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Destruction and Salvation of the Cuban Family, 1959–1962 - North Carolina Scholarship
The Destruction and Salvation of the Cuban Family, 1959–1962
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Revolution Within the Revolution: Women and
Gender Politics in Cuba, XXXXXXXXXX
Michelle Chase
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: XXXXXXXXXX
Published to North Carolina Scholarship Online: May 2016
DOI: XXXXXXXXXX/northcarolina/ XXXXXXXXXX0001
The Destruction and Salvation of the Cuban Family, 1959–1962
Michelle Chase
DOI:10.5149/northcarolina/ XXXXXXXXXX0007
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter argues that struggles over idealized visions of ma
iage, children, and the family
were key to competing notions of the nation’s future in this period. The chapter demonstrates
that, during the revolution’s first year in power, the leadership embarked on moderate reforms
to bolster the family, unveiling initiatives to increase formal rates of ma
iage, construct mass
housing, foment popular family tourism, and supply day care for working mothers. But as the
evolution radicalized, new political mobilizations such as the 1961 literacy campaign
increasingly took women, adolescents, and children out of the family home, and
oader societal
conflicts over religion and education grew increasingly sharp. In this context, the growing anti-
Communist movement appealed to the “destruction of the family,” intentionally spreading
umors that parental custodial rights would be a
ogated. Meanwhile, revolutionary leaders
sharpened their visions of how the state might remold the working-class family.
Keywords: Ma
iage, Family, Children (childhood), Sexuality, Rumors, anti-Communism, literacy campaign,
popular tourism, mass housing, day care
Shortly after coming to power, the new revolutionary authorities embarked on a series of
measures to fortify the family. Mass weddings legalized informal unions. New legislation
enforced protection for children born out of wedlock. Newly subsidized leisure activities and
u
an housing were designed to encourage a healthy and dignified family. Yet by 1960 the
growing ranks of the disaffected and the increasingly organized political opposition charged that
the revolution was destroying the family. How can these two seemingly divergent claims be
econciled?
This chapter examines transformations to the Cuban family, both real and imagined, intentional
and unintentional. Following Anita Casavantes Bradford’s pioneering study of children in the
early revolution, published in 2014, this chapter argues that struggles over idealized visions of
ma
iage, children, and the family were key to competing notions of the nation’s future in this
period.1 Although the revolutionary leadership and the growing ranks of the disaffected initially
shared liberal ideals of family fortification, those ideals were soon strained by the rapid changes
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The Destruction and Salvation of the Cuban Family, 1959–1962
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of the period. Throughout 1960, the new mass organizations and revolutionary campaigns
increasingly mobilized women, adolescents, and children, inadvertently challenging traditional
family structures in the process.2 In this context of rapid transformation, both revolutionary
leaders and those who began mobilizing against the revolution increasingly appealed to “the
family” as a way to justify their positions. In so doing, they sharpened their visions of how the
state might remold the family. By 1961 the revolutionary leadership had moved from reformist
notions of family uplift toward a more strident and interventionist vision of popular motherhood,
strong working-class families, and patriotic childhood. At the same time, Cubans suspicious of
the revolutionary leadership increasingly feared that the new government would displace the
ights and duties of parenthood and the patriarchal family onto an authoritarian state.
(p.171) This fear reached its culmination in a campaign of rumors about the abolition of Patria
Potestad. Patria Potestad was a legal term encompassing various parental rights over one’s
children, including custody. From mid-1960 through 1961, organized opponents of the revolution
with the CIA’s backing intentionally spread rumors that the revolutionary government would
soon end parents’ legal custodial rights to their own children. It was said that all children over
the age of five would be forcibly removed from the family home, sent to schools in the
countryside for indoctrination, inducted into the militias for military training, and, finally, sent to
the Soviet Union for further exposure to Marxism. These rumors, while apparently unfounded,
had serious practical consequences. They helped convince many parents that their children
would be safer a
oad, and thus contributed to Operation Peter Pan, a secret program operated
y the U.S. State Department in conjunction with U.S.-based Catholic relief agencies and the
underground anti-Castro movement in Havana.3 This program consisted of the clandestine
evacuation of 14,000 unaccompanied, mostly u
an, middle-class Cuban children to the United
States. Parents believed these relocations would be temporary. They hoped to either
ing their
children back to Cuba after the revolution’s swift overthrow or join their children in exile.
