Chase, M Women's Organisations and The Politics of Gender in Cuba's Urban Insurrection PDF

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp.
440–458, 2010
Women’s Organisations
and the Politics of Gender in Cuba’s
Urban Insurrection (1952–1958)
MICHELLE CHASE
New York University, USA
This article sheds new light on Cuba’s urban insurrection to oust Ful-
gencio Batista by focusing on two all-women’s anti-Batista groups. It
charts the origins and developments of the groups, explores their con-
ceptions about the importance of women’s political action and examines
the impact that participating in the insurrection had on group members.
The article complicates long-standing assumptions about women’s low
levels of participation in the insurrection and the absence of demands for
gender equity among those who did participate by noting that some older
women militants had histories with the feminist movement of the 1930s,
and that many younger women were forced by the circumstances of the
insurrection to confront and challenge contemporary gender norms.
Keywords: Cuban Revolution, dictatorship, feminism, gender, political

violence, women.
Introduction
Cuba’s official historical narrative proclaims grandly that ‘the Cuban woman was
present’ in the anti-Batista struggle of 1952–1958, as evidenced by the handful of
women among Fidel Castro’s close coterie in the Sierra Maestra. Academic studies
have sought to complicate this picture, but often by studying the relatively small
presence of women in Cuba’s guerrilla warfare as compared to later guerrilla campaigns
(Kampwirth, 2002; Shayne, 2004; Puebla 2003). The lack of gendered analyses of
the Revolution has been exacerbated by the general focus of scholarly and popular
attention on the guerrilla rebels led by Fidel Castro in the eastern mountain regions,
to the detriment of studies of the urban opposition. The main rebel groups in the city
were, like the mountain guerrillas, overwhelmingly male, yet women often participated
informally in the urban setting, especially in behind-the-scenes activities such as buying
and selling bonds, or perhaps engaging in short-lived boycotts or other consumer
actions. Those more deeply involved might relay messages, monitor police movements,
hide propaganda, and provide shelter, transportation or medical assistance for urban
militias (Lewis, 1977: 370–373). There were also some all-women’s groups that formed
in order to oppose dictator Fulgencio Batista. This article will examine the development
of the two most important women’s anti-Batista groups, the Frente Cívico de Mujeres
© 2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2010 Society for Latin American Studies.
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
440 Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Gender in Cuba
Martianas (FCMM; José Martí Women’s Civic Front), and Mujeres Oposicionistas
Unidas (MOU; Opposition Women United).
An analysis of these all-women’s groups will shed light on the dynamics of the
urban insurrection, in particular by illuminating the strategic importance of some
women activists, discussing the political spectrum of the anti-dictatorial opposition, and
illustrating how various opposition groups, both public and clandestine, coordinated
themselves in the struggle against Batista. The article will also explore how women
activists conceptualised the meaning and importance of women’s political action,
which derived less from feminist goals of addressing gender inequality and more from
the perspective of a ‘feminine’ movement stressing women’s moral authority. Yet if
their discourse and actions in some way derived from and reinforced the traditional
role of women in family-related tasks and as the moral stalwarts of revolution,
the insurrection nonetheless also pushed group members to transcend contemporary
bourgeois proscriptions of femininity.
Additionally, this article will re-examine the process of radicalisation or at least deep
transformation of political consciousness in the context of the insurrection. There is a
general consensus among scholars of the Cuban Revolution that most insurrectionists
of the 1950s may have envisioned substantial, or perhaps even radical, social reforms,
but were, if anything, anti-communist. This has led many scholars to either place undue
emphasis on Fidel Castro’s charismatic leadership to explain the transition to socialism
and radical anti-imperialism, following the Revolution’s triumph, or to assume that the
Revolution’s politics shifted left as its social base broadened, without exploring in detail
the politics of Cuba’s popular classes in this period.1 But scholars have largely ignored
the experiences of direct participation in the insurrection itself. By examining personal
narratives of members of the MOU and FCMM, I will suggest that participation in the
anti-Batista insurrection was a profoundly transformative experience for many young
women, turning politically inexperienced middle-class social reformers into movement
militants and revolutionaries. However, for the older women who founded the FCMM
and MOU, this process of political transformation was different. Unlike the newly
formed male-dominated revolutionary groups of the 1950s, which tended to be led by
men in their 20s or early 30s with relatively little previous political experience, the
women’s groups discussed in this article were more multi-generational. The FCMM
and MOU were led by older women of long political standing, with a rank and file
composed predominantly of young women whose activism tended to stem from their
participation in high school or university politics. The sparse biographical information
available suggests that the leaders of both the MOU and FCMM had originally been
politicised through the Marxist left in the 1930s. However, by the 1950s, the FCMM’s
1 A full citation of all the publications about this period would not be possible. The best
works giving a broad overview of Cuba’s major post-1959 transitions include Pérez
(1988) and Pérez-Stable (1993). Both authors explain the Revolution’s radicalisation as
resulting from a number of factors, including Fidel Castro’s charismatic leadership; the
discrediting of the old political parties and resultant lack of any institutional check on
the power and decision-making of the leadership; the support of the popular classes for
redistributive policies; the aggressive actions taken by the US government; and political
moderates leaving for exile. For an interesting counterpoint, see Zeitlin (1970), which
argues that the Communist Party’s strength in the labour unions in the 1930s and 1940s
made older workers more hospitable to socialism in 1961 than younger workers with
less prior exposure to the Party.
© 2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2010 Society for Latin American Studies
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 4 441
Michelle Chase
leaders were affiliated with the anti-communist, left-of-centre Ortodoxo party. The
MOU’s founder and figurehead, also a prominent member of the Ortodoxo party, was
apparently sympathetic to the Communist Party (CP).2
Taking these women’s personal histories into account may suggest different paths
of political mobilisation and radicalisation for younger and older women activists
involved in the anti-Batista struggle. That is to say that many younger members of the
FCMM, MOU and other militant opposition groups experienced a profound change
in consciousness that emerged from everyday experience in the insurrection and was
often expressed inchoately as revulsion toward the arbitrary use of state power and
violence. For older women activists, on the other hand, the insurrection may have
represented one more episode in long histories of militancy, and for some may even
have represented mobilising around a more moderate political vision than that of the
1930s. The trajectory of the women’s organisations and their leaders thus helps us
rethink standard narratives of radicalisation in the Cuban Revolution.
In what follows I will give a general overview of how the groups formed, discuss
how they conceptualised the need for revolutionary action and women’s participation
in particular, and finally explore how participation in the insurrection had an impact
on group members, especially younger women.
The Formation of a ‘Feminine’ Opposition

