes, in the eastern province of Holguín, the following fall to request that their editorial team send her a packet of TIP to try. She had saved all the TIP recipes published by the magazine the previous fall, but the product had never arrived in the markets in her home town. Though “enormously satisfied” to hear that the magazine’s recipes had inspired Irma to embrace the new developments in Cuban food science, the head writer of the magazine’s cooking section, María

Luisa, had to admit sheepishly that the product was rarely available in Havana either, though she would be sure to mail a packet if she stumbled across one in the single market in the city where

TIP was sometimes available. The success of reforms in food production, distribution, and consumption depended on many moving parts. While Opina had helped to create a market by educating the masses about this new product–and “the pages of Opina will always be open to this end,” Maria Luisa assured readers–the production and distribution of the product had proved erratic and insufficient.88 As a result, then, Opina’s campaign simply stoked discontent about food shortages, adding the elusive TIP to the host of products that people wanted to buy but could not.

87 Maria Luisa, “Recetas con TIP.”

88 “Maria Luisa responde,” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1984, p. 13.

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New Dimensions to the New Man

Changes in the Cuban diet stemming from both global trends and local conditions led to changes in the Cuban body. An increased reliance on calorie-heavy processed foods is just one factor in the emerging obesity epidemic in Cuba, a public health issue that was intrinsically tied to the government policies that to an extent much larger than in other parts of the world, determined Cubans’ diets.89 By the 1980s, it was not only the cows who had been fattened up by the Era of the Fat Cows; Cubans from all walks of life were struggling with obesity.

While state sources overwhelmingly framed this as a result of low levels of physical activity, many contemporary observers pointed to the high-calorie Cuban diet. Although as seen, the revolution impacted culinary culture in Cuba significantly, the tendency to consume high calorie foods was shaped by both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary factors, both by tradition and by the types of foods that the state provided through the ration and in meals offered in state- run cafeterias at schools and workplaces which featured carbohydrates prominently. Shockingly, in a country where malnutrition was relatively common prior to the 1959 Revolution, “a 1973 study found that 20.2 percent of children in Havana’s day-care centers were obese.”90 Children were especially privileged by the ration system, which provided certain scarce items, like fresh milk, exclusively to children or those with medical diets proscribed by a doctor. Yet the dietary guidelines established for children, as well as other Cubans, often had as much to do with cultural norms and political promises as they did with standards recommended by nutritionists.

Cubans tended to link excess weight with prosperity, and therefore perceived overweight

89 Except in rural areas where people often supplemented their diet with home-grown foods, what the state made available cheaply on the ration and through venta libre largely determined what people ate.

90 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, 106. With regard to rates of malnutrition in pre-revolutionary Cuba, the authors cite a 1950 World Bank study in which prominent Cuban doctors reported that 30 to 40 percent of urban dwellers and over 60 percent of rural dwellers were undernourished, 12.

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children as healthier than their skinnier peers. As a result, childhood chubbiness was a goal, and

“almost all Cuban children, at some point in their lives, [we]re given an ‘appetite enhancing’ formula which include[d] an antihistamine called cyprohistadina and B vitamins,” to help them get fat and healthy, even while childhood obesity rates were rising at alarming rates.91 Similarly, the goals set by the Cuban state with regard to total calories of food available to each citizen, every day, were considerably higher than those set by international bodies like the United

Nations. In 1980 the state was committed to providing 2,860 calories daily, and economic planners hoped to increase this figure to 3,155 calories by 1985, significantly higher than the internationally recognized minimum of 2,500.92

These cultural expectations were further complicated by the complex interplay of politics and nutrition in a revolutionary context, where the state’s ability to provide for its citizens, especially children, was central to its legitimacy and ideology. Thus, while nutritionists repeatedly advised political leaders that a half liter of milk a day was sufficient for children under the age of seven, the Cuban government continued to promise them a liter a day through rationing, a goal established in the early years of the revolution. When Benjamin, Collins, and

Scott interviewed then-Vice President of Cuba Carlos Rafael Rodríguez in November 1980 about the nutritional standards established through the rationing system, Rodríguez explained that despite nutritionists’ recommendations, the state could not reduce the milk ration until milk scarcity was eliminated entirely. Otherwise the reduction of the recommended amount would be perceived not as a step forward for nutrition, but as a step backwards in terms of the state’s ability to provide for its most vulnerable and valued young citizens. The cynicism with which

