Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era 9780813565217

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Conceiving Cuba

Conceiving Cuba Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era

ELISE ANDAYA

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING- IN- PUBLICATION DATA

Andaya, Elise, 1976Conceiving Cuba : reproduction, women, and the state in post-Soviet Cuba / Elise Andaya. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-6520-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-6519-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-6521-7 (e-book) 1. Human reproduction—Political aspects—Cuba. 2. Reproductive rights—Cuba. 3. Family planning—Government policy—Cuba. 4. Women’s rights—Cuba. 5. Women— Government policy—Cuba. 6. Women and socialism—Cuba. 7. Cuba—Population policy. I. Title. HQ766.5.C8A64 2014 363.9'6097291—dc23

2013037738

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2014 by Elise Andaya All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

To my mother and father, Barbara and Leonard Andaya, and to my children, Mateo and Zoe Frank

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1

ix

Introduction: Reproduction, Women, and the State

2

1

Producing the New Woman: The Early Revolutionary Years

24

3

Reproducing Citizens and Socialism in Prenatal Care

46

4

Abortion and Calculated Risks

68

5

Engendered Economies and the Dilemmas of Reproduction

93

6

Having Faith and Making Family Overseas

114

7

Conclusion: Reproducing the Revolution

137

Notes

145

References

153

Index

165

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt thanks go out to all the people and institutions who nurtured this project over the many years from its conception to fruition. First, I am deeply grateful to the people in Cuba who welcomed me, trusted me, and thereby made my research possible. My affiliation with the Centro Juan Marinello would not have come about without the support of Ana Vera Estrada, who became a trusted friend and mentor through the professional and personal obstacles of research in Cuba. I thank Pablo Pacheco and Elena Socorrás, then-director and vice-director of the Center, whose intellectual openness and interest in international exchange provided me with a crucial institutional home. I am also appreciative of the help and insight provided by scholars associated with the Working Group on the Family. My deepest gratitude, however, goes to the many women and men, friends and neighbors, who allowed me into their homes and their lives, and who trusted me with their stories. While they cannot be named, I wish to single out a few using their pseudonyms in this book: Dr. Janet Torres and Dr. Marisa Sánchez welcomed me into their clinics and helped me understand both the rewards and burdens of practicing medicine in post-Soviet Cuba; Teresa Villa became both friend and guide to her neighborhood; and Carlos Novoa provided me and my husband with research assistance, loyal friendship, and incisive (often humorous) insights into Cuban life. Special love and gratitude go to Celia Peña, who calls me “daughter” and without whom Cuba would not be the same. Finally, I thank the network of Cuban friends and neighbors who helped us survive our first hurricanes and navigate Cuban bureaucracy, introduced us to people in their networks, provided a running commentary about changes in Cuban policy and its effects on social life, and in many other ways shared their lives with us and made our time in Cuba so much richer. I am also deeply appreciative of the various institutions and intellectual communities in the United States that have sustained and inspired me over the long course of this project. At New York University, Rayna Rapp has been a mentor par excellence. Her longstanding intellectual and political commitment to studying the lives of women has been critical in influencing my own thinking on feminism and the anthropology of reproduction, while her ongoing support testifies to the fact that the work of nurturance is never done. I also thank Aisha ix

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Khan, Emily Martin, Ada Ferrer, and Bruce Grant, who gave me invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript and honed my thinking in various ways, as well as Faye Ginsburg, Fred Myers, Connie Sutton, and Jeff Himpele, who freely and graciously offered me support when I needed it. A number of friends and colleagues supported my personal and intellectual growth at NYU and beyond: in particular, I am grateful to Eleana Kim, Julie Chu, Luther Elliott, Sherine Hamdy, and Ulla Dallum Berg, as well as Jenn Guitart and Amy Cooper, with whom I shared some of my first experiences in Cuba. At the University at Albany, I am indebted to a number of people who offered support and critical feedback during the writing process: Jennifer Burrell, Gail Landsman, Barbara Sutton, Kendra Smith-Howard, Kristin Hessler, Jim Collins, and Bob Jarvenpa. Discussions with participants in several graduate seminars on gender and medical anthropology also helped to sharpen my thinking on these topics. Outside my institutional “homes,” I thank Nadine Fernandez for stepping in at just the right time, and for her insightful read of an earlier version of this manuscript. Presentations at a number of institutions and professional conferences provided important opportunities for discussion and feedback. Generous and insightful reflections came from discussants and fellow panelists too numerous to name individually, but whose thinking influenced the direction of pieces of this manuscript. I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support for various stages of this research and writing provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Fulbright-Hays Award, as well as internal grants at both New York University and the University at Albany. At Rutgers University Press, I would like to thank Marlie Wasserman and her editorial staff, who efficiently shepherded this manuscript through its various stages, as well as the helpful and detailed reports of the anonymous reviewers. A wonderful network of friends, in New York and throughout the country, has inspired and supported me as we have shared the experiences of establishing careers, having families, and finding a balance between the two. I am so lucky to have you in my life. My deepest love and gratitude is reserved for my families: Pamela and Harry Belafonte, who made it possible for me for me to live in Cuba; Peter Frank and Betty Levinson, for enthusiastic childcare and constant emotional support; my sister and sister-in-law, Alexis Hamasaki and Sarah Frank, for always being there; and my mother and father, Barbara and Leonard Andaya, who early inspired a love of travel and intellectual engagement. Immeasurable thanks is due to my mother, my first and most dedicated reader, whose love of prose, eye for detail, and disdain for the misplaced apostrophe has consistently held me to a higher standard.

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And finally, I offer my love and thanks to the family that I am now engaged in reproducing: to my husband, Lindsey Frank, my companion in intellectual and reproductive labor, who shared all the trials and triumphs of living in Cuba and who has brought so much lightness and happiness to my life over the years; and to my children, Mateo and Zoe Frank, who can always be counted on to provide the necessary and joyful distractions that are reminders of the important things in life.

Conceiving Cuba

1 Introduction Reproduction, Women, and the State

By the time the family doctor clinic opened its doors to the waiting line of patients at eight thirty in the morning, the streets were already bustling in this densely populated Central Havana neighborhood. Flower sellers set up their brightly colored stands on the broken pavements. Convivial groups of people on their way to work gathered under the peeling, wrought-iron balconies of nineteenth-century homes while they drank small shots of strong, sweet coffee sold from the street-level windows. Adding a constant level of noise to this scene, battered American Fords and Chevrolets—that pre-date the 1959 revolution and now serve as collective taxis—clattered and banged their way down the street, stopping frequently to pick up and discharge passengers, while the boxy, Russian-made Ladas imported during Cuba’s Soviet-subsidized 1970s and 1980s wove briskly between them. The health clinic where I observed weekly neonatal and prenatal health consultations was unremarkable. Except for the fact that the wall sported a nowfaded revolutionary slogan—“Lies may go a long way, but in the end the truth prevails. Viva Fidel!”—the building was virtually indistinguishable from the concrete houses and state-run businesses surrounding it. Its windowless and graying cinder-brick walls were interrupted only by a narrow band below the roof, where latticed bricks permitted the circulation of both air and extremely high levels of street noise. Today was Wednesday, a day supposedly reserved for prenatal health consultations, although when I entered the waiting room, I noted that as usual the wooden benches were filled with elderly patients hoping to receive immediate medical attention. Smiling at the people I recognized from the neighborhood, I passed into the sparsely furnished office. At the desk sat Dr. Janet Torres,1 a plump, dark-skinned woman whose gentle manner and quick smile made her a favorite among patients. Despite 1

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the fact that the clinic had just opened, she was already with a patient whom I recognized, Gisela Navarro, a slight woman in her mid-thirties who was now in the twenty-sixth week of her second pregnancy. I sat as Janet continued with the standard physical examination of pregnant women that included blood pressure reading, comparison of uterine measurements against gestational age, weight gain, and other routine tests. She carefully recorded each number in the patient’s clinical chart, while I helped by recording the results for the file that Gisela would keep with her. When Janet reached the line of numbers that charted Gisela’s weight gain over the course of her pregnancy, she paused, frowning. “Are you eating well?” she asked. Gisela responded in the affirmative. Janet shook her head in disbelief, and told Gisela that her weight gain continued to fall under desired norms. “I’ll give you a couple more weeks,” she went on, “But if your weight gain continues to be below normal I’ll have to admit you to a hospital until your weight improves.” Gisela nodded, and promised that she would pay more attention to her diet. After she had carefully slipped her patient file into a tattered ziplock bag and departed, Janet shook her head again. She knew this family; Gisela worked in a nearby government ministry and her husband, stepfather to Gisela’s daughter from a prior relationship, was a state-employed chemist in a Cuban pharmaceutical factory. They were gente humilde (“humble people”), Janet told me, who lived entirely on their low state salaries without support from remittances or work in the informal entrepreneurial sector with which many Cuban families supplement their wages. Like all pregnant women in Cuba, Gisela received special prenatal rations that included additional milk and yogurt allotments. Yet given Gisela’s continued insufficient weight gain, Janet suspected that she was giving away her supplementary rations rather than consuming them herself. The recipient, Janet believed, was Gisela’s daughter, who had recently turned seven years old and had thus become ineligible for the additional dairy rations that the state provides to young children. While most families were able to supplement their older children’s diet with food purchased outside the ration system, this family’s tight household economy forced Gisela to choose between nourishing herself and her daughter. “It’s true, her daughter is very thin, probably not well nourished,” Janet acknowledged. “But what can I do? I can’t have her giving up the food she needs for her [unborn] baby to care for her daughter.” Such reproductive difficulties and decisions are played out in untold numbers of families throughout the world. Yet unlike most countries, Cuban health policy gave Janet the ability to intervene, however temporarily, in this strained situation. By admitting Gisela to a hospital or maternity home where she would receive an enriched diet and weight monitoring, Janet hoped to both enhance

INTRODUCTION

3

Gisela’s caloric intake and relieve her from the responsibility of nurturing her existing child, at least long enough to produce a baby of a healthy birth weight. Janet made a note in the medical chart and signaled in the next patient. The day continued: this was for her a minor interruption, a slightly worrying but otherwise fairly mundane episode in her routine care of the neighborhood. Yet this book argues that such small dramas powerfully capture the multivalent tensions and contradictions of reproduction, as families and the state struggle to nurture children who are both members of kin groups and future citizens of socialist society. In turn, these moments delineate a shifting relationship between the state and its citizens in post-Soviet Cuba. I initially conceptualized this research project as a study of the policy and practice of reproductive health care in Havana. But over the months in which I participated in the flux and flow of life in a busy neighborhood health clinic, women’s narratives and practices constantly pushed the self-imposed boundaries of my topic. As women carried pregnancies to term or chose to end them, they exchanged updates and gossip about familial tensions and household struggles. The tendrils of their reproductive narratives were enmeshed with commentaries about household economies and social stratification, the gendered burdens of productive and reproductive labor, and migration and transnational kinship networks. Tracking these stories led me to sites far beyond the medical clinic, pushing me to recognize the dilemmas of reproduction as key moments in which to view debates and anxieties over the reproduction of children and socialist citizens, as well as the role of the state in sustaining each. Such a focus necessarily expands the traditional understanding of reproduction as a primarily biological process: at the level of the family, the women with whom I spoke time and again framed reproductive difficulties not as the struggle to facilitate or curtail biological fertility, but in terms of the problems of nurturing children and providing for them given shifting familial circumstances and embattled familial and national economies. At the same time, their choices and decisions about reproductive matters have ramifications for the future trajectory of Cuban society. In this multi-level conceptualization, at stake is not simply the reproduction of children as members of families but also the reproduction of the socialist state and its revolution. The 1959 revolutionaries held out the promise of a radically egalitarian society in which the state would satisfy the needs of all of its citizens. It would eradicate entrenched gender, racial, economic, and regional inequalities that the revolutionaries viewed as the legacy of Spanish colonialism (1515–1898) and American capitalism (1898–1959). Bolstered by economic subsidies from the Soviet Union, the new state guaranteed support for all citizens through, among other measures, guaranteeing full employment and equal pay for equal work; establishing a rationing system to ensure universal and

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egalitarian distribution of household necessities; desegregating public spaces; and inaugurating free and accessible systems of social services, education, and health care. Such wide-ranging social and economic policies were conceived as a means to equalize the terrain for the production and reproduction of a new socialist citizen—el hombre nuevo, or the socialist “new man.” Cuba’s ability to sustain this new society, however, foundered with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. As the Soviet-subsidized market for Cuban sugar vanished, the island was plunged into intense and unprecedented austerity, with shortages that authorities had imagined only in the context of wartime hostilities. This initiated a period known as the Special Period in Peacetime. Frequently referred to simply as the crisis, the Special Period meant the end of the world as Cubans had known it. In the face of near-complete economic collapse, the Cuban government was forced to retreat from its earlier promises of full provision for all citizens from cradle to grave. It opened the previously strictly controlled remittance, tourist, and entrepreneurial economies, and these new apertures drove the development of a dual economy founded on the Cuban peso (in which the vast majority of Cuban state workers are paid) and the U.S. dollar, which was largely available only through the newly opened economic sectors.2 With many goods becoming available only in the dollar markets, the reemergence of social stratification and economic inequality in post-Soviet Cuba profoundly threatened socialist ideals of a fully egalitarian society. The effects of these dramatic changes are encapsulated in the reproductive crisis surrounding Gisela and her family. Gisela and her husband, both of Afro-Cuban descent, were in many ways beneficiaries of the revolution’s social and economic policies: both had been able to pursue professional degrees and secure positions in occupations where Cubans socially identified as black or mulato (one of the local racial categories designating a person of mixed descent) have been historically underrepresented. Yet despite their professional status, their earnings in the peso-remunerated state sector are now insufficient to cover many basic necessities. Moreover, they lack the connections to the remittance or entrepreneurial economies that have become increasingly necessary to obtain what the state can no longer provide. Caught between economic crises at the level of both the family and the state, it was Gisela who struggled to bridge the gap by depriving herself in order to nurture her existing child, embodying in her underweight frame the tensions surrounding the reproduction of household and national economies. Moving from the intimate space of prenatal consultations and abortion clinics to household economies and transnational kinship strategies, my fieldwork and this book track the multivalent meanings and practices of reproduction as they resonate through family politics and public policies. In so doing, I

INTRODUCTION

5

make explicit the entanglement of biological and social reproduction in postSoviet Cuba. The book has two central aims: first and most obvious, my argument insists that reproduction is never simply contained within individual fertile bodies. In post-Soviet Cuba, reproductive politics encompass tensions and anxieties not only about the birth of children, but the reproduction of families, citizens, and the socialist revolution. In the intertwined lifecycles of individuals and states, concerns around sustaining children and households have become crucial nodal points for reflections, tensions, and conflict around the stability and transformation of state claims to a superior socialist morality in a new local and global order. In this context, reproductive dilemmas refer not only to biological issues pertaining to fertility and its management. They also encompass debates, both within families and between the state and its citizens, about the responsibility for nurturance across the generations and the gendered organization of reproductive labor. At the heart of social contestations about the conception and care of children and citizens are thus broader social questions about the legacy of socialism in the twenty-first century. Second, and more broadly, this book contends that the social organization of reproduction comes most clearly into view when reproductive practices are situated within the multiple and intersecting realms of policy that shape family-building strategies. Reproduction is not only enabled and constrained by policies explicitly conceived as regulating health or fertility, but also by policies around labor, housing, migration, and so forth, that often have uneven and contradictory consequences for decisions about bearing and nurturing children. Through close attention to the ever-present slippages and gaps between policy and practice, I foreground reproduction as a lens onto the unpredictable and often unintended consequences of interactions among state policies of population management, international geopolitics and economic processes, familial politics, and personal aspirations as they shape, and are also shaped by, practices of bearing children and caring for dependents. Conceiving Cuba thus contributes to a small but growing number of ethnographies by outside observers of Cuban life inside the revolution. While Cuba has its own tradition of applied social science, the relationship between the revolutionary government and foreign anthropologists has been a fraught one. After American anthropologist Oscar Lewis was unceremoniously ejected in 1970 while conducting the research on which his compendium Living the Revolution (1977) is based, the island was virtually closed to outside ethnographic investigators. (Mona Rosendahl’s 1997 description of life in Soviet Cuba stands alone, and her writing vividly depicts the difficulties of conducting ethnographic research at the time). Since the economic and ideological opening that accompanied the Special Period, a number of anthropologists (many U.S.-based) have conducted rich ethnographic research on the island.

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CONCEIVING CUBA

Reflecting the anthropological interest in subaltern identities, work on groups that the revolution has historically considered problematic or marginal—such as sexual minorities, sex workers, and Afro-Cuban religious practitioners—has been particularly well represented in this research.3 More broadly, a smaller and diverse set of ethnographies has picked up the questions around the legacy of the revolution and the changing relationship of the state to its citizens through examination of interracial relationships (Fernandez 2010), the politics of health and health care (Burke 2013; Brotherton 2012), and social struggles around consumption (Pertierra 2011; Weinreb 2009). In examining the concerns of ordinary Cubans, this book builds on these ethnographies of daily life in post-Soviet Cuba. Yet in tracking dilemmas of reproduction as they unfold in the gendered labor of bearing and nurturing children, it provides a unique ethnographic and theoretical lens for perceiving the connections and tensions between local practices of providing for children and households and the reproduction of the revolution and its ideals in a new politicaleconomic global order. Such an analysis transcends the Cuban context. Many citizens of the former Soviet Union, as well as residents of countries whose economies have collapsed under the pressures of structural adjustment or the current global economic crisis, have also been forced to negotiate harsh new realities that have reshaped their understandings of their past, present, and possible futures.4 For these families in many international contexts, the urgency of issues of household reproduction and familial nurturance, and the often gendered pressures that accompany them, form the lens through which they interpret personal, political, and economic crises and imagine—for better or for worse—the shape of a new society.

Theorizing a Multilevel Analysis of Reproduction In their pioneering work, Conceiving the New World Order, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp argued that reproduction, long assigned to the biological realm, was a critical entry point for exploring broader social struggles. Broadening the theoretical field, they urged scholars of this newly defined politics of reproduction to consider the ways in which “reproduction, in its biological and social senses, is inextricably bound up with the production of culture” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995, 2). Rethinking anthropology’s traditional focus on reproduction as the continuity of cultural and social forms transmitted from generation to generation, they contended that debates over reproduction also revealed the social contestations as families, social groups, and nation-states imagined the reproduction and transformation of society. The past three decades have seen a blossoming of incisive work in the anthropology of reproduction, particularly in topics from prenatal care and

INTRODUCTION

7

the social effects of diagnostic technologies to infertility and surrogacy.5 This important work notwithstanding, assessments of the state of the field have noted the tendency to focus on the processes of conception and birth, especially with respect to the social meanings of the new reproductive technologies and the global biomedicalization of pregnancy (Browner and Sargent 2011; Greenhalgh 2003). Yet reproduction and politics are entangled in other ways as well; debates around reproduction are a key means by which “the morality and desirability of political institutions is imagined, and claims for the ‘goodness’ of state forms are made” (Gal and Kligman 2000, 28). As this book contends, when people bear children or terminate pregnancies, make life choices around the necessities involved in caring for children, or strategically manage fertility and kin relations in the context of migratory aspirations, these ordinary dramas also reveal contested visions of nurturance, gendered citizenship, and the “goodness” of policy. As the literal nexus between the reproduction of biological and social bodies, reproduction in this expanded sense offers a fertile site through which to understand the relationship between the individual/familial practice and the work of states, as the latter are instantiated and experienced through policy and its effects. In volume 1 of The History of Sexuality (1978), Michel Foucault argues that modern states govern through two polar modes: the disciplining of the individual body and the shaping of behaviors, dispositions, and desires, as well as through the exercise of biopower, defined as the proliferation of techniques and professional disciplines aimed at knowing and regulating the social body, or population. Anthropological analyses of the former have flourished: scholars of the field have persuasively illustrated how reproduction is interwoven with culturally and historically specific ideals of gender and personhood, as well as beliefs about the morality and modernity of persons and societies.6 As Susan Greenhalgh (2003) points out, however, a far smaller body of work has focused directly on the role of the state in managing reproduction through population surveys and interventions designed to shape the size and quality of the population.7 The effect of non-reproductive state policy, such as migratory or labor regulations, on reproductive practice also remains relatively uncharted terrain within anthropology. Instead, this sphere of analysis has been ceded to the topdown perspective of policy experts and demographers who ignore or naturalize the state’s power to create new forms of social life that often subvert the goals of state planners. Attention to reproduction in this sense is particularly generative in the context of socialist states where reproduction became central to the state rational planning that would demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism. Early socialist revolutionaries imagined a top-down modernity comprehensively planned by the state: socialist development would not result from haphazard

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growth but from carefully monitored and regulated interventions into the lives of its subjects. Viewing all economic and social life as falling under its purview, socialist rational planning sought to manage both production and reproduction by directing citizens into desired occupations, influencing reproductive practices and demographic profiles, managing population movements, reshaping gender roles and ideologies, and so forth. In consciously acting to produce the “new man,” socialist states thus clearly articulated the relationship between population management and new forms of subjecthood. In this process, as this book tracks, socialist states also produced the “new woman,” sometimes through overt labor or childcare policies, but often indirectly through what Eastern European women first labeled the double or triple day of labor in the workplace, the home, and political activities. Within an ideological system that viewed its human capital as a natural resource, reproductive policy was specifically conceived as a means of bringing a socialist modernity into being. In China, for example, the socialist leadership’s concern with raising the quality of the population entailed the implementation of the notorious one-child birth policy (Anagnost 1995; Greenhalgh 1998). In Romania, official obsession with the reproduction of the human labor force considered necessary to propel the country into modernity led to the imposition of a violent pronatalism that criminalized abortion and contraception and set production quotas for procreation (Kligman 1998). Of course, socialist countries were not alone in actively attempting to shape the contours of their population; a number of developing nations, often under duress by global financing structures, have also sought to achieve national demographic profiles that are considered synonymous with modernity.8 Diverse state approaches to the issue of reproduction thus sharply underscore how cultural values and contested political imaginaries shape reproductive policy at both the national and local levels. While socialist states made reproduction a site of intensive intervention, U.S. policy has been informed by culturally dominant values of individual responsibility and choice, accompanied by a widely held suspicion about government intervention into the lives of citizens and corporations. The result is the very limited role of the state in supporting reproduction: free or subsidized daycare is rare or nonexistent, prenatal and child health care for the poor is made up of a state-dependent patchwork of programs under constant threat from the post-2008 economic crisis, the right to abortion is being steadily eroded state-by-state, and the United States continues its dubious distinction of being one of the few countries in the world without federal laws providing for paid maternity leave, or even universal unpaid maternity leave. These policy decisions place substantial financial, labor, and emotional burdens on kinship networks as women and men struggle to provide what the state will not. More broadly, these policies reflect and amplify issues

INTRODUCTION

9

of stratified reproduction—a term coined by Shellee Colen (1995) to refer to the ways in which women’s reproduction is enabled or discouraged according to hierarchies of class, race/ethnicity, nationality, and so forth—as women from better-off families are able to make choices (albeit always constrained) denied to poorer women. Reproductive policies and politics thus articulate with the social landscape at large, in the values, ideologies, tensions, and inequalities that they reproduce—or, at times, transform. By contrast with the often-violent reproductive policies of other nations, both capitalist and socialist, the Cuban government’s attempt to achieve a socialist modernity has never rested on explicit manipulation of the birthrate. However, as I argue in chapter 3, the intensive management of reproductive health indices has been central not only to the state’s attempts to optimize the strength and well-being of its population, but also to its claims of a superior morality and modernity in the international forum.9 Since the inception of the revolution, the health of the individual has stood as a powerful symbol of the health of society (Feinsilver 1993). In the context of its Spanish colonial history—in which the intense burden of maternal and infant deaths among the poor, rural, and Afro-descended populations reflected deep social inequalities across gender, race, class, and region—Cuba’s current excellent maternal-infant health indicators across all sectors stand as concrete evidence of the state’s egalitarian investment in its population. Rendered as internationally circulating reproductive health statistics, the survival and well-being of pregnant women and infants is held up as a centerpiece of Cuban socialist morality and nurturance on the world stage. Women’s reproductive practices and outcomes thus become important symbolic capital for the socialist state, as reproductive statistics become “gendered signifiers” (Georges 2008) that index a nation’s location in a global hierarchy. Local reproductive realities are shaped not only by national narratives and policies but also by global economic processes and international geopolitical maneuverings that may enable or constrain both state and local efforts at reproduction. In the case of Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet Union and over fifty years of embargo by the United States have had severe repercussions both in the workings of daily life and at the level of the state. During the annual United Nations referendum on the legitimacy of the embargo—the harshest on any country in the world—in which the United States is always roundly defeated, Cuban diplomats point to the fact that Cuba receives none of the some fourteen billion dollars that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund provide to Latin American countries every year. This financial blockade is clearly intended to undermine the socialist state’s ability to reproduce itself both materially and ideologically, further heightening the symbolic value of Cuba’s superb reproductive health statistics as well as state efforts to maintain them.

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Returning to reproductive conundrums as they are experienced and embodied on the local level, this book’s multilevel approach to reproduction draws attention to the vexed intersection between local, state, and international reproductive policies and politics. In Cuba, the post-Soviet state’s limited access to international capital, and its consequent inability to fulfill promises of universal provision, is reflected in women’s and men’s complaints about the difficulties of sustaining children and households in the context of both chronic shortages and the often astronomical costs of goods, from food to household necessities. As the state makes claims to a moral modernity through various efforts to sustain its population, people draw on their embodied knowledge of low fertility and high abortion rates to contest the state’s assertions to socialist nurturance. “There are only three failures of the revolution,” goes a popular Cuban joke, “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Blurring the boundaries between the problems of kin and state, economy and politics, the material shortages that define quotidian life are held up as concrete and embodied signs of the breakdown of the state’s promise of socialist progress. Such narratives of lived experience must be contextualized within the multiple contradictions of life under twenty-first century Cuban socialism; Cuban notions of starvation reflect not the life-endangering lack of calories suffered by the poor in many sites worldwide, but rather the inability to eat culturally desired foods such as meat, rice and beans, and white yams, or boniato (Brotherton 2012; Weinreb 2009). Yet as both women and men point to material insufficiencies as a chief reason for the island’s below-replacement fertility rate (in 2013, 1.47 children per woman), as well as the desire of many young women and men to emigrate, these moments of tension in biological and household reproduction also serve as key moments in which people construct narratives about the “goodness” of the state and its policies. In the nexus between political rationalities, household and transnational economies, and cultural norms and practices, people make constrained decisions about the number of children to bear, residence and migration, and the gendered organization of familial labor. In turn, these ground-level practices shape the contours of the population and strategies of state governance, often in ways unanticipated by the state itself. Indeed, state efforts to regulate the population are never simply internalized by docile subjects: people ignore these policies, use them to their advantage, and engage in an array of informal practices that both subvert and support state goals (Brotherton 2012; Ledeneva 1998). In the gaps between policy and practice, these reproductive practices in turn have implications for the state’s ability to reproduce the socialist revolution. Today, both the state and Cuban social scientists openly debate the problems of high abortion rates, declining fertility, and familial migratory politics, in full knowledge of the hardships of nurturance in post-Soviet Cuba.