The FCMM was formed in January 1953 by Aida Pelayo, Carmen Castro Porta and
several other experienced women activists, including Marta Frayde, who eventually split
off to form the MOU. The women were all, at the time, affiliated with the left-of-centre
Ortodoxo Party, which had begun to splinter even before Batista’s 1952 coup, because
of internal rivalry and the lack of clear leadership after the suicide of party leader
Eduardo Chibás in 1951. Additionally, some of the women also had long histories of
prior activism.
The FCMM’s leaders, Aida Pelayo and Carmen Castro Porta, had initially been
politicised through the Marxist left in the 1930s, although by the 1950s both women
had apparently distanced themselves from the CP and its affiliated groups. Born in 1912
and 1908 respectively, Pelayo and Castro Porta both became interested in politics while
students at Havana public high schools during the turbulent late 1920s and early 1930s.
Pelayo joined the Communist Youth League in 1928; Castro Porta became involved in
the student group of the University of Havana, the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario
(University Student Directorate) (Maloof, 1999: 54–55; Salas Servando, 2008).
A strong protest movement emerged in this period to oust president-turned-dictator
Gerardo Machado, culminating in his overthrow in 1933. The revolutionary surge of
1930–1933 prompted the founding of various radical student organisations, including
the Ala Izquierda Estudiantil (Student Left Wing), a Marxist group based in universities
and high schools, which Aida Pelayo joined. Although the AIE’s theoretical platform
was indistinguishable from the CP and the group included students who were members
of the CP, the group’s stance was also critical of some party strategies, in particular
2 In the 1940s the Cuban Communist Party changed its name to the Partido Socialista
Popular (PSP) but I will refer to it here exclusively as the Communist Party (CP) to avoid
confusion.
442 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 4
its adherence to Soviet directives insensitive to local realities (González Carbajal, 1974:
63; Whitney, 2001: 77–78). During this period, Pelayo met Castro Porta, then working
with Defensa Obrera Internacional (DOI), an internationalist aid group affiliated with
the CP. Pelayo and Castro Porta became close friends during this period and worked
together for the rest of the decade in solidarity organisations for Spanish Civil War
exiles and Cuban political prisoners. Pelayo later worked for the International Red
Cross and as a school teacher in Havana. Castro Porta had worked for the student
magazines Mella and Alma Mater in the 1930s, where she met many of the luminaries of
the Marxist and nationalist Lefts. She eventually became a journalist for the mainstream
liberal daily Prensa Libre (Castro Porta, 1990: 27–28; Maloof, 1999: 54–56; Ricardo,
2004: 168; and on the DOI see Alexander, 1969: 276).
In this period, Aida Pelayo was also attracted to feminism, which was a strong
movement in Havana in the 1930s, and which in some currents overlapped with the
socialist Left and radical student politics (Stoner, 1991: 54–77). Feminism in the 1930s
had encompassed competing political agendas, including elite women who primarily
sought the female franchise and working-class women who sought the amelioration of
labour conditions in predominantly female industries or who linked their criticism of
gender inequality to critiques of capitalism and US imperialism. Controversial issues
were battled out in congresses held in the 1920s and 1930s. Pelayo was a delegate to the
Women’s Congress of 1939, which helped secure women the vote. When interviewed
in the 1990s, Pelayo identified herself as a sympathiser to a more radical strand of
feminism, explaining that ‘our demands as revolutionary women went beyond those
of the Cuban middle-class feminist movement . . . our struggle was also . . . for the full
participation of women and the underprivileged in all levels of society’. By her own
account she became a single mother by choice, marrying the father of her child ‘for one
day’ before he returned to Spain to fight in the Civil War, thus technically ensuring the
child’s legitimacy while also scorning the institution of the bourgeois family (Maloof,
1999: 56).
Judging from their surviving manifestos and statements to the press, the FCMM’s
ideology reflected the founders’ association with the nationalist, left-of-centre Ortodoxo
Party, although in keeping with its stated goal to unite women beyond their existing
political affiliations, the group made no explicit statement of support for any existing
party or group.3 Although occasionally denounced as ‘communist’ by regime supporters,
the group was part of the national-democratic, anti-dictatorial left that was strong in
Cuba in this period.
In its publications the FCMM frequently cited their namesake, Cuban nineteenth-
century nationalist philosopher and independence leader, Jose Martí, drawing on Martí
quotes with broad appeal and rhetorical flourish, focusing on the oppression of the
3 The nationalist reformers who led the 1933 Revolution formed their own party, the
Auténticos, raising the banner of the true ideals of the defeated Revolution and drawing
many former student radicals to its ranks. In the late 1940s, a dissident group of
Auténticos formed their own party, the Ortodoxo Party, led by charismatic former
student leader Eduardo Chibás, who was an anti-communist who supported the ‘West’
in the Cold War, although he did not favour repression of the CP. Pelayo and Castro
Porta probably followed the political trajectory of many Marxists and radicals in the
post-war period, who drifted away from affiliation with the CP and embraced democratic
reform.
Michelle Chase
people, the necessity of struggle and the heroism of sacrifice – all standard tropes
of Cuba’s national-democratic left in the post-war period (Farber, 2006: 34–54).
Their writings occasionally referred to the country’s deep structural problems, such as
dependence on agricultural export commodities (principally sugar), the resulting chronic
unemployment, and foreign monopolies in light and telephone services. Yet the FCMM
can be distinguished from the anti-imperialist or Marxist Left by denouncing certain
‘foreign monopolies’ rather than capitalism per se, and by not linking problematic
economic patterns and accompanying political repression with the political dominance
of the United States in the region. The group referred to the United States, at least
in passing, as ‘a country of liberties, of democracy’, (Castro Porta, 1990: 274) and
appealed to international institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and Organisation
of American States (OAS). The group viewed certain chronic problems as inherited from
the irrationalities of the colonial period (rather than, say, related to the rise of export-
oriented commodity crops in the nineteenth century) and blamed Caribbean dictators
such as Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and
Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela for sullying ‘our America’. The group apparently
did not address those flashpoints that illuminated divisions between the nationalist and
Marxist lefts in the 1950s, such as the Korean War or the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz
in Guatemala. It more often focused on the need to oust Batista and demanded Cuba’s
return to the community of ‘free nations’ under a democratic, civil and constitutional
government. If the group conceded the ‘pernicious evil’ of communism, it nevertheless
disagreed with the use of authoritarian tactics to repress the CP as ‘not the correct
formula’ and a pretext that could be used to repress the democratic anti-Batista
opposition (Castro Porta, 1990: 256, 264).
The MOU was formed in 1956 by Marta Frayde, a practising gynaecologist and
prominent figure within the Ortodoxo Party, then in her late 30s, who split off from
the FCMM to form her own women’s group in 1956.4 Frayde was clearly identified
by contemporaries as belonging to the left wing of the Ortodoxo Party that included,
as one historian has written, ‘more serious social reformers looking forward to a
vigorous reorganisation of the whole of Cuban society; some were even prepared for
collaboration to this effect with the CP (Thomas, 1971: 767)’. In fact, Frayde’s split
from the FCMM may have had to do with a difference in opinion over relations
with the CP (González Pagés, 2003: 114). Surviving documents and bulletins indicate
the MOU’s interest in the international socialist movement. For example, the group’s
bulletin covered the fourth Women’s International Democratic Federation congress held
in Vienna, where a Cuban delegation presented on the conflict then raging in Cuba
(Anon, 1958a). The MOU included in its membership some women who were affiliated
to the CP, or whose families were militants to the left of the Ortodoxo party without
being CP adherents. However, the MOU was not a CP ‘front’ group – as were, for
4 In general, much less is known about the MOU than the FCMM. This is possibly because
the FCMM was larger, more active and longer lasting, although it also likely reflects
the complex post-1959 trajectory of Frayde, who fell from favour with the leadership
for unclear reasons, was accused of collaborating with the CIA and was imprisoned for
several years in the late 1970s. Her case became a cause célèbre, and after her release
she criticised the Cuban leadership from exile in Spain. For this reason she is rarely
mentioned in histories written within the island, despite her prominence and proximity
to the leadership in the early 1960s (see Aranguren et al., 1978).
example, the Federación Democrática de Mujeres Cubanas (Democratic Federation of