91 Ibid., 106-107.

92 Ibid., 104.

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people approached the state’s motives is indicative of widespread exasperation with continued scarcity and continuing official excuses, and the fact that Rodríguez pointed to these attitudes as a limiting factor on the state’s ability to reform the ration with nutritional guidelines in mind, reveals again the power that discontented consumers wielded in this era. “The people’s feelings must be taken into account,” Rodríguez explained, “We can’t be 100 percent scientific about it because politics won’t allow it.”93

Expanding waistlines were a problem for more than Cuba’s youngest citizens. By 1983, over 50 percent of Cubans over the age of 15 were overweight, and 20 percent were obese.94 The efforts to make a greater variety of farm-fresh produce available to the population through parallel market systems like the farmers’ markets dovetailed with increasing awareness and concern over the emerging obesity epidemic on the island. Known as the Campaign against

Sedentary Lifestyles, the state-led movement kicked off in 1980 with “a barrage of advertising on radio, television, and in newspapers,” encouraging increased physical activity.95 The campaign focused more on promoting physical activity than on reducing the reliance on high calorie foods in the Cuban diet, perhaps because state economic policies were themselves partially to blame for the unhealthy diet. There is, however, evidence of concerns about the

Cuban diet in various press pieces published in this period when the national spotlight was fixed on weight consciousness, including the Opina profiles on vegetables discussed above. Opina even published a profile on cucumbers, despite the undoubted universal familiarity with cucumbers, in order to promote them as a nutrient-rich and low-calorie food to aid in weight

93 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 114.

94 Zayda Grinan, “Más del 50 por ciento de los Cubanos están pasados de peso,” Opina (Havana), July 1983, p. 10.

95 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 113.

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loss.96 In addition, they ran a political cartoon in which two obese cats urged readers to “take advantage of the months with vegetables to slim down,” referring to the spring period from

January to June, during which for climactic reasons vegetables were most widely available in

Cuba. “Fill yourself with vegetables,” the cartoon urged, because these six months were necessary to balance out the other six months of the year, when vegetables were less widely available and people relied more heavily on wheat, rice, beans, and meat.97

Clearly issues of scarcity, particularly in the six months of the year that fresh produce was not widely available, contributed to rising obesity levels; yet widespread ignorance about nutrition was also a significant factor, as it led people to make unhealthy choices with the foods that were available. The notable role of the press in promoting nutrition education is significant because, while the expansion of education and healthcare had increased many aspects of medical literacy among the Cuban population, nutritional knowledge was a noticeably lacking. A 1979

ICOIDI study “showed that only 13 percent of Cubans knew what foods contain carbohydrates and only 27 percent knew what foods are high in calories. A mere 4 percent of those questioned had any idea how the body uses the different nutrients.”98 While the Cuban diet did theoretically provide ample protein through the ration, the diet was short on fiber and heavy on carbohydrates.

In addition, the widespread lack of knowledge about caloric content and bodily needs led people to rely heavily on saturated fats, particularly in the form of lard and other cooking oils used to fry food on the stovetop. Frying was the preferred method for preparing meat and vegetables, and beans, rice, and stews were also generally cooked with large amounts of lard or oil. Fats were the

96 MVF, “¡A comer pepinos!” Opina (Havana), July 1983, p. 38.

97 “Tina poca pulga,” Opina (Havana), Jan. 1980, pp. 46-47.

98 Study cited in Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 113.

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first item to be rationed in 1962 but improving conditions in the era of the fat cows made many items available through venta libre for the first time, including fat, which only contributed further to rising rates of obesity. In addition, the Cuban diet featured large quantities of empty calories from sugar, available through the ration in quantities of four pounds per person, per month (six pounds in the eastern provinces). In addition to the high-sugar content of popular snacks like ice cream, Cubans often added large amounts of sugar, and sneaky calories along with it, to everything from coffee and fruit juice to yogurt.99

State representatives faced the emerging obesity epidemic with a mixture of pride and chagrin, framing the issue as a sign of progress and development, albeit one that created its own challenges to overcome. As Hermenegildo Pila, methodologist for the Directorate of Education and Physical Culture at INDER, explained, Cuba was going through a process of development through which many other nations had recently passed. As people were able to rely more on machines in their work and daily lives–from automobiles to elevators–the resultant reduction in physical activity led to a host of cardiovascular problems, the “true plagues of the twentieth century.”100 In some ways, then, the need for a Campaign against Sedentary Lifestyles was in itself a triumph of the revolution, as it reflected development, which was a primary goal of the revolutionary state. This mentality, which framed obesity as progress because it put Cuba on par with developed countries like the United States, also made leaders reluctant to enact change on the nutritional front, which further explains the emphasis on physical activity rather than dietary change in the state’s response to the emergent obesity epidemic, the Campaign against Sedentary

