Opening Spaces for Alternative Citizenship: Bringing Invisible
Bodies to the Public through Art
In socialist Cuba there are some virtues, obligations and rights that members of society require in order to acquire complete citizenship. The criteria for admission in the realm of citizenship are remarkable social contributions toward the achievement of the Revolution’s goals, acting with a sense of political belonging and with a high level of commitment to the social project of the Revolution. With regard to the required obligations,the ideal scenario is one where a citizen’s agency is expressed responsibly and contributes to the realization of the Revolution’s goals, while avoiding confrontational points of view and questioning of the legitimacy of the State’s definition of the common good.
The following project attempts to explore alternative ways of building citizenship in a context where societal membership is linked to a particular ‘social performance’ that has been defined and prescribed from above. My intention is to promote the construction of citizenship (social membership) as a process that could take place from below. In operative terms my project involves two steps. The first one is an ethnographic study of women who work as Veladoras (female gallery guards) in Havana and whose work remains almost invisible in the context of the artistic institutional space. I explore who these women are,how they perceive their role at work and how they perceive themselves as actors in their work. In an attempt to connect the private sphere to the public sphere, I explore their lives outside the workplace. I particularly encourage them to share their experiences at home and to describe the organization of their everyday lives. In order to best achieve these goals, I have structured the paper in two parts. The first part explores a historical context where social membership has been linked to a specific ‘social performance’, defined by the State that rigidly defines what constitutes desirable political actions and the ‘ideal’ citizen. I also analyze the relationship between the conception of revolutionary citizenship and gender. In a second section this paper explores some ways to change this ‘social performance’ through building an alternative model of citizenship from below.
Citizenship in the Revolutionary Period
In 2000 the work entitled Apolítico (Apolitical) by Cuban artist Wifredo Prieto
attracted the attention of both national and international art critics. It represented a group of black and white flags of different nations as a metaphor for the situation of increasing apathy in Cuba during the decade of the 1990s. This period marked a shift in Cuban society due to the fall of the communist block and the beginning of an economic crisis known as the ‘Special Period’. The 1990s were a critical moment for the revolutionary process that began in 1959. After the Special Period, the high level of commitment to the social project of the Revolution, which had previously acted as a framework for building a revolutionary citizenship, began to decay.
With the implementation of a socialist political arrangement, the Cuban Revolution promoted a number of social rights that made a space for a more inclusive model of citizenship. On the one hand, the re‐organization of societal roles and responsibilities set new criteria for admission in the realm of citizenship. This redefinition of citizenship ensured that many of the previously excluded groups could enjoy access to common benefits. Citizens were required to make significant contributions to the achievement of the Revolution’s goals, which would ideally provided the majority of the population access to new programs such as, public education, health care, social insurance, etc. Indeed a remarkable aspect of the revolutionary program was a nationalist agenda that called citizens to collaborate in ‘the different tasks of the revolution’, particularly in the nation building project and the defense of the Revolution from both domestic and international enemies.
The Revolutionary government claimed that they would work to create a ‘new man’ who would incarnate the essence of the revolutionary citizen. Remarkable contributions for the common good, a strong sense of political belonging and a high level of commitment to social justice were considered basic conditions for entrance into the realm of citizenship. The ‘new man’ concept also meant a perceived opposition between individual interests and collective interests. Therefore, the ‘new man’s’ personal interests should not go against the interests of the majority. The revolutionary moral code reacted strongly to those individuals who pursued their self‐interest. In fact they were labeled as antisocial and their attitudes were understood as remnants of the ancient regime. As a consequence they were both subjectively and materially excluded from the realm of citizenship.
On the other hand, the revolutionary project overlooked some of the most distinctive components of the liberal civic rights approach. Matters that, in a liberal context, would be considered off limits to the State were made the object of State surveillance, since it was thought that no truly private affair could be considered innocuous and may threaten the project of defending the integrity of the nation. In that sense, civil rights, such as free speech, free press, free meeting and free association, were controlled by the State due to their potential interference in the success of the Revolutionary project. In that sense, the Revolution silenced the possibility to question the decision‐making strategies of its leaders and forbade any demands for accountability. It also prohibited the possibility of publicly exercising critical thinking or to exercise civil rights in any way that was perceived as opposite to the Revolutionary order. Symptoms of disagreement or opposition towards the political project were purged and seen as antisocial or antinationalist tendencies.
Citizenship and Gender
Gender is an interesting issue in the construction of the revolutionary model of
citizenship. The construction of gender in Cuba has been mainly related to the colonial Spanish model, the American neocolonial model after 1902 and the socialist revolutionary model after 1959. Gender dynamics were interlinked with class relations informed by heavily patriarchal gender relations presented in the dominant Spanish regime, which was regulated by authoritarian Catholic moral and social rules. The oppression of the colonial system had many nuances in gender and in class relations, “the conquistadors provided both provocation and model, Spanish Catholicism provided the ideology of female abnegation; and oppression blocked other claims of men to power” (Connell 1993, 612).