Cuban Women) or the Hermandad de Madres de Marta Abreu (Sisterhood of Mothers
Marta Abreu) – as is suggested by its support of the insurrection at least a year before
the CP declared its adherence to the armed struggle against Batista. Thus the MOU and
FCMM occupied different positions on the political spectrum, yet both were technically
frentes (fronts) grouping women of different political affiliations, and both made at
least rhetorical appeals to women of no prior political militancy.
After its formation, the FCMM grew to incorporate many younger women, some-
times working professionals, but more often students at Havana University or one
of the city’s high schools. The group’s membership was primarily middle-class, white
and concentrated in urban areas. The FCMM’s membership was about 600 or 700
registered members, with perhaps several thousand who participated informally. The
great majority of those women were in Havana, although chapters existed in capitals of
the other provinces, and were especially strong in Oriente and Pinar del Río Although
they undertook some formal meetings and printed an official membership card, the
group was informally organised. Most members interviewed had joined upon invitation
from a friend and seemed to gather information and receive assignments by informally
visiting the group’s leaders or their closest contacts in their homes (Maloof, 1999:
57–58; Izquierdo, n.d.).
The MOU’s membership was demographically similar to that of the FCMM, although
it was smaller.5 It also had chapters throughout the island, particularly in Oriente, Las
Villas and Pinar del Río provinces, although it too was strongest in Havana. Former
MOU members interviewed for the project described being recruited informally by
Frayde herself, a family friend. Surviving documents also note that the group tried to
organise neighbourhood-level committees, not always successfully. The phrase used in
surviving minutes, ‘visits were made to prepare meetings’, suggests something of the
nature of recruitment: probably informal, face-to-face, house-by-house visits undertaken
by women with contacts in the neighbourhood, much as the ‘women’s sections’ of the
principal political parties had done in the 1940s to turn out women’s votes (MOU
meeting notes, IHC, FMF).6 Frayde herself was forced into exile in Mexico in 1957,
but the group apparently continued its activities.
Both the FCMM and MOU were technically civic groups, but they also worked in
tandem with the armed opposition groups that began to lead the opposition move-
ment after 1955. During the earliest years of the insurrectionary period (1953–1955),
which were marked by isolated armed protest actions and growing civic opposition,
the FCMM undertook activities that were primarily designed to raise consciousness
among the general public.7 For example, they organised a production of the plays of
José Martí. Over the course of the next two years the group began to undertake public,
5 One former member estimated that the MOU had as few as 40 members, although that
number seems low, based on surviving documentation (Pedraza, 2007: 117).
6 ‘Sobre la reunion provincial de M.O.U’. Meeting minutes circa 1958. Fondo Movimiento
Feminino, Instituto de Historia de Cuba. On the pre-revolutionary women’s sections,
see oral history with Nilda, Havana, July 2007.
7 Some of the women who joined the FCMM had been briefly affiliated with other groups
established early in the insurrectionary period as well. Eva Jiménez, Marta Frayde and
Thelvia Marín were all apparently affiliated with the short-lived insurrectionary group
Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR), led by professor Rafael García Bárcena;
Concha Cheda had been involved with the Movimiento de Liberación Radical (MLR),
Michelle Chase
civic acts of protest, such as street demonstrations and denunciations released in the
press. They also visited political prisoners, bearing food, clothes and messages. As the
anti-dictatorial movement developed into a primarily armed struggle, the FCMM and
MOU increasingly served as auxiliary support groups to the main rebel groups. In this
capacity members of both groups made organised prison visits, hid wanted men, stored
and transported arms and propaganda, organised aid for the families of rebels who
were imprisoned or dead, ran safe houses, and served as go-betweens and messengers.
Straddling above- and underground activity allowed them to continue to denounce
Batista publicly, organising demonstrations, open letters and other civic acts, while
simultaneously undertaking support actions for rebels. Since both groups were formally
non-partisan and permitted double membership, some members, especially younger
ones, eventually also joined one of these rebel groups.
Gender and Political Action

While neither the FCMM nor the MOU made direct reference to gender inequity in
its pronouncements, we must still ask what discursive appeals they made regarding
women’s political participation. Both groups, however obliquely, found it necessary
in their propaganda to articulate an historical argument for women’s political action,
usually referring to women’s participation in the Wars of Independence or in the
Revolution of 1933.8 For example, one FCMM proclamation of 1956, ‘Message to
Cuban Women’, apparently addressed to a broader audience of women (i.e. not just its
own membership), asks rhetorically, ‘Wasn’t it our apostle [José Martí] who exalted
the virtues and sacrifices of Latin American women?’ The document then lists female
historical figures who joined the continent’s Wars of Independence, often by supporting
their men who had joined the war, or pushing their men to join. It follows that with a
list of Cuban women in particular who had fought in the Wars of Independence against
Spain. The proclamation ends with a call to action, but in effect asks its women readers
to support their revolutionary men – in other words, not to hold back their husbands
or sons who might be engaged in the anti-Batista struggle:
Do not censure, Cuban mother, your rebel son in his patriotic passions.
Encourage him in his thirst for justice. . . . If your husband . . . fights for the
dignity of the Republic, encourage him, uniting his desires with yours. If
a group led by Catholic activists such as Andrés Valdespino and Amalio Fiallo, who
later supported the counter-revolution. See Marín (n/d) and Movimiento de Liberación
Radical (1955), ‘Manifiesto’ (pamphlet), February 1955. For a broad overview of the
MNR, see the introduction to Bonachea and Valdes (1972).
8 The use of the 1933 Revolution as a point of reference distinguishes the FCMM from
the newer, youth-led groups such as the Movimiento 26 de Julio (26 of July Movement),
which tended to reference the War of Independence but not the 1930s. ‘If during the epic
of liberation the Cuban woman occupied a preferential seat in the common aspiration
to break the yoke of colonialism . . . if she was present in the revolutionary days of
1930, how could she now be insensitive to the abuse inflicted on her country . . .?’
‘Declaraciones del Frente Cívico. . .’ Prensa Libre, 11 January 1953, reprinted in Castro
Porta (1990: 257).
your brother has embraced the ideal of liberty, follow him [imítalo], dignify-
ing those ties of blood with a more vigorous understanding. Cuban woman,
honour your glorious ancestors. (reprinted in Castro Porta, 1990: 290)
In bulletins published by the MOU, the analogy of the War of Independence