Lifestyles. Benjamin, Collins, and Scott found that rather than showing interest in healthy

99 Ibid., 104-105.

100 Zayda Grinan, “Caminar, correr, trotar, moverse cada vez más . . . ¡y más salud!” Opina (Havana), June 1983, p. 10.

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alternatives, “many of the officials [they] interviewed seemed to accept uncritically the ‘modern’ western diet as superior.”101

Thus the revolutionary progress that had put Cuba in the camp of fat and developed nations brought with it a new burden on the population, whose lifestyles were the targets of the

Campaign Against Sedentary Lifestyles. By liberalizing agricultural markets, the state was exploring structural reforms to the Cuban diet, but in promoting the Campaign state representatives focused primarily on the lifestyles and activity levels of individual citizens, emphasizing changes individuals could make immediately in their daily lives, rather than sitting back and waiting for the on-going economic reforms to help them access a healthier diet. As the negative effects of collective development were concentrated in individual bodies, so too was the responsibility to overcome these effects.

While Opina called on agricultural producers, and implicitly the state, to alter production cycles and give people the tools they needed to safeguard their health, they also participated in the Campaign by encouraging all Cubans, especially those with sedentary jobs, to embrace a systematic physical fitness regimen that incorporated physical activity three to five times a week.102 Leaders encouraged work centers “to turn their coffee breaks into aerobics classes,” and women’s magazines like Muchacha continued to publish at-home exercise routines into the mid-

1980s.103 Even “Satirichacha,” a regular column in Muchacha that satirized trends and daily life among Cuban youth, encouraged readers to embrace the Campaign against Sedentary Lifestyles

101 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 113.

102 Zayda Grinan, “Caminar, correr, trotar, moverse cada vez más,” 10.

103 On exercise coffee breaks, see Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 113. For examples of at-home exercise plans, see Maria del Carmen Mestas, “Lee: este puede ser tu caso,” Muchacha (Havana), Oct. 1986, pp. 38- 39 and Ana Maria, “Autocontrol,” Muchacha (Havana), Nov. 1986, p. 19.

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by incorporating regular jogs into their daily routines. The article teased those who had not yet done so, asking if they were “part of the group that maintains that their fat came at too high a price to be dropped with such carefree abandon,” which again speaks to cultural attitudes which linked prosperity and abundance with abundant waistlines.104 With a healthy dose of humor, the piece describes how regular jogs could contribute positively to various aspects of young women’s lives, including their daily domestic struggles:

I assure you that you can even solve thousands of domestic problems with a jog around the neighborhood. For example, mark your spots in the lines for milk, at the butcher, and at the vegetable stand, because the sweet potatoes for your diet have arrived in stock, and at the fish shop you will always be first in line. You can also resolve the problem of the laundromat by picking up your sheets, covers, bedspreads, towels, and tablecloths on the way.105

While the tone of the article is clearly tongue-in-cheek, this quote does speak to a number of social and cultural realities that limited Cubans’, and particularly Cuban women’s, ability to embrace healthier lifestyles. The first issue revolves around the demands that revolutionary life placed on women’s time. By encouraging women to incorporate physical fitness into their daily chores, the article illustrates how to make time for physical activity for an audience of exhausted women undoubtedly wondering how they could possibly fit in yet another time-consuming social and political obligation.

The second speaks to the unpopularity of fish among Cubans, despite its healthy properties. While high-quality seafood was often consumed by those who could afford to do so prior to the revolution, revolutionary policies earmarked most high-quality coastal seafood, from shellfish to grouper, for export, so it was almost never available to a domestic audience, not even

104 Original Spanish: “del grupo que manifiesta haberle costado muy cara su gorduda y para soltarla con tanto desenfado,” Pucha, “Satirichacha,” Muchacha (Havana), Feb. 1983, pp. 30-31.

105 Pucha, “Satirichacha,” Muchacha (Havana), Feb. 1983, pp. 30-31.

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a domestic audience of means.106 When Lorna Burdsall’s mother came to visit in the spring of

1978, she mentioned Cubans’ inability to purchase lobster in multiple letters to her other daughter at home, explaining in one that she and Lorna “were lucky to get them [lobsters] that time at Varadero Beach, when we were treated like foreign diplomats.”107 What was available instead was frozen fish imported from the Soviet Union and fresh-water Cuban fish, which did not appeal to Cuban tastes; as Cuban chef Nitza Villapol explained in a 1983 interview, “Most

Cubans think fish is only to be eaten as a last resort!”108 This approach was economically sound: estimates by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United States (FAO) found that

“Cuba could import five times the amount of fish it exported and still come out with a profit.”109

Yet, it was a politically unpopular strategy, as it seemed to go against the “Cuba for the Cubans!” ideology that undergirded the anti-imperialist push that was central to the early and overwhelming popularity of the revolution. Plus, since it provided the population with fish that they did not want to eat, it undermined state efforts to promote healthier lifestyles and combat obesity throughout the 1980s.