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The “New Woman”: Gender, Reproduction, and Socialist Policy The concept of reproduction has deep roots in the history of both feminist and socialist thought, both of which have long recognized that reproduction is bound up with gendered personhood as well as gendered inequalities. Feminist anthropologists of the 1970s (many of whom were profoundly influenced by the socialist intellectual heritage) drew on cross-cultural data to demonstrate the centrality of motherhood to ideologies of full womanhood and adult status in a number of contexts.10 At the same time, they built on a longer history of feminist criticism to argue that women’s apparently universal subordinate status was largely due to their association with biological reproduction and the devalued reproductive sphere. International socialists, analyzing “the woman question” from within a class framework, similarly located women’s oppression in the multivalent concerns over reproduction (Edholm, Harris, and Young 1978). In Marxist theory, social reproduction refers essentially to the reproduction of institutions, processes, and unequal social relationships through which the continuation of capitalism is secured. Although Karl Marx himself said little about women and children within this class system, Friedrich Engels ([1884] 1972) and utopian socialist August Bebel ([1879] 1904) explicitly linked the family as an economic unit, and the position of women within it, as crucial components in the reproduction of ownership of private property and thus of capitalism. In this view, the chief aim of bourgeois kinship practices was the consolidation and augmentation of private property. Patriarchal control over biological reproduction was therefore inextricable from capitalist anxieties over the reproduction of social class; the concern with “legitimate” inheritance from father to son entailed the rigorous surveillance and supervision of women’s premarital virginity and their monogamy after marriage. In turn, ideologies of female honor justified the restriction of middle-class women to the domestic sphere, where their talents were squandered on what socialists saw as the drudgery of reproductive tasks. In Cuba, this rich socialist discursive tradition has both shaped and been shaped by the complex interplay of gendered practices, discourses, and ideologies variously inherited from the island’s history of Spanish colonialism and slave-based capitalism, the contradictions and tensions of gendered life under Soviet subsidization, as well as the social and economic transformations of post-Soviet society. A central concern of the book is thus to examine how the connection between women and reproduction has been imagined within families and in state policy at different moments in the revolution. Gender here is defined as the culturally and socially produced ideas about the differences between males and females, as well as the relations of power and hierarchy that reproduce these differences through families and institutions. These culturally and historically variable categories are formed in the interactions between everyday actions and

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larger discourses, processes, and institutions; at the same time that state policies and local/global economies shape gender ideologies through promoting or discouraging forms of gendered practice, ideas about gender difference—the varied capacities and qualities of men and women—inform policy, family forms, markets, migration, and other diverse spheres of social action. The concept of gender thus encompasses not only beliefs about appropriate roles and practices, but also the opportunity structures that differentially favor or constrain men and women as they are embodied across axes of class, race/ethnicity, family status, and so forth.11 While gender is central to social life in human society, state solutions to the question of gender and reproduction have varied immensely. Driven by the political rise of feminism and socialism in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, questions about the relationship between gender, reproduction, and social and economic policy became central to one of the most contested political and social issues of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century: the extent to which women’s capabilities as child-bearers determine the roles they can assume in the society at large, and whether the state can or should intervene to reshape gender ideologies that assign women to the domestic sphere. In post-World War II United States, policy-makers—reflecting the thinking of large swaths of the population—were profoundly ambivalent about women’s place in the workforce. Rather than encouraging women to join paid labor through the creation of subsidized childcare and family-friendly work policies, as occurred in countries like Sweden and France, the United States instead passed measures to pay mothers to remain at home, and assumed that childcare would be managed within the family. These policy decisions not only led to the welfare system but have had far-reaching consequences in the unevenness of parental leave policies for the care of infants or sick children, as well as the paucity of highquality, affordable day care options in the United States today.12 By contrast, in the early decades of socialist Cuba, the iconic image of women in the workforce became a powerful symbol of broader revolutionary changes.13 As with other socialist countries, the state’s interest in enhancing production led to explicit attempts to intervene in traditional gender roles to increase women’s participation in the public labor force. Reflecting orthodox socialist dogma, women’s emancipation was viewed as a natural product of their movement out of what both socialists and capitalists constructed as the “private” sphere; the state’s task, as the early revolutionaries saw it, was thus to institute policies and practices that would liberate their labor from the reproductive burdens of childbearing and childrearing. Urged on by the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), a national organization established under the auspices of the state to promote women’s social progress under the revolution, the Cuban government recognized that women’s rights and equality in a new

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society depended not only on their control over fertility, but also in shifting some responsibility for household labor and childcare from individual women to the state through the institution of state childcare, workers’ dining halls, and the like. At the same time that the state elaborated a new ideal of female socialist citizenship, it also enacted other social and economic reforms—such as state guarantees of housing, healthcare, employment, and household necessities— which impacted the reproduction of gendered inequalities. With the production and distribution of goods coming increasingly under state control, the new government sought to eradicate the household and family as an economic unit. In so doing, it shifted much of the responsibility for nurturance and well-being from the family to the paternalist state.14 While not explicitly conceived as either gender or reproductive policy, these measures benefited women disproportionately, especially single mothers, who numbered among the poorest of the population (Center for Democracy in the Americas 2013; Nuñez Sarmiento 2010). Gender thus became a principled narrative through which the socialist state articulated its superior morality and modernity to capitalist society. Although socialism declared the birth of “the new man,” it was perhaps more crucially on the practices of women that claims to social progress were staked. Women and the revolution became virtually synonymous; in 1966, Fidel Castro triumphantly proclaimed, “If they were to ask us what is the most revolutionary thing that the Revolution is doing, we would say that it is precisely this, the revolution that is occurring within the women of our country.”15 In so doing, he harkened back to the long socialist tradition that took women’s status as a primary barometer of social evolution (Bebel [1879] 2009). Social and economic policy was mobilized to the grand cause of transforming gender and society as socialist rational planning sought to produce new female subjects who would carry the country forward into modernity. Whereas women under capitalism had been mere chattels of men, as socialist revolutionaries asserted, the new socialist woman would be an enlightened participant in public life, an equal partner in the home, and author of her own destiny. Indeed, Cuba’s accomplishments with respect to women are impressive: women now make up 63 percent of its university graduates and 66 percent of its professionally qualified labor force. Despite these achievements, women continue to be underrepresented in highlevel political positions and have the lowest overall workforce participation in Latin America, posing a challenge to socialist predictions that I discuss in more detail in this book’s final chapters (Center for Democracy in the Americas 2013). As in other socialist states, Cuban policies towards women were often characterized by tensions and contradictions. While women were urged to transform themselves and society through their movement into the public sphere, the resources necessary to support them were often allocated to other areas that

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the leadership considered more pressing. Social and economic policies enacted in other spheres of social life also often circumscribed their options. Essentialized concepts of gender and gendered hierarchies were often preserved in both the policy and practice of postcolonial socialist Cuba, albeit in new formations. Even the state’s progressive reproductive policies served to bring women’s bodies and practices more squarely under the gaze of the paternalist state. The limits of the revolutionary promise to emancipate women has been openly acknowledged by its leadership. In 2012, during the opening to the Sixth Cuban Congress, Raúl Castro acknowledged that women in Cuba had still not achieved the full equality that socialism had promised, exclaiming, “How embarrassing that we have not solved this problem in more than half a century!” In the new social and economic terrain of post-Soviet Cuba, the meaning and significance of socialist claims to gendered progress, as well as questions about the reproduction of the new socialist woman, have emerged with renewed force.

Reproductive Crises: The Special Period, Familial Reproduction, and the State These multiply inflected dilemmas of reproduction take place against the omnipresent backdrop of the economic crisis of the Special Period. The rapid descent of the Cuban standard of living from that of the communist “second world” to that of the so-called third world fractured socialism’s foundational narratives of nurturance and progress. The state-subsidized distribution of food and basic supplies, upon which Cuban families had come to depend, slowed to a trickle as monthly rations were slashed to provide only ten days of food. Average daily caloric consumption dropped 33 percent between 1989 and 1993, from over 2800 calories per day to just over 1800 (Chomsky 2000). By the late 1990s, almost half of the Cuban population could not meet basic food needs (Zabala Argüelles 2010). Shortages of petroleum meant the virtual disappearance of public transportation, as well as lengthy daily blackouts that affected families’ ability to preserve refrigerated food and to pump drinking water into homes and apartments. The reproduction of the state was thrown profoundly into doubt. Forced to retreat from its promises of universal nurturance, it explicitly returned responsibility for sustaining its citizens to individual households and their members. A study published under the auspices of the FMC laid out this new terrain, stating, “The policies of the Cuban state have always been to protect the family and guarantee the necessary conditions for its optimum development. However, the current situation promotes [the family’s] role and that of the community as vital socializing agents for the solution of their own problems” (Álvarez Suárez 2000, 27).

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With the state’s contraction, the gendered burdens of reproduction became starkly apparent. Looking back on the effects of the Special Period in 2004, the secretary-general of the FMC declared, “The Special Period fell principally on female shoulders.”16 As in other countries suffering economic collapse, it was largely the unpaid labor and sacrifice of women that replaced the goods and services no longer available through the public sector (e.g., Benería and Feldman 1992; Sutton 2010). Domestic work was pushed back into the household as the embattled state withdrew services such as laundromats and workers’ dining halls that, however inefficiently, provided some respite for women. Laid siege by the economic crisis, women invented their own soap and shampoo, fabricated makeshift shoes of cloth or rubber from car tires, and found ways to minimally feed their families, often going without so that children and “breadwinners” could eat. New gendered sites for socialist struggle emerged, with women’s efforts publicly heroicized as shoring up the “home front” of Cuba’s battle to retain state socialism (Pertierra 2008). With conditions worsening through the early 1990s, thousands took to the seas on homemade crafts, risking their lives in the perilous waters of the Florida Straits. In 1994 alone, the Coast Guard rescued over 37,000 rafters in U.S. waters. Migration took on a male face as images of balseros (rafters)— overwhelmingly perceived as young, male, and black—became the embodied sign of an ailing state.17 After the governor of Florida declared a state of emergency, then-presidents Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro announced a landmark agreement, informally known as the “wet foot, dry foot” policy. Where previously any Cuban who succeeded in reaching U.S. waters had qualified for political asylum, henceforth only those who succeeded in placing one foot on dry American soil would be permitted to remain. These more stringent U.S. migration policies shocked many Cubans, who had begun to view political asylum as a virtual right, and dismayed those who had hoped to be reunited with family members already in Miami (Masud-Piloto 1996). Conditions on the island hit their nadir as Miami-Cubans opposed to the socialist regime, seeing an opportunity to finally force Castro from power, pushed for even tighter restrictions on the embargo. Amidst numerous international predictions of its imminent demise, Cuba’s desperate circumstances forced the repeal of many of the policies intended to bring about a socially and economically egalitarian society. The state opened certain labor categories to individual entrepreneurs, created new Cuban-foreign partnership enterprises, and decriminalized individuals’ possession of foreign currency, opening the floodgates for a flow of remittances from Cubans in the diaspora to their friends and family on the island. Two economies emerged, one founded on the Cuban peso and the other on the U.S. dollar (replaced in 2004 by the Cuban convertible peso, or CUC). While stores and markets selling items in pesos often stood

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barren, the dollar stores known as shopin (“shopping”), evoking a pleasurable consumption absent from the laborious experience of getting by in the peso economy, displayed shelves stocked with imported goods.18 In providing an outlet for popular discontent and desperation, these policy decisions laid the conditions by which individuals’ ground-level practices would transform a previously highly regulated and insular society—a compromise of which Castro and his government was surely aware. Although the opening of the economy provided the state and its citizens with essential avenues to survive the worst years of the crisis, it also created new and sharp economic stratifications in a state founded on the promise of equality. During the years of Soviet subsidization, the differential between highest and lowest paid workers was about five to one (Evenson 2001). By the early 2000s, those working in private entrepreneurism, the tourist sector, or with remittance-sending relatives could enjoy incomes hundreds of times greater than their peso-remunerated compatriots earning the average state wage of approximately fifteen dollars per month (LeoGrande and Thomas 2002; Mesa-Lago and Pérez-Lopez 2005). Today, while many Cubans vaunt their ties to the dollar economies and overseas networks with name-brand jeans, sunglasses, and the highly-desired (although not always functioning) cellphones, recent studies demonstrate that families comprised of state workers earning only in Cuban pesos still spend more than twothirds of their income on food alone (Grogg 2007). In turn, these disparities are reflected in the ongoing debate about whether the Special Period has actually ended, given the ongoing experience of struggle and deprivation that continues to haunt many Cuban families.19 Questions about the reproduction of families, citizens, and the revolution itself have thus surged to the fore as Cubans navigate the local and global landscape of a post-Soviet world. For those who grew up under the state’s promises of nurturance, the Special Period was thus not just an economic crisis; it threatened the entire world that socialism had built around its subjects and the future that it had predicted. This crisis was made clear to me on a moonless Havana night, rendered pitch black by one of the frequent blackouts that plagued the capital in the summer of 2004, one of the worst since the 1990s. My companion was a close friend, Celia Peña, a tiny woman in her mid-fifties, whose small stature was belied by an uproarious laugh and irascible temperament. Known locally for her perpetual cigarette and her penchant for dying her close-cropped hair unnatural shades of red, she was the daughter of a workingclass Afro-Cuban man whose means of making a livelihood had often been compromised by racism. Her mother was a white woman cast off by her family after her marriage, and so Celia’s parents had eagerly embraced the massive social and economic transformations that took place when Celia was a young girl. On reaching adulthood, Celia began a twenty-year career with the Cuban military.

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By the time I met her in 2002, Celia had retired from the military to teach salsa to tourists in the far more lucrative informal dollar economy. As she related it, the precipitous economic crisis made her realize—as it did with many others—the degree to which the successes of the Cuban revolution had been propped up by subsidies from the Soviet Union. No longer comfortable with what she now viewed as Party propaganda, and finding her military salary insufficient for the cost of living in the new Cuba, she decided to resign from both the military and the Communist Party and set herself up as an entrepreneur in the informal and unlicensed gray market for tourists. This decision, however, did not come without its emotional costs, a toll which came starkly into view as we made our way carefully in the darkness along the broken footpaths of Central Havana. When my flashlight illuminated one of the numerous billboards that declared, “Hasta la victoria siempre” (Until victory, always), Celia burst out, “I believed in all of this, I really did. I sacrificed, participated in mass demonstrations, hated the United States, I volunteered my time and my youth. But where is our victory? What is ‘victory,’ and when will it come? But you know, the young people were the first to realize it. My sons understood this long before I did.” As Celia poignantly describes, just as assertions of socialism’s inevitable victory crumbled during the Special Period, so too did the imagined life trajectories that had been built around the state’s master narratives.20 So long as the revolutionary state was able to deliver on its promises of goods, services, and avenues of mobility, Cubans had been willing to invest in the socialist narratives of modernity and social progress and participate in the political life of the state (Pearson 1997). But with the reemergence of poverty and inequality as concerns of the socialist future, many Cubans, both young and old, now express disillusionment with the state and its revolutionary ideals. As life courses radically diverge from those that official socialist teleology led them to expect, Celia is not alone in wondering exactly what constitutes “socialist victory.” What will happen to visions of socialist egalitarianism and progress in the new economic climate? Will “socialist” ideals and values be reproduced by the younger generations who have known nothing but the burgeoning social and economic stratifications of the Special Period and its aftermath? How will relationships between the state and its citizens, men and women, parents and children, be reconfigured in the wake of massive social and economic change? The economic crisis has thus provoked a broader crisis around the reproduction of socialist citizenship as people emigrate, withdraw from participation in political life, reinterpret their personal revolutionary history, or otherwise reposition themselves in relation to the socialist state and national as well as transnational economies. At the level of kin relations, discussions about the difficulty of sustaining children and households are key moments during which Cubans reflect on the meaning of these dramatic social and

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economic changes in post-Soviet Cuba. “In Cuba, even the price of butter is political,” remarked Maria, a 38-year-old hoping to emigrate to Spain with her husband and daughter despite her mother-in-law’s trenchant refusal to leave Cuba. Referring to the familial arguments about whether socialist policy or the U.S. embargo was to blame for the scarcity and exorbitant prices of many goods, her commentary underscores how discussions of the material difficulties that plague familial reproduction become a venue for articulating competing understandings of the state’s decline in economic and ideological power (see also Weinreb 2009). But this is not a story about the inexorable march from socialism to capitalism. This narrative has been problematized by many scholars of the former Soviet Union (Gal and Kligman 2000; Verdery 1996), while the rise of the new socialism in Latin America also troubles any attempts to locate socialism as a now-moribund grand social experiment of the twentieth century. Moreover, many Cubans both young and old still actively believe in the fundamental principles of socialist egalitarianism and social supports—especially as many taken-for-granted services have been whittled away given the state’s ongoing economic difficulties—and are engaged in vigorous, if not always fully public, debates about the shape of the revolution in the future. The intensely politicized nature of the range of social reproduction thus provides a fertile ground for conceptualizing the tensions of post-Soviet Cuba. For many, the undeniable difficulties of providing for children take place against the backdrop of a state that has historically made significant investments into equalizing the terms for the nurturance of the population. Issues of reproduction are inextricably interwoven with the politics of the family and the state; divergent experiences of “the revolution” are articulated at the center of deeply gendered household, kinship, and generational relations, in which concerns over biological and social reproduction are at the fore.

The Field The data for this book are drawn from ethnographic research conducted in the city of Havana over almost a decade, from 2000 to 2009, including an extended thirteen-month research period from 2004 to 2005. Vibrant and complex, Havana is Cuba’s quintessential transnational space (Brennan 2004). In the city’s architectural medley, buildings dating from the period of Spanish colonialism (some in states of crumbling disrepair, others carefully restored under the direction of UNESCO) sit side-by-side with those representing American midcentury modernism, Soviet utilitarianism, and the pre-revolutionary solares, or tenements. Tourists and Cubans here mingle in greater numbers and more freely than anywhere else in the country, the influence and oversight of political

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organs is weaker, and a greater number of families maintain transnational relationships with friends and family overseas through cellphones, limited use of email, and social networks. Although my interviews led me to neighborhoods throughout Havana, my research was primarily situated in the densely populated, historically more impoverished area of Central Havana. Its reputation for poverty and “undisciplined” or disorderly conduct, like all stereotypes, failed to capture the very mixed composition of the neighborhood, and I found its social and economic diversity an ideal setting for observing the transformations and tensions of the post-Soviet economy. My fieldwork drew on three primary sources of data. The first came from immersion in the busy ambit of my neighborhood family doctor clinic. Under the welcoming wing of Dr. Janet Torres, the family doctor who first invited me to join her clinic, I observed prenatal and neonatal healthcare consultations twice a week for eight months, and accompanied doctors on home visits and on several overnight emergency shifts at the local polyclinic. These family doctors also introduced me to other medical personnel in their social and professional networks. Through these contacts, I observed: weekly ultrasound consultations; two ultrasound training sessions for doctors about to be sent on international support missions to serve in Venezuela, part of a political and trade alliance with the government of Hugo Chávez; intermittent reproductive health consultations in two other family doctor clinics; and counseling sessions with the neighborhood family psychologist. I also visited several neonatal intensive care facilities around Havana. Over the months of my fieldwork, I spent between five to fifteen hours weekly observing a core group of seven doctors and nurses. In addition, I was able to speak with fifteen other family doctors and specialists for periods spanning from several hours to several months. As I have related elsewhere (Andaya 2007, 2009a), although I had official authorization to conduct research, my entry into clinical life was facilitated through personal relationships and informal social networks rather than through the Ministry of Health. While this avenue of access had considerable advantages, primarily in the fact that I was known in the clinic as Janet’s friend and associate rather than an unvouched-for outside observer, it also produced a perhaps unreasonable anxiety on my part about my status in the clinic and particularly about the advisability of asking clinic patients for private formal interviews. Given how quickly news circulates in closely knit Cuban communities, I was concerned that these solicitations might lead to inquiries at higher levels about the researcher who had suddenly taken up residence in the clinic, and I did not wish to jeopardize either my hard-won research site or my generous guides to local reproductive policies and politics. Thus while I collected basic demographic data about familial and reproductive histories of pregnant women in the clinic, I gathered additional information about each patient through the

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less formal—although disciplinarily central—techniques of conversation and participant-observation, rather than through formal interviews. My second source of data consisted of the extended, open-ended interviews with forty-five women and twenty men that I (or my Cuban research assistant, Carlos Novoa) conducted about reproductive decision-making and changes in familial life since the Special Period. Some of these interviews also became opportunities for participant-observation, as informants invited me to accompany them on errands, visits with neighbors, or in strolls around their neighborhoods. In addition to providing rich narratives about reproductive choices and difficulties in post-Soviet Cuba, these interviews produced cumulative background information against which to interpret patterns I was observing in the clinic (contraceptive choices, abortion strategies, and so forth). Given the difficulties of interviewing in Cuba—some common issues related to time pressures, unpredictable schedules, or lack of interest, others to more contextually specific concerns about the appropriateness or advisability of speaking with an American researcher—I took an opportunistic approach to interviewing rather than following a strict research protocol or restricting myself to a single neighborhood. About half of the women were from my own personal networks or gathered through “snowball sampling,” a methodology that women undoubtedly thought of as sending me to their friends. I made contact with the remainder through a formal affiliation that my research center established with a community center in an outer Havana neighborhood. The thoughtful and gregarious social worker there, Teresa Villa, was instrumental in introducing me to women willing to be interviewed, and provided essential contextual information. (This fruitful avenue of investigation ended abruptly four months later when the center’s director, who had supported my research petition, was elected to municipal government. In her new role, it became politically inconvenient to have an American researcher wandering, more or less unattended, among her constituency. The termination of my research access with this development was another reminder of the at times tenuous nature of my research position). My interview sample of men was smaller, reflecting both the composition of my personal networks and the fact that the community center had only approved interviews with women, itself a telling detail about perceptions of reproductive responsibility. My research encounters with men, with the exception of eight interviews conducted by me and twelve by my research assistant, therefore tended to be more fortuitous encounters that took place when the male partners of informants were present and willing to be drawn into conversation about a topic that many thought of as a “woman’s subject.” Thus, while I am fully cognizant of the critical and often overlooked role that men play in family life and reproductive decision making, the nature of my data means that this book focuses primarily on the experiences and narratives of women.

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Interviewees were diverse. Categorized according to generational cohorts, six women and three men were children or young adults at the time of the revolution, eighteen women and eight men reached adulthood prior to the fall of the Soviet Union (1959–1988), and twenty-one women and nine men had reached the age of eighteen during the Special Period or its aftermath (1989–present). To the extent possible, I have tried to signal these generational identities not only by including respondents’ ages at the time of the interview, but also in my choice of pseudonyms. As readers familiar with Cuba will be aware, Russianderived names often date their bearers to children born during the strong Soviet influence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whereas the cohort known as the Y Generation for the striking preponderance of names beginning with the letter Y was born in the later 1970s and 1980s. About two-thirds of the participants were currently in established relationships; although most were not legally married (a typical pattern in Cuba), I have followed Cuban practice in using “husband” and “wife” to designate both formally married and cohabitating couples. Participants were also racially diverse, identifying themselves as blancos (“white”), negros (“black”), and mulatos (“mixed descent”), as well as by other terms used to designate various phenotypes of racial mixture (Fernandez 2010). Reflecting the revolutionary emphasis on education, all of those born after 1959 had completed a primary education and entered secondary school, although some had left school prior to completion. Nine of the women and four of the men were professionals with advanced graduate degrees; seven women and three men were retired; ten women were homemakers; three women and six men were self-employed; and fifteen women and seven men worked in the state sector in low- to middle-skill jobs. Although I have included occupations in my descriptions of informants, these commonly used proxies for class status do not map neatly onto the socioeconomic landscape of post-Soviet Cuba. As my friends and informants often complained, educational achievements and formal occupation often do not correlate with economic status in Cuba’s complex economy, where a taxi driver in the private sector can make ten times as much as a state-employed doctor, and where many families survive primarily on remittances, self-employment, or through informal revenue-generating activities. Third, I drew on Cuban professional and popular materials that focused on concerns around reproduction, sexuality, parenting, and family life. My institutional affiliation at the Juan Marinello Center, the national seat of the Working Group on the Family—a loose network of demographers, sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, and historians—gave me the opportunity to attend conferences and to interview Cuban scholars about their work. Supported by the socialist interest in population management, Cuban social scientists have conducted an important body of applied research on various aspects of women and family life, much of which is contained in single-edition theses

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and publications saved from the Soviet-subsidized 1980s or printed during the intense paper shortages of the Special Period. These scholars were unfailingly generous in sharing their knowledge and in facilitating my entrance to institutional libraries such as the Center for Demographic Studies, the Center for Psychological and Sociological Research, and the National Center for Sexual Education, which provided me with access—although not always unrestricted—to this store of Cuban research. The occasional refusals to permit me to access a research report, or the inexplicable disappearance of a publication that I had reviewed only the day before, were reminders of the suspicion with which foreign anthropologists are still regarded—a fact that my colleagues at the Juan Marinello Center often gently pointed out in my moments of fieldwork frustration. In the popular sphere, I collected newspaper articles and magazine stories, recorded radio and television broadcasts, and attended discussion groups in local institutions to round out my understanding of debates on topics such as sexual education and reproductive health, gender relations, and practices of love and romance among Cuban youth. Translations of both Cuban materials and interviews are my own. Still childless when I conducted the bulk of this fieldwork, the fact of becoming a mother (twice over) during the long process of analysis and writing has inevitably meant that I have reread the material collected for this book in the context of my own U.S.-centered experiences of prenatal care, gendered labor and household economies, and the home/work balance, heightening my appreciation for both the difficulties and the benefits of mothering under Cuban socialism of the twenty-first century. This has also entailed grappling with a central tension: as a feminist, I applaud the Cuban state’s commitment to the provision of services such as subsidized childcare and free and accessible abortion and prenatal care. Also as a feminist, however, I am compelled to critically examine the often unintended consequences of state policies as they shape women’s lives in post-Soviet Cuba. As a final note, I wish to draw attention to the difficulties in writing about Cuba in the context of polemical U.S.-Cuban politics, whereby criticisms of various aspects of Cuban social and economic life (whether voiced by the researcher or by Cubans themselves) is read as an indictment of the entire socialist project. I hope that the narratives and stories of this book will be read against the grain of this polarizing rhetoric, as people’s expressions of satisfaction or disgruntlement with life under socialism are contextualized within the history and politics of a state which—despite its contradictions, frustrating and opaque bureaucracy, and inability to fully deliver on its original lofty promises—has produced some remarkable achievements in its efforts to produce a new woman, a new man, and a new society.