heroines (mambisas) to the activists of the 1950s is used to give meaning to the bravery
of contemporary MOU members. For example, a long description of MOU member
Natalia Bolívar’s perseverance in the face of physical abuse by police marks her as ‘as
‘‘loyal to her mambisa tradition’’’ (Anon, 1958b). The MOU organ also praised the
Pinar del Río branch of its organisation for its ‘patriotic fervour’, proclaiming that ‘The
mambisa of yesterday can feel proud of her sisters of today’! (Anon, 1958c).
References to the War of Independence were common among the 26 of July
Movement and other insurgent groups. But the rhetorical strategies of the FCMM and
MOU can be interestingly compared to the 26 of July Movement’s occasional appeals
to women to mobilise. The latter often cast women’s political action as an innate,
emotional, maternalist response to violence against men. For example, as a Radio
Rebelde broadcast of 1958 read: ‘Cuban woman: You who have seen the blood of your
children shed on our streets, have seen their young faces hardened by rage against the
dictator . . . join the struggle for the freedom of the country [patria]. Help in what you
can . . .’ (Anon, 1958d). The phrasing of other appeals suggests that mobilising women
was seen by the M-26 as a last resort, as in this broadcast of April 1958:
[T]he feminine presence is NECESSARY in this final stage of the struggle

against Batista. OUR COUNTRY NEEDS US in this decisive moment
. . . WOMEN TAKE TO THE STREETS to help our men who FIGHT
BRAVELY against oppression and barbarism. (Anon, 1958e)
While both the FCMM flyer and MOU bulletins discussed earlier locate women’s
militancy within an historical tradition of women’s political participation, the references
made by the M-26 to women’s mobilisation often cast it something exceptional or
temporary, a way of framing women’s militancy as acceptable (Weinstein, 2006: 32).
Despite these important attempts to insert women as political actors within the
historical development of the nation, the relative silence on issues of gender inequity in
the group’s pronouncements seems remarkable, especially given Pelayo’s own history
as a feminist and the presence of other older women in the group whose political
comings of age had occurred in a period in which left politics and feminist demands
had intertwined. The silence should perhaps be interpreted as a conscious manoeuvre
to locate the group within the broader anti-dictatorial left of the late 1940s and early
1950s – that is, within the ‘mainstream’ of the nationalist left, which prioritised issues
of unity, honour and national redemption, making few if any clear pronouncements on
race, gender, or even class.
The absence of any mention of gender inequity may also reflect a generational
difference, for the younger women that the FCMM sought to mobilise had come of
age in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after Cuba’s feminist movement had faded from
prominence and the Cold War increasingly marginalised the communist left. Indeed,
we know that the majority of the women who considered themselves active militants
in the insurrection were young (under 30), and also that the vast majority of them
participated in the large revolutionary groups such as the 26 of July Movement or
the Directorio Revolucionario (Revolutionary Directorate) rather than in the smaller
all-women’s groups such as the FCMM and MOU (Díaz Vallina et al., 1997: 28).
Michelle Chase
Although the role of feminism in the 1940s has yet to be closely studied, it is notable
that the feminist activists of the 1930s had moved into widely varied political alliances
and institutional positions by the 1950s. For example, former socialist feminist Ofelia
Domínguez Navarro had accepted a position as delegate to the UN in 1950, while
the Auténtico Party held power in Cuba, and remained there representing Batista’s
administration subsequently. Meanwhile, the major political parties in the post-war
period apparently excelled at mobilising women – newly enfranchised – at least in the
urban context, likely drawing many former feminists into the ranks of the Ortodoxo
and Auténtico parties. If feminism as a movement had lost its vigour by the 1940s
and 1950s, the same period may also have witnessed unprecedented women’s activism
within the formal party structure.
Rather than focus on gender inequality, the FCMM and MOU seemed to locate
the importance of women’s political action partly in its moral authority, a concept
that formed a subtext to many of the groups’ actions. When women, the implicit
defenders of home, family and morality, stood up to authorities in their defence of
young activists and grieving mothers, such gestures had particular resonance. Certainly
this is often how the martianas are remembered by contemporaries – for example, as
confronting police during funerals of militants or organising the proper honorary rituals
for the dead (Sección de Historia del PCC, 1990: 73; Rodríguez Olmo, 2007). This
was especially true in instances where the groups offered moral support to the family
members – usually the mothers or wives – of ‘martyred’ insurgents. In this capacity, they
helped identify bodies, attended to families during funerals, and brought food and aid
to families of martyred men.
It could be argued that the centrality of women activists in these public displays
of mourning reinforced the dominant gendered roles of mourning and family support,
and to some extent kept women activists within the familiar physical spaces of home,
church and funeral parlour. Still, in the context of the insurrection, undertaking some
‘traditional’ women’s tasks, such as helping prepare burial services or attending a
funeral mass, could become dangerous and lead to physical confrontations with police.
For example, in one bulletin, the MOU praised its members’ combativeness during
funerals, noting with pride that they did not stand down even when police opened fire
on mourners. We also need to understand to what extent we are seeing a strategic
redeployment of such roles by women activists, and what these roles meant in the
context of the insurrection.
Two anecdotes concerning FCMM founder Aida Pelayo suggest that she consciously
manipulated prevailing notions of women’s political activism as deriving from protective
familial instincts, or of women as generally passive, apolitical creatures. In November
1955, Pelayo was asked to speak at a rally called by members of the ‘old’ political
opposition. As the only woman speaker, she found she was expected to speak about ‘the
family and peace’. Yet the seasoned activist managed to turn those themes on their head
by giving a rousing, tour-de-force speech in which she shouted out the names of young
activists killed by security forces, fiercely denounced the regime’s violation of the home,
and ended with a vow to ‘revenge the spilled blood of our brothers’. The crowd rallied
to her speech with shouts of Revolución! (Castro Porta, 1990: 97–99). This incident is
particularly revealing: it shows both general societal expectations that women should
speak of ‘the family and peace’ and the unfixed and potentially disruptive meaning
those themes might have in practice.
One MOU member recalled another incident involving Aida Pelayo, and here the
nature of its oral transmission – repeated even among women who were not part of
Pelayo’s immediate group – gives us a sense of the anecdote’s contemporary appeal and
subsequent memorability:
Aida Pelayo was protagonist in an incredible anecdote that my sister would

tell dying of laughter: [Pelayo] took part in a meeting, and the cops come to
dissolve it, and she runs out, but she bumps into a policeman, and she says
to him – of course, [Pelayo] was a young woman then – she says, ‘Oh, sir,
protect me! Protect me from all this trouble’! And she was the one causing
all the scandal and trouble! (Interview with Zoila, 2007)
Thus, militant women occasionally manipulated stereotypical images of women’s apo-

