Gendering the revolution: Bohemia, power and culture in post-revolutionary Cuba, 1960–85

A historical nation

The gendered construction of national history is nowhere more visible than with Cuba’s apóstol José Martí. The significance of the nineteenth-century independence hero to the Cuban insurrection is maintained in Bohemia through his essays or narrations of his life. In a 1960 contemplation, Fidel Castro asserted that ‘hoy Martí vive de nuevo … nuestra personalidad de nación se ha logrado’.²⁶ Martí is explicitly articulated as the embodiment of a universal Cuban nationhood and culture, whose ideas on leadership, identity and anti-imperialism inform the revolution’s rhetoric and their cultural expression. As Smith and Padula note, it is difficult to ignore the deeply gendered nature of this framework.²⁷ In a 1965 poem responding to Martí’s classic essay ‘Nuestra América’, Latin America’s anti-imperialist struggle is illustrated (Figure 1) as a mestizo man rising from the continent: ‘rompa las cadenas de ignorancia y la superstición: Que despierte el Gigante’.²⁸ Historicising the categories ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ highlights that this imagery was connected to a masculine identity that emerged from Iberian landholding systems and social values; this cultural framework equated male honour with bravery and female honour with sexual integrity, values ironically reproduced by criollo elites to construct respectable national identities.²⁹ Another section of the poem describes America as ‘hija preclara del gran pueblo español … guarda celosa su dignidad’.³⁰ A pan-American anti-imperialist identity is gendered feminine, invoking dignity and chastity as necessary virtues. In this way, the language of universality framing Martí overlooks his identity as an elite male criollo. Through Bohemia, gender conventions particular to his nineteenth-century milieu are transmitted to a post-revolutionary audience.

The mythologisation of Cuban history within this reproduced ideological framework illuminates tension with the narrative of emancipating women. Jean Stubbs asserts that female participation from the independence era to the present is ‘one of the least recognised facets of Cuban history’.³¹ Since then, the significance of women’s multifaceted roles in Cuban history has been uncovered.³² While the revolution’s pantheon centred on men, Bohemia communicates the existence of female heroes, too. One article celebrated Candelaria ‘Cambula’ Acosta, mistress of independence hero Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. Cambula is memorialised for sewing Céspedes’ first independence flag, using ‘un mosquitero rosado, un vestido azul y un retazo blanco para coser la enseña que flameó por primera vez’.³³ The acts of an individual woman who constructed national identity in a literal sense are celebrated through her kinship to a male hero and the exercise of domesticity. A similar process is also visible in other Latin American revolutions, for instance in Mexico and Nicaragua, where androcentric pantheons dominated the creation of national identity and women were included secondarily.³⁴ While on the one hand these narratives reflect the gendered experience of the time, on the other, the exercise of agency through traditional feminine attributes is not challenged but instead celebrated in Bohemia.

Gendered historical narration is most striking through Mariana Grajales in Bohemia, the Afro-Cuban heroine esteemed as ‘la ilustre matrona’.³⁵ As mother of independence hero Antonio Maceo, Grajales ‘dedicó su vida por … la libertad de la Patria’.³⁶ Celebration of Grajales is not limited to popular culture; it is central to official rhetoric. The FMC’s head, Vilma Espín, asserted that she represents ‘la rebeldía y el patriotismo de la mujer cubana … ejemplo y estímulo para las combatientes, para las madres revolucionarias’.³⁷ During the Sierra Maestra insurrection, Castro’s all-female Mariana Grajales platoon defined the movement’s attitude to women during and after the conflict.³⁸ In Bohemia, her life is invoked as a reference point communicating heroism and revolutionary spirit. One such article discussing the burial of a young Cuban focuses on his mother, ‘La Mariana Grajales de la Revolución Cubana’.³⁹ The endorsement of revolutionary mothers exists within a historic context of evocative maternal protest in Cuba.⁴⁰ Invoking this culturally recognised symbol reinforces the legitimacy of the revolution for women and mothers.

The active endorsement of maternal protest as intrinsic to nationhood reveals a central paradox: the Cuban Revolution both celebrated and undervalued feminised activism. On the one hand, female participation in voluntary mobilisations was painted as an unbroken heritage of women’s activism. A 1961 article on agricultural labourers in the Oriente province described ‘la valiente y abnegada mujer oriental, que siempre ha estado presente en todas las luchas por la independencia de la patria’.⁴¹ On the other hand, the government attributed liberation solely to the revolution. ‘Si no hay Revolución no puede haber derecho de mujer, de niño, de madre, de esposa’, exclaimed Castro during the American Women’s Congress in 1963.⁴² Revolutionary rhetoric actively contrasted women’s experience before and after 1959: ‘La Cuba de Ayer’ depicts a naked mother beside impoverished and malnourished children.⁴³ Moreover, revolutionary narrative simultaneously created a continuous line and a discursive break with activism and female experience pre-1959. The development of women’s studies in Cuba emphasised the mobilisation of Cuban women towards feminist demands and political organisation. Bohemia itself was involved in this, critical in the campaign to securing the vote for Cuban women.⁴⁴ However, this experience was obscured, or recast, as the work of wealthy women who did not reflect the revolutionary nation. ‘We never fought for partial demands’, declared Vilma Espín, ‘we hate the feminist movement in the US.’⁴⁵ To the revolution’s official discourse, feminism was bourgeois and imperialist.⁴⁶ The dissonance between these narratives supports the argument made by Maxine Molyneux, that the Cuban government relied actively on women’s experience in previous conflicts but distanced itself from this legacy.⁴⁷

This dissonance is partly due to the revolution’s ideological attitude to female emancipation, which defined female oppression as the result of capitalism and imperialism, in accordance with the Marxist-Leninist theory that the revolution adhered to from 1962. Castro epitomised this ideology concisely: ‘Chovinistas? No! Marxistas-leninistas!’⁴⁸ Accordingly, female liberation without economic revolution was characterised as divisive and insufficient, a narrative lucidly illustrated by Humberto Solás’s 1968 film Lucía. Three Lucías are positioned as chronological successors in female resistance, but only the final Lucía experiences true liberation, under the 1959 revolution.⁴⁹ Using female experience in a narration of poverty, injustice and inequity demonstrates how women were key to retrospectively constructing legitimacy.