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Book Structure In tracking reproduction through family politics and national policies, Conceiving Cuba diverges from canonical anthropology in that it does not focus on a group of people in a single locale, although many of the people with whom I was most centrally involved reappear throughout the text. Instead, the book structure is conceptualized as concentric circles that move outwards both temporally (from the past to the present and beyond) and spatially (from the clinic and household economies to transnational fields). Chapter 2, “Producing the New Woman,” presents a historical overview of early social and policy debates about the connection between women and reproduction, as well as the role of the state in intervening in familial relations. Chapters 3 and 4, “Reproducing Citizens and Socialism in Prenatal Care” and “Abortion and Calculated Risks,” then present a close analysis of reproductive practices in the present; chapter 3 examines how state claims to a socialist moral modernity rely upon intervention in women’s prenatal practices, while chapter 4 moves outward to consider how Cuba’s high abortion rates have generated debate about familial and state responsibility for the nurturance of children and citizens in post-Soviet Cuba. From this fine-grained focus on the intertwining of reproductive politics at the level of gendered bodies, families, and the state, chapters 5 and 6 move outwards again to consider the dilemmas of reproducing families in national and transnational economies. Chapter 5, “Engendered Economies and the Dilemmas of Reproduction,” picks up questions about the connection between women and reproductive labor to explore the gendered contradictions, compromises, and opportunities that have emerged as women and men work to sustain children and households in the new economy. Chapter 6, “Having Faith and Making Family Overseas,” then follows Cubans’ concerns with household and familial reproduction as it shapes their engagement with transnational flows of kin and capital. As Cubans bear children and end pregnancies, debate the gendered organization of labor both in the household and in the workforce, and choose to remain on the island or emigrate, these practices of biological and social reproduction also produce new relationships to kin and state that have implications both for the ideologies of socialist citizenship and for the future shape of the revolution. Drawing on a range of sites and theoretical approaches, this book demonstrates this contested ground as people and the post-Soviet state conceive children and citizens, gendered persons, and engendered futures.

2 Producing the New Woman The Early Revolutionary Years

It is difficult now to capture the profound utopianism that emanates from the writings of the Cuban revolutionaries as they imagined a new society into being. The 1959 revolution was framed as the culmination of a long battle for national sovereignty and the authentic, idealistic, and moral society articulated most cogently by the nationalist poet José Martí in the nineteenth century wars against Spanish colonialism. It promised a society based on full egalitarianism; the state would satisfy the needs of all of its citizens, eradicating the sharp inequalities along the lines of class, race, gender, and region that the revolutionaries viewed as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of capitalism and colonialism. A new society would rise from the ashes of the old; in this grand social experiment, the labor of the people would produce a new socialist person and an entirely new way of life. Inspired by the writings of August Bebel ([1879] 2009), socialist tradition viewed women as the “social barometer” of a civilization’s achievement. Like socialist movements elsewhere, therefore, the early Cuban revolutionaries singled out women as special subjects and objects of social and political work. Consonant with their intellectual roots, they saw the intertwined “social ills” of patriarchy and capitalism as the primary obstacle to women’s equality. Constrained within the domestic sphere and dependent upon men for their survival, women’s true potential for individual and collective emancipation remained captive to their false consciousness, familial expectations, and economic necessity. The revolutionaries’ Marxist-Leninist framework meant that changes in class relations and relations of production were generally prioritized over explicit gender or familial policy. Even so, reforms aimed at incorporating women into the public labor force and ending the exploitation of poor working women inevitably reshaped broader gender and reproductive relations. 24

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Marxists had long insisted that women’s engagement in public labor and activism was the key to their liberation; in Cuba, women’s labor outside the home appeared to be the silver bullet for the problems of both women and the new Cuban state, which experienced a severe labor shortage caused by mass emigration in the years following the revolution. In one bold stroke, the revolutionaries believed, the incorporation of women into the state work force would both liberate their labor from the household for the benefit of the fledgling state, and grant them autonomy from the patriarchal family through their economic independence and emotional self-sufficiency. This would in turn free them to contract conjugal relationships based on companionate love—assumed to be heterosexual—and appreciation for personal qualities rather than concerns around class, racial purity, or economic status. Articulating this new ideal, the minutes of the First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party declare, “Relations between couples under socialism take as their point of departure a different conception, they are based on equality, sincerity, and mutual respect” (Cuban Communist Party 1975). Cuban revolutionaries thus assumed a homology between what they defined as the interests of women and the interests of society. As the fledgling state threw off the shackles of capitalism and imperialism, women too would enjoy an unprecedented liberation from the twin oppressors of poverty and patriarchy. Yet while the revolutionary government launched sustained attacks on the association of reputable femininity with the private sphere of the patriarchal family, early policies reconfigured, but did not dismantle, gendered hierarchies and cultural assumptions about the sources of gendered authority. While state rhetoric exhorted women to remake themselves and society through their engagement in the public sphere, both public policies and informal practices often reiterated and reproduced entrenched ideologies about women’s nurturing and maternal nature. Such largely unexplored contradictions often led to tensions, as women’s association with the labor of nurturance was simultaneously viewed as the primary source of their subordination and as the locus for a new moral society. Heated debates, both within families and among policy-makers, revealed deep social tensions around the reshaping of the Spanish colonial ideologies that linked womanhood to reproduction—seen as both childbearing and responsibility for reproductive labor—as well as the degree to which the state should intervene into “private” gender and familial relations. Cuban women’s fight for their vision of a gender egalitarian society has been the subject of a number of publications by both Cuban and outside observers,1 while Cuban social scientists have examined various facets of gendered and family life. These include: continuing gender inequality and the effects of women’s doble jornada, or the “double day” of both waged labor and domestic

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work; teenage pregnancy and general fertility; intrafamilial tensions and reconciliation; and conjugal relations.2 Ranging from statistical analyses to qualitative interviews, these studies offer valuable insight into the social concerns of revolutionary society, as well as the effort to produce policies and programs that would shape new gendered socialist citizens and families. Rather than a reiteration of this research, this chapter offers a focused overview of how early revolutionary policies with respect to labor (both productive and reproductive) and biological reproduction shaped and were shaped by existing ideologies about gender and gendered practice. The rest of the book then takes up the consequences of these policies, both intended and inadvertent, as they resonate in women’s lives after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Women and Public Work: Out of the House and Onto “the Street” Writing after a visit to Cuba in the 1960s, Elizabeth Sutherland, a young American observer, marveled, “Women were visible everywhere . . . The landscape of Revolutionary Cuba was not a man’s world. No longer were women the janitors, caretakers, and consumers of the society, but also its producers and organizers” (Sutherland 1969). In the early years of the revolution, iconic images of women offering their services to the fledgling revolution became virtually synonymous with the broader social transformations taking place. Carried by the fervor sweeping the country, thousands of women joined the paid workforce. Others volunteered their time in health efforts, agricultural labor, and political rallies and campaigns. In a dramatic symbol of these changes, some 55,000 young urban women—some as young as twelve or thirteen—joined their male counterparts to live and teach in peasant villages for months at a time during the literacy campaigns of the early 1960s, often in defiance of their family’s wishes. Orthodox socialism held that the full incorporation of women into the workforce was a critical measure of national progress toward a more modern, moral, and egalitarian society. In Cuba, the socialist critique of women’s domestic and reproductive roles as the source of their subordination transformed the terrain on which gender relations were imagined, valued, and performed. In the casa/calle (house/street) binary that Cubans inherited from Spanish colonialism, space and gendered morality were tightly intertwined; the spiritual and bodily purity of (some) women was preserved and performed through the maintenance of strict boundaries between the public domain, figured as masculine, and the “feminine” domestic sphere.3 These gendered worlds tightly circumscribed women’s movements, particularly for the middle and upper classes. Men were expected to provide for their dependents through their work in the public sphere, and male ability to support their families without requiring their wives to engage in paid labor was

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central to class and social status. Women were thus largely confined to homebased activities; in their roles as wives and mothers, their presumed heightened moral sensibility protected the family, imagined as a private sanctuary, from the aggressiveness, immorality, and materialism of public life. A woman’s honor and reputation, largely built on pre-marital chastity and marital fidelity, was closely bound to her observation of these boundaries. According to a Spanish adage popular during the colonial era, an honorable woman was one kept in the home with a broken leg (la mujer honrada, la pierna quebrada y en casa) (Fox 1973; Pitt-Rivers 1966). These gender ideologies were deeply intertwined with race and class. As Verena Martínez-Alier (1974) has shown through careful analysis of archival records, the white creole families of Cuba’s post-slavery society consolidated their class position, racial purity, and economic status largely through the exchange of daughters. While white women’s sexual purity and reproductive capacity was carefully guarded, women of color were considered lascivious and sexually available—an ideology reflected in the colonial era refrain that proclaimed, “Just as there is no sweet tamarind, there is no mulata virgin.” For many women of color, opportunities for economic and class mobility were primarily available through relationships formed with white men, whether through concubinage with a man of higher social and economic status or through marriage to a lower-class or impoverished suitor, as well as via the generational process of blanqueamiento, or whitening, through the reproduction of lighter-skinned children. The divisions between public and domestic spheres thus supported not only colonial gender divisions, but also racial and class differences. While “honorable” women were contained within the domestic sphere and supported by male breadwinners, many poor women were unable to conform to these expectations. Their daily entry into the masculine public sphere to labor in the homes, fields, and businesses of wealthier families both produced and confirmed ideological and material distinctions between reputable and disreputable womanhood, whiteness and blackness, wealth and poverty (Allen 2011; Hamilton 2012). Indeed, while a vibrant Cuban women’s movement flourished in Havana during the first part of the twentieth century (Stoner 1991), the writings of early Cuban feminist Mariblanca Sabas Alomá ([1930] 2003) make clear that the desired outcomes of social and political reform for many poor urban women in Havana were economic and conjugal stability—meaning the possibility of remaining within the unpaid domestic sphere with the support of a male breadwinner— rather than the right to work and autonomy from men.4 Even after the end of Spanish colonialism, these gender, class, and racial ideologies remained very much in place, particularly among the more elite classes. Ursula Blanchett-Muñez, born in the 1930s, recalled her prerevolutionary childhood in a privileged Havana family:

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I came from a very wealthy family. My mother died giving birth to me and I was raised like a princess. I had blonde hair and blue, blue eyes. A little princess! I spent all of my time on our estate or visiting our social circle. If I did leave the house, even to go riding on our property, I always had a servant and a dog with me to protect me from los pobres y los negros [poor people and Afro-Cubans], as my father would tell me . . . I was raised to be a wife of a rich man and a mother to his children, to live in that world. But I was independent from the beginning, and oh, how it shocked [my father] when I decided to go to work as a secretary in the early 1950s. He thought it was so improper for me to be going to work, spending all that time with men at my workplace alone. I thought he’d never get over it.

Many women had, of course, already engaged in remunerated labor prior to the revolution. Their participation, however, was generally limited to fields conceived as extensions of their feminine roles, neither altering cultural conceptions about women’s putatively natural affinity for the labor of reproduction and nurturance nor assumptions about the disparate sources of gendered morality. In 1959, women comprised some thirteen percent of the work force (Núñez Sarmiento 2001). Most worked as domestic servants, but women also comprised the overwhelming majority of Cuba’s teachers, social workers, and nonprofessional nurses and midwives. Prostitution also continued to be a source of income for many women, and the 1961 census counted approximately 150,000 prostitutes still working in Cuba. Regardless of their status as paid laborers, women’s moral authority continued to emanate from their sexual purity, devotion to family, and altruistic labor in the home. Socialist conceptions of female citizenship thus posed a direct challenge to established ideas of masculinity and femininity founded on the gendering of both space and moral labor. In classic socialist theory and practice, the new socialist person was to be rational, disciplined, productive and, to a certain extent, undifferentiated by gender. According to this new cosmology, individuals would be valued not according to the highly gendered proscriptions of the prerevolutionary era, but as productive or unproductive members of society. These shifting definitions of value directly undermined established loci of women’s authority. Although women were exempted from the 1971 Anti-Loitering Law that obliged their male counterparts to work, socialist rhetoric clearly elevated women’s labor in the productive sphere over that in the reproductive realm. While celebrating the heroic worker-mother as the ideal socialist woman, the definition of work was restricted to public labor. Housewives were classified as unproductive citizens whose continued existence was considered both an economic drain on state resources and evidence of their inferior political consciousness.

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Concerted efforts were made to incorporate women into the paid labor force through tying older concepts of female virtue to new ideals of socialist labor and revolutionary activity. In mass publicity campaigns, the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) produced posters of women declaring, “My pledge of honor: to occupy an empty job.” Another proclaimed, “As mother, worker, and combatant, a woman takes a job and builds.” In 1962, its first year of publication, Mujeres magazine (the official publication of the FMC) declared that henceforth, “There cannot be a beautiful woman who does not also possess economic independence.”5 Asserting that even physical appeal depended on the internalization of revolutionary goals, this new conception of womanhood made waged labor central to new ideas of femininity and socialist citizenship. Socialist orthodoxy with respect to labor and citizenship thus fundamentally revalued the gendered division between the public and private spheres, celebrating the emancipatory potential of waged labor for women and denouncing the domestic realm as the source of their subordination. Thousands of women responded to the call to adopt new norms of female citizenship and participate in the building of the new society. Celia Peña, first presented in chapter 1, was about ten years old when the revolution took place. Like many poor urban Cubans, her parents lived in a racially mixed neighborhood. When her white mother fell in love with her dark-skinned neighbor, their marriage and subsequent offspring were adamantly rejected by her maternal relatives. Celia’s father, a talented carpenter and craftsman, faced frequent racial discrimination in his search for suitable employment, and eked out a living as an itinerant worker. Her mother, as was common among poorer families of the time, took in laundry as a means to supplement the household income without transgressing domestic boundaries. After the revolution, Celia’s family eagerly embraced the massive social and economic transformations taking place. In the summer of 1959, they joined the hundreds of families socially identified as “black” that flocked to beaches previously designated for whites only. Her father was given full-time work in a state organization and their household enjoyed an unprecedented stability. Celia and her siblings joined the Young Pioneers, a state-run youth group (still extant) established in 1961 to organize social activities and introduce children to revolutionary values. Even Celia’s mother joined the paid workforce, working on the factory floor of a cannery with teams of other female laborers. Celia told me, “She was forty-five years old and she had never worked outside the home before . . . But in the 1960s, there were all of these mobilizations—members of the FMC would come to your home and try to get housewives to go out to work. And it seems that she got excited and decided to join the work force. My father was dead set against it, but what could he do? She said, basically, ‘If you want to keep me, let me go,’ and so she joined the revolution.”

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Yet as with other socialist states, early policies with respect to women were often driven as much by the state’s labor needs and ideological emphasis on production as by its commitment to women’s self-determination (Kruks et al. 1989).6 Faced with high rates of male unemployment inherited from the prerevolutionary era, the new government initially focused primarily on incorporating men into paid employment (as opposed to volunteer labor). Women were in fact not systematically targeted as a potential waged labor force until mass emigrations left the state with a shortage of workers. Between 1961 and 1972, some half million Cubans from an estimated 1961 population of seven million abandoned the island, for reasons ranging from staunch political opposition to the imposition of socialist ideology to more ambivalent concerns about the social and economic direction of the revolution. Despite the ideological espousal of paid labor, therefore, the vast majority of women’s work in these earliest years went unremunerated (although this must be viewed in a social and historical context in which the state provision of basic goods and the dramatic drop in range and quantity of items available for purchase combined to produce a general lack of incentive to pursue paid labor). During the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the missile crisis of 1962, thousands of female volunteers took men’s places in factories, fields, and other workplaces. With a massive labor shortage in the agricultural arena, volunteer brigades comprised entirely of women left their homes for weeks and months to harvest sugar, cotton, fruits, and vegetables. In 1969, in preparation for the (unsuccessful) Ten Million Ton sugar harvest of 1970, the FMC pledged to recruit a hundred thousand women per year to toil alongside men in the fields and sugar mills, as well as to replace men in other industries who had been mobilized for the great harvest. Volunteers visited approximately four hundred thousand homes, speaking with unmarried women and their parents or with married women and their husbands in an effort to incorporate them into the work force (Kaufman Purcell 1973). But despite contributing some forty-one million hours in volunteer labor and state claims that women’s incorporation into the harvest would begin a true “ideological dialogue between [women] and the revolution” (Smith and Padula 1996, 100), the net gain in terms of women’s paid employment was only twenty-seven thousand positions. Arguably, the primary effect of early revolutionary policy was simply to move women’s unremunerated labor from the private realm of familial reproduction to the public sphere of state production. Such efforts, however, often led to familial tensions as men and the state each contested the other’s claims to women’s labor.

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Patriarchal Families and Paternalist States By 1974, Castro acknowledged, “Many of the plans that the revolution is today . . . carrying out could not have been conceived until the great reservoir of human resources that our society possesses in its women was clearly recognized.”7 Urged on by the FMC, the state early acknowledged that women’s ability to participate in productive labor depended on sharing some of the burden of household reproduction. While the state never provided sufficient support to cover women’s needs, it did take important steps towards the partial socialization of reproductive labor through the establishment of workers’ dining halls, public laundromats, paid maternity leave, and state childcare for children from as young as forty-five days, including a few optional live-in institutions for children under five years of age. These services alleviated some of women’s arduous labor in the home, although many critical supports, such as day care institutions, continued to be underfunded and in short supply throughout the revolution (Smith and Padula 1996). State attempts to intervene to harness the “great reservoir” that women’s labor represented, however, often led to familial and conjugal conflicts about women’s changing roles and responsibilities. Some 76 percent of women who entered the labor force in 1969 left before the year was out, citing conflicts with their husbands and difficulties in juggling work and domestic responsibilities (Nazzari 1989). In discussions sponsored by the FMC, women agreed that one of the chief obstacles to their full incorporation into public labor was the disapproval of their male kin (Randall 1974). For many, it was not women’s financial independence that was perceived as the primary threat. One in seven women had already engaged in some kind of remunerated work prior to the revolution. In addition, much of women’s time was channeled towards volunteer, and therefore unpaid, labor. Rather, men’s reluctance to allow “their” women to move freely in the masculine world of the street stemmed from the perception that women were abandoning feminine nurturing roles through their dedication to the state workforce. Reflecting the long-standing association of honorable womanhood with the domestic sphere, women’s occupation of public spaces was considered potentially dangerous to female purity. Men’s concerns about their wives’ entry into the public labor force were not entirely unfounded. Bolstered by a confluence of social and economic factors, including the declining stigma of divorce, changing gender and sexual ideologies, and state policies that guaranteed social support for single mothers, transformations in many women’s public and private lives were tightly intertwined. Women’s entry into mixed-sex occupations, for instance, allowed them unprecedented opportunities to pursue relationships, both platonic and sexual,

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which would have been unthinkable prior to the revolution. Nora Romero, a retired 60-year-old from a working-class family, recalled her husband’s resistance to her decision to seek employment as a low-level administrator in the Department of Transportation in the late 1960s. As a young married woman with a small child, she found life at home frequently tedious and monotonous, especially given the widespread social changes in which many of her peers were actively engaged. Her husband protested her decision, fearing that her participation in the paid labor force would mean her abandonment of her “primary” roles as wife and mother, as well as her involvement with people promulgating “undesirable” ideologies with respect to both gender and society. Laughing, she told me, “My first husband didn’t want me to go out to work, he was a real machista [“macho”]. But then again, I did meet my next two husbands at work!” With the dramatic reshaping of gender roles, as her comment suggests, family life was also undergoing a profound transformation. As the state exhorted women to participate fully in public work, it claimed ever more of women’s time and labor. These demands often took a toll on marital relations, particularly when women’s responsibilities in the labor force were viewed as interfering with their reproductive tasks. Daysi Peña, Celia’s 64-year old sister, recalled the demise of her first marriage under these pressures: We were nineteen when I had my first child, I was pregnant within a month of our marriage. Too young, but we didn’t know anything about these things, my parents never talked about it . . . I was assigned to a job over two hours away, I left at five in the morning to wait for the bus, worked all day, came home at seven or later if the buses were bad, picked up the baby from daycare, fed him, put him to bed. Then often I’d have a meeting of the CDR [neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution] or the FMC in the evening, or my husband would have something, or there would be a rally or a volunteer mobilization or something. I was never home, and between the two of us, we never sat down to a family meal . . . it pulled us apart.

The state inserted itself into home and family, becoming a constant presence in daily life. Propaganda extolling the virtues of socialism or exhorting citizens to join the latest political mobilizations were omnipresent in billboards, newspapers and magazines, and broadcast media. Representatives of the FMC or the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) went door-to-door to press women into participating in revolutionary activities, or to conduct public health campaigns, or ensure that children were attending the appropriate medical consultations as laid out by the latest health policies. Children and adolescents were sent to coeducational boarding schools to receive preparation for proper socialist labor and citizenship, away from their parents’ “traditional”

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gender and social ideologies. Changes in familial life were so complete that when an interviewer asked Che Guevara if the revolution was actively making policy against the family, he responded, “Not so much against the family, as without taking it into consideration” (Bengelsdorf 1985, 37). While the revolution has often been portrayed as anti-family, Carrie Hamilton (2012) points out that love of family was considered a core value to be taught to young party cadets, alongside those of socialism and patriotism. Yet familial sentiment was also inextricably intertwined with devotion to the state; family was considered the basic building block of society. Its principal role under socialism was to raise proper socialist citizens, an obligation that also required families to reject those members who “abandoned” the revolution through emigration. As the state assumed much of the authority that had traditionally been the province of the family patriarch, especially among the rural population and the urban middle and upper classes, the basis for the reproduction of traditional notions of both femininity and masculinity was also transformed. Many men found such challenges to gendered domains of virtue to be deeply unsettling. Articulating a widespread sense of the undermining of traditional gender hierarchies, one male factory worker who emigrated to Chicago after the revolution complained, “A woman [in Cuba] today is every bit a man” (Fox 1973). These developments set in motion broader shifts in ideas about gendered authority. Previously, a “good” woman had been one who deferred first to her father, then to her husband, and finally, in her old age, to her son. Under socialism, women’s willingness to defy their male kin was celebrated as evidence of their political enlightenment and revolutionary commitment. The popular state-run magazines, Bohemia and Mujeres, frequently featured stories about women who had braved the disapproval of their husbands and fathers in order to participate in the social transformations of the revolution. In a reversal of established understandings of gender, it was men who were now perceived to cling to the old armor of tradition and conservatism. The modern socialist woman, by contrast, possessed the superior political consciousness that required her to lead her man or—if necessary—to leave him. Introducing the term machismo, which had been newly popularized by social scientists,8 state organs urged women to challenge machista ideologies by joining forces with the state in the construction of the new society. The early revolutionaries thus imagined a profound reordering of colonial gender and kinship relations: socialist policies of state support would eliminate the economic basis of the family unit and pave the way for the creation of egalitarian and companionate marriages. Yet in many ways, the process of bringing the new socialist citizen into being was also a profoundly conservative one. Disappointing some international socialists who viewed an opening for a radical rethinking of established gender and kinship arrangements, early

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revolutionary policy upheld the heterosexual, nuclear, and legally sanctioned family—associated with the white bourgeoisie—as the ideal socialist family form and the basis for the construction of the new national society. Even the housing units constructed after the revolution were predicated on the model of a nuclear family, ignoring the large extended family groups in which many Cubans lived. The government also initiated a marriage drive known as Operation Family to formally legalize the unions of cohabitating couples. Targeting Cuba’s vast population of cohabitating urban and rural poor, most of whom could not afford the costs associated with legal marriage, the campaign succeeded in marrying over 52,000 couples in group ceremonies by June 1961. Arguably, the goal was not simply the formalization and democratization of marriage as the basis for the reproduction of socialist children and citizens. By linking household registration to the marriage campaigns, the new government also sought to enumerate its population by documenting the existence of its subjects (many of whom had never been registered under prior governments). This brought many Cuban families squarely under the state’s gaze for the first time. In other ways too, the revolutionary state maintained normative gender, kinship, and sexual relations as the moral basis of its nation-building project. Working in Trinidad and Tobago, M. Jacqui Alexander (1994; see also Stoler 2002) argues that postcolonial states, of which Cuba is one, grounded their new nationalism in ideas of respectability. Within the nuclear family, now elevated over other family forms, women were to defend the nation through their maternal roles as the nurturers and educators of the country’s future citizens and through their political mobilization for government campaigns, while men were to serve their nation through public duties and through the adoption of new models of respectable masculine behavior. Within Cuba’s postcolonial and heterosexual nation-family, ‘“proper” sexual and gender performance became central to individuals’ status as revolutionaries (Allen 2011). On the one hand, the revolutionary government mobilized images of the new socialist woman who challenged traditional gender roles and was fully engaged in the construction of a new society through her productive labor. On the other, the policing of moral hygiene to ensure the reproduction of a “healthy” society was a central state concern. Given the prior association of Havana as a sexual playground for foreign tourists, the rehabilitation of prostitutes became a symbol of the moral uplift of early revolutionary society. Sex workers were reincorporated into socialist society through their re-education as teachers, nurses, and dressmakers—occupations deemed to both further the needs of the new nation and appropriate to women’s role as the nurturers of future generations. The revolutionary government also crusaded against homosexuality until well into the 1980s, often incarcerating in labor camps those suspected of “unnatural”—and therefore “counterrevolutionary”—tendencies.

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Throughout the Soviet period, neighborhood representatives of organizations like the FMC and CDR were also enjoined to monitor the moral behavior of their constituents; while both men and women were supposed to conform to socialism’s new moral code, women’s practices came under intensified scrutiny, reproducing a long-standing sexual double standard (Randall 1981; Rosendahl 1997). Thus, even as the state upheld female emancipation as a key symbol of socialist morality and modernity, women in particular were urged to embody a sexual morality appropriate to the new society.9 Ideals of heteronormative masculinity did not go untouched. State media urged men to adopt the new masculine mores of socialist society through egalitarianism in the workplace and at home, although some Cuban scholars have argued that progress towards this goal was achieved primarily through women’s changing expectations of male kin and compatriots, rather than by men themselves (Núñez Sarmiento 2010). Yet in a tension documented in other revolutionary states (Gal and Kligman 2000; Lancaster 1994), while the state sought to fundamentally reshape the relationship between men and women in some arenas, “traditional” ideas of masculinity were reiterated or even celebrated in others. The new Cuban man would be hardworking, familyoriented, and a full participant in the domestic sphere, but also virile, sexually dominant, and capable of defending the honor of both family and country (Rosendahl 1997). As with other socialist revolutions, patriarchal power was often simply shifted from familial relations and centralized in the paternalist state, which was thoroughly gendered as male (Gal and Kligman 2000; Rosendahl 1997). Thus, at the same time that the revolutionaries launched sustained attacks on familial patriarchy as a symbol of capitalism’s moral bankruptcy, the revolutionary government made heteronormative masculinity central to the new socialist political culture that some termed machismo-leninismo (as opposed to MarxistLeninism). Articulating these gendered hierarchies through idioms of kinship, the terms el tío (Uncle) and el papá (Dad) became covert means to refer to the state’s commander-in-chief and the authority of his government. Participation in state culture and revolutionary activity was both militarized and masculinized, despite the unprecedented involvement of women in the military; Celia Peña was just one of the thousands who served in various capacities in these decades. From public health volunteers to youth camps, organizations adopted the military insignia of rank, modeled their dress on military fatigues, and spoke in the language of brigades, campaigns, and squadrons. Nowhere was this military masculinity more evident than in the personage of Fidel Castro, whose public persona was captured most succinctly in his decades-long insistence on military fatigues and his continual self-presentation as a guerrilla unencumbered by wife and children (despite the fact that he has had several long-term

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relationships, including one with Celia Sánchez, a fellow revolutionary fighter, and is father to five children from these partnerships). Political life was masculinized not only in culture but also in composition; as the FMC continually pointed out, women were consistently underrepresented in both state and local government. Even when offered an opportunity for political advancement, many women declined, citing their domestic burdens and their inability to commit to the many night and weekend hours required of the revolutionary vanguard (Aguilar and Chenard 1994). Politics thus remained one of the few domains in which men could pursue traditional venues of authority. Given women’s continued responsibility for the reproduction of household and family, it was often men who rose through the ranks of organized participation in the new state.

Women and Reproductive Labor To a certain degree, socialist policies succeeded in reconfiguring prerevolutionary ideologies around the “public” and “private” and the sources of gendered moral authority. As growing numbers of women entered the labor force, they began to re-signify the traditional association of public domain with masculinity. Yet, as the FMC noted time and again, this movement of women into public domains was not balanced by an equal participation of men in the private sphere of home and family. Women remained primarily responsible for reproductive labor, creating double and triple burdens as they strove to fulfill expectations as mothers, workers, and revolutionaries. As the government readily admitted, women’s reluctance to enter the fulltime work force was not simply attributable to their husbands’ machista ideologies, which socialists viewed as the residue of capitalist influence. From the beginning, the political leadership was aware of the unequal demands on women as they struggled to balance their roles in productive and reproductive work. During the First Congress of the FMC in 1962, Castro himself acknowledged, “Day care centers do not resolve everything, it is necessary to create institutions that allow [a] woman to produce and at the same time fulfill her function as a mother.”10 Yet by the early 1970s, it was obvious that there had been little change in the gender ideologies that associated women with reproductive labor. By contrast with the reams of revolutionary propaganda and human power dedicated to urging women into public labor, efforts to reshape male roles in the domestic worlds of household and family had been far less obvious. During discussions of the Second Congress of the FMC in 1974, representatives expressly noted the contradiction to socialist ideals as male revolutionaries returned to homes in which their wives performed all of the household labor (Randall 1974). Given the continued association of domestic labor with women, many men perceived

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their participation in household chores as profoundly emasculating. Even those willing to engage in household labor tended to view their efforts as helping their wives rather than as an equally shared participation in the household. As Celia Peña recalled, “It was difficult. I’d come home from work and the dishes from breakfast would be still be in the sink. There was dinner to prepare, laundry to do. And this was before the laundry machines came [part of the importation of Soviet goods in the 1970s and 1980s], everything was done by hand. Sometimes my husband would go and wait in the [supermarket] lines for food, or watch the baby while I ran errands, but most of the work fell to me even though I was working too. It’s just the way it was, but sometimes I felt like I’d drop dead on my feet.” In 1975 the government passed the much-lauded Family Code, which made the conjugal sharing of domestic labor and socialization of children a key principle of socialist morality. Now, as one man complained in a CDR meeting during debates prior to the passage of the Family Code, the duties of men would also extend to hanging out the laundry (Randall 1981). This was a particularly sensitive area; while some men were willing to perform domestic chores such as washing dishes in the private space of the home, the demand that they also hang out the laundry would take them onto the balconies, in full view of neighbors and passersby, where their public domestic labor might earn them the mockery of other men. Ironically, both men and women felt deeply ambivalent about the new law. Many men viewed it as yet another state attempt to emasculate them by interceding in private family relations. Women, on the other hand, pointed out that the Family Code had no power to enforce its mandate, and the allowance for divorce on the grounds of unequally shared household chores would simply leave the now-divorced woman responsible for the entirety of domestic life (Smith and Padula 1996). By the 1980s, both foreign and Cuban observers agreed that while the Family Code was an important pedagogical tool, providing guidelines for the ideal socialization for future generations of Cuban citizens, its actual effect on gender roles and responsibilities was debatable; by 1988, the National Study of the Budgeting of Time demonstrated that working women still spent more than twenty-two hours per week in household labor as opposed to just under five hours per week by working men. But women’s continuing association with reproductive labor was not simply attributable to the resistance of their male kin; it also permeated official revolutionary stances and policies. The state’s celebration of production further contributed to the denigration and invisibility of private reproductive labor. Women’s unpaid labor for home and family continued to be perceived as secondary in importance to their “real” work for the state, leaving household chores a largely invisible, devalued, and feminized part of the domestic sphere. Despite constant predictions of increased domestic conveniences with the rise

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in production and prosperity that socialism would bring, women were urged to be patient when the state allocated scarce resources to endeavors considered more politically pressing. Chronic shortages and inefficiencies plagued daily life. Both popular and academic articles of this period record women’s frequent complaints about long queues for rationed goods, the inadequate number of childcare facilities, the bureaucratic allocation of jobs that sometimes assigned working mothers to locations several hours from their home, and state-run laundromats that required two to three weeks to wash a family’s weekly laundry (Reca 1990). Even policies designed to aid working women, such as extending store opening hours until eight thirty on weekday evenings, frequently only lengthened women’s day. Some observers (e.g., Smith and Padula 1996) have further suggested that the Family Code was largely driven by concerns around the social organization of reproductive labor. Tacitly acknowledging both its inability to provide the support demanded by working women and its inadequacy as a parental surrogate, the Family Code effectively returned responsibility for reproductive work to the private domain. Given the well-known overburdening of women, this would have to be a reconfigured private in which socialism’s new man would be an equal participant. And yet, as with many previous familial policies, the Family Code affirmed a traditional notion of gender and sexual relations by establishing the nuclear heterosexual couple as the center of the family unit. At one and the same time, the Family Code represented both a strong assertion of the state’s support for gender equality within the home and a reiteration of a conventional and highly-classed notion of family (Bengelsdorf and Stubbs 1992). Gendered inequalities and the continuing association of women with reproductive labor, at the level of both familial relations and state policy, thus limited women’s ability to embody the new ideals of socialist citizenship. In a political system that awarded points—which could be parlayed into promotions, vacations, or political prestige—to those who participated in voluntary overtime labor, the inadequate realization of state promises of support for working women frequently left them tied to temporary, low-level, or part-time labor that did not accrue the political merit available to their male counterparts. Caught between men’s refusal to fully share in domestic obligations and the state’s reluctance or inability to commit further resources to alleviating women’s domestic burdens, many women’s participation in public life was possible only because domestic labor continued to be shared along gendered generational lines, usually between mothers and daughters. Gender biases within Cuban labor laws further reinforced the reproduction of gendered work: while men could work until the age of sixty, women were required to retire by age fifty-five.11 With the early retirement policies of state socialism, older women frequently

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assumed the duties related to the maintenance of the family and household in a pattern that had also obtained in many households prior to the revolution. Even in the paid labor force, early policies and attitudes often maintained cultural assumptions of women’s greater affinity for reproductive work, simply redirecting them for the development of the nation rather than for individual families. As publications of the FMC frequently highlighted, many women did indeed enter and thrive in nontraditional fields. Most, however, filled positions in the feminized “caring professions,” primarily in the health and education sectors or in service occupations, rather than in the heavy industry often valorized in early socialist discourse. Thus, while socialist orthodoxy largely viewed domestic work as numbing, wasteful, and degrading when performed by unpaid women in the home, similar and often menial labor such as washing clothes, cooking in workers’ dining halls, and childcare (only sometimes remunerated) was celebrated as transformative, emancipatory, and politically progressive once moved into the productive sphere. As Carollee Bengelsdorf has argued, “the very collectivisation of women’s work serve[d] to reinforce the sexual division of labor” (1985, 43). Far from overturning entrenched stereotypes about women’s essential nurturing qualities, state organizations frequently reiterated traditional gender ideologies and divisions of labor, although not without internal debate. Such policies, both explicit and implicit, were deeply rooted in assumptions about gender differences believed to be grounded in nature. In 1964, Trabajadores, the newspaper of the Cuban Workers’ Union, declared, “In offices, teaching and stores, women are better situated than men . . . Women are particularly apt for work that requires manual dexterity; also they are better at monotonous jobs which cause men to despair because of their more impatient nature” (Smith and Padula 1996, 122). Cultural assumptions about the qualities of nurturance and patience deemed inherent to women’s nature, as well as their longstanding association with the reproductive domain, thus constrained the range of occupations viewed as appropriate for women in the public sphere. In 1965, Castro ordered a study of female labor and reproductive function, resulting in the creation of some five hundred categories of female-only employment (under pressure from the FMC, the number of sex-restricted job categories was reduced to three hundred in 1976 and to twenty-five by 1985). Given the need to protect the “development of [women’s] organs,” the “limitations” of their physiques, and the “profound changes during menstruation and maternity,” other jobs were reclassified as exclusively for men. Men and women working in jobs “inappropriate” to their sex were asked to transfer to more suitable employment. The resolutions met with indifferent success; many men refused to transfer, while few women applied for the jobs allotted to them. Finally, the Ministry of Labor dispensed with jobs earmarked solely for women—which the FMC had

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supported—while retaining the prohibition on women in “male” jobs that the FMC had criticized. Through such political interventions, the state both naturalized women as mothers in the new society and appointed itself the guardian of their reproductive capacities (Casal 1980). If women’s unpaid reproductive labor as wives and mothers remained relatively de-prioritized, socialist policies made women’s nurturing roles and protection of their reproductive capacities central to claims about the morality of the new society.

Motherhood, Reproduction, and Socialist Morality In a 1975 speech, Fidel Castro declared, “Socialist society must eradicate every form of discrimination against women . . . But women also have other functions in society . . . They are the creators par excellence of the human being.” In socialism, all citizens were expected to contribute to the building of society according to their abilities. One of the capacities unique to women, of course, was their labor as the bearers of children. Socialism’s productionist bias demanded the reproduction of the human beings whose disciplined and self-sacrificing labor would bring the new utopia into being. In turn, the new efficiency of production would ensure the prosperity of a potentially unlimited number of future citizens. Orthodox socialist population theory thus inverted the presumed relationship between modernization and fertility decline, challenging both the assumptions of demographic transition theory and the practices of Cuba’s former middle class and elite class, among which fertility had been dropping for some time (Diaz-Briquets and Perez 1982). Early Cuban publications made clear an expectation of a demographic boom with the country’s projected economic development: a 1969 editorial in the magazine Cuba opined, “We will never be too many, because the development of a socialist society implies structural changes which at the same time bring about a decrease in growth like the one beginning now in Cuba, the preamble to a new baby boom once the development of technology has liberated new forces and human time has a different dimension” (Landstreet 1976, 226). Similarly, a 1962 article in Mujeres cited Soviet scholar Anton Makarenko to claim that, “One should not limit oneself to a single child . . . Only in families with several children can parental love have a normal character [for raising a ‘wellsocialized’ child].” Linking together the perceived well-being of the family and state, such statements tied the production of multiple children to the formation of properly socialized and socialist citizens. While the state policy never sought to codify motherhood as a patriotic duty (as did other socialist states, most notably Romania), ideologies about women’s “natural function” as mothers had far-reaching consequences. The

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long-standing conflation and sanctification of womanhood and motherhood, pervasive throughout Latin America and a key component of early twentieth century Cuban feminism, was imported directly into revolutionary ideology; motherhood was both the source of women’s moral authority and a fulfillment of their biological destiny.12 Women were essentialized as nurturers of children, and hailed as political subjects through their stakes as mothers, now and in the future. Claiming that women’s political engagement would simply redirect the “essential” feminine and maternal qualities of “love, goodness, vivacity, sweetness, and affability”13 toward the well-being of society as a whole, magazines published by the FMC throughout the 1960s constantly appealed to women-as-mothers, whether in regard to political mobilizations (“Cuban Mothers Mobilize”), the importance of physical activity (“How to Be an Attractive Mommy”), or fashion (“Mommy Goes to a Party!”). In defining motherhood as women’s “other function in society,” the socialist state both naturalized women’s role as reproducers and publicly affirmed its responsibility for the protection of women’s reproductive and mothering capacities. Setting the stage for future linkages between reproductive health and socialist moral legitimacy, the state made the reduction of Cuba’s infant and maternal mortality rates a central priority of public health reforms, appointing itself the guardian of future children who would be “the shoulders that will carry on the great task of building socialism.”14 Reproduction would cease to be a private familial affair, haunted by “traditional” taboos and proscriptions. Gone were the days when, as Dahlia Gómez—a 66-year-old woman originally from the rural western province of Piñar del Río—recalled of her mother, women might bear fourteen children at home with the support of a local midwife and a few female relatives, but see five of them die in early childhood. In massive medical mobilizations, the state built networks of hospitals and clinics, and trained thousands of new doctors and nurses with the goal of providing universal prenatal care, ensuring the birth of all children in medical institutions, and eliminating (and in some cases, criminalizing) the practices of midwifery and curandería (traditional or religious healing) that the revolutionaries saw as undermining the scientific modernity of the new society. Foreshadowing an intense concern with the health of pregnant women and infants as a symbol of a superior socialist modernity, as early as 1962 the revolution had also begun building public neonatal intensive care units for premature and low-birth-weight babies. Even these health-compromised infants were assimilated into triumphant revolutionary narratives; an article on the opening of a neonatal intensive care unit in Havana even declared that those premature babies who “were in a hurry to arrive in the world, as if curious to see what was happening in it” might now be born more frequently than before, “because now more than ever before they are seeing extraordinary things.”15

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Reproduction, gender, and socialist citizenship were tightly interwoven; state and medical oversight into biological reproduction provided new opportunities for underscoring the superior morality and modernity of socialism and for producing a new female citizen. Celebrating the wide-spread introduction of medicalized birth, an early Mujeres article opined, “Science has won ground over superstition and tradition, this time so that women . . . can fully enjoy this, which constitutes our greatest happiness.” 16 Promising that “in the future, in our new homeland,” these medical interventions would permit “birth without pain,” the article ties a utopian vision of pain-free childbirth to narratives of state modernity. Aided by the benevolence of doctors and the state, the laboring mother would realize her “greatest happiness,” exchanging the dangers and constraints of childbearing under conditions of patriarchy, superstition, and tradition for the nurturance of the scientific, if paternalist, state. Yet as the following chapters examine in more detail, policies intended to intervene into reproduction were often uneven, producing further gendered consequences. The state’s concern with women-as-mothers, for example, far outweighed its concern with women as sexual beings, despite a dramatic transformation in sexual mores over the first decades of the revolution. In fact, notwithstanding a philosophical and political commitment to women’s equality, one of the state’s first moves with regard to reproductive policy was the strict enforcement of the existing anti-abortion laws. With this new policing, and with the massive emigration of physicians in the early years of the revolution, access to abortions—previously a well-used method of regulating fertility among all social classes—almost completely disappeared. Moreover, although revolutionary doctors did attempt to introduce contraceptives into health services in the 1960s, as recalled by one of the few gynecologists who remained on the island after the revolution (Fee 1988), the institution of the U.S. embargo in 1962 significantly attenuated the supply of U.S.-made diaphragms and condoms that urban women of the middle and upper classes had enjoyed since the early twentieth century. As women desperate to terminate their pregnancies turned to inexperienced practitioners and self-induced abortions, the number of abortion-related maternal mortalities exploded, along with the number of unwanted births that contributed to the otherwise “euphoric” demographic boom of these years (Diaz-Briquets and Perez 1982). By 1965, although new reproductive health policies had succeeded in dramatically lowering maternal mortality, particularly among the poor and rural populations, more than a third of these mortalities were attributed to clandestine abortions. Faced with the clear failure of health policy, that same year the government ceased its active opposition and returned to a broad interpretation of the existing law. In practice, however, access to abortion continued to be limited until 1972 (women were required to provide

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evidence of their husband’s permission in writing, for instance) and was not decriminalized until 1979. This initial denial of women’s ability to exercise freedom of choice regarding their pregnancies, and the subsequent failure to write unconditional rights to abortion into law for almost twenty years, has been read by many analysts as an inexplicable regression (Smith and Padula 1996) and by exile feminist critics as a permanent stain on the revolutionaries’ moral claims (La Silenciada 1996). Cuban scholars (e.g., Álvarez Vásquez 1985) have argued that this policy did not reflect specific attempts to limit abortion, but rather “the reorganization of the public health system” and the adaptation of the population to “new norms of medical attention,” a statement that may refer to state attempts to protect women by prosecuting unlicensed abortion providers (albeit without replacing them with properly trained alternatives). Although an increase in the birthrate does not appear to have been an explicit goal, the ban may have reflected socialism’s ideological rejection of Malthusian policies of population control. Early revolutionary optimism viewed abortion as unnecessary in a society in which women would be enlightened and empowered participants in the productive economy, sexual and class exploitation would be eliminated, and in which the costs of raising a child would be entirely covered by the state. Policy approaches to women’s reproductive freedom were thus frequently marked by confusion and contradiction. The Cuban state officially acknowledged that women’s control of their fertility was necessary to realize a number of revolutionary aims, including female participation in production, the reduction of maternal and infant mortality rates, and women’s reproductive and social equality. In practice, however, early revolutionary health policies continued to prioritize other social and political goals.17 While free and medically safe abortion became available without restrictions in 1979, a Cuban gynecologist writing for an International Planned Parenthood bulletin in 1971 noted that “when all medical matters, including the sale of diaphragms and oral contraceptives, came under the control of the Ministry of Public Health, public demand exceeded official capacity” (Landstreet 1976, 206). 18 Dahlia Gómez, the 66-year-old woman from Piñar del Río, recalled contraceptive parties where women gathered in the home of a local FMC representative to chat and make contraceptive rings from fishing wire. “But,” she added, “It wasn’t so easy for most women to get one of them. We were lucky, because we made them, but I knew of lots of women who were dying to get their hands on one of those rings.” Shortages of contraceptives lasted until the 1980s, when Soviet-made intrauterine devices (IUDs) and birth control pills became available. These IUDs and high-dosage hormonal pills, however, reportedly caused far more side effects than the homemade rings, and fostered a widespread suspicion about the health effects of contraceptives and their long-term effects (see chapter 4).

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Although the embargo undeniably impacted the state’s ability to provide contraceptives to its population, obstacles were as much ideological as structural. In 1968, health officials admitted that under current mobilizations, contraceptives were simply not a high priority. An American demographer who visited Cuba frequently during the 1960s and 1970s came to the same conclusion, reporting, “There was no concerted educational effort to popularize birth control . . . in contrast with the vigorous educational campaigns mounted by MINSAP [the Ministry of Public Health] in other areas . . . One might almost say there was a policy vacuum with regard to birth control, and MINSAP was not planning to accord it any higher priority in the absence of a clear directive to do so from the government” (Landstreet 1976, 210–11). In fact, the state continued to pay little concerted attention to issues of contraception until the early 1980s, when the impact of repeated abortions on women’s reproductive health became impossible to ignore. Moreover, the provision of contraception often appeared to be driven less by the state’s interest in women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy than in freeing women’s labor. Reflecting the Marxist-Leninist belief that women’s emancipation would proceed naturally from their participation in production, a 1967 article in the newspaper Granma articulated the government’s rationale for investment in contraception: “Contraceptives are provided . . . as an effective means of freeing women from the drudgery of household chores, releasing her for more productive service to society as a whole and freeing her talents for the benefit of all” (Landstreet 1976, 215). Such statements make evident the early revolutionaries’ faith in a series of interlinked assumptions: first, that given access to contraceptives, women would rationally choose to have fewer children. With childbearing and child rearing absorbing less of their time and energy, women would choose to dedicate themselves to public labor, which would in turn lead to their full liberation and equality. While the birthrate did fall dramatically over the course of the revolution, the belief that this would lead naturally to women’s emancipation through participation in production would be constantly challenged, never more so than in the reconfiguration of Cuban society and economy after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Conclusion Throughout the 1960s, images of Cuban women, fully engaged in the construction of a new self and a new society, became iconic of the larger social changes taking place in revolutionary Cuba. For many, the changes brought about by the revolution did provide an unprecedented degree of freedom from the constraints of patriarchy and poverty. Yet in numerous realms of power and practice, the gendered roles and hierarchies that structured prerevolutionary

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society remained firmly in place. Reproductive labor continued to be highly gendered, whether performed by individual women in the family or by groups of female state laborers. The fact that women’s full participation in the public sphere of the new society was limited by their primary responsibility for domestic work remained a central point of contention, despite frequent critiques from both inside and outside Cuba. At the same time, state policies often reproduced entrenched ideologies that naturalized women’s nurturing and reproductive roles, making them central to the morality of the new nation-state. In this partial reshaping of established understandings of masculinity and femininity, both male and female bodies were drawn into the state’s purview in new and unprecedented ways. Yet as with many other nationalist projects (cf. Horn 1994), the bodies of women were seen as the site of both greater dangers and potentials than those of men. In claiming responsibility for the protection and oversight of women, whether laboring or in labor, the paternalist state assumed much of the power that had previously been the province of the family. As the well-being of pregnant women and children became the locus for claims to a new moral society, state policies required ever greater interventions into women’s reproductive behavior.

3 Reproducing Citizens and Socialism in Prenatal Care

It had been a chaotic week at the family doctor clinic where I observed weekly prenatal and neonatal consultations. Dr. Tatiana Medina, one of the two clinic physicians, had taken a month-long medical leave, and Janet was struggling to absorb her colleague’s patients as well as her own. When Janet called in Tatiana’s next patient she frowned immediately at the sight of this very thin young woman in her sixth month of pregnancy, who handed over a plastic bag that contained her clinical history from previous prenatal visits and her most recent ultrasound report. Absorbed in the handwritten notes, Janet noted, “The ultrasound says that the baby’s weight is normal, on the low side, but normal. But you’re very thin, how much have you gained?” She made a quick calculation and then looked up with horror, exclaiming, “You’ve only gained 2.5 kilograms [about 5.5 pounds] in your whole pregnancy? This can’t be!” Aghast, she continued, “This is awful! I have to admit you to a maternity home, because this can’t be—the home right here, a hospital, it doesn’t matter where, because you’ve only gained 2.5 kilograms in your whole pregnancy and you were thin, maybe malnourished, to start with!” I immediately thought of Gisela Navarro, the pregnant patient whose poor weight gain had also caused Janet consternation, and who had just given birth to a daughter with healthy birth weight without requiring admittance to a maternity home. By contrast, the relative severity of this woman’s case set in motion a number of interventions, making explicit the omnipresent anxieties surrounding the birth of low-weight babies for both doctors and the state. Attracted by Janet’s uncharacteristic outburst, two of the nurses walked into the room. Assessing the situation, one added reprovingly, “You have to rest, my dear, because your child is going to be born low birth weight.” Still flustered by her discovery, Janet added, “Yes, you have to have complete rest, I have to admit 46

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you at least until your weight stabilizes, you have to get all the tests done—this is awful!” The young woman’s face registered some displeasure at this prospect, but when she suggested that she could just visit the maternity home on an outpatient basis, Janet quietly informed her that that was unlikely to be permitted. As she left, a waiting patient commented on her thinness. Shaking her head, Janet concurred: If she gives birth to a low-weight [baby], it’s a huge mess for us, because they send [the results] through the hospital, through the Ministry of Public Health, they analyze everything, what happened, why a low-weight [baby] was born . . . [because if the baby is born low birth-weight] it will raise the rate of low-weights in the country, and it could raise the [neonatal] mortality rate as well. Just this year, in this polyclinic zone we’ve had two neonatal deaths, one from congenital malformations and the other, I don’t remember . . . anyway, they counted them as two neonatal deaths. And with these two deaths, because we have so few births, the rate in this municipality is now so high that it raises the rate in the whole country, just with this municipality. We’ve got problems!

Slipping between her anxiety for the welfare of her patient and that of national reproductive health statistics, Janet’s dense commentary neatly illustrates the simultaneous functioning of reproductive health statistics as “technologies of scientific knowledge, of government administration, and of symbolic representation” (Urla 1993, 819). Situating this potentially problematic pregnancy within the context of the neighborhood’s troubling recent birth outcomes, Janet’s concern reflected not only the deaths of two infants, but that those deaths were categorized as neonatal mortalities (rather than fetal deaths) and would thus be entered into the reproductive health statistics for the municipality. Given Cuba’s below-replacement birth rate, particularly in urban areas like Havana, the death of each newborn assumes additional statistical weight with greater potential to affect the national record. In this context, the prospect of a child who might be born low-weight—and whose mother’s own poor weight gain had somehow slipped through the cracks—would reflect poorly on Janet and Tatiana’s own performance. Should the infant not survive, it would also add another black mark to the record of a municipality that was already responsible for raising the national infant mortality rate. Janet’s discovery thus triggered a cascade of interventions aimed at averting the birth of a baby whose potentially compromised long-term health might not only have long term individual and familial consequences, but would also blemish the national reproductive health statistics that are upheld as one of the central achievements of the revolutionary government. Reproduction thus forms a nexus between the health of the individual, population management, and state claims to socialist morality and modernity.

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The Cuban state considers low-weight births highly undesirable, and reproductive health policy dictates the careful monitoring of pregnancies to prevent such outcomes. At the individual level, low-weight babies suffer higher rates of infant mortality, long-term morbidity, and developmental problems. In sufficient numbers, the poor health and productivity of adults born as low-weight babies can be felt at the level of the national population, in decreased economic output and increased health expenditures. Moreover, among international health and development organizations, elevated rates of low-weight births and infant deaths are considered indicative of lack of investment into the welfare of women and children and are often used as a proxy for assessments of good governance. For the Cuban state, prenatal health policy and practice is therefore not simply a means of ensuring the birth of healthy children. Given the international importance of reproductive health statistics as measures of the “goodness” of state policy, prenatal care is also a domain in which women and doctors are urged to uphold markers of socialist moral modernity through ensuring good reproductive outcomes. Intimate practices and relationships are explicitly brought into the public realm of state medical oversight as doctors strive to reduce obstetric risk and produce desired subjects, both in utero and as patients/ mothers. In the process, practices of nurturance and discipline are explicitly coupled in the effort to bring desired maternal and fetal numbers, quite literally, into being.

Reproductive Health and the Morality of the Cuban Socialist State On January 3, 2005, just days after the collection of the final statistics for 2004, the lead headline in Granma, one of the two state-run daily newspapers, screamed, “Infant mortality 5.8!” More sedately, the headline of the other daily, Juventud Rebelde, clarified, “Cuba achieves a mortality rate of 5.8 for every 1,000 live births.” Placing Cuba’s accomplishment in a comparative framework, Granma prominently displayed an image of a healthy, smiling baby next to a chart of selected international statistics, highlighting figures showing that Cuba’s infant mortality rate was slightly higher than that of Canada (5 per 1,000 live births), but lower than that of the United States (7 per 1,000), and far below those of its neighbors, Mexico (23 per 1,000), and Haiti (76 per 1,000). Announcing that Cuba’s infant mortality rate—then the lowest in its history1—placed it among the top thirty-six countries in the world, both newspapers went on to state, “This inarguable accomplishment in the protection of the first of the human rights, that of health, especially that of women and children, was achieved in a country besieged and under embargo for more than four decades by the most powerful might in the world that, on the other hand, exhibited an infant mortality of seven [per thousand live births].”

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Cuba’s superb reproductive health statistics are an achievement of which the government is justifiably proud, since they represent the culmination of the state’s political will and the investment of huge financial and human capital. Cuba’s infant mortality rates have fallen every year, even during the severe economic crisis of the Special Period. Despite massive shortages in food, basic goods, and medical supplies in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, infant mortality rates continued their decline from 11 per 1,000 live births in 1989 to 9 per 1,000 in 1995. Moreover, in 1994 the Cuban Ministry of Public Health established a low-birth-weight clinic to address the increase in rates of low-weight babies caused by the drastic drop in Cubans’ standard of living (Chomsky 2000). That a state under such economic duress as Cuba during the 1990s should continue to invest substantial resources into health care is testament to the government’s commitment to maintaining, and improving upon, previous health gains. Yet public health is not the only issue at stake. In 1987, Castro made clear the terms of the engagement, stating, “Public health became a challenge and a battleground between imperialism and ourselves . . . That is why we have developed the field and are striving to become a medical power with the best possible health indices” (Feinsilver 1993, 203). In this argument, the fully inclusive “public” of public health functions as a moral discourse of counter-hegemony that is explicitly contrasted to both the contemporary United States and to Cuba’s prerevolutionary history of Spanish and American domination. The provision of free and accessible health care for all citizens, regardless of race, class, gender, or region, embodies the moral superiority of socialism over the utilitarianism and inequality considered characteristic of human relations under capitalism. The continued presence of health services is even more symbolic since the 1990s, since the embattled state has diminished its services or reduced subsidies in many key areas such as transportation, childcare, consumer goods, and electricity. In 2005, for example, in response to hostilities by the Bush administration, billboards displaying a smiling group of racially diverse children appeared all around Havana, emblazoned with the rejoinder, “Thanks Mr. Bush, but we’re already vaccinated!” This pointed reminder of Cuban policies that guarantee health coverage for all citizens serves as one avenue through which the state can reiterate its claim to the nurturance and well-being of its population. Such assertions assume additional political weight given Cubans’ experiences of state withdrawal from aspects of health care; as P. Sean Brotherton (2005, 2012) argues, Cuba’s much-lauded health statistics are also supported and achieved through its citizens’ activity in the informal sector to obtain the medications and other supplies that the state can no longer reliably provide. Cuban reproductive and infant health statistics thus resonate far beyond their medical or public health implications. They undergird the moral legitimacy of the revolutionary government both at home and abroad, and are enlisted into

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the ideological battle to assert the continued vitality of the socialist agenda in a new world order. For the Cuban government, as the Granma article makes clear, reproductive health statistics provide a valuable arsenal of discursive weaponry in the fraught ideological exchange that characterizes U.S.–Cuba relations. Framed by the discourse of health care as a human right, the health and survival of babies and pregnant women have been elevated to “sanctified nationality” (Berlant 1998); reproductive health statistics index the well-being of the social body and are central to state claims of the moral superiority of socialism over capitalist inequality. Indeed, when international bodies such as Human Rights Watch charge the government with lack of political freedoms, Cuba has repeatedly pointed to its health indices—often singling out its low rates of infant mortality—as evidence of the moral and political legitimacy of its system. Cuba’s health indicators thus function as powerful “ambassadors for socialism” on a broader international stage (Feinsilver 1993). Cuban health officials and medical professionals pride themselves on the fact that the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization, and UNICEF frequently cite Cuban reproductive health care as a model for other developing nations. Cuba’s health statistics, critical to its moral standing in these global forums, can also be parlayed into material aid such as loans and grants from international health and development agencies, as well as favorable trade deals in exchange for Cuban doctors’ medical service in other countries. As part of these international commitments, Cuba is a signatory to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, a central aim of which is to reduce infant mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015. Given Cuba’s already-low mortality rates, however, this may not prove an easy task. On World Health Day 2005, aptly themed “Every Mother and Child Counts,” the director of the maternal-infant care division at the Ministry of Public Health admitted, “It’s not the same to lower a maternal mortality rate 75 percent from 5 [per 10,000 live births, Cuba’s 2004 maternal mortality rate] as it is from a hundred. But we are at a moment where we have the political will and the available personnel to make this happen.” Of course, reproductive health indices depend not only on political will and medical personnel, but also on the women whose aggregate reproductive practices and birth outcomes become the statistics that represent the health of the population as a whole. I now turn to present an overview of Cuban prenatal care as it played out in the family doctor clinic with which I was associated.

Disciplining Risk, Disciplining Pregnant Subjects The sparsely furnished four-room clinic in which I observed and worked for close to a year was comprised of a waiting room, two doctor’s offices (one clearly

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a makeshift arrangement), and a small adjoining examination room. On its bare walls, the mottled paint was interrupted only by two UNICEF-sponsored AIDS education posters promoting condom use, and a framed postcard claiming, “A Mother is the Purest Form of Love.” Reflecting Cuba’s chronic paper shortage since the fall of the Soviet Union, the educational brochures and reading material often found in doctors’ waiting rooms were entirely absent. Collectively, the two doctors’ offices boasted only five rickety wooden chairs, requiring a constant negotiation of seating as doctors, nurses, and patients passed from room to room. As a frequent occupier of one of the few seats, I was often selfconscious about my presence in the clinic, and strived to make myself useful by taking over the onerous task of inscribing the doctors’ dictated notes onto the patients’ records. In this rather unprepossessing building, with the aid of a rotating threeperson team of nurses and the occasional visits of specialists, the two family doctors—Janet, first presented in chapter 1, and Tatiana, an outgoing practitioner with an occasionally sharp tongue—cared for the thousand or more people (their estimate) living within the radius of a few blocks. The Family Doctor Program, implemented in 1984 to bring health services even closer to the community, had previously dictated a ratio of one doctor and clinic for every urban block; these microlevel health clinics operated under the aegis of neighborhood polyclinics, which offered emergency services and outpatient specialty services, while regional hospitals provided any necessary inpatient and surgical care.2 During my fieldwork, however, the massive mobilization of physicians to serve in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela—in exchange for highly subsidized rates on oil— had required the closure and consolidation of many family doctor clinics. The effect of these closures had been even more pronounced in this densely populated area of Central Havana, where apartments were often subdivided both vertically and horizontally to produce additional makeshift living spaces. To an outsider, the clinic’s atmosphere appeared informal and at times chaotic: patients wandered in and out to greet doctors and give them a small token of appreciation, interrupted consultations to ask a favor of the doctor (frequently a prescription for a family member unable to attend), answered the telephone, and located their own test results when doctors were otherwise occupied. During my fieldwork, a mandate from the Ministry of Public Health prompted a short-lived effort to close the office door during consultations to comply with WHO statements regarding patient privacy. Within a month, however, the doctors had been worn down by their patients’ staunch resistance to this new policy and reverted to freely allowing people to hover in the office doorway as they awaited their turn. In addition to providing routine health care for the neighborhood’s inhabitants, family doctors were responsible for monitoring the health and well-being

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of pregnant women and their infants. Prenatal progress was also monitored by an obstetrician-gynecologist who rotated her visits among a number of family clinics. The specialist currently assigned to this clinic was Dr. Yaína Moreno, a lively and outspoken woman in her late thirties, who was scheduled to be present in the clinic about once a month, although I could in fact detect no predictable routine. This impression was later confirmed by Janet, who noted that the constant departure of physicians on international “missions”—during which medical professionals serve on two- to three-year contracts in war-torn or poverty-stricken areas in exchange for higher salaries and various forms of remuneration for the state, a labor sector that contributes some five billion dollars to the Cuban economy every year (Ravsburg 2013)—and the subsequent shortage of specialists had disrupted the regularity of their visits and the continuity of patient care. Indeed, about six months later, Yaína, who had frequently expressed the desire to be sent on international service as a means to earn additional money to support her young son, herself departed on a three-year mission to Nepal. On this particular morning, Yaína invited me to sit in on a consultation with a young woman during her initial prenatal assessment for her first pregnancy. As part of this routine examination, she instructed her patient about the desirable prenatal diet: “NO: pizza, spaghetti, fried foods, butter, ham, mayonnaise, beer, pork, biscuits, cookies, bread . . .” Seeing her patient’s dismay as she listed many of the most common foods in the Cuban diet, Yaína said, not unkindly, “See? Now you’ve started! Now you have to become disciplined (disciplinada). ‘Disciplined’ means you have to come to the consultations, follow your treatments, do what we tell you to do. It’s about priorities.” Commentary on the importance of discipline as a means to optimize birth outcomes pervaded prenatal consultations. Pregnant women were constantly urged to minimize risk through vigilant monitoring of diet, weight, blood pressure, and psychological well-being, as well as through diligent attendance at the many required consultations. Yaína’s strict diet recommendations, based on international guidelines, were intended to discourage pregnant women from consuming foods with excessive salt and fat or ingesting foods, such as homemade mayonnaise or alcohol, which might be detrimental to fetal health. At the same time, her exhortations aimed to impress upon her patients the necessity of minimizing risk by complying with medical authority and prioritizing their pregnancies over other pressing concerns. A growing body of anthropological research has documented the globalization of biomedical intervention into prenatal care (Georges 2008; Ivry 2009). While assuming different valences in accordance with local contexts, a key characteristic of this biomedical reproductive culture is the proliferation of techniques and technologies for the identification, calculation, and management

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of risk. Such strategies encompass both the incorporation of technologies and tests designed to identify pregnancies or fetuses “at risk,” as well as discourses and practices designed to encourage women to comply with “risk-reducing” behaviors. Paradoxically, rather than eradicating risk, the increasing medicalization of reproduction has made it omnipresent; even apparently normal pregnancies are now believed to require constant vigilance and oversight to ensure desirable outcomes (Taylor 1998). Cuban prenatal care is no exception. Pregnancy and prenatal care in Cuba are considered social achievements whose “successful” culmination results from the assiduous, if hierarchical, collaboration between women and doctors, nurture and discipline, nature and technology. Despite scarce resources, Janet and Tatiana prided themselves on their adherence to international reproductive health policy guidelines aimed at the detection and management of obstetric risk. For the first few months of pregnancy, women designated as low-risk were seen once a month in the clinic to check weight gain, uterine measurements, and blood pressure. In addition to these routine physical examinations, women received a supplemented diet as part of their rations starting at fourteen weeks of pregnancy. Their iron levels were tracked; urinary tests were given before every consultation to check for signs of gestational diabetes, urinary tract infections, or preeclampsia; and both pregnant women and their partners were tested for HIV/AIDS every trimester (an emphasis that reflects Cuba’s concern with maintaining its low HIV infection rates). Women also underwent a minimum of two ultrasounds to track fetal age and weight, as well as a more thorough ultrasound to identify congenital malformations.3 In later stages of pregnancy, the number of clinic visits rose to twice a month, culminating in a weekly clinic visit in the final month. At thirty-six weeks of gestation, all stateemployed women enjoyed fully paid prenatal leave, and many women in jobs considered physically or emotionally taxing could also request medical certificates that permitted them to take leave even earlier in their pregnancy. Women considered high risk (those with a history of difficult pregnancies or miscarriages, or who suffered from genetic conditions, diabetes, or high blood pressure) attended clinic consultations twice a month throughout their pregnancy, as well as special consultations at the local hospital, and could also be referred to an in-patient maternity home for further supervision. In addition to their supervision by a family doctor and a gynecologist, women attended consultations with a nutritionist, a dentist, a geneticist, and with a family psychologist who evaluated their emotional preparation for their pregnancy and the quality of their familial relations, and impressed upon them the importance of breastfeeding. New and expectant mothers were also paid monthly home visits by a doctor or nurse to evaluate home and familial environments, perform routine health checks, teach new parents or mothers-to-be

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about diet and hygienic practices, and look for signs of social problems, such as poor living conditions, alcoholism, and malnutrition, which might pose risks for the health of mother and child. Cuban health policy thus explicitly ties biological and social reproduction together through the language of social costs and population management. Given its responsibility for individuals throughout their life, the Cuban state argues that social and financial investments in prenatal care have significant rewards in the long term: healthy children require less curative medical care and possess greater potential for development, which leads to greater work and educational capacity. Thus, implicit in the Cuban state’s prenatal “gift of health” (Andaya 2009b) is the assumption of reciprocity through which these healthy children, as citizens and subjects, will in the future dedicate their labor and talents for the good of socialist society. Low-weight and health-compromised babies have higher mortality rates and, if they do survive, may suffer considerable developmental and health problems throughout their lives. Since the thinly spread socialist state assumes financial responsibility for the health of the individual from cradle to grave, it has a particular investment in preventing the birth of babies who may require greater medical attention throughout their lives. The eugenic possibilities of this approach are obvious: while Cuban guidelines for genetic counseling insist on a nondirective approach, some observers have noted that abortion is frequently counseled for women with conditions that might lead to negative birth outcomes (Feinsilver 1993; Whiteford and Branch 2008).4 Such policies stand in sharp contrast to the individualist approach and “medical heroism” of market-driven health economies which tout their successes in saving severely health-compromised babies while ignoring the continued labor and financial outlay of families who care for children with significant health and developmental problems (Ginsburg and Rapp 2001; Landsman 2008). The provision of prenatal care, and the associated constellation of discourses and ideologies around risk and discipline, thus falls into a broader history of rational planning that aims to demonstrate the superiority of socialism through managing the “quality” of the population in order to reproduce healthy and productive socialist subjects. But Cuban prenatal care also participates in the aforementioned central contradiction of biomedical prenatal care: at the same time as it promises safer pregnancies and more control over birth outcomes, it also contributes to the construction of pregnancy as a pathological or risky condition that demands constant medical oversight. Pregnant women are subjected to ever-broadening regimes of medical enumeration and surveillance through which their bodily fluctuations are recorded, tabulated, and analyzed in order to detect and minimize obstetric risk. Through this process of clinical observation, medical staff members endeavor to produce disciplined subjects

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who have internalized desired norms and who conform to desired practices without the need for force (Foucault 1978). This elaboration of risk, as in many other countries, has been accompanied by a fundamental shift in the locus of power from the embodied knowledge of women to a reliance on the authoritative knowledge of doctors and technology (Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997; Georges 2008). As Laury Oaks argues in her discussion of U.S. public health campaigns targeting women who smoke during pregnancy, risk assessment is “a disciplinary technology in that it establishes norms, perpetuates reliance on medical experts, and seeks to motivate individuals to attempt to control risk” (2001, 85). In this nexus between state and medical governance and the making of subject-selves, discourses around risk form part of a moral landscape in which “good” patients proactively engage in behaviors thought to minimize risk. Yet apparently similar discourses of risk and discipline are also informed by core cultural values. Research in the United States and in the Britain has highlighted how definitions of risk associated with reproductive technologies tend to engage dominant values of individual autonomy and choice (Franklin 1997; Rapp 1999). Discourses of self-discipline suggest a worldview in which each individual is believed to be endowed with the freedom and the ability to make the “right” choices for optimal health and is thus ultimately responsible for his or her own well-being (Rose 2001). In Cuba, by contrast, discipline is a key political and moral value that describes not only technologies of the self, but also the relationship of the individual to society. The language of discipline is central to political rhetoric; the image of disciplined socialist citizens, portrayed as productive workers, dutiful parents, and fervent patriots tirelessly working together for the development of Cuban socialist society, emerges constantly in official discourse. As in other socialist countries, political ideology envisions individuals “as organically related social beings” (Gammeltoft 2008) and state media, classrooms, and billboards constantly seek to forge desired subjects through intervening in everyday practices. In prenatal care, this ideal of disciplined bodies is refigured to refer to pregnant patients’ compliance with medical guidelines that seek to minimize obstetric risk. Doctors and nurses in the clinic often praised as “disciplined” patients who faithfully attended all the required consultations and maintained their weight and blood pressure between desired norms. In contrast, those women perceived to be at risk for developing complications in their pregnancy were exhorted to be disciplined in their lifestyle choices and to comply with medical authority. The connection between discipline, compliance, and the production of desired medical subjects was so strongly linked in medical discourse that it was even imputed to fetuses. On more than one occasion, the doctor measuring a fetus’s image during an ultrasound commented offhandedly to me, “This

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baby is really disciplined—it’s not difficult at all to get it in the right positions [to measure its head, abdomen, and femur length].” Such personifications of the visualized fetus, as scholars of reproductive technologies have noted in other contexts (Mitchell and Georges 1997), are highly revealing as both medical professionals and future parents project desired cultural attributes (a bouncing boy, a pretty girl) onto the fetal image. For clinic staff, discourses of discipline and risk reduction were thus central to crafting pregnant subjects who aspired to embody the medical norms believed to indicate a healthy pregnancy. At the same time, in keeping with Cuban political rhetoric that enshrines discipline as the defining characteristic both of the ideal socialist person and of the relationship between members of socialist society—and in contrast to the almost exclusive emphasis on individual self-discipline that typifies many market-driven health economies—these regimes of medical surveillance and enumeration also encompassed the relationship between pregnant patients and their doctors, a point to which I return in the final section of this chapter. But in elevating the socialist ideal of the disciplined subject, Cuban political discourse has also produced its opposite—the “undisciplined” person whose behavior is perceived to threaten the well-ordered functioning of society. In the clinic, “undisciplined” (indisciplinadas) patients were those pregnant women that clinic staff perceived to have failed to adopt advised prenatal risk-reducing measures. Yurielis was a boisterous 22-year-old who had moved out of the neighborhood to live with her partner’s family prior to her pregnancy. Even so, she had neglected to file the paperwork needed to formalize her change in residence, and therefore traveled over an hour by bus to attend consultations at the clinic to which she was still legally assigned. She was known for her casual attitude towards prenatal health guidelines, and clinic staff constantly traded stories about her failure to appear at external consultations or her frequent admissions that she had forgotten to take the prenatal vitamins provided free of charge to every pregnant woman. In general, the doctors treated her with a mixture of exasperation and affection, their annoyance at her behavior tempered by her breezy good nature. One morning, however, I entered one of the consultation rooms to see Tatiana angrily castigating Yurielis for yet another infraction, this time a continued failure to attend a specialist appointment to track her low iron levels. After Yurielis promised once again to attend and departed, Janet and the nurses gathered around Tatiana as she exclaimed, “The mothers here are so undisciplined . . . Yurielis was supposed to have gone to that anemia consultation two months ago! I mean, if women can’t even be disciplined and get themselves to their consultations, how can they possibly expect to be good mothers?” Tatiana’s accusation of indiscipline references a broader judgment about desired personhood, in which Yurielis’s perceived self-indulgence, willfulness,

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and lack of planning stands in polar opposition to the qualities of the “proper” socialist subject. At the same time, as suggested by Tatiana’s slippage between her characterization of Yurielis and her condemnation of an entire neighborhood (“the mothers here are so undisciplined”), the concept of indiscipline in prenatal care was also laden with connotations about the culture of both individuals and social groups. Scholars of race in Cuba have argued that, despite revolutionary claims to a raceless society, the ideal socialist citizen is constructed as a white(ened) subject with high levels of cultura, or “culture,” which refers to modes of dress, speech, and comportment that are complexly intertwined with race and class.5 Clinic staff, shaking their heads over an altercation in the street or stories of a fight in the neighborhood the previous night, would frequently declare, “What can you expect? This neighborhood is undisciplined.” Although simply pursing their lips in the direction of the street when I asked what they meant, it is impossible to separate this commentary from the neighborhood’s reputation for poverty, disorderly conduct and (despite its racially mixed composition), a high proportion of Afro-descended Cubans. More specifically, in Tatiana’s opinion, Yurielis’s medical noncompliance displayed a disturbing lack of concern for her own health and that of her future child, casting doubt on her preparation and commitment to mothering. If she could not demonstrate her disciplined maternal nature now by sacrificing other interests and activities to attend her required anemia consultation, Tatiana implied, then she lacked the qualities central to “good” motherhood. (When I talked to her privately, Yurielis, by contrast, drew on her embodied sense of her pregnancy to make her own health assessments, noting, “I’m young, I’m healthy, I feel great, my weight is good, my blood pressure is good. Sometimes the bus doesn’t come, or I can’t get anyone to bring me an hour into the clinic. What’s the big deal if I miss a few tests?”). In assuming that a good mother could be predicted by her self-sacrifice and her willingness to prioritize medical compliance over all else, Tatiana extended medical discourses of risk and discipline to question the mothering capacities of those women whose reproductive practices were considered irresponsible or disorderly. In so doing, she assigned a medical valence to ideals of nurturance and self-sacrificing love associated with popular Cuban representations of motherhood that I discuss more fully in the next chapter.

Contesting Narratives of Irresponsibility: The Gendered Burdens of Prenatal Care While discourses of risk and discipline formed the basis for many of the clinic staff’s judgments about the responsibility of pregnant patients and their preparation for motherhood, these narratives did not always go uncontested. Mari

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Santellano was a quiet woman who was rather unusual among the clinic population in that she was pregnant with her first child in her mid-thirties. Moreover, she arrived at the clinic for her first prenatal appointment already in her second trimester, at fifteen weeks of gestation. Most of the other women I witnessed had reported their pregnancies to clinic doctors between five and nine weeks of gestation; in this context, Mari’s delay was immediately viewed by clinic staff as a possible sign of insufficient maternal dedication. Moreover, unlike most of the other patient-doctor interactions, which proceeded with considerable banter and discussion, her consultations were always terse affairs in which she rarely looked up from her clasped hands. She frequently appeared for her prenatal visits only in the last hour before the clinic closed, and on one occasion, missed her prenatal visit completely and did not come in again until her next scheduled appointment the following month. Given the emphasis on prenatal care, such behavior was relatively rare and Mari was roundly criticized by the nurses who from then on began referring to her privately as La Perdida (the Lost One). It was clear that the clinic staff was perplexed by Mari. Not only did her lack of comfort in the clinic’s informal interactions contravene basic Cuban values around sociality, but she appeared to evince little interest in the details of her pregnancy, unlike most of the women in the clinic’s highly medicalized population. On one afternoon after Mari had left the clinic, Tami, the young student doctor on a temporary residency in the clinic, began discussing her comportment with her next patient. She commented, “With you, I feel a rapport, I feel like you understand when I tell you things, but with her, nothing, she just sits there and doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask questions about her pregnancy or anything. I’d like to send her to the psychologist because I feel like there might be something wrong.” I was rather surprised by her vehemence; for her, Mari’s reticence—and her apparent reluctance to fully embrace the medical oversight set in motion by her pregnancy—indicated a lack of interest in her unborn baby and a possible sign of psychological or domestic trouble. Within the framework of risk and discipline employed by clinic staff, Mari’s occasional “noncompliance” was viewed as irresponsible, irrational, or undisciplined, a reckless endangerment of the welfare of her pregnancy. A month or so after this incident, during her routine prenatal visit, Mari’s blood pressure reading was elevated. Janet gave her an injection to lower her blood pressure, and then sent me to keep her company while she waited on the clinic cot for it to take effect. As we chatted, Mari confided: I can’t stand all of this time [in the clinic], I never thought that it would be so much work (tanto trabajo) . . . But something always happens to me, always something new. First [they found out that] I’m a carrier of sickle cell anemia, and so my husband had to have a test too. After that there was a scare about syphilis, then they lost my tests and I had to do

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them again, then there were problems because the baby wasn’t gaining weight, and now I have high blood pressure. Too much work—and I live alone too. Well, I live with my husband, but you know how men are, they don’t cook or clean. So my mother comes every day from her house, with the transportation problems and everything, and helps out making food and cleaning. And I told her that I’d be quick this time, and here I am, it’s quarter to twelve. I arrived at nine and I’m still here. So much work!

Mari’s description of prenatal appointments as work highlights the gendered labor as women expend time and effort to fulfill the rapidly increasing medical requirements of prenatal care. While the other women with whom I had spoken generally viewed the meticulousness of the doctors’ care within a framework of nurturance, Mari’s account shifted the emphasis from the social work of doctors and women in producing a perfect “product” (Martin 1987) to underscore the other forms of labor for which women are also responsible in their daily lives. While doctors urged women to become disciplined pregnant subjects through prioritizing their pregnancies over all else, Mari’s narrative thus highlights the highly gendered impact that balancing familial responsibilities and prenatal care may have on the extended family of some pregnant women. Indeed, her description of herself as living alone suggests that only women were counted in her tally of the household and its laborers. For Mari, her husband’s lack of participation in household chores meant that time spent attending routine care, lab tests, and external consultations was time away from her domestic obligations, an absence that could only be covered by her mother’s willingness to travel a considerable distance to take her place. Her lateness to clinic appointments and occasional non-appearance reflected not a lack of responsibility or commitment to her pregnancy, but her prior commitments and obligations in her familial domestic division of labor, the neglect of which would have its own consequences. Her apparent failure to internalize the discipline indicative of a moral motherhood was thus based on a different assessment of risk in which the completion of her domestic chores, her mother’s continued goodwill and also, perhaps, her husband’s reactions to her absence, were all weighty factors.

Reshaping Private Worlds: Intervening into Gender and Kinship Relations Family doctors were not oblivious to these conflicting claims to women’s time and energy. The clinic doctors that I met during my fieldwork were almost all women, reflecting the feminized nature of family medicine in Cuba and more generally, and virtually all were mothers themselves. As community coresidents, they were highly aware of the pressures that might constrain women’s ability to adhere to medically advised behavior. Following the WHO definition,

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Cuban health policy views health as a state of bio-social-psychological wellbeing, and the standard evaluation of a newly identified pregnancy includes a number of questions about whether the pregnancy was planned and/or desired, family relations, and household economy. Such questions are designed to give providers broader insight into their patient’s social world and, more pointedly, identify potential threats to a woman’s health or to her ability to fully comply with prenatal health guidelines. These intrusions into the family sphere, however, did not always go uncontested. During one initial evaluation of Luisa Sarmiento, a 28-year-old in her second pregnancy, Tatiana asked about her partner and her family’s attitudes toward the pregnancy: “So they all accept the pregnancy? They’re happy about it?” Luisa, smiling but puzzled, responded, “You have to put down all of this? Look, this is a waste of time, because well, I’m pregnant and that’s that. What does all this have to do with it?” At this, Tatiana put down her pen and explained, “It’s very important because, for example, if you haven’t planned your pregnancy and don’t want it, and neither your partner nor your family accepts it— which happens a lot around here—it will affect your pregnancy. Probably you aren’t going to take care of yourself because really you don’t want it. You’ll eat badly, if we prescribe a medicine you won’t take it, that’s why it’s so important.” In this explanation, Tatiana highlights the presumed lack of compliance that would accompany an undesired pregnancy, requiring additional vigilance on the part of doctors to ensure a positive birth outcome. In fact, given Cuba’s provision of free and safe abortion, the number of undesired pregnancies carried to term (as opposed to pregnancies that were unplanned but later desired) was probably lower than Tatiana suggests, especially in comparison with other countries where abortion is far more difficult to obtain. Faced with Luisa’s gentle challenge to the extension of medical oversight into intimate aspects of domestic and conjugal relations, however, Tatiana defended her medical authority through reference to the presumed risk of an undesired pregnancy to maternal and fetal health. The importance of reproductive health indices for the state’s domestic and international claims to good governance thus underpins the extension of medical authority and surveillance, not only into patients’ reproductive practices, but also into their more private domestic lives. Although Tatiana’s commentary suggests that noncompliance results largely from individual and familial attitudes towards the pregnancy, much of the clinic staff’s discussion of “problem women” involved women whose health concerns were attributed to the pressures of household reproductive labor. While most of the women reported being “spoiled” by their families during pregnancy (no doubt a consequence of Cuba’s low birthrate and the fact that many women would carry only one pregnancy to term), this was not the case for all. Doctors frequently complained

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that the demands by spouses and other kin that pregnant women continue to fulfill their domestic obligations to cook, clean, and provision the house led to their patients’ insufficient weight gain, high blood pressure, and threats of premature birth due to the constant lifting of heavy objects. In such cases, doctors would often recommend bed rest as a way of relieving women of their domestic duties. When they suspected that pregnant patients were continuing to work excessively around the home, Tatiana or Janet would telephone the patient’s family directly from the clinic to reprimand them for not enforcing these recommendations. The women themselves received these blunt interventions differently; while some commented that perhaps now their husbands would listen, others were clearly uncomfortable during the telephone call, and the effectiveness of these strategies was unclear. The doctors viewed such interventions into gender and kinship relations as part of their state-mandated responsibility to ensure good reproductive outcomes. Yet in those cases in which these interventions failed—or when they feared that the pregnancy would either result in the birth of a premature or low-weight baby or pose a risk to the mother’s health—the authority vested in doctors allowed them to attempt to further influence birth outcomes by referring patients to an in-patient maternity home. Inaugurated in the early 1970s, maternity homes were initially intended primarily to serve rural women who often lived at great distances from the nearest maternity hospital. Since Cuba insists that hospital births are safest for mother and child—99.9 percent of Cuban births are in hospitals—rural women nearing their due date are sent to a maternity home to ensure a swift transfer to a hospital at the onset of labor. Maternity homes are now ubiquitous throughout both urban and rural areas; they function to monitor the health of pregnancies that may produce a low birth-weight baby or a fetal, neonatal, or maternal death. They provide diets rich in dairy, fruits and vegetables, and meats, which are foods scarce in the diet of many Cubans, as well as round-the-clock care from a full-time staff of specialists who follow women’s physical progress and teach classes on breastfeeding and early infant childcare. In this atmosphere, women are supposed to rest and relax, free from the demands of family and domestic chores. A pregnant woman may be admitted to a maternity home multiple times during her pregnancy, and remain in residence until doctors agree that her condition has stabilized. Cuban news programming abounds with television spots that highlight various maternity homes around the country, during which women invariably praise the high quality of the food and the care that they have received. Maternity homes are thus portrayed as the ultimate manifestation of state beneficence and nurturance toward pregnant women; they are considered part of the state’s duty to support reproduction and ensure the best possible birth outcomes for all of its citizens, regardless of economic status, race, or region.

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While certainly true, the glowing state media reports of women’s experiences in these homes differed markedly from my observations in the clinic, where admittance into a maternity home was usually framed as a good-natured, but serious, threat should the woman fail to adequately discipline herself. I not infrequently heard variations of Tatiana’s admonishment to a patient whose weight gain exceeded desired norms: “You’ve been undisciplined, but that’s enough already, because you have hypertension. If you’re not disciplined, I’ll put you in the maternity home because I don’t know what you’re eating, but you’re eating too much.” Patients almost invariably reacted to the mention of maternity homes with expressions of dismay as they attempted to cajole the doctor into giving them a little more time to achieve the desired state. When asked directly, however, women nonetheless generally understood these referrals were an expression of the doctor’s concern for the health of their pregnancy—a factor that was ultimately more important than their dislike of a facility that was “not comfortable like home,” or their anxiety about the impact their temporary absence would have on their family. For doctors, maternity homes were an important resource that allowed them to not only ensure that women received needed medical and nutritional attention, but also provided them with a tool to intervene into familial relations that they perceived could be detrimental to the pregnancy, as illustrated by the case of Gisela Navarro, with whose story this book began. At the same time, doctors often expressed sympathy for women’s aversion; Janet agreed with one patient that conditions at some maternity homes were pesado, or depressing, since women had to share a room, and family members were not able to spend the night. Patients often had to supply their own sheets and blankets, there was only one telephone available for use (significant in a country in which access to cell phones is still very limited), and the food intentionally avoided the high salt and fat content that appeal to the taste of many Cubans. Maternity homes thus make explicit the twinning of nurturance and discipline in Cuban prenatal care. Especially given the emphasis on reproductive health statistics, Cuban health policies underscore women’s greater insertion into biomedical disciplinary regimes of enumeration and oversight during the prenatal and postpartum periods as opposed to other moments in their lifecycle. This ever-increasing penetration of doctors and technology into processes of reproduction could be viewed as evidence of Cuban health care’s integration within the more punitive aspects of the state surveillance apparatus (Crabb 2001). Yet Cuba’s policies should also be favorably compared to those of many developing countries where the paucity of resources devoted to state-sponsored prenatal health care leads to high rates of maternal and infant mortality. Closer to home, maternity homes could be contrasted with the punitive policies of some U.S. states, where women can be incarcerated for fetal endangerment, yet

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little help is typically provided in the form of drug rehabilitation or prenatal/ maternal support to help at-risk women (Whiteford and Vitucci 1997). Reproduction thus stands at the intersection between individual reproductive practices and state policies and politics of population management. Supported by the state’s material and symbolic investment into prenatal care, doctors’ discourses and practices of nurturance and discipline are aimed at shaping modern pregnant subjects who will bear healthy children and future citizens. These will, in turn, contribute to the productivity of the socialist state and reaffirm its morality in the international sphere. Cuban reproductive care, however, is also notable in that it is not only pregnant women who are nurtured and disciplined through state health policies, but also doctors themselves.

The Nurturance and Discipline of Doctors in Prenatal Care It was already hot and humid at eight o’clock on this August morning, and the white and glass walls, tiled interior courtyard, and freshly watered plants of the bright new polyclinic building (where I observed ultrasound consultations once a week) offered a particularly welcome respite from the dust and noise of the cobbled street outside. Although the emergency room was empty at this hour, the courtyard space was already filled with people, primarily pregnant women and their companions, waiting for the nurse to give the signal that ultrasounds had begun. At about eight thirty, the doctor nodded to the nurse, and the first patient filed into the small dim room that housed a bed, an aging ultrasound machine acquired some years prior—when an unknown overseas hospital updated its technology and donated the older machines—and a desk where the nurse collected referral slips from patients and took dictated notes from the doctor to inscribe manually in the patient’s health booklet. The atmosphere was courteous and professional. Between the hours of eight thirty and twelve, when the ultrasound clinic closed, the doctor on duty saw some eighteen to twenty patients, approximately one every ten to twelve minutes. The majority were pregnant women sent from the neighborhood family doctor clinics for routine fetal measurements or for the fetal anatomy scan given at around twenty weeks. Still others came to detect a suspected pregnancy; in one of the peculiarities of Cuban national reproductive health care, urinary pregnancy tests were available only in the pharmacies that sold foreign products for CUC, not through the national public health system, and the free ultrasounds given at polyclinics were a primary means of pregnancy detection. Unlike many other countries in which the visualizing power of ultrasound is perceived to facilitate parental bonding with the fetus,6 the single monitor was positioned toward the doctor and, except when turned so the doctor could indicate some aspect of the fetal anatomy, out of view of the woman herself. The

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doctors worked efficiently, calling out fetal measurements and diagnoses to the nurse who diligently recorded them in the patient record, usually addressing women directly only to congratulate them on the health of the fetus (in the case of second-trimester anatomical scans), or to identify the presence or absence of the embryonic sac that indicated a pregnancy in the first weeks of gestation. On this particular morning, the routine was momentarily broken when the door opened and a teenaged girl peered shyly into the dim room. Blocking her entrance, the nurse asked for her referral. The family doctor on duty that day, Dr. Marisa Sánchez, broke into a rare smile. Recognizing the young woman as a patient from her own clinic, Marisa affectionately responded for her, “She doesn’t need a referral. I dream about this young girl, I see her face when I eat my beans!” We laughed, and Marisa went on, “It’s true, because in my sixteen years of work I’ve never had a fetal or maternal death, nor a low-weight or a growth-restricted baby. But it seems like this girl is going to stain my record, she’s going to bring me a low-weight [baby] and lose me my case of beer [that is frequently given as an end-of-year bonus].” A few minutes later, as she measured the shadowy images of the fetus resolving in the ultrasound monitor, Marisa shook her head, saying, “In my opinion, it’s still low-weight . . . It has the head of a fetus of 33 weeks, not your 36 weeks.” Addressing me directly, she went on, “For me, the most important thing is that she gets to 40 weeks . . . I want her to have a child of 5.6 pounds, just 5.6 pounds. I’ve already admitted her to the maternity home so many times, made her stay in the hospital for days at a time, all so that she doesn’t climb the stairs, so that she rests, and still . . .” As she trailed off, the nurse looked admiringly at Marisa, then shook her head at the young woman in mock disapproval, and commented, “How lucky you are to have a doctor that cares so much!” Shifting between her concern for the well-being of her patient’s unborn baby and her half-joking concern for her own reputation and record, Marisa’s commentary underscores the intertwining of state and medical authority in Cuban prenatal care. In expressing her desire for a baby born weighing “just 5.6 pounds,” Marisa was referring to a child born 0.1 pound over the internationally accepted standard for low birth weight (5.5 pounds). Given the state’s goal to continually improve reproductive health indices, doctors can be held accountable for any negative birth outcomes. Their performance is monitored by the Ministry of Public Health, and a record perceived as suboptimal can result in sanctions ranging from the loss of bonuses, like those represented by an annual case of beer, to disqualification from competition for more substantive and highly desired material rewards, such as televisions, that form part of the socialist system for incentivizing state workers, who may have few other avenues for acquiring such commodities. Doctors are thus highly aware of state surveillance over their own work; as Janet commented when discussing the weight gain of

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one of her patients, “If a low-weight baby is born, they don’t leave you alone, they even call you at home, asking why this happened.” In both providing the nurturance required to ensure the birth of healthy babies and urging women to comply with prescribed prenatal practices, family doctors serve as the gatekeepers between the reproductive well-being of individual women and the well-being of national reproductive statistics. This is not to claim that reproductive care in Cuba is driven solely by doctors’ awareness of state oversight. Medical professionals are genuinely concerned about their patients’ welfare—these are, after all, neighbors and often friends. Yet they are also positioned as the moral representatives of the state in the juncture where individual women’s health practices become internationally touted reproductive health statistics. Just as pregnant women are nurtured and disciplined within biomedical regimes of knowledge, doctors are also enmeshed in practices and processes of surveillance and enumeration as the socialist state strives to improve its reproductive health indices. Of course, state disciplinary efforts over its doctors do not go uncontested, and medical professionals both privately and professionally also assert the importance of patients’ individual responsibility for their own health. On one occasion, one of the nurses voiced a complaint about a mother who had repeatedly failed to bring in her child on the days that the nurses were scheduled to vaccinate. Janet promptly chimed in, clearly thinking about Mari’s recent non-appearance for her prenatal visit, “Well, it’s because people here have the bad habit of thinking that it’s the doctor’s responsibility, that it’s the doctors who should be in the streets, climbing the stairs to their apartments, reminding them [of appointments]. But this is your pregnancy, yours, and the one who has to live with this child is you, not me. But they think that the responsibility should fall on the doctor.” Rejecting older models of socialist medical practice in favor of a discourse of individual responsibility, Janet thus suggests that pregnant women, as future mothers and caregivers, must shoulder a greater portion of the responsibility for discipline and the management of prenatal risk. Such discussions underscore an ongoing debate, especially among professionals, about the extent to which socialist emphasis on state nurturance has fostered an unhealthy dependence on paternalist policies. More specifically, they highlight the changing context of medical practice in contemporary Cuba, where the massive mobilization of physicians and medical support staff on international missions, particularly to Venezuela, has left remaining doctors feeling overwhelmed with increased patients and responsibilities (see Andaya 2009b). Yet given the continued political importance of reproductive health indices, protecting state goals requires doctors’ continual oversight over the sexual and reproductive practices of female subjects whose behavior may

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jeopardize the basis of reproductive health statistics. In one instance, Yaína, the obstetrician-gynecologist, informed me that her job was not simply to look for sexually transmitted infections (infecciones de transmisión sexual), but also for sexually transmitted sicknesses (enfermedades de transmisión sexual). Explaining that infection refers only to sexually transmitted bacteria and viruses, whereas sicknesses can also be of neurological or social origin, she told me that her job included “look[ing] for social conduct in high-risk populations . . . so this is very socially important work.” Midway through my fieldwork, a handwritten poster appeared on the clinic’s wall, describing the health profile of the community, including rates of HIV/AIDS, alcoholism, and obesity. Of the 285 women listed as of fertile age, 53 were listed under the category “preconceptional risk,” with 42 identified as “controlled” and 11 as “uncontrolled.” In response to my questions, Janet clarified, “Preconceptional risk [refers to] women of reproductive age that have some kind of sickness—sometimes a biological sickness, but more often [problem] “social cases,” adolescents, those who could have a low-weight baby or a fetal death . . . ‘Controlled’ means that we’ve identified these women, talked to them, and they have a contraceptive method, or they’re sterilized. ‘Uncontrolled’ are those who don’t have any contraceptive placed, aren’t sterilized, don’t use condoms, and could get pregnant.” The medical discourse of risk is thus extended to encompass broader social and ideological motivations for state intervention into reproduction— the problematic biological and social reproduction of undisciplined subjects. “Uncontrolled” women are doubly troublesome: if they continue with their pregnancies, these “social cases” are considered more likely to be the undisciplined pregnant subjects whose health practices and living circumstances may lead to negative birth outcomes. If they choose to terminate their pregnancies, their reproductive practices also contribute to the high abortion rates that the state also considers a consequence of irresponsible reproduction, as I examine in the next chapter.

Conclusion As the intimate practices and attitudes of pregnant women are made part of the public realm of state medical oversight, the ideal of the disciplined, compliant, and risk-reducing pregnant patient is intertwined with the broader socialist national vision of productive and disciplined socialist citizens. At the same time, however, the frictions and anxieties articulated in the relationships among doctors, pregnant women, and the state suggest a shifting ground on which notions of nurturance and discipline, governance and self-governance, are being re-worked with respect to the reproduction of children and statistics in prenatal care.

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Attention to the multivalent meanings of reproduction thus underscores the intersection of individual practices and state political goals through practices of prenatal care. Through discourses of risk and discipline, pregnant women (and their doctors) are urged to produce the desired health statistics that stand for the reproduction of both healthy children and the international moral standing of the Cuban government. Yet as I argue in the next chapter, given the strains of the post-Soviet economy, discourses and practices around reproduction—and in particular, Cuba’s high abortion rate—can also form a basis for women and their families to contest the state’s claims to modernity and socialist progress.

4 Abortion and Calculated Risks

On a cool February afternoon in one of Havana’s outer suburbs, I climbed the steep stairs to the second floor apartment of Idaly Santos. Idaly was a single mother whose gregarious manner concealed a fierce independence. Over the past decade, her mother and siblings had slowly scattered to the United States and to France, leaving her the sole occupant of her large apartment. These relatives were also the source of an ample and dependable flow of income, prompting her to leave her job as an administrator in the state’s tourism sector and rely exclusively on this transnational flow of capital. The previous year, feeling lonely after the recent departure of most of her family, and with her daughter already grown with her own child, she had decided to take advantage of her comfortable household economy to have another child, despite her single status. “Independent reproduction!” she triumphantly proclaimed with a smile. Drawn to her outgoing nature, and eager to hear more of her rather unusual reproductive history, I was delighted when she agreed to a formal interview. Idaly met me at the top of the stairs, cradling her three-month-old son, and waved me into her spacious living room. Expecting a private interview, I was rather taken aback to hear the loud thump of reggaeton (a recent Latin Carribbean musical genre) on the stereo and the laughter of the ten or so people drinking rum from small plastic cups. Brushing away my apologies, Idaly ushered me into a small curtained bedroom to begin our interview. As I began my routine explanation about my research on reproduction, she suddenly interjected, “I’m a super-mother, a super-grandmother, I’m forty-one years old and I just had my son three months ago!” We laughed as I agreed that she was unusual in a cultural context where most women tended to have their children much younger. “It’s true,” she told me, proudly declaiming, “I’m a modern woman, 68

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not like some women around here. I’ve had twenty-four abortions and only two children. I follow the modern norms of developed countries.” Her declaration highlights an apparent contradiction: in highlighting her advanced maternal age and low fertility, she aligns herself with women from developed countries whose low birthrates are considered to index their modernity. Indeed, while troubling to the state’s long-range planning, Cuba’s below-replacement fertility is commonly interpreted in large part as evidence of Cuba’s social modernity, as women both limit and postpone their births in favor of education and careers (Benítez 2003).1 Debates over abortion practices thus take place in the context of state anxiety about the demographic challenges that Cuba will face given its rapidly aging population and its inability to fully reproduce its labor force. Proposals to bolster the birthrate by limiting access to abortion are not unknown; during one conference I attended, a male scholar in the audience argued that if not for abortion, there would be a million more Cubans alive today. However, this is a minority view, and the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) and other Cuban officials and academics have constantly reiterated their support for abortion as a “social gain that cannot be lost” (Heredero 2011). At the same time that she stakes her claim to modernity through her low fertility, however, Idaly’s means of achieving this status—the use of repeated abortion—is frequently viewed in the health and development literature as a traditional form of fertility limitation that represents the failure of the population to embrace a “modern” reproductive decision making, as anthropologists have often noted (Johnson-Hanks 2002; Paxson 2004). According to the teleological narratives inherent to development discourse, with the modernization of the population, women should embrace rational, risk-averse reproductive practices that decrease both their risk of an unwanted pregnancy and of complications resulting from an abortion. Yet Cuba’s abortion rates, among the highest in the world,2 continue to be of concern to medical and public health officials and are considered an anomaly in the country’s otherwise modern demographic profile (Benítez 2003). At the heart of these conflicting interpretations of abortion practice are contested definitions of nurturance, modernity, and social progress, as women and the state consider the problems of reproducing children, households, and modern female citizens in post-Soviet Cuba. Cuban studies recognize the role that economic concerns, low salaries, and scarcity of housing play in the abortion rate, as well as, less frequently, women’s concerns about the range and quality of available contraceptives (Gran 2004). Yet official discourse about abortion is dominated by anxious speculation about women’s apparent willingness to risk their health through multiple abortions, despite national statistics showing that around 77 percent of women between 12 and 49 years of age have

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used some form of contraceptive (Heredero 2011). In this context, high abortion rates are frequently attributed to ignorance about contraceptive methods, “irresponsible” sexual practices, wide cultural acceptance of abortion, or “traditional” gender and family ideologies—in other words, the failure to embody ideals of modern, disciplined, and rational socialist subjects. For the state, high rates of abortion thus index the still-incomplete project to transform reproductive ideologies and gender roles. By contrast, women’s narratives shift the focus to suggest that abortion is in large part a consequence of the state’s inability to deliver on its promises of material prosperity that had underpinned an earlier vision of socialist modernity. Given the constraints in which they make their reproductive decisions, women turn to abortion to assert a responsible motherhood and modern womanhood by bearing only those children for whom they can adequately care. For them, private reproductive practices stem from the very public problems of social reproduction in post-Soviet Cuba.

Abortion Politics in the Cuban Context Since its full legalization in 1979, Cuban abortion policies have been the most liberal in Latin America. By contrast with many countries in the region, as well as an increasing number of U.S. states, the provision of universal, medicalized, and free abortion is considered one of women’s fundamental reproductive rights, and the only legal restrictions stipulate that it must be voluntary and performed in a medical institution by a licensed practitioner. During my fieldwork, two forms of abortion were widely available: legrados, dilation and curettage abortions performed on pregnancies from seven to about ten weeks of gestation; and regulaciones, a vacuum aspiration technique introduced in the 1980s that is performed prior to six weeks of gestation. Doctors strongly encouraged women to interrupt a pregnancy early through the vacuum aspiration method rather than waiting for a legrado since regulaciones could be performed at local polyclinics rather than in hospital facilities, did not require general anesthetic or blood transfusions, and posed less risk of complications. However, Cuba’s progressiveness with respect to abortion policy is counterbalanced by a very short time frame for unrestricted abortion access, and the strict limits placed on secondtrimester abortions stand in sharp contrast to abortion’s ready availability during early pregnancy.3 Women wishing to terminate pregnancies after about ten weeks gestation (as opposed to twenty-four weeks in the state of New York) must petition for an abortion on the grounds of fetal malformation or risk to their own physical or psychological well-being. They must then pass through a formal evaluation committee—comprised of doctors, gynecologists, and a psychologist—which weighs the potential risks of a late abortion (in Cuban terms) against the risks of continuing the pregnancy.

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State restrictions on abortion, however, are not anchored in questions about the moral status of the fetus-as-person, by contrast with many sectors of both Latin American and U.S. society (Ginsburg 1989; Morgan 1998). In a country that was officially atheist until 1992, internationally based Christian churches hold little direct political influence, and open religious practice of any kind became broadly socially acceptable only after the momentous visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998. This history of socialist scientific rationality and its disdain for religiosity has left its mark on Cuban society: while many Cubans identify either as Catholic or as adherents of Santería—a syncretic religion with roots in Catholicism and African religions—concerns around fetal personhood were seldom articulated by the women with whom I lived and worked, and never publicly by doctors or health officials. Rather than its morality as a practice, therefore, abortion politics in Cuba coalesce around concerns with rates and risks. The state holds that abortion is a public health problem; during my fieldwork in 2004, 11 of the 54 maternal mortalities were abortion-related (Acosta 2006) and in 2009, more than half of the cases of female infertility among young women were thought to be due to a history of multiple abortions (Heredero 2011; CNNExpansión 2008).4 For health professionals, reducing the incidence of abortion is a logical way to improve reproductive health. Anxieties around abortion rates are thus inextricable from the state concern about the reproduction of state morality and modernity in the international sphere. After the visit of Pope John Paul II—during which he denounced promiscuous behavior and reliance on abortion in an internationally-televised speech—Fidel Castro declared that it was his duty as a revolutionary to oppose widespread use of abortion and called for improvements to programs of sexual education. Although trends are difficult to track with certainty, since Cuban abortion data were circulated only as internal state documents until well into the 1980s, it appears that official abortion rates peaked in the late 1980s at around 80 abortions for every 100 live births (Benítez 2003).5 By 2009, according to the Ministry of Public Health, this number had been reduced by 50 percent. This dramatic decline, however, was accomplished in large part by a statistical sleight of hand. Perhaps reflecting state desire to favorably manage reproductive indices, regulaciones are not included in the annual abortion rate, although they are reported separately. Given that rates of regulaciones have risen in almost direct proportion to the decline of legrados, rates of pregnancy interruption have in fact remained steady for the past twenty years. Articulating the official perplexity at this apparent contradiction to state and international health and population expectations, a Cuban demographer elaborated to me, “We’re not happy with the rates, it’s true. Why? Because we think that there is no reason to arrive at an abortion, we think that there is sexual education,

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that there’s free health care, that you can go to a doctor and get a contraceptive method that best suits you . . . That’s why we’re not happy.”

Contesting Tradition and Modernity through Abortion Practice Women’s continued reliance on abortion as a means of fertility control has thus elicited sustained state, academic, and medical disapproval about the seemingly irresponsible sexual and reproductive practices that heighten women’s reproductive risk. Explanations for Cuba’s continuing high abortion rate often focus on women’s irresponsible decision making or their lack of awareness of the risks of abortion. One Cuban journalist stated that “many women in Cuba resort to abortion . . . as though it were just another contraceptive method. Some even prefer it to condoms, the pill, or intrauterine devices, without giving a thought to the risks involved or the ethical aspects.” Citing the case of a 21-year-old student awaiting termination of her third pregnancy as evidence of some women’s failure to rationally appraise abortion’s risks, the author went on, “She admitted being afraid of the ‘disagreeable process’ . . . but she does not think about the possible consequences that general anesthesia or the abortion itself could cause, let alone about her chances of dying” (Acosta 2006). Cuban women’s apparent willingness to risk their health through repeated use of abortion is in turn blamed on a traditional or irresponsible reproductive culture that indexes the population’s lesser progress toward modernity compared with the putatively more responsible practices of developed countries. Deploring women’s reliance on abortion as a means of fertility limitation, another Cuban journalist described abortion as a “cultural phenomenon that is transmitted from generation to generation” (Heredero 2011). Similarly, Tami, the student doctor on rotation in Janet and Tatiana’s clinic, commented to me, “Here, we don’t have a responsible culture like they do in the United States. Here people . . . drink some rum, go to a party, and get pregnant, and then if they don’t want it, they just join the line for an abortion.” Underscoring the open and contested meaning of Cuba’s abortion rates, these assessments of abortion as a consequence of the population’s backwardness stand in stark contrast to Idaly’s interpretation of her own reproductive history—24 abortions—as evidence of her modern attitude and her similarity to women in developed countries. Other iterations of these teleological narratives view abortion rates as a consequence of the persistence of traditional sexual values in the population and, in particular, the problem of undesirable roles and ideologies around masculinity, or machismo. Writing in Mujeres magazine, a male doctor linked abortion to the cultural maintenance of the prerevolutionary sexual double standard, arguing that while parents are reluctant to talk to their daughters regarding pregnancy prevention, they continue to view their sons’ sexual activity as a sign

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of virility and manhood. In this machista culture, he claimed, many men “walk through the world ‘transmitting’ . . . an undesired pregnancy and are therefore ‘carriers’ of a potential abortion. Because of their attitude, numerous women and girls end up with a regulación, a pharmaceutical abortion, or an abortion with anesthesia [a legrado]. And any of these three bring risks of health problems or sicknesses because they involve a dangerous operation” (Más 2004, 90). In this somewhat awkward metaphor, the medical language of disease transmission shifts the locus of responsibility for abortion from women to men. Depicting unwanted pregnancies as a consequence of women’s infection by men, this assessment underscores the medical risks associated with abortion while portraying it as a consequence of the entrenched social malaise of machismo. In these representations, high rates of abortion stem from the failure of both men and women to fully disavow the values of a tradition-bound past and embrace the modern reproductive and gender values of a disciplined socialist citizenry. Attempts to reduce abortion indices must therefore begin with the task of modernizing the populace: “To change the number of abortions,” the doctor writing in Mujeres argued, “one must change something even more difficult: values, behaviors, traditional patterns, dichotomous models in the education of boys and girls, and deeply entrenched familial and social beliefs that are tolerated, and even encouraged among us” (Más 2004, 90). For him, high abortion rates are inextricably linked to the problem of the reproduction of traditional gender and familial relations and the still-incomplete project of creating the modern socialist subject, family, and society. While his observation about a continuing sexual double standard holds some truth, such accounts reiterate foundational socialist political narratives in which the modern and beneficent state and its vanguard must lead, educate, and discipline the backwards and unruly population. In so doing, they also obscure the complex and sometimes contradictory history of state rationality with respect to contraception and abortion. Theorizing the binary between modernity and tradition in the context of China’s one-child policy, Susan Greenhalgh argues that “modernizing states, in their rush to generate development, actively create the tradition that affirms and troubles their putative modernity . . . even as they attempt to fabricate modernity alone” (2003, 199). Similarly in Cuba, state policies towards the uplift and modernization of both women and society have at times also inadvertently fostered the construction of sexual and reproductive cultures that are now defined as traditional, irresponsible, and risky. State boarding schools intended to create a new socialist citizenry by educating youth away from the gender, race, and class ideologies of their parents, for example, were themselves implicated in the sudden explosion of teenage pregnancies and abortions. Feeling the desire, or the pressure, to express modern sexual selves who had cast aside traditional taboos, young people explored the

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sexual relations previously constrained by familial and social controls—often without adequate access to sex education or contraceptives. From 1975 to 1983 the most fertile cohort (which had remained fairly steady since before the revolution) dropped from women aged 20 to 24 to women aged 15 to 20. Abortions among teenagers spiked, while one-third of all births during this period were to teenage mothers (Benítez 2003). In these cases, the “traditional” practices of early motherhood (that previously existed among poor and rural women in particular) and high rates of abortion were reproduced in part as a result of early socialist experiments in modern education and reproductive policy. Many women with whom I spoke also problematized the relationship between modernity and tradition in their own reproductive histories. As the following sections show, women’s narratives inverted the presumed hierarchy between the modern state and traditional women by pointing to abortion as a consequence of the state’s inability to fulfill its part in an implicit social contract: the provision of the modern conditions necessary for the reproduction of children and future socialist citizens.

The Meaning of Motherhood Motherhood in Cuba, as in other Latin American and Caribbean countries, is a highly desired and socially valorized role that is deeply intertwined with cultural claims to full female personhood.6 Capturing the near-universal conflation of motherhood and womanhood, Amalia Dominguez, a 28-year-old factory worker, told me, “I wanted to become a mother in order to feel like a woman, to have someone to care for, to love.” Similarly, Jorgito Vera, a 37-year-old truck driver, explained his acquiescence to the desire of his much younger partner to have a child despite already having fathered children with two other women, saying, “Who was I to tell her that she would never know what it was like to be a woman, to be a mother?” Most of my respondents were aware that it is no longer so uncommon for women in Western Europe and in North America to decide to remain childless, yet they all claimed that no Cuban woman would voluntarily choose not to become a mother (in fact, the very few older childless women that I encountered were the subject of either pity for their assumed infertility or speculation about their sexual orientation). Reflecting this social emphasis on motherhood, Mother’s Day is a time of great social importance; as I discovered during my own fieldwork, women of childbearing age who have not yet borne a child will also be presented with flowers and cards by friends and neighbors as a means of including them in this important social ritual, and to recognize their mothering potential, thereby making clear the tacit assumption that they will one day become mothers.

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Both women and men constantly reiterated their belief in the importance of children, by which they almost exclusively meant biological offspring.7 Interviewees would often qualify lengthy narratives about the difficulties of raising children in Cuba’s economic context by quoting the popular adage, “Where there’s room for a bed, there’s room for a cradle,” to emphasize the necessity of having a child even under difficult circumstances. I was given different reasons for desiring children: for some, children were a means of concretizing a marital bond or ensuring a man’s continued presence in the household. For others, children brought meaning and a sense of accomplishment to lives otherwise seen as virtually paralyzed through the constant struggle (lucha) of daily life. As Reinaldo Novillo, a 59-year-old retiree, put it, “Look at us, same stuff on the television, same apartment, same furniture as we’ve had in this apartment for thirty years . . . Children make you feel like you’ve done something, that you’re moving forward in some way.” The most common response to my question about reasons for desiring children, however, reflected beliefs about children as one’s “true family” or one’s “flesh and blood.” In this view, children are the literal embodiment of intergenerational continuity that anchors parents and children within relationships of nurturance and obligation, even as other relationships are broken through death or departure to other countries. Maikel Suárez, age 37, an independent (non-state-affiliated) artist, told me, “From a generational and social point of view, now you have your descendants . . . to have offspring, good or bad, is to have your descendants.” Sondra Cuno, a 32-year-old nurse, further elaborated, “Look, what we say is that your real family is your children, they are your flesh and blood. Your mother and father are going to die, your partner might leave, but you have your children. I have my mother, my aunt, my niece, they are all very important. But my real family is my children. They are the only ones you can depend on to care for you when you’re old and alone.” For Sondra, as with many of my respondents, the importance of children lay in the expectation of reciprocal nurturance and emotional investment— “someone to love and to love you,” as another woman put it. The desire for the reciprocal love and care that is considered children’s obligation to their parents, especially mothers, also encompassed a less explicitly articulated expectation of material support during their parents’ elderly years. While adult children have likely always been valued as a source of emotional succor and caregiving, the importance of offspring as a source of financial support may be on the rise in the post-Soviet economy. One morning in the family doctor clinic, for instance, Janet shook her head over the state of a querulous elderly woman who frequently came to the clinic complaining of stomach pains and low blood pressure. When Janet told her to eat more frequently, the woman retorted that her complete reliance

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on her pension and the ration book meant that she was only usually able to eat one real meal a day. After the woman’s departure, Janet turned to me to explain that the woman’s son—her only child—had emigrated and had as yet been unable or unwilling to send remittances. “And that’s the lesson here,” Janet concluded, “In these times, don’t get left without family.” (Noting the precarious position of elderly Cubans who rely entirely on state pensions, the Cuban government has acknowledged that the typical monthly pension—during my fieldwork, around 120 pesos, or 5 U.S. dollars—is inadequate to cover even basic expenses, and has pledged to increase programs of social supports for the elderly.) Women described the importance of childbearing in terms of the presumptively immutable character of the bonds between mothers and their children, particularly by contrast with the perceived fragility of the conjugal tie. Indeed, some 65 percent of women have separated from at least one marital partner by the time they reach 35 years of age (Benítez 2003). When I asked people to list the relationships most important to them, interviewees inevitably began with their mothers, followed by their children or siblings, and, very occasionally, their fathers. Reflecting research conducted in many parts of the Caribbean, where numerous scholars have commented on the frequent brittleness of conjugal bonds and the strong female networks that typify Caribbean social and familial life, I often found that partners, even current relationships, occupied last place in the list or were completely absent.8 The gendered kinship tally of Sondra Cuno, the nurse—in which she listed her mother, aunt, and niece, but omitted any mention of her current husband and father of her infant—was thus not unusual. Yet despite the cultural and social emphasis on bearing a child, women were careful to stress that the biological act of parturition does not in itself index the achievement of motherhood. Working in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, Ana Cristina Pertierra (2008, 2011) found that adult women derived status from their ability to successfully manage their households, as measured by the cleanliness of their homes and the consistency and quality of food provisions. The struggle to provide for one’s family through labor in the home, sacrifice, and the creative negotiation of material shortages and state bureaucracy was thus a key source of moral standing, identity, and self-worth. Similarly in the narratives of the women I interviewed, it was the ongoing labor of nurturance that was viewed as ennobling, and a key attribute of both adulthood and femininity. Almost universally, my respondents narrated the shift from girlhood to womanhood through reference to the gendered labor of caring for children and households. Olgita Mesa, a 39-year-old woman who ran a modest peso-based business lending books to neighbors, told me, “In truth, I didn’t really feel like a woman until after I had already had my second child. My mother had always lived with me and helped me, and then she remarried and

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moved away. And so I was here alone, and had to do everything by myself with two children: wash, iron, make food, everything. It wasn’t easy, but that’s when I became a woman.” Conversely, the cultural linkage between motherhood and reproductive labor could also form the basis for questioning claims to full womanhood. For instance, during a stroll through the neighborhood in the weeks following our interview, Idaly Santos and I passed by a home where a teenaged girl sat in the doorway, idly playing with the infant in her lap. After we passed out of earshot, Idaly scoffed disdainfully, “She thinks she’s a woman now that she has a baby. But who is it who is taking care of the baby, cooking and cleaning, while she [the young woman] is out on the street? Her mother. She doesn’t know what it is to be a woman.” The highly gendered qualities of nurturance and self-sacrificing reproductive labor are thus central to popular ideologies of moral motherhood. As part of a Mother’s Day television special in 2005, a reporter interviewed passersby about the meaning of motherhood. One young man opined, “A mother is the one who does everything for you. You always remember her voice, her face, her advice, her embraces, the tears that she cried for you.” An older woman echoed his sentiment, explaining, “A mother is the one who cares for you when you are sick or sad, who struggles for you and gives you everything. Because of her sacrifices, a mother is sacred.” This sanctification of motherhood, for which there is no paternal parallel, both valorizes and naturalizes the highly gendered labor of nurturance, making sacrifice a key attribute of the “good” mother. If women’s achievement of socially acknowledged motherhood and womanhood is predicated on gendered reproductive labor and self-sacrifice, these ideologies are also steeped in modernist discourses of economic rationality, in which the modern and moral mother bears only the children for whom she can appropriately provide.9 State surveys demonstrate that despite a professed desire for two to three children, most women point to poor national and household economies as their reason for bearing only one. Women’s abortion narratives thus illustrate the complex and competing interpretations of modernity, responsibility, and nurturance that are negotiated in the shadow of the economic decline Cuba has experienced since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Reproductive Difficulties: Nurturance in a Time of Hardship Given my immersion in the American abortion context, I was struck by the contrast between Cuban women’s openness about their abortion histories and the secrecy that often surrounds the practice in the United States. Not only were most women willing to elaborate on their abortions to me on the first meeting, but lines for regulaciones in polyclinics were frequently open affairs where

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women passed the time chatting with passing acquaintances. I commented on this difference to Teresa Villa, the community social worker with whom I worked in one neighborhood. A warm and unassuming person, Teresa had grown up in the neighborhood and was both well-liked and respected by the community she served, a fact amply demonstrated by the number of people who greeted her from windows and balconies or invited her in for coffee during her rounds. At 32, she was close to me in age and, as the mother of two young daughters herself, I found her to be a thoughtful interpreter of local social and familial life. On this occasion, responding to my observation about reactions to abortion, Teresa immediately commented, “Oh yes! Here, if a woman loses a baby that she wanted, then she might feel bad, she might feel guilty, it’s very traumatic. But if you interrupt a pregnancy because you can’t have this child, what can you do? It just can’t be, you don’t have the conditions.” At the time, we were sitting in her tiny, airless two-room apartment where she lived with her husband and two young daughters. When she had inherited the apartment it consisted of a single room in the overcrowded and decrepit solar (tenement) where she had grown up. Despite her university degree and her husband’s job as a state-employed engineer, she had remained there with her family because they had been unable to exchange the apartment for anything larger (at the time the only legal way to obtain new living quarters, as I describe later in this chapter). Finally, to their overwhelming relief, they had been granted the adjoining room when the family that had lived there emigrated to the United States. Reflecting on the pragmatism with which many women approached abortion, Teresa then told me about the circumstances that had led to her own decision to abort a pregnancy several years prior to the birth of her first child. “There were six of us—my mother, my father, me, my brother and his wife, and my husband when he could stand it, otherwise he’d sleep at his mother’s house—all living in this one-room apartment. And then I got pregnant. Well, there was no choice. I couldn’t make them all live and sleep in a single room with a tiny crying baby too. I didn’t have the conditions (no tenía condiciones).” Women continually invoked the phrase, “I didn’t have the conditions,” as the entry point for reproductive narratives that were densely intertwined with commentary on the gendered burdens of nurturance, in the context of: low state salaries; the dual economy; shortages of housing, food, child care, and transportation; as well as the continuing domestic division of labor. Raquel Ríos, a 31-year-old state-employed factory worker and mother of one, responded to my question about further childbearing with a litany of chores and responsibilities, asserting the rationality and responsibility of her decision to undergo multiple abortions by declaring that she was not “crazy” enough to have another child: “I stand in line for hours sometimes for the bus to go to work, I come home and there’s a blackout, I’m exhausted and still have to go to the bodega [the rations

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dispensary] and shopin [the dollar store], I cook, clean, and do all the laundry by hand . . . And you think we could manage to care for another child? I’m not crazy, I don’t have the conditions.” The prospect of childbearing is a potentially fraught issue given the acute housing crisis in Havana, as Teresa’s story underscores. In both formal interviews and informal conversations, the problems of housing and the problems of family emerged as virtually synonymous: as one popular maxim holds—playing on the similarity between the words casa (house) and casar (to marry)—“Quien quiere casar, casa quiere” (Whoever wants to marry, wants a house). While the revolution inherited a chronic housing shortage, particularly in urban areas, the pressure was exacerbated by revolutionary attitudes that assigned housing construction to a reproductive economy that was de-prioritized within socialist planning (Hamilton 2012). Until 2011, housing could not be commercially transacted; house exchange, or permuta, was the only legal option, one which often required long delays and the agreement of multiple parties, a situation deftly parodied in the Cuban comedy Se Permuta (House Swap). These restrictions, combined with the virtual cessation of urban construction since the 1990s, have meant that many young couples now live in crowded multi-generational homes and contemplate familial life with little possibility of obtaining their own quarters. Since the birth of a child impacts all co-residents, decisions relating to childbearing are often influenced by familial circumstances. While both men and women viewed abortion as ultimately a woman’s personal decision, women frequently explained their choice to keep or terminate an unplanned pregnancy with the simple phrase, “Everyone was in agreement.” By contrast with official discourse about the irresponsibility of repeated abortions, women’s abortion narratives were replete with descriptions of their attempts to fulfill expectations of responsible, moral motherhood through ensuring the conditions for the reproduction of children and households, even as the state retreated from its promises of full nurturance and material progress. In response to my standard interview question about changes in family life since the Special Period, Paula Ruíz, a 48-year-old mother and local FMC representative, explicitly compared conditions for raising children in Soviet and postSoviet times, saying, “I think it’s always been difficult to have children, because life is hard, you have to work hard to give children the things that they need . . . But in the eighties [before the fall of the Soviet bloc] this kind of poverty didn’t exist, there were more things in the stores and everything was cheaper.” For a population reared on the expectation of subsidized consumer goods and values of social equality, the post-Soviet dual economy has substantially impacted its sense of social and economic well-being. Raquel Ríos, the state-employed factory worker, bitterly complained, “I don’t advise anyone to have babies in today’s society. You can’t! Everything is so expensive, everything is in dollars.

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There’s nothing for pesos . . . and so Cubans have to look for dollars through the black market or buy them in the state exchange booths. But the salaries are so low and they haven’t risen. So we live on air.” For both Paula and Raquel, the problems of familial reproduction were intimately tied to crises in the reproduction of the socialist state. Both women and men pointed to low fertility as a consequence of the whittling away of state subsidies and the overwhelming difficulties of surviving in the dual economy. Yainely Marcos, a 24-year-old homemaker and mother of one, answered my question about changes in family life by exclaiming, “Things are so hard now! They don’t give you anything! You know what I got when I gave birth? Two handkerchiefs, one sheet, ten diapers, one pullover, a pair of socks and two towels! When I went to get my guarantía [“guarantee”; state-provided goods for a newborn], I was the only one who kept it, everyone else went out and began selling them on the street. . . . because they need[ed] the money. They say that fertility is very low and the clinics where they do regulaciones are full . . . and it’s [because of] the economic problems.” High abortion rates, Yainely argues, are fundamentally a consequence of the country’s economic problems rather than the population’s lack of sexual responsibility. As families are increasingly required to rely on their own resources, they have responded by limiting their fertility, often post facto. This perspective was echoed from a slightly different angle by Janet, the family doctor, as she discussed with me the increase in older mothers seen in the clinic. Interpreting the growing proportion of children born to mothers over thirty as a consequence of the state’s underdevelopment rather than the modernity that older motherhood is usually thought to index, she explained, “During the Special Period, women chose not to have children, and waited for times to get better. But they never did, and so now women are saying to themselves, ‘If I don’t have my child now I may never be able to have one.’” In the post-Soviet economy, Janet suggests, women now see that the old basis for biological and social reproduction that relied on the state’s provision of adequate “conditions” is unlikely to return. Their reproductive decisions thus reflect a determination to have children while they are biologically able, despite the continuing economic difficulties at the level of both the state and the household. Their commentaries thus highlight the difficult situation in which the socialist state now finds itself: having staked its moral claims on the universal nurturance of citizens and children, it is now judged by standards that it can no longer fully uphold. For Yainely, the perception of the state’s meager contribution upon the birth of her child contravenes basic expectations of the state as a provider and nurturer; state “guarantees” for its newborn citizens in the form of baby goods amount to little when adult family members are struggling for money in this new economy. Her complaint reflects a genuinely felt

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experience of state withdrawal in comparison with decades past (which she in fact knows only through the nostalgic accounts of older family members). At the same time, such perceptions of state neglect must be considered in light of the fact that the governments of most countries provide no material goods at all to parents when their children are born. Questions about the reproduction of children and households have thus become key nodal points for evaluating the “goodness” of the post-Soviet state. As reproductive statistics circulate through different spheres of social life, their meaning is contested by the very people whose practices they purport to describe. For many women, discourses about abortion are framed within a strongly held sense that the socialist state can no longer deliver upon its promises of nurturance and social support. In tying their embodied and statistical knowledge of low fertility and high abortion rates to the difficulty of sustaining modern families in post-Soviet Cuba, my respondents’ reference to “conditions,” as opposed to the narrow medical focus on risk, insisted upon the rationality and responsibility of abortion by pointing to the wider social and economic environment in which such practices were embedded.

Low Fertility as a Sign of the Modern Anthropologists working in diverse contexts have noted how classic modernization theory, which constructs overpopulation as both sign and root cause of national underdevelopment, have permeated popular discourse around reproduction. In many countries, family size has become a potent means of marking locally salient distinctions between traditional and modern, wealthy and poor, urban and rural.10 Under the influence of these international discourses, Cuban women have also come to view fertility regulation as the hallmark of a modern woman and moral mother. In this gendered teleology, those women who bear many children, or who are considered to become mothers at too young an age, are regarded as less modern and less responsible than their less fertile counterparts. While women “in the old days” or those in countries with less “modern” conditions are forced to bear children for whom they could not adequately care, “modern” Cuban women can now make responsible decisions about their childbearing; as a prominent family lawyer declared to me, “Abortion plays a part in the low fertility rate, but [the question] is also: Who are those who have abortions? Those who have enough education and culture to know that it’s bad to bring a child into the world under . . . deficient conditions.” The perception of unconstrained reproduction is thus often read as a failure to achieve ideals of moral and modern motherhood. Georgina Pérez, a 42-year-old homemaker and mother of four, confided to me, “I hear people on the street saying, ‘Look at her, she’s filled herself with children. What a way to

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give birth! What a way to have children for fun!’” Such judgments frame Georgina’s relatively high fertility (especially in the Cuban context) as evidence of her irresponsibility and lack of sexual restraint, a capitulation to immediate and personal gratification at the expense of a responsible motherhood. “Irresponsible” childbearing—like high rates of abortion—was also considered a sign of women’s lack of discipline and modernity. During one prenatal consultation in the family doctor clinic, I witnessed the nurses criticizing a woman who chose to keep an unintended pregnancy despite having given birth just four months prior. “You used to be disciplined,” they exclaimed, “but now you’re undisciplined. What happened to you? Are you playing the victim?” Referencing the specter of the undisciplined female socialist citizen who fails to regulate her sexual and reproductive practices, their jabs suggest that she has become a “victim” to traditional gender relations in which women are oppressed through constant childbearing. Low fertility is closely tied to an evolutionary narrative that is complexly interwoven with discourses of social progress, class, and region, which carry with them racialized connotations. In this view, women with many children are the traditional or irresponsible reproducers and stand as the “other” to socialist ideals of disciplined, modern, and responsible motherhood. The higher fertility of guajiros (country people), for example, is attributed to the persistence of traditional gender and familial practices that emphasize early marriage and fecundity, as well as (only half-jokingly) the increased interest in sexual intercourse given the presumed lack of modern distractions. Similarly, the stereotype of marginales (social marginals)—living in crowded multi-generational homes with numerous unkempt children—is held up as embodied evidence of their sexual and parental irresponsibility and their lack of the culture expected from a disciplined socialist citizen. The normally nonjudgmental social worker, Teresa, surprised me during one neighborhood walk when she indicated a small, poorly lit household with a number of children gathered around the stoop, telling me that this was one of the “marginal” families in her assigned district. In an aside, she murmured, “You know, the richer the people, the less they give birth. Because those with many children live very poorly, they have a lesser cultural level. If you pass that house where we were before, you’ll see all the children there, sitting on the floor, without shoes or clothes, without a sweater even in the winter. There’s no conditions.” Moral judgments about reproductive others were thus shot through with wider discourses of modernity which linked women’s level of culture to fertility, and tied gendered assessments of maternal nurturance to practices of consumption and the achievement of proper “conditions.” In this context, women’s recourse to abortion is one means to realize a culturally valued motherhood within the economic constraints of contemporary Cuba. While the apparent

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failure to regulate reproduction is viewed as a consequence of sexual irresponsibility and lack of proper maternal sentiments of nurturance, responsible and modern mothers turn to abortion so as to bear only those children for whom there are adequate “conditions.” Inverting common U.S. interpretations of abortion as a refusal to nurture, women commonly quipped in response to neighbors’ queries about their pregnancy status, “I was pregnant, but I sent it to study en el exterior because I didn’t have the conditions.” This typically Cuban gallows humor plays on the double meaning of exterior as “outside” and “overseas,” reframing abortion as an act of maternal caring. In this image, the fetus is given the possibility of traveling and studying abroad, an opportunity out of reach of most Cubans, while simultaneously reflecting on the lack of “conditions” for responsible reproduction in contemporary Cuba.