Journalists framed their calls on individuals to embrace more active lifestyles through the lens of collectivity that undergirded so much of the revolution’s justifying ideology. As a result, the Campaign Against Sedentary Lifestyles resulted in a partial re-definition of the New Man, incorporating physical activity performed for the sake of physical fitness (rather than moral or

106 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 102.

107 As discussed in Chapter 2, Burdsall was a North American who lived most of her adult life in revolutionary Cuba. She occupied a privileged space as both a foreigner and member of the Cuban political elite, due to her marriage to Manuel Piñiero, head of intelligence for many years, and her position as head of Cuba’s modern dance troupe. Burdsall, CHC, Series 2.1, Box No. 1, Folder No. 13. See letters from February 12, 1978, for visit to Varadero, as well as March 8, 1978.

108 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 103.

109 Ibid., 102.

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spiritual development, or economic contributions to the revolution’s success through volunteer physical labor) into the ideological model. This New Man was “a healthy man, well-developed physically and mentally,” and was “the man of the future, at least in our country.” Press pieces on the Campaign framed embracing these new tenets and prioritizing health as crucial to the advancement of the Cuban revolution’s mission, to the benefit of all Cubans: “This is a sure method for prolonging the socially useful time of man’s life,” creating “a citizen who is more apt, better prepared” and whose health is in a state to “permit him to live, struggle, and produce in correspondence with all of the problems of his time.”110

Revisions to the New Man ideology to incorporate the Campaign against Sedentary

Lifestyles were a precursor to the massive ideological shift involved in the “Rectification of

Errors” campaign, which Fidel Castro announced in February 1986 at the opening of the Third

Congress of the PCC.111 This process involved turning away from the pragmatic solutions of the

1970s and early 1980s in favor of a return to the idealistic 1960s. It is no wonder that Che’s New

Man would be revived in this context, as the New Man, who had a well-developed socialist consciousness and responded well to moral incentives, was central to the idealistic economic policies of the 1960s, most notably the abandonment of material incentives and the emphasis on voluntary labor. As Fidel Castro announced and explained the rectification process to the Cuban population twenty years after Guevara’s death, he often used Che “as the ultimate model for rectification.”112

110Zayda Grinan, “Caminar, correr, trotar, moverse cada vez más,” 10.

111 Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 172.

112 Ibid., 173.

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Conclusions

The farmers’ markets were a primary target of the Rectification process because they were a culmination of everything that Fidel Castro had come to think was wrong with the early

1980s experiments in market liberalization. They had unleashed class stratification, once limited to the simple division between the political elite and everyone else, among the greater population. Prices at the farmers’ markets were lower than those on the black market but very high compared to the subsidized prices on rationed and venta libre goods: at the farmers’ market, rice and beans cost roughly six times the ration price, and luxury items, like meat, were even more expensive.113A single chicken cost roughly “twice the average daily wage.”114

As a result, some could afford to shop more often and purchase more at the farmers’ markets than others. ICOIDI officials estimated that 50 to 80 percent of Cuban families shopped at the farmers’ markets once a month, while highly-placed officials estimated closer to 50 percent, and international observers like the FAO came in below 50 percent.115 Therefore while roughly half of Cuban consumers saw their standards of living improve as a result of the farmers’ markets, the other half did not. Even within the sectors of society that could afford to purchase at the farmers’ markets, there was considerable variation. Some could afford to shop often at the markets and buy whatever they liked while others were priced out of the more expensive items, like meat, and used the farmers’ markets primarily to stock up on items like rice and beans that could be stretched to supplement the ration. While Cubans overwhelmingly favored the expansion of the consumer economy that began in 1980, it is worth noting that this emergent

113 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 62.