litical nature in order to successfully carry out their political work.
Additionally, some of the tasks undertaken by the FCMM and MOU, while to some
extent drawing on and reinforcing the special moral authority exercised by women, also
had far more than merely symbolic importance. For example, visits to political prisoners,
one of the hallmarks of both the FCMM and MOU, was not merely about raising morale
or even simply providing material aid; it also had crucial strategic importance for the
anti-Batista underground. For example, the cell structure of the insurrectionary groups
usually prevented men from knowing more than ten or twelve other members. Thus,
when a new detainee arrived, the existing prisoners – organised inside the prison into
their respective revolutionary groupings – needed confirmation of his personal identity
and group militancy before including him in group strategising sessions. The FCMM
took notification out to their movement contacts to confirm the new detainee’s claims,
and also to verify his detention to his closest cohort in the underground. More visible
work on behalf of prisoners included submitting a claim of habeas corpus as quickly as
possible after an arrest in order to prevent torture or killing during detention by raising
a legal shield. Both the FCMM and MOU worked jointly with families of the political
prisoners, insurgent groups and progressive lawyers to coordinate legal action.
The FCMM also played a leading role in organising support actions for the hunger
strike waged by political prisoners in June 1957, to protest against prison conditions and
to demand the destitution of a particularly abusive prison head, Manuel Ugalde Carrillo.
The incident reveals something of the dynamics of cooperation that existed within the
anti-Batista movement. Launched primarily by imprisoned members of the clandestine
26 of July Movement, other above-ground political groupings worked to support the
hunger strikers by simultaneously attempting legal action against the prison head and
appealing to public opinion through street demonstrations and media interventions. The
FCMM helped organise demonstrations of prisoners’ families outside the courts, staged
an intervention in a televised talk show where they held up a large banner reading ‘We
demand the dismissal of Ugalde Carrillo’, and planned a very short-lived parallel hunger
strike undertaken by some prisoners’ mothers outside a city centre church. Several
days after the end of the prisoners’ hunger strike, Ugalde Carrillo was removed. The
hunger strike and public outreach campaign garnered great public support and had an
important impact on movement morale (Castro Porta, 1990: 171–178).
Personal Transformation and Political Militancy

Groups such as the FCMM and MOU present us with an interesting problem, as they
tended to bring together older women of lengthy political trajectories with younger
women who were often political novices. If the older leaders of the groups to some
Michelle Chase
extent shaped the thinking of their younger cohorts and provided the organisational
framework in which the younger women’s activism developed, interviews with former
participants in the urban opposition suggest that their participation in the insurrection
itself had a great impact on their political consciousness, and that the insurrection was
a period of intense personal transformation for them.9 In fact, changes in the political
consciousness of younger FCMM and MOU members derived primarily from their
experience at the everyday level of the insurgency, a process that was similar to that
experienced by other young women affiliated with the urban clandestine movements,
such as the 26 of July Movement, the Revolutionary Directorate, and others. Several
factors contributed to these transformations: the transcendence of the middle-class
milieu of most urban opposition cadres, the experience of shared political commitment
with one’s compañeros, the impact of witnessing increasing police violence, and engaging
in the physical risk implied by opposition activity.
Most members of the FCMM and MOU were from the light-skinned middle class;
some were more affluent. Both the FCMM and MOU put their middle-class bearing
and privileged contacts to use in organising against the dictatorship, drawing upon their
more affluent members’ family contacts with foreign diplomats or among the political
elite to arrange amnesty status for male comrades in danger or to obtain their release
from prison. Daily operations could also depend on a woman’s contacts. For example,
one MOU member recalled how the group’s tasks were divided up in informal meetings
of the group’s executive council:
For example, Marta [Frayde] would say that we needed the plans of the
movements of the army in Santiago de Cuba. So she would say, ‘OK, who is
friends with the wife of someone in the army’? [or] ‘Look, someone has to
ask [the sweets factory] La Estrella . . . to give us some food for the political
prisoners . . .’ Then we would say, ‘Who here is friends with the owner of La
Estrella’? [and] ‘We have to spread the news that such-and-such has been
tortured . . . Who’s going to speak to the reporters’? . . . And like that, more
or less, we [each] had our contacts and we knew the contacts the others
had, and you [acted correspondingly]. (Interview with Natalia, 2007)
The class background of most of the members of the FCMM is suggested by the
types of public demonstrations and protests that they tended to organise. The group
took particular care to mark José Martí’s birthday each year, placing wreaths on statues
and outside churches, often sparking violent exchanges with the police and resulting
in detentions. One woman who later became a member wrote this description of her
9 For this project, I interviewed roughly a dozen women who had belonged to either the
FCMM or MOU. All of the interviews took place in Havana, through a self-selected
network of women who had remained in contact with one another and were willing to
be interviewed. The oral histories thus reflect the vision of those women who stayed
in Cuba after 1959 and continue to support the revolutionary government. While this
post-revolutionary trajectory obviously affects their personal stories, for example, by
reflecting heavily the current officialist narratives of the revolutionary leadership, I have
attempted to analyse them with that in mind. Additionally, only the youngest members
of the groups are still alive, although there are several published interviews conducted
with some of the older members. The former members I have located outside Cuba have
not agreed to be interviewed.
first sight of the group, in an incident that suggests a strategic appeal to the innocence
and moral authority conferred by the Catholic Church, whose formal adherents in
pre-revolutionary Havana were largely white, middle-class women. She came upon a
tumult between a group of women and police in front of a centrally located church; a
crowd of people had formed, shouting in support of the women:
The argument was heated; the nucleus of the group was formed by a group
of women dressed in black . . . trying desperately to save a floral wreath
that went back and forth between their hands and the police. The cops
were trying to rip it up and those flowers became a matter of principle for
both sides. . . . I was moved by the defence of those flowers. I didn’t even
know who they were for, but it was enough to hear one official shout, ‘You
women are just using the dead as an excuse to have a skirmish with the
police. Enough with the masses and flowers’! (Castro Porta, 1990: 222)
Other public demonstrations organised by the group took place in the commercial
heart of the city, on Galiano Street, between Reina and Neptuno, in Centro Habana.
Since the development of new, more affluent residential areas such as Vedado and Santos
Suárez, Centro Habana’s housing had passed to the popular classes. Additionally,
hundreds of young working-class women were employed in this area as waitresses and
shop attendants, as well as seamstresses in smaller workshops. The area also featured
tall US-style department stores such as El Encanto, Fin de Siglo, La Época and Flogar,
scattered among smaller, more traditional stores covered with porticos, making for
comfortable, shaded strolling and window-shopping.
The choice of the location probably reflected the middle-class background of most
martianas, who easily posed as shoppers and restaurant patrons while preparing for
a street protest or sabotage action. We can assume that the intended audience for the
Mujeres Martianas’ protests held in this shopping district was probably predominantly
(although not exclusively) female and was socially mixed, including shop workers,
shoppers and local residents.
This intersection was the site of the FCMM’s most impressive and best-organised
protest in December of 1955, as well as a protest organised by FCMM’s youth section
in 1957 to publicise the hunger strike then being waged by political prisoners. Former
martianas remember both demonstrations as being highly successful and generating
support among the shoppers and employees present. As one woman recalled: ‘It was
an extraordinary experience, to see . . . how you could move the masses, how people
could be politicised in that moment! All those indifferent people . . . When we showed
up with our placards they lined up on the sides of the street and started applauding’!
(Interview with Blanca, 2005). If her comment reflects the paternalistic tendency evident
in official narratives of the Revolution – the passive masses moved to action by an
enlightened vanguard – it also reveals the deep impact such encounters had on young
militants.
Whether in public protests in which the groups addressed a broad, socially mixed
audience, or in sustained contact with families of militants from distinct back-
grounds, their actions in the anti-Batista movement pushed young women beyond
their familiar confines and changed their worldviews. For example, as the same
FCMM member recalled her experience of bringing aid to the families of assassinated
militants:
Michelle Chase
What opened my eyes wasn’t [reading Marxist theory] . . . I was a student