After the Revolution started in 1959 there were some changes in the traditional understanding of gender and it was the beginning of an interesting relationship between women and the State. Women’s emancipation has been essential to official policies and goals of the socialist State. The socialist paradigm prompted intense transformations in Cuban life and numerous reforms to liberate women from their traditional roles. The new face of Cuban women appeared through the images of women in the militia, in the countryside, in the sugar cane harvesting or as the face of the campaign for literacy. A new model of militant politicized women began to be displayed by all kinds of media and a powerful organization was created to help women in their quest for equality. But, the public sphere remained strictly divided by gender stereotypes and the private sphere continued to reproduce patriarchal values.
According to the studies carried out by investigators such as Sheryl L. Lutjens (1995,1) the reflection of Cuban women’s situation can not be directly deduced from an archetypical socialist State: “Women are an essential, if neglected, piece of all the puzzle in the Cuban socialism”. From the beginning of the revolution Cuban women made striking gains, with the support of government policies, that improved their general living conditions and emancipated social groups previously marginalized by their class, race and gender. Strategies implemented by the Cuban government regarding women’s emancipation showed considerable advances in society.
To analyze the real commitment that the government had to women it is helpful to explore the State’s ability to makes changes in the public spheres as well as the private sphere, where the State has little or no access. The Federacion de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC,Federation of Cuban Women), is the organization created to represent the interests of women. People have often criticized it’s lacking of autonomy and see it as another tool of the government: a mere mediation between women and the State. The objective of the FMC was the same to other mass organizations created in the country: to represent specific interests while supporting the main functions of the State.
Especially in the early stages, the organization’s goals and the mentality of their leaders were often counter to the discourse of Western feminism and the idea of a separate struggle for women’s rights. It is very important to understand women’s emancipation inside a larger project of nation‐building. This idea shows the need for a branch of feminism that was re‐invested and re‐oriented to the Cuban specific reality. The Cuban feminist movement created its own set of values where the idea of women’s liberation was impossible to separate from other social problems. This was a common viewpoint for women in Latin America during the sixties and the seventies who participated with men in the urban struggles or guerrilla movements against military dictatorships. The main leaders of the feminist movement struggled with how to re‐organize feminism and cultural identity in opposition to the ‘Western canon’ that responded to a ‘bourgeois’ concept of feminism.
Eventually the mentality of feminist leaders changed and sought closer ties with overseas activists, but the isolation of society due to political conditions also grew.Currently, feminist theory and politics of citizenship have embraced an internationalist agenda by promoting a model in which the interests of women go beyond membership to a particular community. It is interesting to see how struggles for the economic, political and social independence of the nation contributed to create a strong nationalistic ideal that frustrated struggles for minority rights, such as struggles for the emancipation of black people and women. During both the Republican and the revolutionary periods, whenever a particular movement against racism appeared in Cuba it was rejected and discredited under the charge of treason to the ideals of the inclusive nation that Jose Marti and other heroes of independence had sought (Con todos y para el bien de todos, with all together and for the common good).
The ideal of racial and gender equity were perceived of as the particular interests of certain groups even though they were publicly recognized as victims of discrimination and had fewer opportunities to participate in politics. Women had to be Cuban first and therefore, faithful to the goals of the collective before seeking to fulfill to their own needs as women. This logic proved to be an obstacle to achieving the specific goals of women. Indeed citizenship scholars are still debating whether movements that maintained an attachment to the nationalist projects were more or less effective in their own particular struggles for equality.
As years passed some concepts changed. Many researchers pointed out that the idealism of the first years in the Cuban revolutionary process suffered when it adapted to a society with a strong patriarchal system. “Beginning with the notoriously unorthodox socialism of the 1960, history and necessity have informed the ideological and institutional orthodoxies of the revolution’s strategies for women” (Lutjens 1995, 1). A single organization tried to represent and include all the sides of this debate while always supporting the idea that women should be incorporated into revolutionary tasks. In the end our socialist society reproduced the oppressive structures that it set out to abolish,following the same pattern of other socialist countries. Women continued to be confined to the private sphere and this posed real problems for achieving equality. At the same time,different social strategies allowed women to participate in all kinds of revolutionary tasks and to assume different sort of challenges in the workplace and public spheres.
To what degree we can say that women’s demands were met by ‘differentiated citizenship’? Many initiatives show that women demands were not actually met by special representation in the political process (‘differentiated citizenship’) but would have been better served by being incorporated into a shared identity that would integrate previously excluded groups and re‐define the national identity. Nevertheless for the Revolutionary government to continue to be supported by women, some realities had to be publicly accepted by Revolution leaders.
Fidel Castro gave a speech in the Congress of the FMC in 1974, where he had to admited that, “women’s equality doesn’t exist yet” (Castro 1974). In the mid‐1970s, according to studies done by the Partido Comunista de Cuba only few women had been elected as delegates for the Poder Popular Local due to inequalities in the private realm that condemned them to take care of their homes, their husbands and their children. The Cuban revolution seeks equal citizenship for women on the basis of combining family and public responsibilities, but this initiative has had to deal with many social stereotypes. During the 1970s and the 1980s,films debated the problems and obstacles in the search for women’s equality and at the same time criticized the mentality of society. Nevertheless, many films and TV programs depicted the ideal woman as someone who had no direct interaction with the practical problems of public life (except childcare). An analysis of television and film materials shed some light on the way that problems traditionally related to women, such as the double workload of employment and home, child rearing and labor discrimination, were represented and they showed an educational approach that could be propagandistic. In the end these portraits were unrepresentative of the real women’s problems of sharing time between home, work and children.
