Revolution within the Revolution

Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962

Michelle Chase

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469625010
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

A handful of celebrated photographs show armed female Cuban insurgents alongside their companeros in Cuba's remote mountains during the revolutionary struggle. However, the story of women's part in the struggle's success has only now received comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a "revolution within the revolution, " Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process. Tracing changes in political attitudes alongside evolving gender ideologies in the years leading up to the revolution, Chase describes how insurrectionists mobilized familiar gendered notions, such as masculine honor and maternal sacrifice, in ways that strengthened the coalition against Fulgencio Batista. But, after 1959, the mobilization of women and the societal transformations that brought more women and young people into the political process opened the revolutionary platform to increasingly urgent demands for women's rights. In many cases, Chase shows, the revolutionary government was simply formalizing popular initiatives already in motion on the ground thanks to women with a more radical vision of their rights.

Chapter 1: Dead Cities and Other Forms of Protest, 1952–1955

Nineteen fifty-five was a busy year for some women in Havana. It began with months of pounding the pavement, collecting signatures for the campaign to grant amnesty to political prisoners. It was marked by a series of inspiring public rallies and heartrending funerals. It ended with a series of arrests during a rowdy women’s protest against police violence on the downtown streets of Galiano and San Rafael. These actions—rarely mentioned in histories of the Cuban Revolution—reflected several years of mobilization and organization sparked by Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 coup d’état, which unleashed a variety of protest actions that continued for the next few years. In retrospect, we can see 1955 as a year of transition, as civic protest began to give way to armed opposition, a shift that would have implications for both women’s and men’s roles in the anti-Batista movement. This chapter seeks to recover and analyze these largely forgotten events in order to establish a richer and more complex historical narrative of the revolution, and also to suggest some explanations for their having been forgotten in the first place.

This chapter focuses on the early years of the anti-Batista opposition movement, from 1952 to 1955, a poorly understood period that is often seen retroactively and teleologically as the period that gave birth to the rebel movement eventually led by Fidel Castro. Thus the earliest protest actions, and the earliest anti-Batista organizations that formed, tend to be viewed as “precursors” to the Twenty-Sixth of July Movement rather than being examined in their own right.¹ To some extent this narrow focus is testament to the strength of the official revolutionary narrative that emerged after 1959, which privileges the role of the cohort around Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra.² It also reflects challenges with regard to sources, as most easily available documentation of the period focuses on the leadership and on the guerrilla war. But by examining the surviving ephemera, carefully combing State Department reports, and drawing on interviews, we can sketch out the contours of the early opposition to reveal something of its assumptions, aims, and constituency. Methodologically, attention to the geography of protest suggests interesting patterns, raising questions not prompted by the scrutiny of speeches, manifestos, or other forms of written or spoken discourse. What emerges is a portrait of a vibrant, varied mass movement in the making, which disrupts standard narratives of the anti-Batista resistance.

Most strikingly, women were often important actors, contrary to popular assumptions. The presence of women in this early period of anti-Batista opposition reflects several characteristics of the movement. First, early anti-Batista protesters forged a creative repertoire of dissent that included many actions that were relatively accessible to women as well as men. Urban protesters undertook an array of actions, including public demonstrations, phone chains and rumor campaigns, collective “stay-at-home” days, “flash” protests, patriotic street theater, boycotts, and other consumer actions. Early anti-Batista protesters also adopted a creative and flexible use of space, pioneering forms of civic activism that either never required public protest or redefined how public protest might be imagined, blurring the gendered boundaries between house and street. Thus the earliest years of the Cuban anti-Batista movement were characterized by what we might call gender-inclusive protest strategies, in which urban women and men together forged a compelling range of protest actions. It was the rise of the armed movements from 1955 onward that introduced sharper distinctions between women’s and men’s roles in the anti-Batista opposition.