at the university and . . . my friends would say to me, Hey, you should
read Anti-Dühring, read Capital . . . and yes, I was interested [in Marxist
theory]. But what really opened my eyes was working with the families of
martyrs . . . Those families were enduring so much difficulty, going hungry,
they couldn’t get work anywhere. (Interview with Blanca, 2005)
For the predominantly middle-class young women who engaged in militant protest
action during the insurrection, experiences such as these changed their worldviews
by drawing them out of their relatively privileged social circles. In oral histories and
memoirs, one can almost feel the boundaries of their social worlds extending through
a series of new experiences, including momentous events, such as the police opening
fire on a protest or funeral, and smaller everyday experiences, such as travelling long
distances outside Havana alone for the first time (Nieves Rivera, 1981: 55).
Shared personal risk and political commitment solidified new bonds among
compañeras, generating strong feelings of attachment and prompting women to imagine
new forms of solidarity. One FCMM member described a sense of connection between
her and other FCMM members, even those she did not personally know: ‘If someone
said, ‘‘That lady over there is a martiana’’ . . . [I] just sort of looked at them differently.
I guess it’s the same thing with the Masons or [any other] brotherhood or sisterhood
organisation’ (Interview with Naty, 2005).
While the insurrection forged new identifications and political commitments, it also
broke old ones. As one woman recalled: ‘I had a group of friends, partiers [pepillos], we
would get together to listen to records, dance, have fun. But when mom and I started
to participate in the revolutionary struggle, I distanced myself from them; I couldn’t
understand their mindset anymore. . . . Those kids weren’t bad, but they were frivolous’
(Nieves Rivera, 1981: 62–63). Thus the change in consciousness that some young
women experienced was not only derived from their sense of connection to their partic-
ular opposition group, but also from a more general sense of becoming a political being.
Written testimonies and oral histories suggest that many young people were greatly
affected by physical acts of participation and by witnessing. As the insurrection
continued and rebels established a stronghold in the eastern mountain chain, police
brutality in the urban context increased. In particular, the spectacular nature of
state violence – for example, the appearance of dead bodies left in public places by
security forces and often bearing grisly signs of torture – had a strong effect, as did the
police assassination of several well-known urban oppositionists. Women interviewed
for this project frequently described the centrality of police violence in hardening their
opposition to the regime. As one woman recalled, ‘I started to have a sense of revulsion at
the sight of a police uniform. I took part in all the protests . . . It was a revulsion that [came
from] when you saw the cops beating [the protesters]’ (interview with Alba, 2006).10
10 If such comments reflect the official revolutionary discourse regarding the brutality of
the Batista regime, they are nonetheless bolstered by contemporary documents. For
example, the clandestine press of the period focused overwhelmingly on the deaths
of young oppositionists and the sadism of security forces, and much of the broad
mobilisation that took place during the final two years of the insurrectionary period
could be characterised by its stance against violence and official impunity. On this point
see Chase (forthcoming).
Police violence implied the problem of physical risk-taking, a measure of one’s

militancy. Women activists, especially those drawn from high-school or university
student bodies, describe the combination of fear and euphoria associated with taking
part in the increasingly dangerous student protests. The limited participation of women
in these violent conflicts with police thus made the experience more meaningful for
those women who did participate, for it marked them as exceptional among their peers.
For example, several women interviewed conveyed a sense of pride occasioned by the
recognition of their male compañeros:
Women also went [to violent protests]. They did. But in the majority
they [the protesters] were men. The men themselves [encouraged us not to
go]. I remember [student leader] José Antonio Echeverría would say to me:
‘Don’t go, because look at all the police down there.’ But I wouldn’t leave! I
would just stand a little bit behind the others. (Interview with Elvira, 2007)
Police violence also inevitably produced martyrs as the struggle wore on, and,
throughout the urban insurrection, funerals – both real and symbolic – became impor-
tant public acts, loaded with political and emotional weight. When well-known activists
were killed during protests their funerals could draw thousands of people, including
delegations sent by the major opposition groups to important funerals outside Havana.
The atmosphere of these mass funerals and burials was rowdy, with attendees shouting
out revolutionary slogans, waving their respective organisations’ banners, and often
sparking violent conflict with the police, and thus sometimes setting off a new cycle of
funerals and protests (Cruz Díaz, 1982: 127–128; Sección de Historia del PCC, 1990:
42–43).
Mass funerals were also the site of rousing oratory, often given by both political
and religious figures who used the platform to denounce the violence of Batista’s
regime – probably one of the few public sites where such sentiments could be expressed
after 1956. As the insurrection wore on and danger caused insurgents to keep an
increasingly low profile, funerals also became an important site for the renewal of
ties between activists who had not seen each other in months. Participants also recall
the importance of describing a funeral in detail – who had attended and so on – to
compañeros who had not been able to attend (Nieves Rivera, 1981: 43–44). Thus, mass
public funerals became important sites for the construction of political solidarity in the
urban opposition. Due to the fact that the ‘martyrs’ created by state repression were
almost always male, ‘political’ funerals also became important rituals for establishing
the honour and masculinity of the young men killed in the urban underground. Here,
young women militants often played a central role by leading funeral processions,
assisting a victim’s family members or going to great lengths to procure a rebel army
uniform – for there was symbolic importance in burying men in the uniform of the
Rebel Army, even if they had never worn the uniform in combat (Nieves Rivera, 1981:
46; Sección de Historia del PCC, 1989: 138–139). Women members of the FCMM,
MOU and urban clandestine organisations also played an important role in ‘claiming’
the bodies of recently killed militants, because police sometimes tried to have bodies
buried quickly, without being identified, fearing the repercussions of a mass funeral
occasioned by the death of a particularly well-known insurgent (Franqui, 1980: 219;
Nieves Rivera, 1981: 46; Sección de Historia del PCC, 1990: 71–80).
This dynamic was sparked early in the dictatorial period in Havana, when student
Rubén Batista was badly injured during a protest on 15 January 1953, and died a
month later. His funeral turned into a mass protest and marked the FCMM’s first
Michelle Chase
major public appearance as a group. A contingent of about 100 FCMM members

led the funeral procession, which began at the steps of the university and made its
way to the Colón Cemetery, dressed in black and carrying a huge banner inscribed
with a quote from José Martí: ‘The blood of the good is never shed in vain’. The
group also performed a guard of honour at subsequent funerals for student activists,
helped the victims’ family members identify the body, and helped organise the memorial
services and funeral procession. The FCMM – like other women oppositionists – also
adapted the visual symbols of bereavement to political dissent, dressing in black for
demonstrations or when attending trials, to show they were in mourning over the
country’s political situation. Through their verbal denunciations and performative
protests, women activists used their moral authority to highlight the impact of police
violence on martyrs’ families, thus denouncing the violations of the sanctity of the
domestic sphere through state terror (Kaplan, 1982; Franco, 1999).11
Negotiating the Private Sphere