Differences between the private and the public realms are also an important issue in the discussion about citizenship and gender. In Cuba, problems of the private domain received plenty attention from the political sphere and, although the State tried discuss private issues in the public domain, changes made to improve women’s lives were seen as considerations for her ‘natural’ obligations. Many stereotypes existed in Cuban society with regard to gender and a gendered subjectivity was applied to women in general. Here we can see the division made by Raia Prokhovnik (1998) when analyzing the different practices of public and private citizenship, there are women who behave autonomously and work as ‘equals’ with men but do not adequately fulfill their role as family nurturer, and there are women who remain in the private realm to take responsibility for the home, husband and children and do not assume paid employment. All these experiences were publicly recognized as evidenced by Fidel’s speech to the FMC Congress in 1974. “Women are nature’s workshop where life is forged; they are the preeminent creators of human beings. And I say this because far from being the object of discrimination and inequality, women merit special consideration from society” (Lutjens 1995, 2).
In Cuba women have many life different experiences that depend on their different characteristics including social, racial and geographic aspects. White women’s experiences were different from those of black women, who entered the public domain earlier but with the stigma of libertinage. These experiences show that attempts to incorporate women by simply adding them into a ‘male‐defined’ public space will inevitably fail. After the ’Special Period’ that Cuba experienced in the 1990s, improvements in the living and working conditions for women have been almost impossible to achieve. The space of struggle for women’s equality has also dramatically decreased. Society and the women within it became very skeptical about any research or reflexive process aiming to analyze the present condition of women in different fields. When compared to previous decades when talking about women’s equality was so important, the present has seen the elimination of spaces for debate around concrete obstacles to women’s freedom because these lead to a direct critique to the society’s economic problems.
Although the FMC continued existing as organization and other institutions such as the CENESEX (associated with the Ministry of Public Health) continue their campaigns for women equality, the visible institutional problems in the country and diminishing funding for public campaigns and projects are large obstacles.
Cuban women are dealing with new social problems such as exclusionary tensions due to isolation, lack of information, and migrations. Cuba is a country that has generated a great number of migrants and asylum seekers in recent decades and a significant proportion were women. Popular songs and some audiovisuals of elite distribution highlight the increase in prostitution and women who organize their emotional lives in relationship with their economic interests. But this is rarely mentioned in the official means of communication. (Ruth Lister (1997) notes in her text, Citizenship: Towards a feminist synthesis, the way that exclusionary forces and laws construct women as economic dependents.)
Veladoras: Building Alternative Ways of Perceiving Citizenship
The following project attempts to explore alternative ways of building citizenship in a context where social membership is linked to a particular ‘social performance’ that has been defined and prescribed from above. My intention is to promote the construction of citizenship as a process that takes place from below. My project involves two steps. It began as an ethnographic study of women who work as Veladoras (female art gallery guards) in Havana. Their role and their contribution within the context of the artistic institutional space are almost invisible. They are always alienated from the institutional process of decision‐making and they are represented as ‘invisible objects’ located between the visitor and the artwork.
Once I gathered the information and analyzed it, I began the second step of the project, which was the organization of a photograph exhibition. In doing so I expose the gendered, racialized and stratified life experiences of women who remain socially invisible and open a space for them to experience social membership in the public space of the art gallery. My approach to a feminist citizenship is different to traditional feminist models that understand women’s citizenship according to the value that women can obtain in the public world. My work does not focus on women who play prominent roles in Cuban public life but rather, it is devoted to researching women who struggle to sustain themselves while dealing with very difficult conditions in low paid workplaces. Although their specific work is the objective of the selection, I try to analyze their lives without subscribing to one or the other side of the public‐private dichotomy. They are not women who have chosen to stay full time in the private realm, because most of them need to share home expenses with their family members but their existence in the public realm is precarious and largely ignored.
Describing the Project
My project consisted of organizing an art exhibition using ethnographic data, so I started by conducting a number of interviews. I explored who the Veladoras are, how they perceive their roles at work and the processes of self‐perception in which they are involved.
During the interviews they focused on their specific biographies, the spectrum of options that they have in the labor force and their relationship with the art world. I asked them to express their opinions about such issues as labor discrimination, and racial discrimination.
It was also very important to see them as individuals giving opinions about the way they see themselves as citizens and their ideas about economic, social and politic aspects of society. In exploring this part of their life I sought to explore their worldviews about politics, and to take into account the diverse ways in which they engage in activities in the public realm.
In an attempt to connect the private sphere to the public sphere, I explored their lives outside the workplace. I particularly encouraged them to share their home experiences and to describe the organization of their everyday activities. It is very important, according to the concepts of Public and Private Citizenship proposed by Raia Prokhovnik (1998, 86), to understand practices in the private sphere as also “political in character, in the sense of not being simply ‘natural’”. Therefore, an attempt to look for the value of daily activity in the private realm will focus on the way women commonly act in this sphere, where they usually assume different roles. I asked them to express their opinions about their roles in the private sphere.