114 Ibid., 64.

115 Ibid., 65.

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socioeconomic inequality was unpopular with those who had internalized revolutionary ideology that celebrated a classless, egalitarian society. In the context of the debates about the farmers’ markets that arose following government raids in early 1982, Benjamin, Collins, and Scott found that “perhaps the majority of Cubans” favored government regulation of farmers’ market prices to mitigate this emerging inequality while still allowing for the improvements that the markets brought to the consumer landscape.116

In addition, the farmers’ markets added significant strain to the relationship between private farmers and the revolutionary state. Farmers could make considerably higher profits selling directly to consumers rather than through the state, and as a result, they reserved their lowest quality produce for the acopio, the quota that they were legally mandated to sell to the state. The quality of produce available at subsidized prices through rationing and venta libre declined as a result of these profit-oriented decisions. The low-quality produce available through state markets had been a source of consumer complaint and frustration even before the farmers’ markets made the laconic refrain— “the acopio arrived like this”—even more common, undermining state efforts to improve the state-run consumer economy.117 This process undermined state economic goals much like widespread practices of pilfering did.

Yet other aspects of the parallel market, such as parallel market stores established by the state, were also plagued by similar problems, and they were never singled out as problematic for reform as the farmers’ markets were. Centro, a three-story department store built in Havana in

1983, is a telling example. From its first day of operation, the store was overwhelmed by lines.

Into the mid-1980s upwards of 6,000 people a day, with around 16 percent of them from other

116 Ibid., 73.

117 Maria Helena Capote, “Con las rebajas de precios ¿Quién gana o pierde más?” Opina (Havana), Sept. 1984, p. 58.

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provinces, attempted to enter the store and peruse its offerings, which included a wide range of fresh and processed foodstuffs as well as clothing and household goods.118 For some specialty items, like cakes, it was not uncommon for people to begin lining up at 1 in the morning, and the lines generally did not dissipate until around 4 PM each day.119 Much like with the farmers’ markets, prices were quite high, but that did not deter those customers who could afford to buy.

Meat, seafood, dairy, and specialty fruit and vegetables were the most popular products and they were also the most expensive.120 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott found that these stores were characterized by prices that were “equal to or in some cases even higher” than the prices that characterized the farmers’ markets and even the black market.121

Yet despite these problems, when Opina visited the store in 1984 and interviewed shoppers, they found that people were generally excited merely at the prospect of buying something new. One couple explained that “Centro opened our eyes” to all of the ways that they could break out of their food rut and vary their diets. As a result, “bad humor had disappeared” from their house.122 Perhaps fearing that press coverage would emphasize the long waits, one man even encouraged the journalist to let readers know about this atmosphere of contentment:

“You should say that in this line, we are all happy,” he told her.123

Although state-run parallel market stores, like Centro, clearly also contributed to the emerging inequality in society, they were still state-run stores in which the state was able to

118 Marta Vesa, “Dos millones ya hemos comprador en Centro,” Opina (Havana), July 1984, pp. 37-41.

119 Ibid., 38-39.

120 Ibid., 39.

121 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 75.

122 Vesa, “Dos milliones ya hemos comprado en Centro,” Opina, 38.

123 Ibid., 41.

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exercise greater control and oversight and reap the profits. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the farmers’ markets was that they allowed private farmers to reap profits well above state salaries, which destabilized society. In many speeches about the decision to embark on the

Rectification of Errors Campaign, Fidel Castro held Cuba’s “millionaire farmers” up as one of the island’s most pressing social problems, a counterpart to the ideological vision embodied by

Che. Castro was concerned about the fundamental incompatibility of the farmers’ markets with socialism as early as 1982, when he gave a speech to the UJC in the context of state crackdowns on the markets:

When a person sells chickens for 15 pesos, even if he raised them, that person is making more money in several weeks by selling a few chickens than a worker makes in a whole year . . . Now that worker keeps the transportation system going, produces textiles, grows sugarcane, produces sugar, milk, eggs, and meat for the people. But he earns a modest salary . . . This can never be reconciled with the concepts of socialism and communism.124

Yet the situation can also be understood in reverse: what if it was not the farmers’ profits that were the problem, but the artificially low state salaries? After all, it was the lowest state salaries and pensions that led the revolutionary state to subsidize food costs so dramatically, and it was these subsidies that contributed to consumer complaints at the farmers’ markets seemingly exorbitant costs, which in turn undermined public health efforts to combat obesity.

Faced with these contradictions, rather than pursue reforms by which Cuban socialism could be made to coexist with capitalist elements like the farmers’ markets, government officials led by Fidel instead decided to attempt a return to the 1960s. With the Rectification of Errors

Campaign the state expanded its participation in the economy “to the point that it regained a

124 Castro speech to the UJC, 4 April 1982, cited in Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 70.

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virtual monopoly of all economic activities.”125 Parallel market stores continued to exist, and, in fact “much of the food sold at these government stores comes from private producers.”126 It was not the private farmers themselves that had been the problem, but the increased autonomy that had accompanied their access to profits. In the state-run stores, their produce continued to sell at high prices, yet it was the state that reaped the benefits.