But just as a defence of domestic sanctity might prompt militant public action, public
action also first required some negotiation over domestic relations. Although bourgeois
gender proscriptions in the 1950s were not as strict as in earlier decades of the
century, adult chaperones closely regulated contact between young men and women in
a courtship context, such as parties and dances held in immigrant associations, social
clubs or homes. A young unmarried woman’s public movement was still somewhat
suspect, and streets and plazas in Havana thus afforded an anonymity and a relative
privacy that many young women’s parents, who hailed from small towns in Spain or
elsewhere in Cuba, had not known and felt were threatening. The modern, semi-public
spaces of the darkened cinema or the privately owned car posed similar perils. For their
part, many high-school-aged girls travelled easily from one side of the city to another
on public transport, noticed the relative liberty of young women in Hollywood films
and began to get annoyed at what they felt were antiquated restrictions. One FCMM
member, a teenager during the years of the insurrection, recalled an early battle with
her father, sparked by excessive regulation of her older sister’s sexuality. After hours
of preparation for an extended family picnic in the country, her father – who could not
go himself, because of work – suddenly got cold feet over the presence of his teenager
daughter’s boyfriend, and vetoed the whole outing:
11 Scholars examining ‘feminine’ movements have long noted the capacity of movements
initially calling for the restoration of the beleaguered private sphere, or the ‘defense of
life’, to radicalize. As Temma Kaplan famously observed, ‘women’s defense of the rights
accorded them by the sexual division of labour, although fundamentally conservative,
[may have] revolutionary consequences (Kaplan, 1982: 551). Many scholars of the
various groups of mothers of the disappeared throughout Latin America have echoed
this observation, noting the radical potential of movements that uphold ‘life’ against
dictatorial terror. As Jean Franco has argued about one such group, they pioneered a
political practice ‘in which the rights (and rites) of kinship were given precedence over
the discourse of the state’ (Franco, 1999: 50). Yet too often scholars have taken those
movements as calls for ‘peace’ or non-violence. The FCMM’s and MOU’s endorsement
of the armed struggle remind us that the acceptance of violent methods of struggle may
be an extension of a felt abhorrence for (state) violence; the two are not contradictory.
And right then I stood up to him [and] I told him that everything was ready
and that I was going. [I said to him:] ‘Listen to me. We go to school alone.
We go to our English classes alone. And during all that, do you two follow
us? Because we can tell you we’re going to school and then not go! So what
is all this nonsense, this backwardness, this watching over people? . . . And
when I have a boyfriend, I won’t tolerate having a chaperone.’ (Interview
with Anolan, 2005)
Conflicts such as these could only be compounded by young women’s participation

in the insurrection, which involved not only political and physical risk-taking, long
absences and unrestricted movement about the city, but also close, unsupervised
association with single men. Hidelisa, a teenage member of the FCMM who later
became a cell leader for the M-26, recalled conflicts with her mother over visits from a
30-something political contact of hers, who might stop by the house to ask her for help
in hiding a compañero wanted by the police or in distributing clandestine publications.
In order to avoid provoking her mother, they eventually devised a meeting signal:
When he went to see me he would play a song on the jukebox [in the
corner bar] . . . he would put on this one song, ‘Doce campanas’. I lived in
the house across the street, and you could hear it perfectly and I knew it
was him. And so I’d go out yelling, ‘Mom, I’m going to the corner for a
second’! I’d meet with him, we’d walk around the block, and he would tell
me what he needed. (Interview with Hidelisa, 2005)
Hidelisa was increasingly drawn into the struggle and later went underground, living
in a house rented in a neighbourhood far from her parents, and masquerading as the
wife of one of the two compañeros she lived there with. Seeking parental approval, she
appealed in vain to her mother’s own political sympathies: ‘I told her that [Ortodoxo
party leader Eduardo] Chibás had died for a reason.’ Her M-26 compañeros met her
parents to appeal to them in a more traditional language, pledging their paternalistic
protection of the young woman. Still, the idea of her daughter living with two unrelated
men proved too much for her mother, and finally caused Hidelisa to break off ties with
the family until years after the Revolution’s triumph.
Some young women recalled extreme reactions to their political participation from
their parents, who sometimes put blame on the figure of a ‘troublemaking’ boyfriend
who, they believed, had drawn their previously innocent daughter into political – and
sexual – trouble. These examples remind us that it was difficult to disentangle young
women’s political activity and sexuality, for the ideological conflation of the public
with the political meant that women’s freedom of movement always also brought on
tensions over their sexual freedom.
On the other hand, in interviews, some FCMM and MOU members recalled one or
both of their parents being supportive in their political endeavours, helping them to
hide materials, allowing wanted men to sleep in the family house, or perhaps providing
economic support for their political activities. Yet even when this was the case, it was, in
general, harder for young women than men activists to hide their political participation
from their families. Even older, married women sometimes faced similar disapproval
from their husbands. Thus, women’s activism required some previous battle over the
boundaries of patriarchal authority, sparked new conflicts within the family, or perhaps
even strengthened familial ties around newfound political solidarities. In other words,
although the all-women’s anti-Batista groups discussed in this article did not address
Michelle Chase
gender inequity in their pronouncements, instead primarily demanding the ousting of

Batista and calling for a renewed political and economic sovereignty, their actions
nevertheless required them to negotiate and confront the patriarchal relations of the
home. In so doing, they became aware of the limitations of the social constructions of
gender and developed a consciousness not simply as anti-dictatorial activists, but also
as political women.
Conclusions
Discussions of the Cuban insurrection have tended toward two assumptions about
women’s participation: first, that women’s participation was numerically low and,
second, that their participation was not guided by calls for gender equity. This article
has attempted to nuance these assertions by suggesting that the participation of women
in the urban context was substantial and important, if perhaps never as widespread as
male participation. I also hope that my research will add to an emerging revision of
‘officialist’ narratives that long suggested that women had entered Cuba’s political sphere
under the tutelage of the post-1959 socialist state. Newer research, including recently
published memoirs and biographies, suggest that many urban women were mobilised
during the rise of the post-war political parties. The leaders of the FCMM and MOU, like
other women who rose to leadership positions with the 26 of July Movement and other
revolutionary organisations, had been activists for the Ortodoxo Party in the 1940s, and
some had been involved in the anti-Machado movement of the 1930s. These women
then applied their political experience and organisational skills toward helping the
movement to topple Batista (Alvarez Tabio, 2003: 108–130; Cabrales, 2006: 46–67).
Additionally, while it is important to recognise that groups such as the FCMM and
MOU did not focus on calls for gender equity, and are perhaps better described as
‘feminine’ than feminist movements, we must also note that the older generation of
leaders were familiar with feminism and had come of age at a time when feminism was
not seen as anathema to socialism, as it would be in the 1960s. Thus, the absence of
more strongly worded calls for gender equity must be treated as a question, not a given,
and seen as responding to political transformations from the 1930s through the 1950s.12
If members of the FCMM and MOU now routinely reject feminism as a bourgeois
movement in conflict with socialism, we must recognise that their personal stories have
been shaped by official revolutionary narratives within Cuba, which have tended to
stress that women’s participation in the insurrection was not motivated by calls for
gender equity. Some surviving members insist that their struggle was never a project
for specifically female vindication, for they fear that a ‘feminist’ reinterpretation of
their struggle would be divisive. Yet, for many of them, participation in the insurrection
profoundly changed their consciousness and their senses of self, by pushing them beyond
the confines of their own relatively privileged neighbourhoods, generating a sense of
solidarity among political contacts, heightening their militant sense of opposition to state
violence, and spurring them to confront and challenge patriarchy in their daily lives.
12 Groups such as FCMM might be compared to other contemporary ‘feminine’ organ-