Once I gathered the information and processed it, I started the second step of the project, which was the organization of a photograph exhibition. I did not want to restrict my research to only describing the women’s experiences using my own voice, so once I gathered the information I invited them to collaborate as co‐creators of the exhibition by giving opinions about the way I should organize the artistic work I was planning to produce.
I asked them for suggestions about the selection of the work to exhibit. My purposes in doing so was to move from practices of social ‘invisibilization’ that make certain people passive (merely objects of the photograph), to practices that perceive those people as active participants in the processes of self‐representation (to become active decision‐makers in regard to composition, scenery or places where the photographs were taken). The exhibition also seeks to empower them by going beyond their anonymous activity and bringing their personal biographies to the public sphere, in other words, the exhibition is an attempt to introduce them as members of society.
The final result was a number of images that represent their roles as guardians and their ‘passive’, invisible location between the artwork and the visitors. They commonly appear inside the space of the gallery and their images appear reflected in different objects as the glasses and work, or taking a rest in a backyard, reading a book or looking at themselves in a mirror. The hierarchical institutional order was also interpreted through images that show the disposition of spaces and people around the gallery.
Contributing to a New Citizenship: Making Visible the Invisible
To make visible the reality many women face in Cuba today and make visible their lives is one of the main objectives of this research. We should take into account that they represent an important and significant stratum in Cuban society. They are working class mothers, most of them Afro‐Cuban, with low educational levels. They are not autonomous economically and although they have a variety of choices to participate in the public realm, the multiple obstacles they face have a strong impact in their chances of actually doing so.
These obstacles are often related to the difficulties they face when negotiating their responsibilities in both the public and private realms. Although the Revolutionary process tried to change hierarchies and a significant number of women are occupying outstanding positions in public life today, men have historically defined priorities in the public world,and, as a result, the best choices are reserved for men.
On the other hand, many women live in matrifocal homes where they are the breadwinners of their families, in charge of sustaining themselves, their children and elders. That is the situation of one the women I interviewed. Concepcion has had to take paid employment but she has no expectations that she will assume decision‐making responsibilities or leadership activities. Throughout the history of discrimination and inequity these women have suffered, so they usually don’t feel confident enough to take the risks that would make them more active decision‐makers (with some exceptions, of course). Concepcion’s options are mainly focus on her possibilities of finding a husband with a higher economic income or in the possibility of immigrating to another country.
There is a diversity also of women’s experiences according to the relationship with the sphere of politics. Beyond the general disenchantment with the world of politics and, as Prokhovnik (1998) said, that many women do not identify their concerns with what happens in the traditional political sphere, the women I interviewed have different levels of commitment to politics. That is the case of Mariuska, whose husband has direct commitments through work with the government and in the neighborhood serves as the nighttime guard. Mariuska describes her peculiar status as citizen but she also faces stigma because she is responsible for detecting, and denouncing illegal activities in the community. During the ‘Special Period’ these illegal activities were a means of survival for many of her neighbours. She assumes the same status of her husband by helping him with his activities and, at the same time, accepting low paid institutional work that casts no doubt on her integrity as a citizen.
The issue of the economic crisis in the 1990s has special significance for many institutions and projects, which, prior to the crisis, enjoyed significant funds and then experienced a radical change in its traditional methods, channels and functions. The key element here is the problem of corruption which divided society in two different types:‘normal’ procedures that use the institutional and official channels created by the government to accomplish specific tasks and that of the corrupted mechanisms as second or informal choices that appear through illegality. Although men usually assume both options,it’s common to find more men in the second choice leaving institutional work, which pays poorly, to women. Illegal work involves more risks, engages activities that are seen as ‘suitable’ for women and has benefits that are much higher than institutional work provides. In Cuba, men usually rule in the realm of alternative solutions and alternative experiences caused by economic crisis. Their need to survive obliges them to break the law,
separates them from the objectives and goals of the State and causes them to break their own moral standards. Women who participate in these informal realms do so through their husbands, and the women that I interviewed have experienced some improvement in their economic situation but at the expense of becoming entirely economically dependant. This dependence can lead to problems in the home such as domestic violence.
The Veladoras project seeks to go beyond the disenchantment women experience with the world of politics in Cuba. It seeks to empower women by sharing their opinions both about their private lives and about the larger society. Furthermore, the project succeed in organizing and unifying these women giving them the opportunity to identify with the experiences of other people who share their racialized or gendered identities. This research was able to assess the diversity of women’s lives and experiences in Cuba today.
References
Castro Ruz, Fidel: “Discurso pronunciado en el 1er Congreso de la FMC”. 1975.
Connell, R.W. "Theory and Society." Special Issue: Masculinities 22, no. 5 (October 1993): 597‐623.
Lister, R. "Citizenship: Towards a Feminist Synthesis." Feminist Review: Special Edition on Citizenship: Pushing
the Boundaries, no. 57 (1997).
Lutjens, S.L. "Reading Between the Lines: Women, the State, and Rectification in Cuba." Latin American
Perspectives 22, no. 2 (1995): 100‐124.