Instead, Operation Peter Pan resulted in permanent emigrations and often in painful, years-long
separations between children and their parents.
Gender and sexuality determined the pattern of these fears over familial destruction. The plights
that might befall prepubescent children, adolescent boys and girls, and adult women were
viewed as distinct. Parents focused on the political indoctrination of young children, especially
as private education was abolished. When it came to teenage boys, they wo
ied that they would
e trained to fight in foreign wars. But fears over the removal of teenage girls from the home
focused more on potential sexual transgressions: parents feared that adolescent girls’
mobilization through government campaigns would result in either sexual promiscuity and
pregnancy or militarization and hence masculinization.
Similarly, the heightened focus on children inevitably meant that changes to adult women’s roles
were given special scrutiny. Women in their cu
ent or future role as mothers were seen as the
lynchpins of the family, and deviation from their traditional roles was imagined to facilitate the
disintegration of the family unit. For this reason, changes that in retrospect seem relatively
innocuous—such as women performing voluntary manual labor, joining a mass organization,
engaging in paid labor for the first time, or simply being (p.172) encouraged to more
frequently leave the house for “the street”—could be read as symptomatic of deeper and more
threatening changes. For if women could be subverted from their traditional calling as mothers
and homemakers, families might then be abandoned to the whims of the state. The specter of
state intrusion into the domestic sphere thus seemed to position mothers as the state’s natural
The Destruction and Salvation of the Cuban Family, 1959–1962
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antagonists, and the emerging anti-Castro opposition accordingly imagined women at the
vanguard of anticommunist resistance.
The conflict over the roles of women, children, and the family also influenced the racial
imaginary of the period. Anti-Castro propaganda tended to depict the family under siege as
white, middle-class, and nuclear.4 In many ways, ironically, this bolstered the revolutionary
leadership’s increasing portrayal of exiles and oppositionists as economic elites incapable of
accepting the racially inclusive project of the revolution. And while state-sanctioned propaganda
still often depicted imagined revolutionary subjects as white, this was beginning to change, as
new actors—such as the Afro-Cuban literacy
igade volunteer Conrado Benítez—were publicly
cele
ated as the embodiment of revolutionary abnegation.5
Rumors over the state’s appropriation of children should not surprise us. As the historian Karen
Dubinsky notes, social and political upheavals often generate anxieties that are expressed in
apocalyptic stories about missing children. From rumors of children stolen by the monarchy
during the French Revolution, to fears of Communist “baby snatchers” during the Cold War, the
plight of children has historically ca
ied an enormous symbolic impact.6 The particular
dynamics of the Cold War, with its simultaneous emphasis on the need for domestic security and
the pervasive threat of global annihilation, generated an even more intense focus on children’s
protection in the capitalist West.7 For different reasons, children in the socialist world and in the
evolutionary upheavals of the decolonizing world were also endowed with special importance.
Children were the future citizens, the “new men” and “new women” who would construct a more
just future society. They had to be educated in new revolutionary values in order to transcend
the tradition that weighed down older generations.8 In 1959 Cuba found itself at the crossroads
of these different cu
ents. As a result, children—and by extension the family—were invested
with enormous symbolic significance.
This chapter suggests that perceived threats to children, the family, and conventional forms of
ma
iage and sexuality were an important motor of disaffection and exodus in the crucial period
of the revolution’s definition and consolidation. These perceived threats also helped the growing
organized (p.173) opposition congeal. Just as the politically plural anti-Batista movement had
papered over differences with a discursive focus on manly martyrdom, grieving motherhood, and
distraught families, so too did allegations about the destruction of the family lend coherence to
the poorly unified and politically diverse anti-Castro movement. And they fueled the articulation
of a more conservative, Catholic-inspired vision of womanhood and family within the anti-Castro
movement. Taking allegations of family destruction seriously thus helps us recapture the moral
anticommunism that was especially characteristic of the middle sectors, who feared intimate
transformations to the family and the self as well as
oad economic and political changes.
Studies of the anti-Castro movement have been so dominated by the polarized “official” accounts
of the island