Abstract
This article presents a gender analysis of power and culture in post-revolutionary Cuba, using Bohemia magazine as a source. It argues that despite the relative paucity of historical research on the subject, gender was integral to the identity, legitimacy and popularity of the Cuban Revolution. This article examines Bohemia as a communicatory tool and a site of dissemination and contestation to demonstrate how the Cuban Revolution both endorsed and criticised the cultural ideals it inherited. Bohemia elucidates a dynamic between grassroots enthusiasm, institutional mobilisation and popular disenchantment, whereby gender discourse functioned to encourage and regulate behaviour. The article first focuses on the construction of national identity through historical narratives in Bohemia, exploring the uses of José Martí and Mariana Grajales to create an ambiguous discourse framing behaviour, both domestically and internationally. It then shifts to the discursive construction of the individual Cuban woman, analysing the multiple contentious identities that existed in this post-revolutionary cultural framework, using this incongruity to evidence fundamental shortcomings in the revolution’s approach. The final section bridges the national and the individual to understand how these discursive frameworks were used to encourage female participation in the workplace, in political organisations and social campaigns. This analysis also highlights that the central dissonance within the revolutionary project’s cultural framework prevented the realisation of gender equality. This article therefore argues that a gender analysis is integral to understanding the nature, legitimacy and longevity of the Cuban Revolution on both a national and international level.
Highlights
Gendering the revolution: Bohemia, power and culture in post-revolutionary Cuba, 1960–85 2 analysis highlights that the central dissonance within the revolutionary project’s cultural framework prevented the realisation of gender equality
This study demonstrates how gender depictions worked in practice, in particular given the competing and incongruous nature of these discursive concepts
As a revolution whose image, identity, legitimacy and popularity had so much bound up in gender, an analysis of these themes is integral to understanding the Cuban Revolution
Summary
The revolution which proclaimed its victory on 1 January 1959 is internationally synonymous with the ultimate sign of masculinity, the barbudo, and its most famous icon, Fidel Castro. This section explores the domestic and international implications of this construct as evidence of the significance of gendered discourse to power, demonstrating that the uneasy legacy of colonial Cuba figured centrally in the post-revolutionary period. The depiction of pregnant women and female nurses explicitly evokes a feminine tranquillity: ‘alegría, serenidad, orgullo de maternidad, charlas sobre idénticos sintomas, planes, proyectos, estudios, canciones, felicidad’.107 This romanticised language ties women’s biological role as mothers to their experience of post-revolutionary health care, as the state supported the individual woman ‘en su función natural de alumbrar un nuevo humano’.108. The cognitive dissonance across the magazine’s content illustrates a wider tension, as Cuban culture negotiated the competing gender constructs that emerged as part of the post-revolutionary period This is further illustrated by Bohemia’s use of sexualised women to promote revolutionary participation. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions requires permission of the copyright holder)
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