Prokhovnik, R. "Public and Private Citizenship: From Gender Invisibility to Feminist Inclusiveness." Feminist
Ethics and the Politics of Love, 1998
Bodies to the Public through Art
In socialist Cuba there are some virtues, obligations and rights that members of society require in order to acquire complete citizenship. The criteria for admission in the realm of citizenship are remarkable social contributions toward the achievement of the Revolution’s goals, acting with a sense of political belonging and with a high level of commitment to the social project of the Revolution. With regard to the required obligations,the ideal scenario is one where a citizen’s agency is expressed responsibly and contributes to the realization of the Revolution’s goals, while avoiding confrontational points of view and questioning of the legitimacy of the State’s definition of the common good.
The following project attempts to explore alternative ways of building citizenship in a context where societal membership is linked to a particular ‘social performance’ that has been defined and prescribed from above. My intention is to promote the construction of citizenship (social membership) as a process that could take place from below. In operative terms my project involves two steps. The first one is an ethnographic study of women who work as Veladoras (female gallery guards) in Havana and whose work remains almost invisible in the context of the artistic institutional space. I explore who these women are,how they perceive their role at work and how they perceive themselves as actors in their work. In an attempt to connect the private sphere to the public sphere, I explore their lives outside the workplace. I particularly encourage them to share their experiences at home and to describe the organization of their everyday lives. In order to best achieve these goals, I have structured the paper in two parts. The first part explores a historical context where social membership has been linked to a specific ‘social performance’, defined by the State that rigidly defines what constitutes desirable political actions and the ‘ideal’ citizen. I also analyze the relationship between the conception of revolutionary citizenship and gender. In a second section this paper explores some ways to change this ‘social performance’ through building an alternative model of citizenship from below.
Citizenship in the Revolutionary Period
In 2000 the work entitled Apolítico (Apolitical) by Cuban artist Wifredo Prieto
attracted the attention of both national and international art critics. It represented a group of black and white flags of different nations as a metaphor for the situation of increasing apathy in Cuba during the decade of the 1990s. This period marked a shift in Cuban society due to the fall of the communist block and the beginning of an economic crisis known as the ‘Special Period’. The 1990s were a critical moment for the revolutionary process that began in 1959. After the Special Period, the high level of commitment to the social project of the Revolution, which had previously acted as a framework for building a revolutionary citizenship, began to decay.
With the implementation of a socialist political arrangement, the Cuban Revolution promoted a number of social rights that made a space for a more inclusive model of citizenship. On the one hand, the re‐organization of societal roles and responsibilities set new criteria for admission in the realm of citizenship. This redefinition of citizenship ensured that many of the previously excluded groups could enjoy access to common benefits. Citizens were required to make significant contributions to the achievement of the Revolution’s goals, which would ideally provided the majority of the population access to new programs such as, public education, health care, social insurance, etc. Indeed a remarkable aspect of the revolutionary program was a nationalist agenda that called citizens to collaborate in ‘the different tasks of the revolution’, particularly in the nation building project and the defense of the Revolution from both domestic and international enemies.
The Revolutionary government claimed that they would work to create a ‘new man’ who would incarnate the essence of the revolutionary citizen. Remarkable contributions for the common good, a strong sense of political belonging and a high level of commitment to social justice were considered basic conditions for entrance into the realm of citizenship. The ‘new man’ concept also meant a perceived opposition between individual interests and collective interests. Therefore, the ‘new man’s’ personal interests should not go against the interests of the majority. The revolutionary moral code reacted strongly to those individuals who pursued their self‐interest. In fact they were labeled as antisocial and their attitudes were understood as remnants of the ancient regime. As a consequence they were both subjectively and materially excluded from the realm of citizenship.
On the other hand, the revolutionary project overlooked some of the most distinctive components of the liberal civic rights approach. Matters that, in a liberal context, would be considered off limits to the State were made the object of State surveillance, since it was thought that no truly private affair could be considered innocuous and may threaten the project of defending the integrity of the nation. In that sense, civil rights, such as free speech, free press, free meeting and free association, were controlled by the State due to their potential interference in the success of the Revolutionary project. In that sense, the Revolution silenced the possibility to question the decision‐making strategies of its leaders and forbade any demands for accountability. It also prohibited the possibility of publicly exercising critical thinking or to exercise civil rights in any way that was perceived as opposite to the Revolutionary order. Symptoms of disagreement or opposition towards the political project were purged and seen as antisocial or antinationalist tendencies.
Citizenship and Gender
Gender is an interesting issue in the construction of the revolutionary model of
citizenship. The construction of gender in Cuba has been mainly related to the colonial Spanish model, the American neocolonial model after 1902 and the socialist revolutionary model after 1959. Gender dynamics were interlinked with class relations informed by heavily patriarchal gender relations presented in the dominant Spanish regime, which was regulated by authoritarian Catholic moral and social rules. The oppression of the colonial system had many nuances in gender and in class relations, “the conquistadors provided both provocation and model, Spanish Catholicism provided the ideology of female abnegation; and oppression blocked other claims of men to power” (Connell 1993, 612).