A second important factor in explaining the prevalence of women in the early anti-Batista movement is the importance of urban consumer culture. As this chapter suggests, the anti-Batista protest movement of 1952 through 1955 was primarily—perhaps exclusively—an urban movement. As such, it was shaped by the concerns of its urban constituency and the urban space in which it emerged. Since early in the century, Havana had developed a lively commercial center and modern, American-influenced consumption practices. The earliest protest actions often focused on disrupting these patterns of consumption through boycotts or other consumer-oriented actions. Protesters targeted department stores, movie theaters, and other sites of consumption and leisure, or they called for some combination of not buying, not paying taxes, and withdrawing from society entirely for a day. Women, who were implicitly imagined as consumers par excellence in Cuba and elsewhere, were therefore particularly implicated in these types of protests. If these early calls to action sometimes relied on limiting and prescriptive language regarding women’s implication in consumer culture, or implicitly saw their field of action as confined within the family home, they nonetheless opened channels for women to participate politically in the incipient anti-Batista resistance.

Finally, early anti-Batista protesters seem to have often been drawn from the ranks of Ortodoxo Party sympathizers, which may also help explain the presence of women that we find here. The Ortodoxo Party—a reformist political party that was growing in strength in this period, as will be discussed further subsequently—seems to have enjoyed widespread support from urban women, although the phenomenon has yet to be explained in the scholarship.³ A 1949 survey that polled greater Havana residents on whether they preferred the Ortodoxo leader Eduardo Chibás or Fulgencio Batista showed that Chibás owed his narrow lead to disproportionate support among the women polled. (Among men, Chibás and Batista came in neck and neck.)⁴ And the Ortodoxos had been so successful at mobilizing women in Santiago for public protests in the early 1950s that contemporary sources occasionally claimed that the majority of participants in Ortodoxo rallies were women.⁵ The life histories of individual militants also suggest that many of the women who eventually rose to leadership positions within the revolutionary movement had first been members of the Ortodoxo Party, like their male counterparts. For example, Celia Sánchez Manduley, now best known as Fidel’s loyal right-hand woman in the Sierra, had been an organizer for her local chapter of the Ortodoxo Party in the late 1940s.⁶ Similarly, Gloria Cuadras de la Cruz, one of the pillars of Santiago’s anti-Batista underground, had been head of the women’s section of the Ortodoxo Party in Santiago.⁷ In Havana, Pastorita Núñez, who became a Twenty-Sixth of July leader and a founder of the group José Martí Civic Front for Women, had been a leader of the women’s section of the Ortodoxo Party in Havana.⁸ These and other women brought their previous organizing experience to bear on their new political activities.

The antidictatorial movement that ultimately led to one of the twentieth century’s most radical revolutions has too often been narrated as a straight line from the spectacular armed attack on the Moncada barracks led by Fidel Castro in 1953 to the rebel army’s triumph against the regular army in December 1958. Rethinking the earliest period of anti-Batista protest gives us another perspective on that storied turn to guerrilla warfare. Of course, the growing guerrilla struggle was increasingly important, and by late 1958 a sizable part of the Cuban public supported the rebel army. But that was never the whole story. Broadening the scope of our inquiry suggests an incipient mass civic protest movement, spanning both house and street, involving both women and men. Importantly, many of the creative forms of public protest described here persisted throughout the entire insurrectionary period, institutionalized after 1955 through the growth of the Civic Resistance Movement (Movimiento de Resistencia Cívica, MRC), a civilian opposition movement affiliated with the Twenty-Sixth of July Movement. Although a deep reappraisal of the MRC falls beyond the scope of this chapter, further historical work will surely reveal the full extent of its influence and particularly the role of women activists within it. However, even a brief reassessment of the MRC’s actions after its formation shows that it drew heavily and successfully from the repertoire of protest pioneered between 1952 and 1955 by anti-Batista activists.⁹ Thus this early period of opposition activity was foundational, establishing patterns of mass activism that endured alongside the rise of arms, albeit often belittled as the rear guard. Exploring these other stories sheds light on little-known chapters of the urban resistance and raises questions about how the revolution was made.