Perhaps the most significant difference from the first period of idealism is that the late

1980s and early 1990s were a period of forced idealism that “did not have grassroots support but rather was institutional and imposed from above.”127 In the absence of the euphoria that had accompanied revolutionary leadership’s ascent into power and major showdowns with the

United States, state efforts to enforce shared sacrifice for the collective good lacked an ideological foundation as well as popular support. This was an important distinction for many, who experienced the extreme scarcity of the 1990s not as collective sacrifice to build socialism, but instead simply as hunger and poverty.

125 Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 174.

126 Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, No Free Lunch, 75.

127 Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 173.

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EPILOGUE

While the looming collapse of existing socialism was central to Fidel Castro’s decision to embark on the Rectification of Errors Campaign, the crisis of the Special Period was rooted as centrally, if not more so, in the shortcomings of the revolutionary state than it was in the elimination of Soviet subsidies. As Carollee Bengelsdorf has argued, limitations in both the political and economic sphere, which were only consolidated in the course of Soviet-style institutionalization in the 1970s, have been central to the crisis facing Cuba since the 1990s. The areas where economic difficulties have been most concentrated since the 1990s— “food production and distribution, work efficiency and redundancy, transportation” —are precisely the areas where consumer difficulties and complaints were most concentrated in the 1970s and

1980s, as I have argued.1 These economic difficulties cannot be separated from the limitations of so-called “popular democracy.” As evidenced in this dissertation, Cubans pushed the state to be more responsive to these problems but leaders chose to prioritize other goals. Therefore,

Bengelsdorf writes, the Special Period “has everything to do with the absence of democracy in the structures of decision making and the ramifications of a system that, in practice, allowed those in freedom to act (or not act) without having to answer to anyone.”2

I agree with Bengelsdorf’s central argument that the problems of the Special Period stem from a fundamental lack of accountability within the Cuban political system, which was a problem well before the 1991 Soviet collapse. This dissertation tells a story of average Cubans using a variety of methods and arguments to debate official notions of the role of consumerism in a revolutionary society. For many, these critiques did not entail a counterrevolutionary position.

1 Bengelsdorf, The Problem of Democracy in Cuba, 169.

2 Bengelsdorf, The Problem of Democracy in Cuba, 169.

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Instead, they came from within the revolution, from a desire to push revolutionary leadership to make good on its promises, which always centered on shared abundance, even if after 1960 that abundance was located in an elusive future. It is a story of average Cubans pushing revolutionary leadership to alter their definition of revolution, if not in theory than in practice. After the battles and hardships of the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s was a period in which Cubans challenged their political leaders to harness the revolution’s promises of social justice and egalitarianism and incorporate these notions into daily life in ways that were sustainable and compatible with a widespread desire for a return to normalcy, ordinary lives in ordinary times. Many believed in the so-called “Big Idea” of communism, but they also pushed the state to provide them with the resources that they and their families needed if they were going to participate meaningfully in the process of helping society to get there.3 As a result, those who fell prey to the ambiguous charge of ideological diversionism were often stunned to find themselves under attack as counterrevolutionaries. In their minds, they were devoted revolutionaries whose only crime was to advocate for an alternative vision of what the revolution meant.4

As we have seen, these efforts at true popular democracy had limited results. While economic planners expanded the consumer and service economies in the 1970s and again with the introduction of the parallel market in 1980, Fidel Castro and other high leadership, threatened by the increasing individual autonomy that resulted from early 1980s market liberalization,

3 Here I am using the “Big Idea” of communism along the lines of Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, which presents a cacophony of voices trying to understand the collapse of the Soviet Union and what it has meant in their lives. As Alexievich’s narrators document, individual relationships with the Soviet state and the Big Idea varied considerably, which I believe also to be the case for Cuba.

4 This mirrors trends in the realm of cultural production, where most cases of censorship were exercised against people who did not oppose the regime, “thought of themselves as ‘revolutionaries’ and were stunned and outraged to be accused of ideological diversionism, improper conduct, or counterrevolutionary activities,” Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State, 28-29.

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ultimately chose power for themselves over empowering the people. While revolutionary leadership made much of the promise of popular democracy exercised first in mass rallies and later through Poder Popular, in reality, decision making was always and remains concentrated in few hands. In setting out to build communism under the leadership of a small, vanguard party, the state cut off avenues of citizen participation and influence on the course of revolutionary development. As Grenier has argued for radical socialism and communism in general, freedom is always a problem because “it is an end, not a mean [sic], and one cannot build socialism if everybody is free to oppose socialism.”5 In the Cuban case this aversion to individual freedom cut off the possibility of debate, negotiation, and flexibility in what socialism could and should mean in people’s lives. This despite the fact that many Cubans who challenged austerity and the

“thin cow mentality” did so less out of an aversion to socialism and more out of a desire to make socialism compatible with their lives, to build “socialism with a human face,” as the Czech reformers of the repressed 1968 Prague Spring called it.

As a result of leadership’s unwillingness to meaningfully engage with citizen conceptions of the meaning of revolution, many of the revolutionary state’s policies had unintended effects.

State and society both continue to deal with the fall out. Rather than eliminating gender inequality and strengthening the Cuban family, the Family Code pushed these problems under the rug(s) in individual homes. As some individuals internalized these new norms and others did not, the state provided no means for enforcing the Family Code or mediating disagreements. As a result, despite policies encouraging legal marriage, consensual unions and divorce rates skyrocketed. The latter tended to peak in moments of extreme scarcity, first following the Ten

Million Ton Harvest in 1971, then as Soviet subsidies dried up in 1989, which speaks to the toll

5 Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State, 20-21.

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that material scarcity and uncertainty takes on marriages, particularly when one partner is disproportionately responsible for overcoming these factors. Even in Retrato de Teresa, the iconic depiction of the struggle for gender equality in Cuba, the only solution that Teresa and

Ramón can find to their differences is separation. By 1991, as the Special Period set in, 1 in every 2.3 Cuban marriages ended in divorce, one of the highest rates in the world.6

Thus, the Cuban state did not provide a meaningful solution to the problems of material scarcity and gender inequality, and in the absence of such a solution, many Cuban women have rejected the institution of marriage as incompatible with the other roles that they play in revolutionary society. Smith and Padula found that women were more likely than men to seek divorce, and that this discrepancy was rooted in the fact that women were more likely to internalize the new gender norms outlined in the Family Code than men were. After a first divorce, men were more likely than women to remarry. As Smith and Padula write, “Cuban authorities opined that men remarried because they were ‘less able than women’ to confront domestic tasks;” whereas divorced women, especially women with political or professional ambitions, seemed to find “always having to think of my husband” a burden from which they were glad to be free.7

Material scarcity also impacted family planning in unanticipated ways. Fertility rates in

Cuba peaked in 1964 in the context of shortages of contraception and a baby boom fueled by the euphoria of the early days of the revolution. After that, fertility rates declined steadily. By 1978, they were down to 1.8 children per couple, below replacement levels for the first time in Cuban history. Fertility rates have only continued to drop in the context of economic collapse, and Cuba

6 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 155.

7 Ibid., 157.

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was the first country in Latin America to achieve 0 percent population growth.8 In the absence of meaningful solutions to scarcity offered by the state, Cubans have chosen to have fewer children, and despite a rapidly aging population, down to the present young Cubans leave the island in disproportionate numbers to seek economic opportunity.

Today, after the visit of a sitting U.S. president and the death of Fidel Castro, much has been made of the apparent liberalization that has taken place in Cuba under the presidency of

Raúl Castro. While scholars and observers alike speak of Cuba in transition, it is unclear what lasting effect this liberalization will have, if any at all. The increasing visibility of previously taboo topics, as evidenced by Pánfilo in Vivir del cuento, but also in state media, which debuted a new program on state television called Cuba Dice that includes “‘man-on-the-street’ interviews,” is reminiscent of the emergence of new state spaces for expressing discontent and advocating for change that emerged in the late 1970s, like Opina.9 These spaces served as safety valves for expressing discontent as much as, if not more so than, they functioned as true motors for change: the revolutionary state was attentive to discontent in this period, but never truly accountable, and it picked and chose its economic reforms according to its own priorities, not the priorities of the people. As we have seen, the market liberalization undertaken in the 1980s was rolled back when it began to threaten the power and control exerted by revolutionary leadership.

While Raúl’s reforms go further than the market liberalization undertaken in the 1980s, both in economic and political terms, they also respond to lasting and acute scarcity that has undermined the popular basis of the revolution, particularly the safety net of socialized services and other protections that were once guarantees. Though a Castro brother, one of the original 26th

8 Ibid., 151.

9 Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State, xii.

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of July barbudos, continues to rule, Cuba in 2018 looks little like what Cubans who yearned for revolution would have imagined or dreamed in 1959.

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LIST OF REFERENCES

Archival Sources

Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami, Miami, FL

Burdsall Family Papers, circa 1930s - 1970s

José Lezama Lima Papers, 1961-1976

Special and Area Studies Collections, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

Lawton Chiles Senate Collection

Oral History Interviews

Nancy Hernández Smith (pseudonym), Santiago de Cuba, July 2015

Veronica Proskurnina, June 2014, Moscow, Russian Federation

Newspapers and Periodicals

Periodicals in Print

Bohemia (Havana, Cuba)

Demanda: Revista científica del ICOIDI (Havana, Cuba)

Ellas en Romance (Havana, Cuba)

Muchacha (Havana, Cuba)

Mujeres (Havana, Cuba)

Nuevos Rumbos (Gainesville, FL, USA)

Opina (Havana, Cuba)

La Revista de Comercio (Havana, Cuba)

Somos Jovenes (Havana, Cuba)

Digital Periodicals

Caiman Barbudo (Havana, Cuba)

Chicago Tribune (Chicago, United States)

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Cubanet (Havana, Cuba)

Havana Times (Havana, Cuba)

La Jiribilla (Havana, Cuba)

The New York Times (New York City, United States)

Washington Post (Washington, DC, United States)

Films

Grey, Judith. 2003. Sin Embargo. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources.

Raggi, Tulio. 1977. El Primer Paso de Papá. Havana: Instituto Cubano del Arte y Indústria Cinematográficos. Uploaded 27 Aug. 2012. Accessed online 23 Aug. 2016 at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsujnyGPM34.

Vega, Pastor. 1979. Retrato de Teresa. Havana: Instituto Cubano del Arte y Indústria Cinematográficos.

Published Primary Sources

Balari, Dr. Eugenio R. 1990. Los consumidores y el desarrollo del sistema de abastecimiento en Cuba. Habana: Instituto Cubano de Investigaciones y Orientación de la Demanda Interna.

Barredo, Lázaro. 1981. Asamblea nacional del poder popular de Cuba. La Habana:Editorial ORBE.

Castro, Fidel. 1978. II período de sesiones de la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular. La Habana:Editora Política.

Castro, Raúl. (1972) 1985. “El diversionismo ideológico arma sutil que esgrimen los enemigos contra la revolución.” La Habana: Ministerio de Cultura.

La Comisión de Orientación Revolucionaria del Comite Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba. 1972. Los CDR y el delito contra la propiedad. La Habana: Imprenta Frederico Engels.

Departamento de Orientación Revolucionaria del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba. 1980. Algunas consideraciones sobre la propaganda diversionista del imperialismo contra los paises socialistas. La Habana: Editora Política.

Dirección de Orientación y Comportamiento del Mercado. 1979. Encuesta sobre el trabajo que desarrollan las oficinas de registro de consumidores. La Habana.

Espín Guillois, Vilma. (1975) 1990. “Informe presentado a la comision de trabajo sobre el pleno ejercicio de la igualdad de la mujer.” In La mujer en cuba: Familia y sociedad, discursos, entrevistas, documentos. La Habana: Imprenta Central de las FAR.

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Espín Guillois, Vilma. (1986) 1990. “La batalla por el ejercicio pleno de la igualidad de la mujer: acción de los communistas,” In La mujer in Cuba: Familia y sociedad, discursos, entrevistas, documentos. La Habana: Imprenta Central de las FAR.

Espín Guillois, Vilma. (1988) 1990. “Entrevista concedida a la revista “Claudia” de Brasil, sept. 1988.” In La Mujer en Cuba: Familia y sociedad, discursos, entrevistas, documentos. La Habana: Imprenta Central de las FAR.

Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC). 1974. Tesis profundizado la accion revolucionaria de la mujer, segundo congreso. La Habana.

Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC). 1975. Memoria II Congreso Nacional de la Federación de Mujeres Cubanas. La Habana: Editorial Orbe.

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Dissertations and Theses

Krebs, Lauren N. 2015. “La Revolución Preparada, Political Tourism in Cuba, 1963-1978.” MA thesis, University of Florida

Wierzbicki, Agnes Martha. 2005. “The Cuban Black Market.” MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Alexis Baldacci was born in Joliet, Illinois. She spent her childhood in the Midwest.

After taking a Cuban history class on a whim while completing her Bachelor of Arts in creative writing at Illinois State University, she never looked back. While at Illinois State University, she spent a semester developing her language skills and falling in love in Granada, Spain. During her graduate studies at the University of Florida, she spent a summer at Moscow State University in

Moscow, Russian Federation, to acquire the language skills and cultural knowledge necessary to understand the 1970s and 1980s in Cuba, a period of intense Soviet influence. She spent most of

2015 in Cuba, completing research for this dissertation. She graduated from the University of

Florida with a PhD in history in May 2018.

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