A Thesis entitled What Women Want: Emancipation, Cuban Women, and the New Man Ideology by Alysia Shaffer Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in History Dr. Charles Beatty-Medina, Committee Chair Dr. Amanda Bryant-Friedrich, Dean College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo December 2017 An Abstract of What Women Want: Emancipation, Cuban Women, and the New Man Ideology by Alysia Shaffer Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in History The University of Toledo December 2017 Historians often marginalize Cuban women’s contributions to the development of Cuban society throughout the 20th century. Though not as predominant as men, women fought and sacrificed for Cuban Independence. When Cuba gained independence, women were still second class citizens; however, through women’s organizations, they pushed for social change as well as challenged the government in favor of their own emancipation. Later, in the struggle against the Batista regime, despite participating as guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra and urban and underground activists, scholars sideline Cuban women in favor of their male counterparts, los barbudos— “the bearded ones.” When the Cuban Revolution succeeded in ousting Fulgencio Batista from power, women remained vocal among supporters and were drivers of change in Revolutionary Cuba. Latest historiographical trends seek to recapture the role Cuban women played in their country’s liberation as well as their own emancipation. My research posits Cuban women progressively assumed qualities which made them influential actors of nation-building as well as the embodiment of the Cuban new man. This project examines women’s changing roles from the late 1890s until 1975, and it explores women’s agency and activism. iii For José—my Über driver in Miami—and my seventh grade English teacher. You’ve both inspired me to do my all: one encouraged me to keep studying the Cuban Revolution and the other told me I wouldn’t make much of myself because of being soft-spoken. Contents Abstract ii Contents iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1 13 Chapter 2 34 Chapter 3 54 Conclusion 80 Bibliography 83 i 1 Introduction As Cuban society changed in the years following the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara noted the importance for Cuban citizens to transform into hardworking egalitarian figures, or the Cuban new man, who would meet the challenges of their evolving country. These individuals would be selfless, politically conscious, and willing to better themselves and their fellow countrymen. My research posits Cuban women progressively assumed qualities which made them influential actors of nation-building as well as the embodiment of the Cuban new man. Prior to the Revolution, distinctions among class and race informed the means in which women participated in change and the degree of visibility they received. However, with the fall of the Fulgencio Batista regime in 1959, women became more active in education, the workforce, and pushing Revolutionary ideals. Che stressed the concept of voluntarism which provided a framework for women’s integration within the new man ideology.1 Using voluntarism as a rallying cry, Guevara called for the Cuban people to become vanguards of their country and continue the revolution which Fidel Castro began and spearheaded. Women, plenty 1 According to Samuel Farber, voluntarism is “the idea that human will and consciousness can by itself overcome any objective, material obstacles.” Cuban voluntarism finds its roots in the writings and speeches of Mao Zedong. William A. Joseph posits that voluntarism was “one of the defining characteristics of Mao.” For Guevara, this concept not only explained the success behind the Cuban Revolution, but it also laid the groundwork for the transformation of Cuban society through the development of the new man. 1 2 of whom had fought alongside Castro and Guevara in the Sierra Maestra, answered this call in earnest. Those who had been guerilla fighters or underground combatants in the late 1950s took on more transparent political roles and responsibilities by the 1960s to contribute to rebuilding the Cuban nation. Furthermore, following the triumph of the Revolution, women’s enrollment in revolutionary institutions—whether academic or vocational—increased and surpassed their male counterparts, and their involvement in the workforce reflects this drive to embody the goals of the Cuban Revolution. In the course of seventy years, beginning around 1890, Cuban women transformed their status from “impediments” in the struggle for independence to “revolutionary vanguards” within Castro’s Cuba. Socioeconomic status conditioned women’s agency and determined the role they could play in the early Republic of Cuba. Upper-class white educated Cuban women were able to articulate the female experience through prose and poetry; or, more broadly, those women who had access to wealth and status hosted fundraisers or sent jewels and money to line the pockets of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC).2 On the other hand, middle- and popular-class women were more likely to participate in strikes and protests to achieve better working conditions or higher wages.3 Furthermore, the struggle for women’s suffrage in the Early Republic showcased the competing definitions of womanhood and the extent to which women ought to participate in social and political 2 Lillian Guerra, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth- Century Cuba (UNC Press, 2005), 78. 