After the Revolution started in 1959 there were some changes in the traditional understanding of gender and it was the beginning of an interesting relationship between women and the State. Women’s emancipation has been essential to official policies and goals of the socialist State. The socialist paradigm prompted intense transformations in Cuban life and numerous reforms to liberate women from their traditional roles. The new face of Cuban women appeared through the images of women in the militia, in the countryside, in the sugar cane harvesting or as the face of the campaign for literacy. A new model of militant politicized women began to be displayed by all kinds of media and a powerful organization was created to help women in their quest for equality. But, the public sphere remained strictly divided by gender stereotypes and the private sphere continued to reproduce patriarchal values.
According to the studies carried out by investigators such as Sheryl L. Lutjens (1995,1) the reflection of Cuban women’s situation can not be directly deduced from an archetypical socialist State: “Women are an essential, if neglected, piece of all the puzzle in the Cuban socialism”. From the beginning of the revolution Cuban women made striking gains, with the support of government policies, that improved their general living conditions and emancipated social groups previously marginalized by their class, race and gender. Strategies implemented by the Cuban government regarding women’s emancipation showed considerable advances in society.
To analyze the real commitment that the government had to women it is helpful to explore the State’s ability to makes changes in the public spheres as well as the private sphere, where the State has little or no access. The Federacion de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC,Federation of Cuban Women), is the organization created to represent the interests of women. People have often criticized it’s lacking of autonomy and see it as another tool of the government: a mere mediation between women and the State. The objective of the FMC was the same to other mass organizations created in the country: to represent specific interests while supporting the main functions of the State.
Especially in the early stages, the organization’s goals and the mentality of their leaders were often counter to the discourse of Western feminism and the idea of a separate struggle for women’s rights. It is very important to understand women’s emancipation inside a larger project of nation‐building. This idea shows the need for a branch of feminism that was re‐invested and re‐oriented to the Cuban specific reality. The Cuban feminist movement created its own set of values where the idea of women’s liberation was impossible to separate from other social problems. This was a common viewpoint for women in Latin America during the sixties and the seventies who participated with men in the urban struggles or guerrilla movements against military dictatorships. The main leaders of the feminist movement struggled with how to re‐organize feminism and cultural identity in opposition to the ‘Western canon’ that responded to a ‘bourgeois’ concept of feminism.
Eventually the mentality of feminist leaders changed and sought closer ties with overseas activists, but the isolation of society due to political conditions also grew.Currently, feminist theory and politics of citizenship have embraced an internationalist agenda by promoting a model in which the interests of women go beyond membership to a particular community. It is interesting to see how struggles for the economic, political and social independence of the nation contributed to create a strong nationalistic ideal that frustrated struggles for minority rights, such as struggles for the emancipation of black people and women. During both the Republican and the revolutionary periods, whenever a particular movement against racism appeared in Cuba it was rejected and discredited under the charge of treason to the ideals of the inclusive nation that Jose Marti and other heroes of independence had sought (Con todos y para el bien de todos, with all together and for the common good).
The ideal of racial and gender equity were perceived of as the particular interests of certain groups even though they were publicly recognized as victims of discrimination and had fewer opportunities to participate in politics. Women had to be Cuban first and therefore, faithful to the goals of the collective before seeking to fulfill to their own needs as women. This logic proved to be an obstacle to achieving the specific goals of women. Indeed citizenship scholars are still debating whether movements that maintained an attachment to the nationalist projects were more or less effective in their own particular struggles for equality.
As years passed some concepts changed. Many researchers pointed out that the idealism of the first years in the Cuban revolutionary process suffered when it adapted to a society with a strong patriarchal system. “Beginning with the notoriously unorthodox socialism of the 1960, history and necessity have informed the ideological and institutional orthodoxies of the revolution’s strategies for women” (Lutjens 1995, 1). A single organization tried to represent and include all the sides of this debate while always supporting the idea that women should be incorporated into revolutionary tasks. In the end our socialist society reproduced the oppressive structures that it set out to abolish,following the same pattern of other socialist countries. Women continued to be confined to the private sphere and this posed real problems for achieving equality. At the same time,different social strategies allowed women to participate in all kinds of revolutionary tasks and to assume different sort of challenges in the workplace and public spheres.
To what degree we can say that women’s demands were met by ‘differentiated citizenship’? Many initiatives show that women demands were not actually met by special representation in the political process (‘differentiated citizenship’) but would have been better served by being incorporated into a shared identity that would integrate previously excluded groups and re‐define the national identity. Nevertheless for the Revolutionary government to continue to be supported by women, some realities had to be publicly accepted by Revolution leaders.
Fidel Castro gave a speech in the Congress of the FMC in 1974, where he had to admited that, “women’s equality doesn’t exist yet” (Castro 1974). In the mid‐1970s, according to studies done by the Partido Comunista de Cuba only few women had been elected as delegates for the Poder Popular Local due to inequalities in the private realm that condemned them to take care of their homes, their husbands and their children. The Cuban revolution seeks equal citizenship for women on the basis of combining family and public responsibilities, but this initiative has had to deal with many social stereotypes. During the 1970s and the 1980s,films debated the problems and obstacles in the search for women’s equality and at the same time criticized the mentality of society. Nevertheless, many films and TV programs depicted the ideal woman as someone who had no direct interaction with the practical problems of public life (except childcare). An analysis of television and film materials shed some light on the way that problems traditionally related to women, such as the double workload of employment and home, child rearing and labor discrimination, were represented and they showed an educational approach that could be propagandistic. In the end these portraits were unrepresentative of the real women’s problems of sharing time between home, work and children.
Differences between the private and the public realms are also an important issue in the discussion about citizenship and gender. In Cuba, problems of the private domain received plenty attention from the political sphere and, although the State tried discuss private issues in the public domain, changes made to improve women’s lives were seen as considerations for her ‘natural’ obligations. Many stereotypes existed in Cuban society with regard to gender and a gendered subjectivity was applied to women in general. Here we can see the division made by Raia Prokhovnik (1998) when analyzing the different practices of public and private citizenship, there are women who behave autonomously and work as ‘equals’ with men but do not adequately fulfill their role as family nurturer, and there are women who remain in the private realm to take responsibility for the home, husband and children and do not assume paid employment. All these experiences were publicly recognized as evidenced by Fidel’s speech to the FMC Congress in 1974. “Women are nature’s workshop where life is forged; they are the preeminent creators of human beings. And I say this because far from being the object of discrimination and inequality, women merit special consideration from society” (Lutjens 1995, 2).
In Cuba women have many life different experiences that depend on their different characteristics including social, racial and geographic aspects. White women’s experiences were different from those of black women, who entered the public domain earlier but with the stigma of libertinage. These experiences show that attempts to incorporate women by simply adding them into a ‘male‐defined’ public space will inevitably fail. After the ’Special Period’ that Cuba experienced in the 1990s, improvements in the living and working conditions for women have been almost impossible to achieve. The space of struggle for women’s equality has also dramatically decreased. Society and the women within it became very skeptical about any research or reflexive process aiming to analyze the present condition of women in different fields. When compared to previous decades when talking about women’s equality was so important, the present has seen the elimination of spaces for debate around concrete obstacles to women’s freedom because these lead to a direct critique to the society’s economic problems.
Although the FMC continued existing as organization and other institutions such as the CENESEX (associated with the Ministry of Public Health) continue their campaigns for women equality, the visible institutional problems in the country and diminishing funding for public campaigns and projects are large obstacles.
Cuban women are dealing with new social problems such as exclusionary tensions due to isolation, lack of information, and migrations. Cuba is a country that has generated a great number of migrants and asylum seekers in recent decades and a significant proportion were women. Popular songs and some audiovisuals of elite distribution highlight the increase in prostitution and women who organize their emotional lives in relationship with their economic interests. But this is rarely mentioned in the official means of communication. (Ruth Lister (1997) notes in her text, Citizenship: Towards a feminist synthesis, the way that exclusionary forces and laws construct women as economic dependents.)
Veladoras: Building Alternative Ways of Perceiving Citizenship
The following project attempts to explore alternative ways of building citizenship in a context where social membership is linked to a particular ‘social performance’ that has been defined and prescribed from above. My intention is to promote the construction of citizenship as a process that takes place from below. My project involves two steps. It began as an ethnographic study of women who work as Veladoras (female art gallery guards) in Havana. Their role and their contribution within the context of the artistic institutional space are almost invisible. They are always alienated from the institutional process of decision‐making and they are represented as ‘invisible objects’ located between the visitor and the artwork.
Once I gathered the information and analyzed it, I began the second step of the project, which was the organization of a photograph exhibition. In doing so I expose the gendered, racialized and stratified life experiences of women who remain socially invisible and open a space for them to experience social membership in the public space of the art gallery. My approach to a feminist citizenship is different to traditional feminist models that understand women’s citizenship according to the value that women can obtain in the public world. My work does not focus on women who play prominent roles in Cuban public life but rather, it is devoted to researching women who struggle to sustain themselves while dealing with very difficult conditions in low paid workplaces. Although their specific work is the objective of the selection, I try to analyze their lives without subscribing to one or the other side of the public‐private dichotomy. They are not women who have chosen to stay full time in the private realm, because most of them need to share home expenses with their family members but their existence in the public realm is precarious and largely ignored.
Describing the Project
My project consisted of organizing an art exhibition using ethnographic data, so I started by conducting a number of interviews. I explored who the Veladoras are, how they perceive their roles at work and the processes of self‐perception in which they are involved.
During the interviews they focused on their specific biographies, the spectrum of options that they have in the labor force and their relationship with the art world. I asked them to express their opinions about such issues as labor discrimination, and racial discrimination.
It was also very important to see them as individuals giving opinions about the way they see themselves as citizens and their ideas about economic, social and politic aspects of society. In exploring this part of their life I sought to explore their worldviews about politics, and to take into account the diverse ways in which they engage in activities in the public realm.
In an attempt to connect the private sphere to the public sphere, I explored their lives outside the workplace. I particularly encouraged them to share their home experiences and to describe the organization of their everyday activities. It is very important, according to the concepts of Public and Private Citizenship proposed by Raia Prokhovnik (1998, 86), to understand practices in the private sphere as also “political in character, in the sense of not being simply ‘natural’”. Therefore, an attempt to look for the value of daily activity in the private realm will focus on the way women commonly act in this sphere, where they usually assume different roles. I asked them to express their opinions about their roles in the private sphere.