isations such as Women Strike for Peace, in which a younger generation of women
were primarily motivated by calls for peace or anti-violence, but the same organisation
gave older women with histories of activism with the CP or first-wave feminism an
organisational platform as well (see Swerdlow, 1993).
References
Alexander, R. (1969) Communism in Latin America. Rutgers University Press: New
Brunswick.
Alvarez Tabio, P. (2003) Celia, Ensayo Para una Biografia. Oficina de Publicaciones del
Consejo de Estado: Havana.
Anon (1958a) ‘Cuba en el Congreso de la F.D.I.M.’ Propósitosl 1(4): 5.
Anon (1958b) ‘Actitud ejemplar’ Propósitos 1(3): 8–9.
Anon (1958c) ‘Noticias breves’ Propósitos 1(4): 2.
Anon (1958d) Untitled clandestine radio broadcast transcript, Carlos Franqui Papers, Prince-
ton University Library.
Anon (1958e) Untitled clandestine radio broadcast transcript, Carlos Franqui Papers, Prince-
ton University Library, April.
Aranguren, J. L., Castellet, J. M., Claudin, F., Foucault, M., Goytisolo, J. and Ruiz Jimenez, J.
(1978) ‘In a Cuban Prison’ (letter to the editor) New York Review of Books 25 (19),
December 7. [WWW document]. URL http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7972 [accessed
February 2010].
Bonachea, R. and Valdés, N. (eds.) (1972) Revolutionary Struggle, 1947–1958. MIT Press:
Cambridge.
Cabrales, M. (2006) El Rostro Descubierto de la Clandestinidad: Memorias de Gloria
Cuadras de la Cruz. Editorial Oriente: Santiago.
Castro Porta, C. (1990) La Lección del Maestro. Ciencias Sociales: Havana.
Chase, M. (forthcoming) ‘The Cuban Trials’, in G. Grandin and G. Joseph (eds.) A Century
of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long
Cold War. Duke University Press: Durham.
Cruz Díaz, R. (1982) Chicharrones: La Sierra Chiquita. Editorial Oriente: Santiago.
Díaz Vallina, E., Dotre Romay, O., and Dacosta Pérez, C. (1997) ‘La mujer revolucionaria
en Cuba durante el período insurreccional, 1952–1958.’ Revista de Ciencias Sociales
(Rio Piedras, PR) 3(3): 24–32.
Farber, S. (2006) The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. University of North
Carolina Press: Chapel Hill.
Franco, J. (1999) ‘Going Public, Reinhabiting the Private’ in M. L. Pratt and K. Newman
(eds.) Critical Passions. Duke University Press: Durham, 48–65.
Franqui, C. (1980) Diary of the Cuban Revolution. Viking Press: New York.
Frayde, M. (1978) ‘In a Cuban Prison’. New York Review of Books 25(19).
González Carbajal, L. (1974) El Ala Izquierda Estudiantil y su Época. Ciencias Sociales:
Havana.
González Pagés, J. C. (2003) En busca de un espacio: historia de mujeres en Cuba. Ciencias
Sociales: Havana.
Izquierdo, I. (n.d.) ‘La ‘maldita’ Aida Pelayo’ [WWW document]. URL http://tribuna.com.cu/
mujeres/historia/maldita1.htm [accessed 18 February, 2010].
Kampwirth, K. (2002) Women and Guerilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas,
Cuba. Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park.
Kaplan, T. (1982) ‘Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona,
1910–1918’, Signs 7(3): 545–566.
Lewis, O. (1977) Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba, Vol 2:
Four Women. University of Illinois Press: Urbana.
Maloof, J. (1999) ‘Aida Pelayo: School Teacher and Revolutionary’ in Voices of Resistance:
Testimonies of Cuban and Chilean Women. University Press of Kentucky: Lexington,
53–61.
Marín, T. (n.d.) Autobiografía política. Unpublished manuscript.
Nieves Rivera, D. (1981) Rojito. Editora Política: Havana.
Pedraza, S. (2007) Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus. Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge.
Michelle Chase
Pérez, L. (1988) Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. Oxford University Press: New
York.
Pérez-Stable, M. (1993) The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy. Oxford
University Press: New York.
Puebla, T. (2003) Marianas en Combate: Teté Puebla and el Pelotón Femenino Mariana
Grajales en la Guerra Revolucionaria Cubana, 1956–1958. Pathfinder Press: New
York.
Ricardo, Y. (2004) La Resistencia en las Antillas Tiene Rostro de Mujer. Academia de
Ciencias: Santo Domingo.
Rodríguez Olmo, J. (2007) ‘A los héroes los enterró el pueblo’ April 14. [WWW document].
URL www.tribuna.co.cu [accessed 2 November 2007].
Salas Servando, M. (2008) ‘Una historia sin vacilaciones, ni descanso’ July 24. [WWW
document]. URL http://www.almamater.cu/sitio%20nuevo/paginas/universidad/julio/
carmen.html [accessed 9 June 2009].
Sección de Historia del PCC (1989) Semillas de Fuego: Compilación Sobre la Lucha
Clandestina en la Capital, vol I. Ciencias Sociales: Havana.
Sección de Historia del PCC (1990) Semillas de Fuego: Compilación Sobre la Lucha
Clandestina en la Capital, vol. II. Ciencias Sociales: Havana.
Shayne, J. D. (2004) The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba.
Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick.
Stoner, L. (1991) From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman’s Movement for Legal
Reform, 1898–1940. Duke University Press: Durham.
Swerdlow, A. (1993) Women Strike for Peace. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Thomas, H. (1971) Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. Harper and Row: New York.
Weinstein, B. (2006) ‘Inventing the ‘‘Mulher Paulista’’: Politics, Rebellion, and the Gendering
of Brazilian Regional Identities’. Journal of Women’s History 18(1): 22–49.
Whitney, R. (2001) State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilisation and Political Change.
University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill.
Zeitlin, M. (1970) Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class. Harper and Row:
New York.
Archival Sources
Carlos Franqui Papers, Princeton University Library, Princeton.
Fondo de Movimiento Femenino, Instituto de Historia de Cuba, Havana.
Copyright of Bulletin of Latin American Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Chase, M Women's Organisations and The Politics of Gender in Cuba's Urban Insurrection PDF

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Chase, M Women's Organisations and The Politics of Gender in Cuba's Urban Insurrection PDF

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp.

Keywords: Cuban Revolution, dictatorship, feminism, gender, political

The Formation of a ‘Feminine’ Opposition

example, the Federación Democrática de Mujeres Cubanas (Democratic Federation of

Gender and Political Action

In bulletins published by the MOU, the analogy of the War of Independence

[T]he feminine presence is NECESSARY in this final stage of the struggle

Aida Pelayo was protagonist in an incredible anecdote that my sister would

Thus, militant women occasionally manipulated stereotypical images of women’s apo-

Personal Transformation and Political Militancy

What opened my eyes wasn’t [reading Marxist theory] . . . I was a student

Police violence implied the problem of physical risk-taking, a measure of one’s

major public appearance as a group. A contingent of about 100 FCMM members

Negotiating the Private Sphere

Conflicts such as these could only be compounded by young women’s participation

gender inequity in their pronouncements, instead primarily demanding the ousting of

12 Groups such as FCMM might be compared to other contemporary ‘feminine’ organ-

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen