Laboring for the State explores the relationship between family and state formation in Cuba’s early revolutionary period. Hynson argues that between 1959 and 1971, the revolutionary government implemented an intense program of social engineering to create the “new family.” Through a set of reforms redefining the nuclear family, the revolutionary state consolidated access to citizens’ productive and reproductive labor.Well-written and grounded in a comprehensive engagement with English-language scholarship about women and gender in twentieth-century Cuba, the book offers a glimpse into some of the most fascinating, intimate, and under-researched aspects of the Cuban Revolution. The book’s four thematic chapters each explore a distinct reform project: the introduction of family planning, encouragment of legal marriage, suppression of prostitution, and promotion of the male breadwinner ideal. By reconstructing these projects, Hynson claims to correct the historical amnesia surrounding the Revolution’s regulation of labor and morality.The book’s overarching framework examines each project in terms of the state’s supposed authoritarian turn (28). The framework suits the discussions of the Military Units to Aid Production (umap) work camps and even the rehabilitation centers for prostitutes. However, it proves less insightful for family planning and formal marriage. Overall, the book evinces an ideological and moral hostility to the Revolution that sometimes leads Hynson to overstate her argument and make unsubstantiated judgments about state coercion of women and families.In part, the difficulty stems from an often-thin evidentiary base, over-reliant on secondary scholarship and published primary sources that tends to privilege, perhaps intentionally, foreign and exiled perspectives. Hynson notes that she sought “narratives that run counter to the one promoted by the state” (28). However, a dearth of primary sources from Cuban archives brings into even sharper relief the reliance on U.S.-based repositories and published sources, such as travel narratives, memoirs, ethnographic accounts, and foreign perspectives. A few references to two documents housed at the Federation of Cuban Women Archives appear to be the extent of the Cuban archival sources employed in this study.The discussion of abortion illustrates these challenges. In Chapter 1, Hynson argues that the extension of family-planning services to Cuban women exemplified “increased state control over women’s bodies and their reproductive decisions” (41). But how could access to contraception, the decriminalization of abortion, or the creation of maternity homes have negatively impacted women’s reproductive autonomy, even if physicians attempted to exert their own moral authority? Hynson rests her argument, in part, on a claim that abortion, “illegal, yet tolerated,” prior to the Revolution, initially became more restrictive thereafter (42), but the broader documentary record supports neither claim.Hynson’s contention that women enjoyed broad access to abortion prior to the Revolution is based mainly on published accounts of foreign women who traveled to Cuba to obtain the procedure, which likely contributed to the island’s reputation as the “abortion capital of the world” (47–50). Hynson rightly notes that the privileged status of these women probably afforded them impunity, but she neglects the documented hardships that impoverished Cuban women and midwives suffered during the same period. Surviving documents show that judges pursued criminal charges in cases of suspected abortion at least as early as the 1880s, following the implementation of the 1870 Penal Code in Cuba. By the 1910s, the island’s medical community had already proposed that physicians report suspected abortions to judicial authorities. Moreover, the criminal court records housed in municipal and provincial archives prove that Cuban judges prosecuted abortion between the 1930s and the 1950s, based on a relatively more liberal abortion law codified in the 1936 Social Defense Code. These records, markedly absent from the book, challenge Hynson’s claim that women enjoyed greater reproductive freedom prior to the Revolution.Nor did Cuban women’s reproductive freedom diminish after 1959, as Hynson suggests. Based, in part, on an indictment of the Revolution for failing to include abortion in the free health care that it extended to the rural population, this judgment neglects the legal landscape governing that historical moment: Abortion was still technically a crime under the Social Defense Code, which remained in effect until 1979. Unfortunately, Hynson misses the opportunity to engage with key bodies of archival evidence available in Cuba that could have substantiated a more modest claim about the continuity in restrictions of women’s reproductive lives between the republican and early revolutionary periods. The Provincial Historical Archive of Cienfuegos alone houses more than 200 court proceedings involving suspected abortion during the early years of the Revolution, prior to 1965.Hynson even finds Cuba’s 1965 decriminalization of most abortions unsatisfactory. That year, the revolutionary government adopted the World Health Organization’s more expansive definition of health, enabling more women to obtain legal abortions through the 1936 law’s exemption for procedures required for the woman’s health. Although the interpretive shift effectively ended criminal abortion investigations, Hynson disputes Latner’s assertion that Cuban women enjoyed legal access to abortion before U.S. women did, which, in her view, attributes to Cuban women “a state-ordained right to reproductive autonomy that they did not have” (27).1 How could the same moderately restrictive abortion law liberate women prior to the Revolution, only to oppress them afterward, despite a more liberally interpretive regime?Although Hynson is certainly right to acknowledge the ways by which state projects encroached upon individual freedoms, the omission of crucial background information prevents her from offering a more balanced assessment of the purpose of revolutionary reforms and their place within twentieth-century Cuba’s medical and moral landscape. The projects might have seemed more logical, for instance, if Hynson had situated them within a broader revolutionary agenda to improve maternal and infant health. After all, in the 1930s, Cuban physicians acknowledged that family planning was key to preventing unwanted pregnancies, which disproportionately contributed to both abortion and infant death. They also understood illegitimacy and single motherhood as major contributors to infant mortality. Moreover, prostitution regulation was often a cornerstone of campaigns against venereal disease—often linked to poor pregnancy outcomes. A fairer assessment might have interrogated the extent to which expanding family planning, encouraging marriage, suppressing prostitution, and expecting men to support their families impacted the everyday lives of mothers and children.Qualms aside, readers will relish the clarity of Hynson’s writing, as well as the forcefulness of her claims. They will also undoubtedly appreciate her intimate approach to the Cuban Revolution. However, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted in the face of arguments that seemingly resurrect the Cold War ideologies to find coercion and oppression in the extension of free and legal reproductive health care for women.