Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 to 1969

Abstract

How do political actors forge social solidarity across preexisting axes of social difference? This article investigates how political elites undertaking projects of political articulation—understood as linking together diverse constituencies to create integrated political blocs—contend with preexisting cultural constraints embedded in the social fabric. I do so by tracing how the post-1959 Cuban regime attempted to build a population-wide revolutionary identity despite persisting cultural understandings of women primarily as apolitical housewives. Through systematic analysis of a large corpus of state discourse in the form of speeches and women’s magazines, I show how regime leaders negotiated, with varying degrees of success over time, the cultural constraints that gender posed to their unifying project. Ultimately, the regime’s initiatives to politicize women through including them in mass campaigns and radicalizing their traditional household tasks were relatively successful, but cultural backlash against women’s increasing presence in the labor force prompted the institutionalization of a gendered division of labor in the economy that traditionalized their initially radical entry into the workplace. Analyzing how political elites confront and manage social differences within political blocs promises to contribute to a better understanding of the political production of social solidarity and its downstream effects on categorical inequalities.