Country Fact Sheet UN Women Data Hub

On that day, Castro and Guevara were celebrated as heroes by the thousands of Cubans that welcomed the pair in the streets. Historically, Cuba was a largely agrarian society, with a tourism-based economy in the urban areas, primarily Havana. Many women were forced to work as maids or prostitutes in these areas because there were not many other choices for them, as they were excluded from educational opportunities. Before the revolution, around 70% of women in the workforce were domestic servants, working for long hours with low pay and little to no benefits. Only around 194,000 women were in the workforce, with around 700,000 considered unemployed and 300,00 underemployed. After the creation of the FMC in 1960, efforts were made to increase the reproductive rights of women in Cuba. In 1965, abortion was decriminalized and in 1979, abortion was made free and more easily accessible.

• They are often curious about dating foreigners, and many local women are attracted to Americans.
• “It is not legal but it is not illegal either (…),” tattoo artist Santana told Reuters as she began work on a tattoo.
• She said there should be more credit available for women business owners and more done to care for children, the sick and the elderly, which are responsibilities that now fall mainly on Cuba’s women.
• As the fighting intensified, Castellanos and her husband built a life-saving field hospital.
• Bayard de Volo argues, however, that this was an important time for women involved in the anti-Batista movement since they enjoyed a degree of mobility and undetectability that their male counterparts did not.

Indeed, more than 90 percent of all domestic workers were female. Fewer than 3 percent of Cuban women, however, worked in agricultural, fishing, construction, and transport industries.

She pledged her support to the revolutionary cause after Fidel Castro and his men led the notorious attack on the Moncada Barracks. De los Santos aided rebel survivors, smuggled arms for guerrilla fighters and joined the revolutionary army in the mountains, where she instructed illiterate soldiers and rural children.

The ideological utility of an all-woman platoon outlasted the armed insurrection itself. As Bayard de Volo notes, “In the long run, the post-1958 Revolution held up Las Marianas as a symbol of women’s equality, which in turn called upon Cuban women to participate in national defense” (p. 233). In chapter 6, Bayard de Volo sidesteps the historical play-by-play of the insurgency to focus on the gendered narratives that emerged during and after the revolution.

Cuba returns to an infant mortality of the last century

Despite many women with children having advanced collegiate degrees and jobs in the professional workforce, they also have the responsibility to care for their children, husbands, and do most, if not all, of the cooking and cleaning for the household. Unequal distribution of household work can be at least partially attributed to the concept of Machismo often found in Latin American countries.

But growing access to the internet – which only recently became commonplace on the island, as well as cultural exchange through the island’s tourism industry have increasingly exposed the population to practices like tattoo art so common elsewhere. Cuba’s government maintains a list of approved, private-sector trades, and “tattoo artist” is not among them. Though the practice is not explicitly outlawed either, the http://luciferino.com/2023/02/15/the-8-best-brazilian-dating-sites-apps-that-really-work/ legal limbo has long forced the art to remain in the shadows. The nearly 200-member woman´s association, called Erias, was founded in July 2021, and is the first to actively and openly promote body art on the island, a practice for decades considered taboo in Cuba, especially among women. As of 2011, women in Cuba made up more than 80% of university students and around 68% of university graduates.

She relies on an impressive array of historic documentation—ranging from radio transmissions and clandestine press leaflets to oral history and personal communications—to establish the nature and extent of women’s participation in the M-26-7 anti-Batista efforts. However, the meticulous piecing together of the historical record on the role of women in the rebel movement is quite a different task from then establishing the absence of women in the Cuban War Story, as Bayard de Volo also claims to do. I do not find the same methodological care and rigor to be evident for the period after the rebel victory.

Specifically, it is the absence of certain narratives that grabs Bayard de Volo’s attention. Whereas “tactical femininity” is lifted up as a desirable ideal, war stories surrounding women’s involvement in bombings and as victims of sexual assault are backgrounded in the Cuban War Story. What Bayard de Volo’s historical evidence allows her to demonstrate, then, is that “the urban underground used traditional femininity—particularly notions of women as passive and politically and sexually innocent—as a tactic of war” (p. 133). Unlike what is claimed by the Cuban government, gender equality is a long way off in Cuba. Unfortunately, most Cubans do not believe sexism exists because they grow up hearing that it was eradicated by the revolution.

The Enchanted Shrimp of the Cuban Dance

On the discursive side, “rebels used narratives of women’s contributions in prior conflicts to legitimize contemporary women’s activism and inspire Cubans more generally to rebellion” (p. 23). From a military perspective, “tactics developed in the wars of independence were applied to the 1950s insurrection, and some women active in Cuba’s 1930s rebellion transferred their political experience to the 1950s, lending a sense of continuity as well as efficacy” (p. 25). In actuality, employed women in Cuba do not hold positions of power—either political or monetary. The Cuban Congress, although elected by the people, is not the political body that truly calls the shots. The Cuban Communist Party—only about 7 percent of which is made up of women—holds true political power. Markedly, the systems of evaluating gender equality in other countries around the world aren’t universally applicable, as women are much less represented in the true governing body of Cuba than we are led to believe. In addition, the professions that are usually synonymous with monetary wealth and the power and access that come with it (doctors, professors, etc.) do not yield the same financial reward here.

The author thus demonstrates that the growing support for a social revolution began well before and women were politically active and organized well before Batista’s regime came to power. In keeping with the idea that the insurrection was both an ideological and a military one, the author speaks to both the symbolic importance of women’s previous mobilization and their tactical contributions to rebel efforts.

You are all special for the simple reason that you are all women. “Unlike just three years ago, today we can say that women are getting tattooed here on a daily basis,” Arrieta told Reuters amid a photo session in Havana. While tattoos themselves are not illegal in Cuba, the island’s traditional “machista” culture has long stygmatized the practice, relegating it largely to seamen, prostitutes find more at https://absolute-woman.com/latin-women/cuban-women/ and prisoners. Before the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, abortion in Cuba was illegal and contraceptives inaccessible. Reproductive health laws were patterned after the 1870 Penal Code in Spain, making abortion highly restrictive. In 1936, some of the more restrictive laws were rewritten and put into the new penal code, called the Social Defense Code.