A revolutionary nation

Alongside institutional and cultural construction, the celebration of an explicitly gendered national history played an important role in creating conciencia. Discussion of the 1961 education brigades in Bohemia was deeply militaristic, revealing the enduring importance of martial masculinity and its discursive cultural power: ‘la brigadistas de alfabetizadores … soldados de la enseñanza sobre la marcha’.⁵⁰ This discourse is characterised by Carlos Alberto Montaner, an outspoken exiled critic of the revolution, as evidence of its ‘épico-machista’ outlook.⁵¹ This language links national identity with a historical experience of anti-American struggle that resulted in associations between masculinity and physical strength.⁵²

However, deconstructing the language of masculinity illuminates a more nuanced relationship. Montaner’s characterisation of a revolution pervaded by hegemonic machismo obscures the importance of multiple masculinities within state-enfranchised identity. This is particularly evident in the context of patriotic defence. Fear of internal and external threats led Castro to create the CDRs in 1960, neighbourhood organisations that administered social programmes and protected local areas. Bohemia juxtaposes the CDRs with a cowardly, treacherous masculinity. Cubans colluding with foreign powers are referred to as gusanos (worms, maggots), a motif which appears in several comics and cartoon strips in 1961.⁵³ Similarly, a CDR advert decried the ‘gusanera terrorista’, opposed to ‘todo afán noble’.⁵⁴ In an atmosphere of uncertainty, anti-revolutionary behaviour was connected clearly to a rejected masculinity. Citing Ann Stoler’s work on gender and race in the operation of empire, Peter Wade argues that in discourses of nationalism, morality is employed in ‘strategies of inclusion and exclusion … linked to the defence of the social body against denigration and abnormality’.⁵⁵ Official discourse was permeated by fears over the revolution’s stability and sought to regulate behaviour by condemning such acts dually, as unpatriotic and un-masculine. The CDRs’ expression of masculinity contrasted chivalrous rebel masculinity with the barbarism of Batista, a crucial discursive factor in winning the battle ‘over hearts and minds’.⁵⁶

This chivalrous masculinity also continued into the revolutionary project with Che Guevara’s ‘New Man’, which organised a new Cuba along lines of honourable masculinity: ‘the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love’.⁵⁷ The revolution’s masculinised militarism did not prevent female participation, but women’s inclusion is narrated as a corollary supplement to this masculine framework. For instance, a 1983 article on the Territorial Troops Militia (MTT) described the FMC’s facilitation of female enrolment in the militia after years of requests.⁵⁸ Enrolling women served as a sign of modernity and legitimacy, a dynamic highlighted by feminist analysis of international relations.⁵⁹ However, military and national defence retained its masculine essence. As such, an advert for military participation quoted a child asking to be a soldier, mentioning that parents of ‘hijos varones’ surely know this conversation.⁶⁰

Cuba’s initial post-revolutionary economic plans involved nationalising industry, increasing domestic production and reducing sugar exports, to decrease dependency on the US and because the government’s social reform programme necessitated thorough economic restructuring.⁶¹ Bohemia provides evidence of the explicit connection between economic growth and revolutionary patriotism, as the magazine’s adverts and articles were used to encourage consumer activity. A May 1960 Esso advert claimed ‘78 años refinando petroleo en Cuba!’, tying this to the labour of ‘técnicos y obreros cubanos’.⁶² In the following weeks, foreign-owned firms were nationalised as the revolution shifted towards a new ideological course: Marxism-Leninism.⁶³ However, as these companies left, the revolutionary consumer patriotism they espoused only grew stronger. A 1961 article described the construction of new railways, alongside pictures of muscular men labouring, declaring: ‘ahora, la tensión de los músculos, el sudor de las frentes … no acrecientan el poder económico de monopolios extraños, sino una sola voluntad al servicio de Cuba’.⁶⁴ This masculine labour is articulated as a foundational element in Cuba’s sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States. As in the construction of national identity, masculinised physical strength emerges from Cuba’s historical struggle and contemporary defence. Similarly, discussion of a hydroelectric plant describes the ‘esfuerzo de los hombres … así trabaja el proletariado cubano de hoy’.⁶⁵ A working-class, masculine identity is thus constructed as both emblematic and constitutive of a new patriotic Cuban economy.

These masculinities also emerge in political discourse through the ‘underdog’ narrative expressed in Bohemia. David and Goliath imagery is recurrent, as the magazine chastises ‘la amenaza cobarde’ of ‘un imperio gigante contra un pueblo pequeño’,⁶⁶ and depicts Uncle Sam ejected by a rock labelled ‘socialismo’.⁶⁷ Cuba’s masculinised heroic national identity was defined against the demonised masculinity of the United States. Caricatures portray US politicians as stock villains with spiked teeth and claws, an aggressiveness linked explicitly to infringement of Cuban sovereignty: ‘En el Pentagono … “Alguna nueva formula para destruir a Castro, señores!”’⁶⁸ These constructions communicate Cuba’s foreign policy through gendered cultural references drawing on historical experience, offering an accessible interpretation for criticism of the USA.

Feminised victim discourse is a commonly used device to construct actors as legitimate or aggressive.⁶⁹ This is also evident with Bohemia’s narration of atrocities in Vietnam, recurrently reported on from 1966. Pictures of mothers carrying injured children through rivers and trenches attest to ‘el horror de la Guerra’, reflected ‘en estos rostros de una madre vietnamita y sus hijos, después de un ataque yanqui’.⁷⁰ These photographs construct an evocative narrative of heroic motherhood in the face of aggressive brutality. In feminising the Vietnamese nation, America’s demonised masculinity is compounded. As such, one satirical comic depicts soldiers arguing in competition about the number of Vietnamese children they have each killed.⁷¹ Using women and children in an emotive war narrative undercuts an American claim to justice and implicitly bolsters Cuba’s anti-imperialist stance by presenting its allies as honourable victims.

