Women’s Work in Special Period Cuba

Women’s Work in Special Period Cuba
Author: Daliany Jerónimo Kersh
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2019-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030056309

The abrupt loss of Soviet financial support in 1989 resulted in the near-collapse of the Cuban economy, ushering in the almost two decades of austerity measures and severe shortages of food and basic consumer goods referred to as the Special Period. Through the innovative framework of individual and collective memory, Daliany Jerónimo Kersh brings together analysis of press sources and oral histories to offer a compelling portrait of how Cuban women cleverly combined various forms of paid work to make ends meet. Disproportionately impacted by the economic crisis given their role as primary caregivers and household managers and unable to survive on devalued state salaries alone, women often employed informal and illegal earning strategies. As she argues, this regression into gendered work such as cooking, sewing, cleaning, reselling, and providing sexual services precipitated by the post-Soviet crisis to a large extent marked a return to pre-revolutionary gendered divisions of labor.

Conceiving Cuba

Conceiving Cuba
Author: Elise Andaya
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2014-05-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813565219

After Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the Castro government sought to instill a new social order. Hoping to achieve a new and egalitarian society, the state invested in policies designed to promote the well-being of women and children. Yet once the Soviet Union fell and Cuba’s economic troubles worsened, these programs began to collapse, with serious results for Cuban families. Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how, with the island’s political and economic future in question, reproduction has become the subject of heated public debates and agonizing private decisions. Drawing from several years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside Cuba’s households and medical systems. Along the way, she introduces us to the women who wrestle with the difficult question of whether they can afford a child, as well as the doctors who, with only meager resources at their disposal, struggle to balance the needs of their patients with the mandates of the state. Andaya’s groundbreaking research considers not only how socialist policies have profoundly affected the ways Cuban families imagine the future, but also how the current crisis in reproduction has deeply influenced ordinary Cubans’ views on socialism and the future of the revolution. Casting a sympathetic eye upon a troubled state, Conceiving Cuba gives new life to the notion that the personal is always political.

Women and Work in Cuba

Women and Work in Cuba
Author: Marie Withers Osmond
Publisher:
Total Pages: 40
Release: 1988
Genre: Women
ISBN:

This exploratory study examines how structural conditions and policies in Cuba, which have attempted to implement socialist ideology on gender equality, actually impinge on the everyday lives and perceptions of Cuban women. The paper first outlines the theoretical premises on which socialist policies on work and family were formulated and then presents data on four areas of contemporary state policy with regard to goals and implementation toward increasing women's opportunities. The second section of the paper presents data from in-depth interviews with 61 female factory workers. The results indicate that there are specific structural features that hinder the liberation of Cuban women. The interview data reveal the specific interaction of social class on perceptions of work-family linkages and women's liberation.

From Cuba with Love

From Cuba with Love
Author: Megan Daigle
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2015-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520282973

"Megan Daigle explores the role of women in Cuban political culture by examining the rise of economies of sex, romance, and money since the early 1990s. Investigating the lived realities of the Cuban women (and some men) who date tourists and offering a unique perspective on the surrounding debates, From Cuba with Love raises issues about women's bodies-what they can or should do and, equally, what can be done to them. Daigle draws attention to the violence experienced by these young women at the hands of a moralistic state, an opportunistic police force, and even their own families and partners. Daigle's provocative perspective will make readers question how race and politics in Cuba are tied to women and sex, and the ways in which political power acts directly on the bodies of individuals through law, policing, institutional programs, and social norms"--Provided by publisher.

Reyita

Reyita
Author: María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780822325932

Assisted by her daughter, Daisy Rubiera Castillo, the author recounts her life as a black woman struggling with prejudice and change in Cuba over the span of 90 years. Known as "Reyita", Maria de Los Reyes Castillo Bueno starts her story with the abduction of her grandmother by slave traders and shares her own experiences as a mother, laborer, and revolutionary.

Voices of Resistance

Voices of Resistance
Author: Judy Maloof
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813182670

Latin American women were among those who led the suffrage movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their opposition to military dictatorships has galvanized more recent political movements throughout the region. But because of the continuous attempts to silence them, activists have struggled to make their voices heard. At the heart of Voices of Resistance are the testimonies of thirteen women who fought for human rights and social justice in their communities. Some played significant roles in the Cuban Revolution of 1959, while others organized grassroots resistance to the seventeen-year Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Though the women share many objectives, they are a diverse group, ranging in age from thirty to eighty and coming from varied ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The Cuban and Chilean women Judy Maloof interviewed use the narrative form to reinvent themselves. Maloof includes narratives from a poet, a tobacco worker, a political prisoner, an artist, and a social worker to demonstrate the different faces of their struggle. In the process, these women were able to begin to put together their fragmented lives. Speaking out is both a means for personal liberation and a political act of protest against authoritarian regimes. The bond that these women have is not simply that they have suffered; they share a commitment to resisting violence and confronting inequities at great personal risk.

Dreaming in Cuban

Dreaming in Cuban
Author: Cristina García
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2011-06-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307798003

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

Cuba is a State of Mind

Cuba is a State of Mind
Author: P. W. Long
Publisher: blue ocean press / ARI
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2006
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 4902837188

The Spiritual Traveler series provides a new type of travel writing that allows the reader to experience the consciousness of a nation. It gives future travelers to Cuba another perspective to consider. (Foreign Travel)