Fulgencio Batista and His Adversaries

Fulgencio Batista burst back on to the Cuban political scene with a remarkably fast coup d’état executed on March 10, 1952. Batista has been so vilified in Cuban officialist historiography and in popular memory that in retrospect it can be hard to fully understand what his return to power meant. We know that Cuba’s elite groups and institutions at least formally supported Batista’s coup.¹⁰ He also apparently still enjoyed some popular support.¹¹ Although Batista is often depicted as a bloodthirsty right-wing dictator, such caricatures rely on his final few years in power, by which time he relied overwhelmingly on the military for his support and used force to repress the revolutionary movement that opposed him. But a longer focus on Batista’s entire political trajectory suggests that he was a military reformer, not unlike the other populists who rose to power in the circum-Caribbean region in the same period. Men like Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua began their ascent in the turbulent 1930s with significant popular support. Their long careers ended several decades later in the polarizing atmosphere of the Cold War, when they ruled as far more repressive dictators. They owed their powerful early appeal to policies that genuinely, if unevenly, benefitted the urban or rural popular classes. Perhaps more importantly, they were often the first national leaders to describe the popular classes—at least popular-class men—as crucial citizens of the modernizing nation.¹² Batista fits within this general panorama. Never a truly right-wing or even politically conservative dictator, he embraced a corporatist and militarist vision of modernity and reform.

Batista originally rose to political prominence in the tumultuous aftermath of the 1933 revolution, which ousted Gerardo Machado. As a sergeant in the army, Batista became a member of an unstable five-man group of leaders referred to as the pentarchy, which disintegrated when the U.S. government supported Batista over more democratic reformers such as Ramón Grau San Martín and radical nationalists such as Tony Guiteras. Over the next few years his power grew. Batista repressed the revolutionary Left led by Guiteras, but by the late 1930s, firmly in power, he had incorporated many of the 1933 revolution’s proposed reforms. In 1940, his administration presided over the drafting of a remarkably progressive constitution, a “tropical version of the Rooseveltian New Deal,” in the words of the historian Jesús Arboleya.¹³

As president, Batista undertook some progressive initiatives, such as promises for agrarian reform and the abolition of large estates, the extension of rural education under a quasi-militarized rubric, and increased state regulation of the sugar sector. He struck a tactical alliance with the Communist Party, seeking to widen his popular base of support, and implemented some concessions to labor, such as the eight-hour day, social security, maternity leave, and paid vacation.¹⁴ Batista cast himself as being “for the working man,” and he was still remembered that way in some interviews conducted fifty years after his overthrow.¹⁵ He won the 1940 presidential elections, apparently without resort to fraud, and yielded office in 1944 to his old rival, president-elect Grau San Martín of the Auténtico Party.¹⁶

In the eight years during which Batista was absent from national politics—from 1944 to 1952—the institutionalized forces of political reform were fragmented and weakened. While the Auténtico Party’s 1944 rise to national power was initially greeted with widespread optimism, by 1952 the party’s corruption in office and violent suppression of some labor activists had largely discredited it. In the same period, the dynamic Ortodoxo Party, founded as a splinter group from the Auténticos, became immensely popular in the urban centers. Its fiery leader, Eduardo Chibás, helped to discredit the Auténticos through frequent public allegations of corruption. But after Chibás’s “martyrdom” (he committed suicide in 1951), the Ortodoxo Party never regained its institutional strength. Subsequent party leaders lacked his charisma and unifying power, and internally, party militants unofficially splintered into several groupings based around rival leaders.¹⁷ Still, Chibás’s legacy remained strong.¹⁸ Some of the earliest anti-Batista groups directly referenced Chibás as an inspiration, while others indirectly referenced his famous slogan, “Honor against corruption” (Vergüenza contra dinero). Indeed, many of the early anti-Batista groups were likely derived from disillusioned factions from the ranks of the declining Auténtico and Ortodoxo parties.¹⁹

If Cubans grappled with how to respond to the abrupt end of constitutional rule after March 1952, they were not alone. Throughout the region, leaders such as Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela increasingly ruled with an iron fist. The short-lived postwar optimism toward the possibility of social democracy and development soon waned, as the postwar democratic consensus gave way to the polarization of the Cold War. Organized labor and the leftist parties that had flourished in the immediate postwar period were curbed by national elites with the backing of the United States.²⁰ The strains of the period were perhaps particularly acutely felt by the small countries of the Caribbean, which had little industry and declining agriculture, whose sovereignty was compromised by the immense weight of U.S. influence, and whose urban political sphere was rife with struggles over government spoils and sinecures.²¹

The combination of the external transformations associated with the rise of the Cold War and Cuba’s own internal political flux explains the strong sense of political crisis that emerged among contemporaries. Cuban politics was already in a crisis of sorts even before Batista’s 1952 coup. These developments also help explain why protest in response to the coup was initially rather limited, as it came at a ti...