The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.10           March 16, 1998 
 
 
Meeting Discusses Women, Cuban Revolution  

BY NANCY COLE
PHILADELPHIA - "Women in Cuba: A Revolution within a Revolution" was the title of a program that attracted more than 80 people at the University of Pennsylvania campus February 12. The speakers were Johana Tablada, third secretary in the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., and Elizabeth Stone, an airline worker and editor of the Pathfinder book Women and the Cuban Revolution.

The meeting was sponsored by the Philadelphia Cuba Support Coalition, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Philadelphia chapter of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, and a number of groups at the University of Pennsylvania. These included the Greenfield Intercultural Center (GIC), Penn Women's Alliance, and the Caribbean and Latin American Students Association and African American Student Association at the Graduate School of Education. The audience was made up of students from the campus, workers, and local political activists, including a number from the Puerto Rican community. The meeting was chaired by Inez Ramos, Graduate Latino Program Coordinator at GIC.

"We're still far away from equality," began Tablada, who served on the national committee of the Federation of Cuban Women before joining Cuba's diplomatic corps in this country two years ago. "You can change the laws but it's difficult to change the mind," she said, describing through personal experience how her generation, which grew up after the 1959 revolution, is taking big steps in combating what she called the "macho idiosyncrasy." The next generation will take it even further, she said. Tablada cited several representative statistics that register women's progress in society, including that 23 percent of the Cuban parliament is made up of women and 49 percent of Cuban doctors are women.

After the 1995 United Nations World Conference of Women in Beijing, Tablada noted, Cuba was one of the first countries to sign its agenda for women's rights because prerequisites such as legal provisions for "maternity leave, equal pay, protection for single mothers had been in place in Cuba for many years." She pointed to other statistics that measure Cuba's priorities: an infant mortality rate of 7.8 per 1,000 live births, which is the lowest in the Third World and is lower than Washington, D.C., for example. The maternity mortality rate is 2.2 deaths per 1,000 births. "If all of Latin America had a rate that low," Tablada said, "20,000 women would live every year" who now die during child birth.

The deep economic crisis that enveloped Cuba after the collapse of trade with the Soviet Union in the early 1990s hit women the hardest, she explained, since it was primarily women who had to contend with cooking through long blackouts and cleaning without soap. It is still difficult today, she explained, "but the terrible moment has passed."

But the new economic dynamic under way to help survive the crisis "could be a challenge to the laws and norms" of legal equality, she explained. There are 300 joint ventures with foreign companies under way in Cuba, Tablada said, and "these companies might not like women or Blacks; we have to watch this and talk about it." While Cuba needs to develop its economy and efficiency, "we have to take care that it won't undermine our ethical principles."

A problem that has accompanied the increase in tourism to Cuba is the reemergence of prostitution after its virtual elimination with the 1959 revolution. "If you go to Cuba, you will realize it is an issue again, but never of the dimension it had before 1959," Tablada said. "It is illegal. It is not advertised. There are no hot lines, no places where women can go and legally offer that service - before the revolution there was one house after another. It is not what Cuba needs, and we don't need it to attract tourists."

One of the issues highlighted by the Pope's visit to Cuba is abortion. Stone, who is a member of the International Association of Machinists, began her remarks by noting that supporters of women's rights in the United States recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, which was the result of women organizing a fighting movement.

"By the year 1969, when our movement was just getting off the ground, women in Cuba had won many things, including legal, free abortion," Stone said. "We saw something else," she added. "Once Cubans won something - like maternity leave, child care, free health care, birth control, or abortion - there were no threats to take it away again. This was unlike the United States, where the minute the Supreme Court decision [legalizing abortion] came down, it was attacked. Over these 25 years we've had to keep fighting for this right."

Stone said there is a sustained ideological campaign against the idea of women's equality today, pointing to "the relentless charge that abortion is murder, that childcare is bad for children, that women don't really want to be part of the same dog-eat-dog world as men. The purpose is to keep our labor cheap, to keep our wages as low as possible by making us feel we can't be as serious or as full-time about our jobs as men. The purpose is also to divide workers, men from women."

Stone pointed out that attacks on women's rights and conditions are also taking place internationally, with the biggest effects on women in the Third World. She explained Cuba has been able to make so much progress precisely because it has broken out of a system dominated by those who have an interest in exploiting women.

"What does the Cuban revolution mean for us today?" Stone concluded. "First, that it is possible to win full equality for women. There is a path and a perspective that can lead to equality; Cubans have started along that path. And second, that the women's struggle has to be part of the workers movement; it has to be part of the kind of power that can only come when we unite all working people and fight for the rights of all."

Responding to reports during the Pope's visit of the high rate of abortion in Cuba, Tablada said, "We don't encourage abortion. We are against using it as a contraceptive method. There have been campaigns to reduce its use. But we are for the right of women or parents to decide."

One young man at the meeting asked Tablada to explain the little opposition to abortion given Cuba was heavily Catholic. She answered that Cuban Catholics may go to church but they don't abide by the Pope's ban on abortion and contraception. "The birth rate in Cuba was reduced dramatically because when women decide to work, they're not going to have 10 kids. They're going to have one kid, like in the industrialized countries."

Tablada invited those at the meeting to visit Cuba and talk with Cuban women themselves. She pointed to the International Women's Solidarity Conference in Cuba in April as an opportunity to do so.

Nancy Cole is a member of the International Association of Machinists.

 
 
 
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