3 K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman’s Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (Duke University Press: 1991), 169. 2 3 reform. Here, higher class women dominated the leadership of women’s organizations and often times closed their ranks to lower class and Afro-Cuban women. Cuban women had greater visibility at the forefront of Cuba as the nation evolved from a neocolonial playground of the United States to Castro’s Revolutionary Cuba. In addition to a rise in female employment, women were also more directly involved with shaping the future of Cuba through platforms like the Literacy Campaign, in which volunteers from urban cities dispersed throughout the island to confront Cuba’s problem of illiteracy. Many were also active members of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), an organization that promoted women as agents of society. However, the underlying morality sets these mediums apart from past attempts to include women in society.4 Where feminist movements before the Revolution worked within the male-dominated system and “preserve family and Hispanic morality,”5 the wave of female revolutionaries after 1959 broke down these ties to a patriarchal power structure and “mounted measures for equalizing sex roles.”6 My research analyzes women’s role in Cuba from 1898 with the end of the Spanish American War/Cuban War of Independence until 1975 when the Cuban government enacted the Family Code. The end of the Spanish American War began a period of intranational tensions for Cuba where different strands of nationalism competed for cubanidad, or the Cuban identity. Though not always welcomed or visible in their aid, women regularly engaged in activities that supported the identity they identified with. It 4 Louis Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (Oxford University Press: 2014), 261. 5 Stoner, From the House to the Streets, 193. 6 Pérez, Cuba, 294. 3 4 was often the case that class and ethnicity largely informed women’s cubanidad. Women who participated in the Cuban Revolution also came from diverse backgrounds and walks of life, but united under Castro’s charisma and vision of Cuba free from the puppet regime. Sixteen years after the Cuban Revolution ousted Batista, the Revolutionary government passed the Family Code into law, which served as a statement of the Revolution’s support of women and “put the full moral and legal force of the revolution behind the long-standing demands of working women.”7 I veer from the current historiography on the Cuban new man, because it does not give much attention to women’s agency. However, to do this, I synthesize the literature on the new man with two historiographical threads of Cuban feminist historiography that tend to focus on women in Cuba either before or after the Cuban Revolution. Historians Yinghong Cheng and Richard Fagen represent the new man historiography. In Creating the New Man: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities, Cheng argues the 20th century witnessed successful communist revolutions that utilized state policy to secure a place for the new man in history. His work focuses on the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions and specifically on the “interaction between revolutionary change and human nature.” The former two provide ideological background on how previous communist regimes approached the formation of the new man. Guevara’s notion of the new man differs from the Soviets and the Chinese, because the Cuban new man was gender inclusive and well defined while also upholding a “mass line mentality.”8 Cheng examines how the Cuban Revolution differed from the classical 7 Pérez, Cuba, 294. 8 Foremost, in the Soviet Union, there was a gender divide between the new Soviet man and the new Soviet woman (collectively known as the new Soviet Persons), but each new 4 5 Marxist idea of revolution as the Castro-Guevarist model of revolution perpetuated the need for a strong vanguard, rather than socioeconomic clarity, to inspire revolutionary consciousness. Within his discussion of the Cuba’s perception of a new man, Cheng claims the revolutionary voluntarism laid the groundwork for the success of the Cuban Revolution during and after the fight in the Sierra Maestra. Cuba’s socialist revolution, in accordance with the classical Marxist interpretation, should not have been possible. Cuba never experienced an abundance of industrialization and development of a proletariat capitalist wealth, yet it went through a dramatic change from a post-hegemonic nation to a socialist society.