Bohemia also offers another, seemingly paradoxical, feminine construction of national identity: armed female resistance. Latin American women frequently appear holding guns, as in one image (Figure 2) of ‘la mujer venezolana’, participating ‘por la liberación nacional, como en Cuba’.⁷² The magazine also provides similar images of female guerrillas in Vietnam.⁷³ In her analysis of the insurrection, Bayard de Volo characterises the ‘even the women’ narrative, framing women’s actions as heroic, transcending ‘normal’ roles under dire circumstances.⁷⁴ Feminised anti-imperialism is striking compared to the absence of this in a Cuban context. As explored, outside tokenistic examples, militarised defence tends to masculine imagery. When depicted, the experience of women in relation to traditional gender stereotypes simultaneously delegitimises the United States and reaffirms this gender ideology.

In one notable exception to this, a March 1985 volume features a Cuban female soldier on the cover, with her beret and gun in front of red flowers.⁷⁵ This imagery is replicated inside the magazine too, in an advert encouraging female participation in the MTT: two flowers hold guns in front of a Cuban flag (Figure 3).⁷⁶ The flower pictured is the white mariposa, the national flower of Cuba. This imagery is therefore explicitly feminine and patriotic. As discussed, feminine images of defence are comparatively rare. This issue was from early March, when Bohemia traditionally marks International Women’s Day with a more focused look at women’s participation. This imagery also bears striking resemblance to the visual language of another Cuban magazine: the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America’s (OSPAAAL) Tricontinental Bulletin. Tricontinental was created to promote international solidarity, using emotive iconography to narrate global anti-imperialist struggles. As Lani Hanna highlights, women with guns, feminised with flowers or with children, were a recurring motif.⁷⁷ Bohemia’s advert should therefore be viewed in the context of an ongoing cultural project to catalyse international solidarity. However, Tricontinental was translated into four languages, designed with foreign output in mind. Bohemia’s advert should be contextualised within the background of the ongoing Angolan War, in which Cuba was playing a major role, having sent thousands of combatants to support an anti-imperialist insurgency. While Lorraine Bayard de Volo indicates that the state did not need to encourage female participation, with enough male militants in the forces sent to Angola,⁷⁸ Bohemia here attests to a secondary priority: incorporating women into the MTT to replace male combatants, thereby ensuring domestic security. Just as the state employed ‘tactical negrificación’,⁷⁹ strategically deploying the imagery of race and African heritage to promote participation in Angola, the state here employed gender and femininity strategically, to stimulate participation at home.

Overwhelmingly, women’s participation in transnational solidarity in Bohemia is connected to peace as a feminised concept. The symbolic connection of the Cuban nation to feminised peace is one of the most important and overlooked aspects of the gendered construction of culture, as most analyses of Cuba’s third-world internationalism have focused on the language of brotherhood and martial masculinity.⁸⁰ In Bohemia, an article describes the murder of 16-year-old América Labadí during the Machado era, while at a protest ‘contra la Guerra y por la paz’.⁸¹ The article constructs her death as symbolic of a national (and continental) struggle for peace: ‘vimos caer a América, que llevaba la bandera’. As historians reinstate the importance of the 1970s as a decade of increased international significance, particularly through Cuba’s international medical aid campaigns,⁸² the feminised rhetoric of these campaigns merits exploration. In Bohemia, a group of mostly female medics are shown waving with a caption invoking feminised imagery: ‘La Hermosa Flor Del Internacionalismo’.⁸³ Like analysis of the military, this does not preclude male participation, as the pictures demonstrate; however, women’s overrepresentation in these images, alongside the language of sisterhood, motherhood and love is significant. A similar article interviewing female Cuban medics in Nicaragua describes the reward of meeting ‘una madre que nos cuenta cómo ya su hijo está bien’.⁸⁴ Like América Labadí, portrayed as emblematic of Cuban women, peace is depicted as an innately female Cuban attribute, a task to which women of post-revolutionary Cuba are well suited.

This also reinforces the link between international discourse and the structure of post-revolutionary Cuba. One element of this is leadership: Bohemia demonstrates that, of the five high-profile women within the revolution’s inner circle, all are involved in international initiatives, most notably Vilma Espín in connection with the FMC and Elena Gil, ‘Presidente del Movimiento por la Paz y la Soberanía de los Pueblos’.⁸⁵ The FMC’s leading role in international conferences also illustrates the importance of this mass organisation in connection to peace, a facet overlooked by analysis of the group’s function. For instance, a 1962 draft of the FMC’s agenda placed ‘la lucha por la paz’ above the emancipation of women in a list of the organisation’s goals.⁸⁶ Within the increasing isolation and tension of the Cold War context, transnational solidarity was particularly important, as attested in a 1971 visit from Elena Lagadinova, a prominent Bulgarian politician who headed the Committee of Bulgarian Women’s Movement: ‘cada nuevo encuentro es una oportunidad para seguir fortaleciendo y estrechando este intercambio’.⁸⁷ The coverage of the FMC indicates that women’s centrality in constructing and participating in peace was inextricable from legitimating discourse surrounding the Cuban nation as it emerged internationally.

In conclusion, historical narratives are of significant importance within Bohemia, serving to construct national identity. This deeply gendered identity created a framework that framed, rewarded and regulated the behaviour of individuals. However, the state’s mythologisation of Cuban history relied on pre-existing cultural gender norms, and the contradictory rhetoric that emerges emphasises the uneasy relationship between Cuba’s past and present.

Ama de casa

Writing for an imagined Cuban woman is nowhere more evident than in Bohemia’s‘ Cosas de Mujer’ section. Formalised in 1962, it expanded on the magazine’s regular recipes to include ‘todo lo que sea de interés femenino’. The inaugural segment celebrates by affirming ‘las palabras del Comandante Guevara: “el socialismo no está reñido con la belleza”’.⁸⁹‘ Cosas de Mujer’ compiled recipes, style guides and interior decoration tips, offering floral stitching patterns⁹⁰ and children’s coat hanger cut-outs.⁹¹ The guides emphasise practicality and accessibility; indeed, the presentation of this section is enthused with the desire to assist the ama de casa in managing the numerous demands on her time. This section was authored by famous cook Nitza Villapol, whose stated aim was to help women balance multiple obligations while keeping their family healthy.⁹² A 1962 spread offers the housewife nine ways to use squash in feeding her family, from flan and croquetas to mayonnaise and pie.⁹³ One recipe asserts that ‘una lata de langosta puede ser … solución a esa pregunta que oye a diario la ama de casa: Qué tenemos hoy para almorzar?’⁹⁴ Villapol prefaces a 1964 collection of fish recipes with the evolutionary history of the fish, its culinary uses around the globe and a breakdown of its nutritional content.⁹⁵ This also demonstrates a desire to impart information and educate the housewife, in keeping with the revolution’s stated aims of elevating the Cuban people through education and better health outcomes.

The imagined woman that emerges from this segment is fashionable, thrifty and eager to learn how to better serve her family. In projecting this ideal housewife, ’Cosas de Mujer’ at first glance appears to offer little evidence of change; but this ideal housewife was necessarily operating in the rapidly changing socio-economic context of post-revolutionary Cuba. In this vein, one of Villapol’s articles in 1963 offers the ama de casa a guide to understanding imported food products and how to use them, including pictures to help her identify foreign labels.⁹⁶ Another recipe is described as useful to ‘aprovechar los poquitos de vianda que le quedan de una semana para otra’.⁹⁷ Villapol’s writing helped Cubans adjust to rationing, shortages and new food imports.⁹⁸ This emphasises the Cuban government’s reliance on the nation’s housewives and the existing associated discourse; in using Bohemia to transmit information (via housewives) about socio-economic changes and to rationalise these changes, the government actively perpetuated the image of the Cuban woman as ama de casa. This is heightened when placing ’Cosas de Mujer’ in the context of post-revolutionary dissent. Home-makers were a key source of post-revolutionary protest as food shortages swept the nation, most visibly in the repressed 1960 Cárdenas demonstrations, where they banged pots in the street.⁹⁹ Michelle Chase’s argument that ‘women’s roles as consumers became more conflictive’ in this period, both a source of identification with the revolution and a basis for protest,¹⁰⁰ is supported by the content of‘ Cosas de Mujer’ in Bohemia.

In Bohemia, gender constructions were also used to recalibrate consumption as a patriotic, revolutionary act to help the Cuban nation. One of Villapol’s 1964 recipes provided tomato recipes alongside a picture from an earlier article, showing a woman picking them during the nation’s agricultural drives.¹⁰¹ Outside‘ Cosas de Mujer’, adverts targeted female consumers with the language of revolutionary participation. A 1960 advert for Fab detergent linked the brand’s packaging and the Cuban flag: ‘esa linda caja de FAB ES TODO CUBANA en azul, blanco y rojo como la bandera cubana’, emphasising this with a claim to employ 1,030 Cuban labourers.¹⁰² This advert is targeted specifically at women, showing a housewife washing up, above a comic strip giving housewives’ reasons for choosing the brand: ‘deja los vasos limpios … los platos brillan!’¹⁰³ These images largely disappear during the 1970s, as a prolonged period of austerity frustrated consumer culture, but they later return. Inside a 1980 cover, there is an illustration of a woman standing beside flowers and the colours of the Cuban flag, behind a washing machine (Figure 4). The advert advises how to extend the longevity of her beloved machine through proper care.¹⁰⁴ It is significant that despite the dissimilarities between the consumerism of the 1960s, still strongly influenced by US capitalism, and the consumerism of the 1980s, such similar imagery is found in both. Far from being superficial, this indicates a profound continuity in discourses of femininity and the construction of the ama de casa.

Exploring the use of adverts to target Cuban women highlights the government’s perception of the country’s women. Outside Villapol’s content, the‘ Cosas de Mujer’ section began to be used to transmit health directives, in the strategically placed MINSAP (Ministry of Public Health) adverts at the end of the segment. These adverts often focused on national health concerns like gastroenteritis¹⁰⁵ or tuberculosis, but urged the reader to maintain a clean home or to be attentive to their family’s symptoms. Many MINSAP adverts also provided guidance for mothers.¹⁰⁶ Not only does Bohemia’s coverage attest to the prioritisation of maternal and infant health initiatives, the magazine also functioned as a communicatory tool to assist in women’s maternal role. It also advertised this to the Cuban public. A 1964 article on ‘Casa Bonita’ described the activities of this newly established maternity home. The depiction of pregnant women and female nurses explicitly evokes a feminine tranquillity: ‘alegría, serenidad, orgullo de maternidad, charlas sobre idénticos sintomas, planes, proyectos, estudios, canciones, felicidad’.¹⁰⁷ This romanticised language ties women’s biological role as mothers to their experience of post-revolutionary health care, as the state supported the individual woman ‘en su función natural de alumbrar un nuevo humano’.¹⁰⁸ The language in Bohemia echoes official rhetoric: Castro asserted the need to help women primarily because they are ‘el taller natural donde se forja la vida’.¹⁰⁹ The coverage in Bohemia therefore communicated the benefits of the revolution to the nation through the depiction of women as maternal. For example, a report on a new municipal health centre in Guantanamo highlighted unprecedented maternity care to convey a rural population which ‘hoy cuenta con un eficiente servicio de salud pública’.¹¹⁰ The provision of maternal health care equalised health outcomes between the urban and rural areas. Moreover, it provided legitimacy both nationally and domestically.¹¹¹ Cuba’s health care system began to garner an international impression during the 1970s, and as with medical missions, the communication of these advancements through gender functioned to benefit the revolutionary state.¹¹²

Felina

The claim of the revolution to have ended women’s sexual objectification by uprooting the racial and sexual legacies of imperialism was another means by which it gained legitimacy.

Writing in 1972, American feminist Margaret Randall juxtaposed the revolution with the sexualised commodification of North American women: ‘desde la niñez, el sexo femenino es seductor para la publicidad en la sociedad de consumo’.¹¹³ This was echoed in Bohemia itself: in 1975 the magazine criticised its periodical counterparts across Latin America, deriding their maintenance of ‘el viejo ideal femenino de erotismo y sumisión: la mujer doméstica, decorativa y sobre todo consumidora’.¹¹⁴ However, Randall’s equation of anti-imperialism with anti-commodification is profoundly at odds with the content in Bohemia.

First, Bohemia continued to be heavily influenced by the consumer and celebrity culture of the US and Europe. In 1960, brands like Myrugia and Palmolive continued to use white, conventionally attractive women and their evocation of feminine beauty to advertise products within the magazine.¹¹⁵ The maintenance of inherited gender conventions is also evident in the marketisation of strong, heroic masculinity. Adverts for men’s supplements exclaimed: ‘sientanses jovenes’,¹¹⁶ ‘no seas medio hombre!’¹¹⁷ Foreign companies were expropriated in the same year, and while these disappeared from the pages of Bohemia, the advertising style lingered. Adverts for cosmetic hair removal presented light-skinned women in make-up, declaring a hair-free ‘esencial para el encanto feminino’.¹¹⁸ Into the 1980s, this imagery featured in government adverts in Bohemia. For example, a 1982 programme to encourage Cubans to return used bottles for industrial reuse consistently depicted a mother with make-up and large pinned curls, completely reminiscent of the advertising culture of the 1960s.¹¹⁹ In contrast, from the early post-revolutionary period, the FMC’s magazine Mujeres made a deliberate shift away from materialism and conspicuous consumption in its messaging, epitomised in the magazine’s November 1961 name change from Vanidades. ¹²⁰

The‘ Pocas Palabras’ section of Bohemia is particularly illustrative of the continuing influence of external celebrity culture, highlighting shortcomings in the claim to have opposed sexual objectification. In this segment, photographs of actresses, models and media personalities consistently featured. For instance, a 1960 article on the English actress ‘Sabrina’ explained that, ‘por donde quiera que va los hombres se vuelven maravillados para mirarla’, comparing ‘la extraordinaria exuberancia de su busto’ to the measurements of Marilyn Monroe and Sofia Loren.¹²¹ Bohemia provided its readers with Brigitte Bardot’s swimsuit pictures in 1964¹²² and Liz Taylor’s in 1969.¹²³ Contrary to common belief and in spite of its official rejection, Cuba was never cut off from popular culture outside the island; in fact, as Ian Lumsden argues, Cuban media remained heavily tied to the images, values and culture of its North American and European counterparts.¹²⁴

The misogynistic framing of women in Bohemia’s‘ Pocas Palabras’ was not confined to an international context. This is most evident with the ‘Felinas’ comic series which emerged in 1969, a recurring strip with two female characters explicitly sexualised and derided through their depiction. ‘El hecho de yo llevar relaciones con tu novio no te da derecho a coqueteaer con él delante de mi!’, one caption reads.¹²⁵ The series portrays women as promiscuous, conceited and vindictive: ‘Fantastico mi amiga! Figúrate que encontré un novio que hace una combinación maravillosa con mi vestido nuevo!’ (Figure 5).¹²⁶ This probably reflects a culture of growing sexual liberation, but also reinforces stereotypes demonising women when their sexuality was not explicitly for male consumption. The comic strips page was renamed from the mid-1960s to ‘Humor Internacional’ or ‘Humor Extranjero’. But while this indicates a desire to distance Cuban culture from misogynistic humour, its continued inclusion in the magazine undermines this.

Even in 1985, Bohemia’s comics still regurgitated these tropes. On the final page of an issue from February 1985, a woman shops for sunglasses and bikinis and asks the shopkeeper to include a well-endowed man who could pay for her spending on the beach. Underneath, a man looks on anxiously at the hammer in the hand of his wife. She assures him not to worry, as she has taken a first aid class.¹²⁷ This final cartoon is particularly striking given Bohemia’s campaigns to empower housewives to engage in DIY and home improvements. The cognitive dissonance across the magazine’s content illustrates a wider tension, as Cuban culture negotiated the competing gender constructs that emerged as part of the post-revolutionary period.

This is further illustrated by Bohemia’s use of sexualised women to promote revolutionary participation. In 1969, a light-skinned blonde woman undressing among crops was accompanied by the speech bubble: ‘cuando termino de recoger café, siempre leo en Pocas Palabras’.¹²⁸ A 1974 article praises a group of young Cuban women for their beauty as they enjoy a well-deserved holiday at Varadero. The ‘hermosas jóvenes … heroínas del trabajo’ are pictured in their bikinis, with a photograph at such a low angle that presumably the photographer was lying on the floor.¹²⁹ Not only is this a far cry from Randall’s ideal, the sexualised depiction of women is tied directly to the experience of economic mobilisation. Similarly, a May 1969 magazine included an illustration (Figure 6) of a male cane cutter fantasising about sexualised female workers.¹³⁰ The inclusion of these images demonstrates a cultural tension between the change sought by the state and the continued existence of sexualised tropes. For the revolutionary government and some scholars, this misogyny was foreign-imposed.¹³¹ Indeed, Castro had encouraged a ‘caballerosidad proletaria’ to combat this sexual and social legacy.¹³² However, the continuing presence of these images in a Cuban context indicates that it was an implicit feature of Cuban culture which failed to be challenged by the revolution, in spite of its formal rejection.

In a December 1960 article celebrating the 515th anniversary of the invention of the printing press, a series of pictures titled ‘Asi Se Hace Bohemia’ demonstrated the production process of the magazine (Figure 7). Each description is accompanied by a woman pictured in the role, wearing make-up, posed suggestively in tight clothes, either in heels or barefoot.¹³³ The continuity in cultural imagery is significant when considering the ways that the revolutionary government sought to involve women in the workplace. The following section of this chapter explores how, not in a manner dissimilar to this example, the perpetuation of cultural tropes was used as a tool for mobilisation, as a powerful force in regulating behaviour to achieve policy goals.

The new woman

Bohemia gave consistent attention to the actions and events of the FMC, the organisation at the forefront of the revolution’s mobilisation of women. Set up in 1960, this organisation promptly displaced the collection of autonomous women’s groups that existed previously. While Mujeres was the official mouthpiece of the FMC in print, Bohemia provided its readers with reports on the work of the federadas, particularly leading up to its congresses. For example, the magazine interviewed FMC members and leaders regarding the group’s goals ahead of its next congress.¹³⁵ Subsequent debate on the nature of the FMC reflects wider discussion on the characterisation of the revolution itself, comprising paternalistic groups with little potential to effect change,¹³⁶ or an albeit restricted organisation that emboldened existing activist enthusiasm.¹³⁷ At its First Congress in 1962, Vílma Espín made the sense of responsibility that linked women to the revolution through the FMC clear: ‘mis compañeras consideran que todas las mujeres debemos saber cuál es el papel que nos corresponde en la Sociedad que construimos’.¹³⁸ Espín’s language is infused with a sense of enthusiasm and obligation to serve.

The significance placed on female participation in constructing post-revolutionary Cuba is evident in the recurrent discussion of women’s involvement in Bohemia. The 1961 Cuban literacy campaign dominated the discourse of this year, as 271,000 teachers mobilised to teach nearly one million illiterate Cubans, mostly in the island’s rural provinces: the campaign reduced the illiteracy rate to 3.9 per cent by 1962.¹³⁹ In Bohemia, both men and women participate in these brigades, but coverage focused on the emancipatory impact on the new Cuban woman: ‘estas dos jóvenes brigadistas … pertenecen a esa nueva generación de la mujer cubana capaz de cualquier sacrificio, como dignas herederas de Mariana Grajales’.¹⁴⁰ The inclusion of women was partly due to economic necessity, given the large number of teachers and physicians who left the island in the exile waves of the previous year.¹⁴¹ Moreover, in minimising the vast differences between rural and urban life, it was deeply symbolic, cultivating legitimacy for the regime through the medium of female solidarity. Women’s participation in these programmes, which often took them outside the home for the first time, helped inculcate loyalty to the revolution for a generation.¹⁴² Indeed, such processes were consciously replicated in other Latin American countries such as Nicaragua, where mass mobilisation of young women in the 1980s broke down traditional gender roles while also building popular support for the regime.¹⁴³

Another key focus of women’s involvement was the workplace, a primary task of the inaugural revolution because of the demand of economic and social plans.¹⁴⁴ Bohemia’s coverage emphasised the unprecedented participation of women. An article discussing the operation of power factories in September 1961 described how ‘la mujer cubana se ha incorporado activamente al trabajo en fábricas, talleres’.¹⁴⁵ In 1974, the magazine contrasted the 670 thousand women in the workforce with only 194 thousand in 1959, the latter being mostly domestic workers who lacked rights like maternity leave.¹⁴⁶ Cuban women’s current position is again compared with their previous Ie, particularly for Afro-Cuban women who had made up the domestic workforce during the Batista era.¹⁴⁷

Women’s involvement in the workplace was connected to the creation of círculos infantiles, state-run infant facilities embodying a dual role: liberating women’s domestic commitments and bringing up children within a revolutionary ethos. Castro discussed the nationalisation of factories and construction of círculos as crucial to create ‘aquellas circunstancias que permitan a la mujer no ser esclava de la cocina’.¹⁴⁸ Moreover, the 1975 Family Code provided legal mechanisms to stimulate female participation, seeking to alleviate domestic burdens by establishing that ‘both spouses are obligated to care for the family they have created’.¹⁴⁹ The Bohemia edition published on 7 March 1975, the day before the Code’s introduction, provides a history of women’s revolutionary participation, outlining the ideological imperative for gender equality, before introducing the Code and what it means. The article declares that, having secured equality in the workplace, the battle ahead lies with tackling cultural hangovers and prejudices from the previous generation. It asserts that realising women’s equality is the responsibility of all society, and the man in particular.¹⁵⁰

While Margaret Randall celebrated the Family Code as legislation which fundamentally destabilised gender roles in Cuba, particularly for a younger generation of women,¹⁵¹ the emergence of women’s studies scholarship on Cuba highlighted the serious shortcomings with the Family Code. The government fundamentally undervalued women’s domestic labour, and the ultimate objective of the Code was unachievable.¹⁵² In Pastor Vega’s 1979 film Retrato de Teresa, the titular character wakes at dawn to carry out the domestic chores, prepares her family for their days at school and work, before she herself leaves for the garment factory where she is employed. Despite the discursive construction of the Cuban woman as an inexhaustible fighter with endless reserves to give to family and to the revolution, this clashed with the reality of domestic life: ‘El día tiene veinte-cuatro horas. Y yo tengo casa … hijos … marido a atender.’¹⁵³ The weaknesses in the legislation resulted in little impact Ived experience of gender. As Maxine Molyneux has demonstrated, Cuban surveys indicate that the division of labour remained unchanged: the Family Code’s impact on gender divisions in reality was limited.¹⁵⁴

In the Bohemia issue the week following the Code’s introduction, only two pages in the middle of the magazine are devoted to a description of the ceremony, as well as the celebrations of International Women’s Day.¹⁵⁵ The noticeable marginalisation betrays a lack of attention towards the Code. There also appears to be little desire to tackle cultural hangovers on the part of the magazine’s editors. The cartoons on the penultimate page of the same issue reinforce the presentation of women that the Code sought to overturn: a castaway rejoices, seeing a bikini-clad woman rise from the water, only to be dismayed when her children appear too; at dinner, a husband grimaces at his food, while his wife assures him that she (mostly) followed the recipe.¹⁵⁶

However, there are examples of the use of Bohemia to promote cultural change. In November 1974, Bohemia published a collection of interviews with Cuban men, discussing their opinions on women working and men doing household chores.¹⁵⁷ The interviews display general agreement on the topic: women have equal capacity to work and have the right to participate in society. Each interview gives the man’s age, job and the length of his marriage, as tIss their own experience of housework, and the reasons they believe in equal distribution of work. In presenting these views as normalised and justified, the interviews are an attempt to stimulate these Iiscussions among male readers in order to change their views. This highlights how Bohemia was used to frame and regulate behaviour.

The only discordant interview in this section is a tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale for the machista reader. The husband discusses his rejection of these new ideals, before his wife apparently leaves as the interview ends. Instead of a photo, the accompanying illustration reinforces this point succinctly, depicting the husband’s cruelty, effectively imprisoning his family (Figure 8). As such, the man is criticised on two counts, for failing to be an honourable man and for failing to be a true revolutionary. In this way, rival concepts of masculinity were used to encourage change in behaviour, drawing from the discursive construction of citizenship and revolutionary nationhood. However, the inclusion of these interviews implies a need to encourage behavioural change; from this, we can read the continuing prevalencI of pre-revolutionary cultural ideas.

I want to be useful

The coverage in Bohemia also suggests a further reason for the failure of the Code: the revolutionary government’s continued focus, indeed reliance, on the construction of the Cuban woman as mother and housewife. While the magazine’s promotion of women in the workplace implies a desire to stimulate economic participation, the advertisement and celebration of women’s work is articulated with reference to traditional, feminised attributes. In a 1961 advert (Figure 9) encouraging women to enrol as nurses, the tagline, ‘Sólo Una Mujer Inspira Esta Confianza’ constructs a link between women’s medical participation and the presumption of innately maternal attributes.¹⁵⁸ Similarly, in a 1964 article on female reporters in Cuba, below a picture of a woman playing with a child the caption reads: ‘Mirta Rodriguez Calderón estaba aquí en función de periodista, pero la curiosidad de la repórter cede ante la ternura de mujer’.¹⁵⁹ Moreover, the article recounts how the interviewees ‘se pasmaban ante la hermose e inteligente periodista cubana’.¹⁶⁰ The economic involvement of women is thus reduced to the value of maternity and beauty, demonstrating a fundamental dissonance between work as women’s liberator and the pursuit of feminised labour.

The endorsement of traditional feminised labour came from both bureaucratic and grassroots sources. On the one hand, it was directly pursued by government organisations. For example, female relatives of workers from the ANAP were incorporated into the FMC–ANAP mutual aid brigades from 1966.¹⁶¹ Bohemia depicts these brigades participating in crop drives,¹⁶² highlighting their importance to FMC legislation: the organisation promised in 1974 to ‘trabajar por incrementar la incorporación de la mujer campesina’ to the FMC–ANAP.¹⁶³ Moreover, the establishment of madrinas (godmothers) for male cane-cutting brigades endorses this maternal femininity for the benefit of agricultural labour. One madrina describes caring for the men she likens to her sons: ‘Yo soy la madrina de la mejor brigada de la província!’, she boasts.¹⁶⁴

On the other hand, these examples also demonstrate that enthusiastic feminised participation came from individuals. An article on a female cane cutting brigade places emphasis on working ‘sin olvidar la belleza’, as these women operate their own voluntary hairdressing station: ‘la peluquería es muy importante … no hay que olvidar que somos mujeres’.¹⁶⁵ In criticising the government’s failure to incorporate more women into the workforce, Alberto Montaner argued for a need to ‘desmachizar la nación’, maintaining that women’s failure to incorporate was due to fear of having to ‘dejar de ser mujeres’.¹⁶⁶ In fact, the government actively endorsed a vision of women working in connection with conceptions of beauty and maternity, thus reinforcing existing cultural codes of femininity. In a culture that remained overwhelmingly patriarchal,¹⁶⁷ this necessarily narrowed the scope of participation.

This is reinforced by the invocation of women’s labour as exemplary when it transcended outside traditional boundaries. While within Bohemia the active participation of individuals is highlighted, read against the grain this content implies its exceptionality and therefore the dissent of others. The end of the 1960s saw a return to sugar agriculture as the island’s primary economic output. la zafra, the annual sugar cane harvest season, saw the revolutionary government mobilise workers from across the island to cut cane. The 10 million-tonne target in 1970 required an enormous amount of voluntary labour, but this period was marked by extremely high rates of absenteeism.¹⁶⁸ One article discusses the ‘Rosa la Bayamesa’ female brigade, newly formed to cut cane in Camagüey. According to the interviews, the women requested the formation of a female brigade, and the Rosas criticise men who are not meeting targets: ‘me dicen que por esta zona hay un hombre que sólo corta 50 arrobas. Que me lo traigan’.¹⁶⁹ The transgression of traditionally feminine timidity and inferior strength is used to emasculate men who are not keeping up with targets. Similarly, a 1985 article chastising labourers asserted that ‘La Indisciplina Laboral Frena La Productividad’, connecting this to revolutionary masculinity with the declaration that all tasks in a man’s life ‘suponen cumplir con un conjunto de obligaciones’.¹⁷⁰ On the following page, an advert encouraging industry enrolment depicted a young boy in front of male-held machinery, volunteering ‘Para Forjar un Hombre Nuevo’, linking masculine identity to the participation of revolutionary individuals in economic labour.¹⁷¹ Not only was the New Man discourse used to decry absenteeism as unpatriotic, as Alberto Montaner argues, it was deeply gendered and reliant on traditional connotations of masculinity and femininity to frame behaviour.¹⁷²

Gendered economic discourse is also prevalent in Bohemia in the articulation of women’s economic contributions through the language of love and sacrifice. In an article interviewing young festival representatives, a mother describes the forces driving her to take on additional voluntary work: ‘es amor por mi familia, el amor por mi trabajo, por el estudio, por la Patria, por la Revolución, por mi tierra’.¹⁷³ As with conceptions of the nation and female participation in an international sphere, moralistic, familial language uses pre-revolutionary gender conventions to express women’s post-revolutionary role. That this quote comes from a citizen rather than official discourse indicates interplay between grassroots enthusiasm and its harnessing through gendered discourse to stimulate participation. In many cases, women’s involvement in revolutionary activities is attributed to will and the desire to overcome. An article on the first female Cuban aviator, Berta Moraleda, explains that her driving force was ‘voluntad de vencer. Deseó ser útil y lo ha sido y es’.¹⁷⁴ The rhetoric of ‘being useful’ emerges in other cultural forms: in the climactic scene in Retrato de Teresa the protagonist fights with her husband who has forbidden her to work, screaming ‘quiero ser útil!’¹⁷⁵

Defending the revolution

The ambivalence of endorsing traditional femininity alongside attempts to end women’s domestic role becomes distinctly problematic when considering the CDRs and their reliance on housewives’ labour. As evidenced in Bohemia, the CDRs were crucial to Cuba’s health care programmes: CDRs ‘laboran por la salud popular’, coordinating with MINSAP on vaccination, sanitation and public health campaigns.¹⁷⁶ Half of Cuba’s medical staff left the country between 1959 and 1962.¹⁷⁷ In the context of a depleted medical workforce, the CDRs were critical to realising the post-revolutionary commitment to improving the nation’s health. For instance, Bohemia shows CDR members going door to door in the countryside to raise awareness of uterine cancer and testing. Both the use of the assumed feminine pronoun (‘compañera’) and the accompanying photographs convey that this was overwhelmingly a voluntary effort by women.¹⁷⁸ Indeed, the FMC estimated that 60 per cent of CDR members were women and, crucially, housewives, describing how Cuban women went to ‘una concentración con los hijos en brazos’.¹⁷⁹

Within Bohemia, housewives are not only described as the majority within the CDRs – they are presented as uniquely suited to the task of neighbourhood protection because of their domestic and maternal qualities. One article asserted that ‘dentro de los Comités hay activdades que se avienen mejor a la mujer que al hombre’, including public health, education and maintaining vigilant watch over the neighbourhood.¹⁸⁰ Similarly, the magazine describes how, ‘en horas diurnas vigilan las mujeres, mientras hacen los quehaceres de la casa o se asoman al balcón’.¹⁸¹ This vigilance is also linked to their role as mothers: ‘protege la mañana de sus hijos/de los hijos de todas’.¹⁸² The idea of the heroic, protective self-sacrificing mother clearly invokes the memory and cultural connotations of Cuba’s martyr mothers. The expansion of gender history in Latin America has brought recognition of the informal networks through which women secure pragmatic change in their neighbourhoods, like improvements to water supplies.¹⁸³ Bohemia offers discussion of how housewives organised road repairs and prepared the removal of antisocial ‘malentes’, highlighting their active participation in local organising.¹⁸⁴ The content of Bohemia makes clear that the CDR system thus functioned by taking advantage of these informal networks and institutionalising them.

While Bohemia testifies to the weight of women’s work in the CDRs, this is at odds with official CDR advertisement within the magazine. The masculinised imagery of heroic defence is here emphasised, for example in a 1961 advert which depicted a muscular arm holding a machete (Figure 10).¹⁸⁵ Similarly, in Bohemia’s comics, the CDR is personified as a male soldier.¹⁸⁶ This dissonance between reality and rhetoric is reinforced by the structure of the CDRs. As in the FMC, women were not represented in the leadership: the government’s reliance on women at a popular level was not reciprocated with representation at the top.¹⁸⁷ Bohemia does present an isolated, more realistic representation in a September 1983 front cover illustration of the Cuban people, in which an elderly lady with a CDR band on her arm is centred.¹⁸⁸ This presentation perhaps implies greater awareness of the organisation’s make-up, although in a historical context, it suggests that the discursive construction of the CDR was deeply bound up with the revolution’s priorities. Regalado Someillian links the defiant, impassive, masculine imagery of CDR adverts to the volatility of the period.¹⁸⁹ Thus, in connection with the construction of national identity, the threats of the 1960s manifested in a desire to boast defensive capabilities through martial masculinity. However, the next two decades saw rising disaffiliation and apathy as generational change combined with social and economic difficulties.¹⁹⁰ In this light, a shift in presentation of the CDR may reflect attempts to encourage participation by representing the people who made up its ranks.

The discursive construction of women’s participation therefore displays a fundamental incongruence between the revolution’s message and its means. Elisa Andaya argues that the revolution demonised the unproductive housewife as an example of ‘inferior political consciousness’.¹⁹¹ While this fits with rhetoric which encouraged labour outside the home, it obscures the other half of the paradoxical dynamic towards women: de facto reliance on housewives’ unpaid labour. As acknowledged by Cuban official Teresa Sanchez, a national director of the CDRs, the organisation allowed women to balance ‘la obligación de su casa, la del trabajo … les permite participar, ayudar a la Revolución’.¹⁹² This discourse illuminates tension between the active participation of women loyal to the revolution, an official narrative which celebrated their contributions through feminised language, and the implicit assumption that women who do not contribute lack use, and are traitors to the social process which liberated them.

This rhetoric also placed the onus of liberation on women themselves. As Teresa Sanchez stressed, there was no place in post-revolutionary Cuba for the ‘muchacha pobre que espera que su liberación la traiga un día un hombre que llegue a su puerta’.¹⁹³ Women’s active participation within the new opportunities was encouraged, but no analysis of the wider gendered and cultural structures that prevented female agency was considered. Indeed, Sanchez’s words are deeply ironic in light of Bohemia’s unchallenged reproduction of the narrative that heralded 1959 and Fidel Castro as the bearers of women’s liberation; as communicated in a 1977 article on Cuba’s economic development, ‘te lo prometió Martí, y Fidel te lo cumplió’.¹⁹⁴