Once I gathered the information and processed it, I started the second step of the project, which was the organization of a photograph exhibition. I did not want to restrict my research to only describing the women’s experiences using my own voice, so once I gathered the information I invited them to collaborate as co‐creators of the exhibition by giving opinions about the way I should organize the artistic work I was planning to produce.
I asked them for suggestions about the selection of the work to exhibit. My purposes in doing so was to move from practices of social ‘invisibilization’ that make certain people passive (merely objects of the photograph), to practices that perceive those people as active participants in the processes of self‐representation (to become active decision‐makers in regard to composition, scenery or places where the photographs were taken). The exhibition also seeks to empower them by going beyond their anonymous activity and bringing their personal biographies to the public sphere, in other words, the exhibition is an attempt to introduce them as members of society.
The final result was a number of images that represent their roles as guardians and their ‘passive’, invisible location between the artwork and the visitors. They commonly appear inside the space of the gallery and their images appear reflected in different objects as the glasses and work, or taking a rest in a backyard, reading a book or looking at themselves in a mirror. The hierarchical institutional order was also interpreted through images that show the disposition of spaces and people around the gallery.
Contributing to a New Citizenship: Making Visible the Invisible
To make visible the reality many women face in Cuba today and make visible their lives is one of the main objectives of this research. We should take into account that they represent an important and significant stratum in Cuban society. They are working class mothers, most of them Afro‐Cuban, with low educational levels. They are not autonomous economically and although they have a variety of choices to participate in the public realm, the multiple obstacles they face have a strong impact in their chances of actually doing so.
These obstacles are often related to the difficulties they face when negotiating their responsibilities in both the public and private realms. Although the Revolutionary process tried to change hierarchies and a significant number of women are occupying outstanding positions in public life today, men have historically defined priorities in the public world,and, as a result, the best choices are reserved for men.
On the other hand, many women live in matrifocal homes where they are the breadwinners of their families, in charge of sustaining themselves, their children and elders. That is the situation of one the women I interviewed. Concepcion has had to take paid employment but she has no expectations that she will assume decision‐making responsibilities or leadership activities. Throughout the history of discrimination and inequity these women have suffered, so they usually don’t feel confident enough to take the risks that would make them more active decision‐makers (with some exceptions, of course). Concepcion’s options are mainly focus on her possibilities of finding a husband with a higher economic income or in the possibility of immigrating to another country.
There is a diversity also of women’s experiences according to the relationship with the sphere of politics. Beyond the general disenchantment with the world of politics and, as Prokhovnik (1998) said, that many women do not identify their concerns with what happens in the traditional political sphere, the women I interviewed have different levels of commitment to politics. That is the case of Mariuska, whose husband has direct commitments through work with the government and in the neighborhood serves as the nighttime guard. Mariuska describes her peculiar status as citizen but she also faces stigma because she is responsible for detecting, and denouncing illegal activities in the community. During the ‘Special Period’ these illegal activities were a means of survival for many of her neighbours. She assumes the same status of her husband by helping him with his activities and, at the same time, accepting low paid institutional work that casts no doubt on her integrity as a citizen.
The issue of the economic crisis in the 1990s has special significance for many institutions and projects, which, prior to the crisis, enjoyed significant funds and then experienced a radical change in its traditional methods, channels and functions. The key element here is the problem of corruption which divided society in two different types:‘normal’ procedures that use the institutional and official channels created by the government to accomplish specific tasks and that of the corrupted mechanisms as second or informal choices that appear through illegality. Although men usually assume both options,it’s common to find more men in the second choice leaving institutional work, which pays poorly, to women. Illegal work involves more risks, engages activities that are seen as ‘suitable’ for women and has benefits that are much higher than institutional work provides. In Cuba, men usually rule in the realm of alternative solutions and alternative experiences caused by economic crisis. Their need to survive obliges them to break the law,
separates them from the objectives and goals of the State and causes them to break their own moral standards. Women who participate in these informal realms do so through their husbands, and the women that I interviewed have experienced some improvement in their economic situation but at the expense of becoming entirely economically dependant. This dependence can lead to problems in the home such as domestic violence.
The Veladoras project seeks to go beyond the disenchantment women experience with the world of politics in Cuba. It seeks to empower women by sharing their opinions both about their private lives and about the larger society. Furthermore, the project succeed in organizing and unifying these women giving them the opportunity to identify with the experiences of other people who share their racialized or gendered identities. This research was able to assess the diversity of women’s lives and experiences in Cuba today.
References
Castro Ruz, Fidel: “Discurso pronunciado en el 1er Congreso de la FMC”. 1975.
Connell, R.W. "Theory and Society." Special Issue: Masculinities 22, no. 5 (October 1993): 597‐623.
Lister, R. "Citizenship: Towards a Feminist Synthesis." Feminist Review: Special Edition on Citizenship: Pushing
the Boundaries, no. 57 (1997).
Lutjens, S.L. "Reading Between the Lines: Women, the State, and Rectification in Cuba." Latin American
Perspectives 22, no. 2 (1995): 100‐124.
Prokhovnik, R. "Public and Private Citizenship: From Gender Invisibility to Feminist Inclusiveness." Feminist
Ethics and the Politics of Love, 1998
muy interesante!
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