The Riskiness of Contraceptives Time and again, women’s narratives drew my attention to the social, cultural, and economic “conditions” in which they turned to abortion as a moral and responsible decision. Yet for Cuban medical and public health professionals, the key question is why women would rely on limiting births post facto through abortion, rather than limiting and controlling fertility through contraception. One contributing factor, as both health officials and my respondents were quick to point out, is the legality, accessibility, and relative safety of abortion in Cuba, as well as a broad social acceptance of pregnancy termination (Bélanger and Flynn 2009).11 However, despite occasional speculation about the sexual irresponsibility of others, none of my respondents portrayed their own abortion histories as a reproductive choice preferable to contraception, in contrast with some women interviewed in Cuban popular articles on the subject (Acosta 2006). Rather, they argued that their recourse to abortion resulted from the risks and inadequacies of the unhealthy contraceptive options available to them. In public health discussions, high abortion rates are frequently attributed to women’s ignorance about available contraceptives and their proper use. A Cuban survey conducted in conjunction with the U.N. Population Fund, for example, found that 30 percent of women requesting abortions claimed to be inadequately informed about their contraceptive options (Acosta 2006). This number is striking given the availability of contraceptive education in high schools, community centers, and medical clinics, as well as the fact that contraception is a frequent subject of television programming, radio shows, and discussion groups. Women’s reported lack of information reveals that these public health campaigns are not reaching their target audiences, either due to the medium of presentation or—as suggested by a Cuban sociologist studying teenage pregnancy—because contraceptive messages tend to get lost in

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campaigns where discussion of sexual health tends to be dominated by HIV prevention. Indeed, outside one polyclinic room where regulaciones were performed and where information about birth control would seem almost obligatory, the small notice board beside the door was dominated by glossy, colorful UNICEF sponsored posters about HIV prevention. Beneath this, a small piece of paper stated simply, “Regulaciones are not free of possible risks. Don’t use them as a contraceptive. The most frequent complications may be: pain, bleeding, infection, contraceptive failure [for IUDs], perforation.” Finally, a small typed printout described “Most Utilized Contraceptives: Diaphragm, Condoms, Pills, Vaccination, Implants, Lippes Loop, Copper T, Multiload.” Not only was there no further explanation about the advantages and disadvantages of each method, but rather confusingly, many of these contraceptives are still not currently available in Cuba. Further, Cuban studies have found that some 20 percent of unwanted pregnancies result from IUD failure12 (Más 2004) and a further 52 percent occurred after women were using, and then abandoned, a birth control method (Acosta 2006; Bélanger and Flynn 2009). This statistical portrait suggests, not a population that is unaware of contraceptive availability, but one that is deeply unsatisfied by its contraceptive options. In contrast to state representations of abortion as a medical risk, my respondents frequently stated that available contraceptives carried significant risks to women’s health and well-being.13 Reproductive histories were often rife with complaints about the quality of readily available contraceptives. The most commonly used contraceptive in the United States, the birth control pill, is still used relatively little in Cuba, and many women continue to view it with suspicion, remembering the high-dosage Soviet-made products that had reportedly led to many health problems among users. A number of the women I interviewed—including, to my surprise, Sondra Cuno, the nurse—told me that the contraceptive pill should be avoided as it induced facial hair, weight gain, and secondary male characteristics. The unpopularity of the pill also reflects the difficulties of obtaining a constant supply given the U.S. embargo that tightly constrains the Cuban state’s ability to purchase pharmaceuticals at affordable rates. Although the state now manufactures its own generic version, interruptions in manufacturing and distribution still make this an unreliable, and therefore ineffective, birth control method. Only two of the women I interviewed were currently using this as their primary contraceptive, and they considered it a coup if they were able to purchase a six-month supply at a time; otherwise they were forced either to take a temporary hiatus or to switch to another pill with a potentially different dosage. These shifts between different versions of the pill can be complicated: triumphantly displaying a four-month supply of pills that she had succeeded in acquiring for her daughter, Jorgelia Estrada, the mother of a 16-year-old girl, told me that they had previously been

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carefully breaking different brands of contraceptive pill into halves and quarters in an attempt to match dosages from month to month—certainly a potential recipe for hormonal swings and other undesirable side effects. Condoms, always a presence on the Cuban contraceptive scene, have become far more readily available since the initiation of the massive UNICEFsupported HIV/AIDS education campaigns. Yet they continue to be associated with prevention of HIV infection in new and fleeting relationships rather than as a form of fertility limitation. As a Cuban sociologist commented, “In our country the promotion of sexual health is centered . . . on the condom as a means to prevent AIDS [and] STDs and not to control fertility . . . But [the consequence] is that many youths think that the only and exclusive thing that it does is prevent AIDS. When they talk about condoms . . . they never give a response associated with controlling fertility.” Further, Cuban researchers frequently complain that both men and women often resist using condoms, and see them as unnecessary and undesirable in the context of stable and monogamous relationships. In my interviews, both male and female respondents agreed that condoms were undesirable in long-term relationships, complaining about the reduction in sexual sensation, interruption of sexual spontaneity, suspicions of infidelity on the part of one or both partners, as well as, at times, male resentment of the interference with unrestrained sexual intercourse that is often associated with virility and masculine power.14 This decidedly ambivalent attitude towards condoms was clearly evident in interviews conducted with men; while all stated that birth control was the responsibility of both partners, almost half indicated that they found condoms bothersome and refused to use them. In several of these cases, their partners had become pregnant and had to turn to abortion as a consequence. As in many developing countries where contraceptive cost and longevity is a factor, female sterilization and IUDs are the most common forms of fertility control. IUDs are generally recommended for women and teenagers alike; however, they were far from a satisfactory solution for many women. Reflecting the findings of state surveys, many of the women I interviewed reported abandoning this method after experiencing pain, bleeding, infection, internal damage, and contraceptive failure. Even so, inadequate production and importation means that IUDs are not always available. During my time in the family doctor clinic, it was not uncommon for Janet or Tatiana to receive phone calls from their counterparts at neighboring clinics to ascertain if they knew where an IUD could be obtained. Finally, while tubal ligation is widely used, policies regarding its use are rather restrictive: women seeking sterilization must have borne two healthy living children and, if in a relationship, provide their husband’s written consent before the procedure will be performed. The doctors I queried about this policy

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did not interpret this as a pronatalist move; rather, they viewed it as the state’s attempt to protect women from making, or being forced to make, a premature decision to stop childbearing that they would later to come to regret, as well as a belief that decisions about reproduction should be made jointly as a conjugal unit. Such paternalist policies—reflecting the convergence of cultural associations of womanhood with motherhood, socialist ideals about egalitarian decision making within companionate marriage, and assertions about the state’s role in protecting women’s reproductive capacity—are perhaps not unwarranted: sterilization has a dark history in many countries where its uneven use reflects broader social discrimination around race/ethnicity or cultural differences, poverty, or perceived “unfitness” as mothers (López 2008; Tarlo 2000). Yet for the many Cuban women who only desire one child, such reproductive policies largely restrict sterilization as a contraceptive option. While official health discourse highlights the risks of multiple abortions, women’s reproductive narratives pointed to the broader risks associated with reproduction and its control. These include the side effects of the contraceptives available to women, male displeasure at the prospect of condom use, and the risk to individual and familial well-being posed by the birth of a child. Given these constraints, it is not surprising that so many women find themselves resolving the problem of an undesired pregnancy through recourse to quick, safe, and medicalized abortion with all the state guarantees. At the same time, however, they pointed to the gendering of state policies and local practices that holds women responsible for managing these reproductive crises.

The Gendering of Suffering Early one cool morning, I stood in a white-tiled hallway of a polyclinic among a cluster of mothers, boyfriends, husbands, and friends, all waiting patiently outside the room where regulaciones were conducted. I had never been to this polyclinic before, and had come to accompany my friend Lili Menéndez in her quest for a “late” regulación. Lili was a 26-year-old office worker who, for the past six months, had been in a relationship with a younger man, Alfredo, who claimed that he wanted a child and who refused to contemplate using any form of birth control. Several months prior to this abortion, she had discovered she was pregnant, and they had briefly separated when she decided to end the pregnancy. Lili lived with Manuelito—her seven-year-old son from a prior relationship—and her aging grandmother in a tiny, one-bedroom unit, inherited when her father emigrated to Miami when Lili was 14. (Lili was estranged from her mother, a rather unusual situation in Cuba.) Given her tight living quarters, the newness of her relationship with Alfredo and, as I describe in chapter 6, her own desire to join her father in Miami, the prospect of another child was untenable.

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Moreover, although Lili refused to openly admit the possibility, it was rumored that the expensive gifts of perfume and jewelry that she received from Alfredo were paid for through his trysts with male tourists.15 Following the termination of the pregnancy, Lili turned to her brother, a doctor, to secure an IUD (which she had been unable to obtain through her local clinic) and insert it for her. Convinced that she was protected, she had not at first been concerned when she did not menstruate. When she finally saw a doctor, she discovered that the IUD had moved positions and she was almost seven weeks pregnant with twin fetuses. “I’m in a real bind,” she confided. While she loved Alfredo and believed his claim that he wanted the children, she also suspected that he was looking for ways to emigrate. “And if he leaves, what then?” she asked me in anguish. “Me alone with three children, in my little house with my grandmother? In my heart I want them, but I can’t support them, and it would be me that would have to take care of them, and I can’t, all alone, I can’t.” Having missed the deadline for a regulación, she petitioned her doctor for a referral to the hospital for a legrado. The results of her blood tests, however, showed that she was anemic and, to her dismay, the doctor refused to perform the abortion because of the risks posed by a possible hemorrhage. After an unsuccessful attempt to induce a miscarriage through suppositories brought by a friend from France, and nearing the ten-week limit for abortions, in desperation Lili decided to pay a personal visit to the doctor who performed regulaciones at her local polyclinic. She confided in the local nurse, smoothing the way through the gift of one of Alfredo’s foreign perfumes, a common practice in Cuba’s economy of favors (Andaya 2009b; Ledeneva 1998). To her relief, the nurse offered to add her name to the list of women waiting for a regulación without requesting the referral that would document the number and gestational age of the fetuses, as well as her anemia. The following day, when Lili and I arrived in the waiting area, the nurse on duty gave Lili a quick nod of recognition. As Lili approached her desk, the nurse advised her in a whisper to withhold any information about her gestational status from the doctor until she was sure that the procedure was well underway, and then admitted her into the procedure room. I waited as women slowly entered and exited the inner room. After about an hour, the door opened again and the nurse showed me into a cold, white-tiled post-operative room where Lili lay shivering under a thin blue sheet on a steel stretcher. The process had been a traumatic one: during the initial examination, the doctor had identified her pregnancy as being more advanced than the six-week limit for regulaciones. Fearful that the doctor might refuse to perform the operation, Lili told her of her multiple attempts to end the pregnancy and begged for her help. Fortunately for Lili, the doctor on duty (who Lili later described gratefully as a “good person,

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a kind person”) took pity on her and agreed to continue with the operation, resulting in a painful dilation and curettage procedure without anesthesia. I helped Lili from the steel stretcher, supporting her as she shivered from the combined effects of cold, pain, and exhaustion. As she slowly dressed, the admitting nurse bustled in. Seeing Lili’s stricken and tear-stained face, she remarked sternly, although not unkindly, “Now that you’ve resolved your problem, you should think harder next time!” Lili nodded silently, and thanked her for her help in facilitating the abortion. Turning to me then, Lili indicated a young woman in her twenties who was just exiting the operating room. “She told me before she went in that this was her nineteenth regulación! Can you imagine? How can she bear it?” Just then, we overheard the nurse chastising the young woman. During her procedure, the doctor’s initial examination of the extracted material had not revealed any fetal tissue. “There was nothing there!” the nurse exclaimed, “You must have something wrong in the head to keep coming back here!” As we left, we heard the young woman protesting these accusations, declaring that her menstrual period had been ten days late and her doctor had advised her to come “to be certain.” In urging these young women to think harder, the nurse referenced dominant and pervasive discourses of abortion as a consequence of the population’s “irrational” or “irresponsible” practices. Writing in the Greek context, Heather Paxson (2004) contends that while women are urged to move from abortion to pre-conception methods of fertility control that are considered more modern and rational, at stake is a broader shift in concepts of gendered selfhood as women are exhorted to actualize their desires for children through conscious planning. The linkage between reproductive practices and concepts of modernity and rational planning was also common in Cuba: Tami, the student doctor, concluded her assertion that Cuban women, unlike those from developed countries, do not plan their pregnancies by declaring, “Even if they plan, it is an unconscious planning.” The implication is, of course, that Cuban women are less than fully rational in the ways that women from developed countries are presumed to be. Countering these representations, women’s narratives underscored the gendered policies and practices that constrained their ability to plan their pregnancies. On one occasion I was drawn into an unexpectedly lengthy and enjoyable discussion of abortion politics in the United States and in Cuba after an interview with Ilsa Vera, a 27-year-old concert violinist on maternity leave with her first child. Patiently listening to my efforts to think through my findings on contraceptive and abortion practices, Ilsa quietly interjected: The thing is, [even if] a man doesn’t want a woman to give birth, the one who has to suffer (sufrir) a contraceptive method . . . the one who has to go to the operating table so as not to have children, so as to care for the

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children she has, is the woman, not the man. And that’s what they don’t explore in any depth in this country. . . . So if you look psychologically you realize that [abortion] does not necessarily bring shame to a woman, because it’s normal that a woman be the depository of all these machista and cultural conflicts. So it’s normal [when women hear of another’s abortion], we ask, ‘Oh, an abortion? How are you feeling?’ and everyone knows a remedy for the pain as well as ways to keep your insides [reproductive organs] clean.

Far from the isolation and secrecy that often surround women’s abortion experiences in the United States, Ilsa portrays abortion as an experience that brings women together in mutual acknowledgment of their multiple and collective sacrifices, including risking their bodies—through both contraception and abortion—to prevent undesired births and nurture existing children. Yenlis Rivera, a 22-year-old university student, reiterated this assessment more bluntly, declaring, “Look, this is a machista society, men don’t want to use condoms and the contraceptives that exist do a lot of damage to women. And so when women stop using contraceptives to rest [their bodies] and tell men to use condoms, they don’t do it. And it is in this period that women get pregnant and have to have an abortion.” In these accounts, it is women who take on the burden of suffering as they make the deeply constrained choice between often unsatisfactory forms of birth control, men’s frequent reluctance to participate in fertility limitation, and bearing children for whom neither they nor the state can adequately care. Such pressures are exacerbated by the gendering of caregiving and the fact that men frequently abdicate responsibility for children after a separation; in my interviews, although some women stressed their partners’ conscientious fulfillment of the reproductive labor of caregiving, others openly questioned men’s dedication to child-raising. This tension was made clear when Idaly Santos invited me to stay and join her friends for a drink after the completion of our interview. The subject of my research sparked vigorous conversations among her convivial friends and, at one point, Rodrigo Lima, a 44-year-old self-employed carpenter, told me that he prided himself on being a good father to his four children from four different mothers despite the fact that he did not live with any of them. Overhearing this claim, Idaly ribbed him, “You had four children and didn’t raise a one!” Defensively, Rodrigo replied, “It’s true that I didn’t live with them, but I was still a good father.” Turning back to me, Idaly snorted, “You see, that’s what all men say, all men say that they’re good fathers, it’s the mothers that care for the children and raise them, but all men say that they’re good fathers.” Rather than indexing women’s sexual irresponsibility, women’s accounts suggest that abortion represents yet another manifestation of women’s gendered responsibilities as they absorb the “machista and cultural conflicts” of Cuban

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society; by terminating unwanted pregnancies, they absolve men of responsibility for participation either in contraception or in caregiving. Given the chronic lack of “conditions” for childbearing, abortion is one means by which women demonstrate their morality through their personal and bodily sacrifice for the well-being of existing children. In this context, the emphasis is on controlling fertility; whether this occurs prior to or after conception is less important. These provocative commentaries thus suggest an analysis of abortion practices as situated within nested patriarchal and paternalist structures that encompass not only the demands of individual men but also the priorities and concerns of Cuba’s revolutionary government. While the sexual education initiatives since the 1980s have succeeded in restoring the age of the most fertile cohort to that of the prerevolutionary standard (Benítez 2003), they have had little impact on the total abortion rate. Arguably, the most significant shift in abortion practice over the past twenty years has not has been a reduction in the total number of abortions, but a lowering of the gestational age at which women terminate their pregnancies.16 Given the state’s preference for regulaciones, many doctors advise women to request this form of vacuum-aspiration abortion if they are at all uncertain about their pregnancy status. That is, in cases when neither tactile tests nor ultrasound—the only methods of pregnancy detection available through the public health system17—can confirm a pregnancy before six weeks of gestation, doctors will urge women to request a regulación rather than waiting for a clear confirmation of pregnancy to prevent the necessity of a legrado. Statistics gathered through examination of the extracted material demonstrate that about 68 percent of regulaciones do interrupt a pregnancy (Gran 2004).18 Less obvious, however, is this number’s inverse implication—that 32 percent of regulaciones are performed on women who are not in fact pregnant. Thus, while Cuban reproductive health policies guarantee virtually unlimited access to abortion to women in the very early stages of pregnancy, policies designed to minimize risk and reproduce the socialist state’s internationally touted maternal mortality statistics have narrowed the window of opportunity when women may readily end an undesired pregnancy. This has had dual effects. It has constrained the options of women like Lili, who for various reasons are unable to obtain a legrado before the ten-week limit: they must petition a medical advisory board for a “late” abortion, continue with an initially unwanted pregnancy, or resolve their circumstances through soliciting favors. The other face of this policy was embodied in the young woman that Lili and I encountered in the regulación clinic. Irrespective of the reasons for her high number of prior abortions, she had requested this particular regulación on the advice of her doctor when she did not menstruate that month. Presumably, her doctor had been unable to definitively rule out a pregnancy and had advised her to obtain a regulación to avoid the possibility of a legrado later. The fact that 32 percent of

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regulaciones are performed on women who are not pregnant suggests that this is not an isolated incident. In severely limiting the timeframe for legrados, health policies have in fact encouraged the normalization of abortion, even unnecessary ones, at the very early stages of pregnancy. In the absence of significant investment into contraceptive quality and availability, it appears that state concern around medical risk has not encouraged greater reliance on contraceptives; it has simply decreased the parameters of what is regarded as moral reproductive time. Since determinations of reproductive responsibility depends upon women’s identification of pregnancy at earlier gestational ages, they must regulate and monitor their bodies ever more attentively so as to request a regulación within the allowed timeframe. In cases of uncertainty, many of these women turn to regulaciones to avoid the riskier, and far less desirable, possibilities of either a legrado or of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. Given the state’s concern over high rates of abortion, as well as its recognition that repeated abortions of any kind are detrimental to women’s health and future fertility, the official silence surrounding unnecessary abortion procedures is both puzzling and disturbing. Compared with the significant resources channeled into providing growing number of prenatal tests, the state’s relative lack of investment in improved contraceptive quality and accessibility, or in subsidizing alternative forms of pregnancy detection such as urinary or blood tests, is even more marked. Such tensions suggest the ongoing prioritization within reproductive health policy of the productive outcomes of sexuality (the healthy births that become internationally touted health statistics) at the expense of its nonproductive expressions, with significant implications for women’s health and well-being.

Conclusion Cuban reproductive health policy guarantees free and medicalized abortion (albeit with strict time limits) as part of a laudable commitment to women’s reproductive rights. Yet women’s recourse to abortion is a far from a free choice as they navigate the multiple gendered structures that shape their options in post-Soviet Cuba. Reframing state concerns about the putative irresponsibility or ignorance of women who engage in the risky practice of multiple abortions, women like Idaly, Lili, and Teresa describe abortion as a way to realize expectations of responsible womanhood and motherhood given the demands by men, the state, and their children on their time, labor, and bodies. Given these challenges, women turn to Cuba’s excellent medical system to prevent births for which—for the many reasons simplified in the phrase, “I don’t have the conditions”—they feel they cannot provide.

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Debates about the meaning of high abortion rates, conducted both among women and between women and the state, thus center on contested claims to morality and modernity, and reflect wider concerns about the ability of the state to provide the “conditions” for the nurturance and reproduction of children and socialist citizens. In the next chapter, I move out from the reproductive politics at the level of gendered bodies to consider the dilemmas of reproduction in the engendered economies of post-Soviet Cuba.

5 Engendered Economies and the Dilemmas of Reproduction

Time and again, women’s reproductive dilemmas underscored a wider debate, articulated both within familial relations and in state policy, about the responsibility for nurturing children and citizens in post-Soviet Cuba. As the narratives of the previous chapter demonstrated, women attributed low fertility and high abortion rates not simply to the expense of raising children, but also to the gendered demands of balancing claims by family and the state in the complex and often fragile arrangements in which children are born and sustained. Such tensions have repercussions not only for reproductive practice in terms of fertility rates, but also for the distribution of gendered labor and the production of gendered subjectivities. In socialist theory, state support for reproduction and the de-gendering of the productive and reproductive spheres would form the basis for new and egalitarian norms of female and male socialist citizenship, both in the home and in the workplace. In practice, as the lives of my informants showed, while women assumed many new roles and obligations outside the home, the connection between women and reproduction remained largely intact; women’s supposedly natural affinity for nurturance and reproductive labor was often tacitly reaffirmed at both the level of the state and in familial gender relations. Thus, socialism’s new woman has been produced not simply through explicit policies around labor or childcare, but also indirectly through women’s double and triple burdens as mothers, workers, and revolutionaries. Moreover, as in other socialist states (Gal and Kligman 2000), the historic alliance between women and the state made women in many ways more dependent than men on state policy and largesse to realize the new gendered ideals. The contraction of the state therefore had gendered effects when responsibility for household reproduction was returned to the family—that is, to women.1 Observing 93

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Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Katherine Verdery (1994) argued that “The end of socialism necessarily mean[t] making once again invisible, by feminizing them and reinserting them into households, those tasks that become too costly when rendered visible and assumed by the state.” Although reproductive tasks in Cuba were neither defeminized nor fully moved out of the private domestic sphere, the forced reorganization of Cuba’s post-Soviet economy has meant the elimination or reduction of many of the benefits that the state was previously expected to provide. During the height of the Special Period, the exorbitant number of hours required to supply the home with goods and services that could no longer be found or afforded in the public sphere meant that many women abandoned their positions in the paid labor force for the unpaid work of reproducing the private sphere (Pearson 1997; Valdés Jiménez 2010). This has also had consequences for the reproduction of the “new woman.” In this chapter, I return to key concerns introduced in chapter 2 about the relationship between women and reproduction, this time as they are refracted through the post-Soviet household and labor economies. Exploring this issue through the analysis of three extended case studies, I ask: What gendered opportunity structures have emerged, as long-standing state policies are experienced in new economic conditions? How does the continued feminization of reproductive labor inform the gendering of the various economies of labor, and vice versa? And finally, what are the implications for socialist visions of gender egalitarianism and ideals of female citizenship? In posing these questions, I reiterate this book’s central contentions: first, that processes of reproduction neither end at birth nor are contained within unique fertile bodies, but continue in the ongoing labor of sustaining children, households, and social forms. The frequently uneven distribution of this labor across axes of gender and generation (as well as, in other contexts, race/ ethnicity, class, and nationality) reveals the social organization of reproduction, as well as the interactive effects between gender and reproduction. Thus, not only do gender ideologies shape responsibility for familial and household reproduction, but the forms of gendered practice that emerge as people work to secure the broader “conditions” for the nurturance of dependents also shape gendered subjectivities, often in ways antithetical to the predictions of the state. The second and related point maintains that the social organization of reproduction is best understood not simply in conjunction with policies explicitly targeting gender or reproduction. It must also be contextualized in the interplay between household relations and broader economies, as well as state policies governing issues like labor and housing, which often have uneven and contradictory consequences for gender ideologies and the allocation of labor. While I make no claims to represent the diversity of women’s labor and reproductive arrangements, the case studies presented here—a teenage mother, a female

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household head, and a homemaker—offer a view into some of the tensions, compromises, and opportunities that have emerged as both women and men work to sustain children and households. In their everyday practices, they also produce relationships to kin and to the state very different to those imagined by the early revolutionaries.

Maidol Varela: Negotiating Childcare and State Labor I met Maidol outside a sprawling school complex near the quiet neighborhood of Regla, across the bay from Havana proper. From the shade of the street, I could see a large cafeteria filled with young people laughing and bantering as they devoured the rice and beans and scant slices of yam, or boniato, that were the school’s offering that day. Around one o’clock, the cafeteria hall slowly emptied as students filed into classrooms or spilled in small noisy groups onto the street. After some time, Maidol emerged, still dressed in her blue waitressing uniform with her black curls pulled back under her cap. Seeing me waiting, she smiled tentatively. Our meeting had been arranged by her cousin, a friend of mine who knew that I was researching issues of reproduction and thought that I might be interested in interviewing a teenage mother. Maidol had generously agreed to the meeting, although I had the sense that we both felt like awkward participants on a blind date. This feeling quickly dissipated as we walked toward her home, the streets quiet and empty in comparison with the bustle I had become accustomed to across the bay. As we strolled, Maidol told me about the circumstances that had led to the birth of her daughter the previous year. The father, Yunier, had been a classmate in her high school; the attraction was mutual and they quickly began dating. Maidol’s mother, she continued in a flash of bitterness, was old-fashioned, and had refused to talk to her daughter about sex. According to Maidol, her mother had assumed—against the reality of contemporary Cuban youth culture— that her daughter would follow the old norms of premarital chastity. When I asked about other avenues for information about sexual education, Maidol shrugged ambivalently. While she had heard about some forms of contraceptives at school, she remembered little about them (and indeed, revealing her lack of knowledge about contraceptive use, later told me that whenever she now missed a day on the contraceptive pill, she simply took several the next day to “make up”). Her father had also maintained silence on the topic, a fact that Maidol found natural and intelligible, reflecting a gendering of responsibility that holds mothers primarily accountable for transmitting sexual information to their daughters, with fathers responsible, albeit less so, for their sons. After dating Yunier for only a few months, Maidol discovered that she was pregnant. Yunier was delighted and together they approached Maidol’s parents

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to share the news. As Maidol had anticipated, her mother was furious, and demanded that she immediately seek a regulación before it was too late. Her father, however, while equally disappointed and anxious about his daughter’s schooling and future relationship with her boyfriend, urged her to keep the pregnancy. According to Maidol, her father had heard about the fertility risks of multiple abortions in some of the state media and was concerned about the consequences of undergoing even a single abortion. “He told me to have the baby and that they would help me,” Maidol went on. “That way, no matter what happened later, if I had to have another abortion and something happened, at least I’d have my child.” Reflecting the cultural conflation of womanhood and motherhood, Maidol’s father was convinced that any obstacles that she might face as a teenage mother would be far less weighty than the regret and sorrow he believed that she would feel should she never have the opportunity to become a mother again. Under pressure from her family, Maidol’s mother acceded. Since she did not work outside the home, it was agreed that she would become the primary caregiver for the child during the day. Maidol and Yunier, meanwhile, would continue to live separately until they had finished their schooling. When their daughter Mikela was born, Maidol recalled, Yunier was initially doting and attentive. However, within a few months, his visits had become sporadic and he increasingly eschewed quiet nights with Maidol and Mikela for the livelier company of their teenaged classmates. Soon afterwards they broke up permanently, and although he still stopped by to visit Mikela, he neither contributed financially nor in substantive caregiving. By the time Maidol finished her narrative, we had arrived at her home, nestled in a cluster of row houses near the waterfront. In the spacious but sparsely furnished living room, her father was sprawled in a rocking chair, watching a little girl of about a year toddle around the room. From an adjoining kitchen, I heard the clatter of pots as Maidol’s mother cleaned up from the midday meal. Despite the simplicity of the surroundings, I immediately noticed evidence of a hearty lunch as well as the presence of a new-looking television and stereo system that Maidol later told me her father had been able to purchase overseas through his work as a merchant marine in a joint Cuban-foreign enterprise (which paid its employees part of their salary in CUC). After her parents had politely engaged me in conversation, Maidol scooped up Mikela and we retreated to their shared bedroom. Prominently displayed on the wall was a framed certificate signed by Fidel Castro. Noticing my interest, Maidol lit up with pride, telling me that she and other school staff had been presented with it as thanks for their work during a visit by a group of Venezuelan youths. The school was not an ordinary high school, but an escuela de superación (“improvement school”), part of a politically important mobilization designed

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to reincorporate young non-working Cubans into the social body by training them in particular vocations, such as nursing and social work, that were currently high state priorities. Typical of socialist rational planning, such efforts at population management represented a logical, if not always socially successful, resolution to two state concerns: first, the increase in the number of young desvinculados (those “unlinked” from the socialist work system) who neither studied nor worked in state-recognized employment and second, the shortage of social workers and nurses to care for the individual and social body. Labor for such politically favored institutions came with particular rewards. When Maidol had left school the previous year, she had had the choice between two jobs. The first was an office position in a mixed foreign-Cuban enterprise, where part of her wages would be paid in highly coveted CUC. On her father’s advice, however, she had taken a poorly paid but politically connected job as a cafeteria waitress in the escuela de superación. Underscoring the role of kinship in shaping political understandings of the successes and meaning of the revolution, Maidol’s decision was in part influenced by her father’s belief that a position in a school dedicated to improving the lot of Cuban youth represented an important commitment to the socialist government. In turn, her father’s relationship to the revolution was influenced by his assessment of the relative social and economic stability of his life by comparison with the difficulties encountered by his own poverty-stricken parents. Additionally, his work as a merchant marine provided him with a fairly privileged vantage point: not only did it allow him access to highly desired goods often unavailable in Cuba, but it also permitted him to travel, something that has been unthinkable for most ordinary Cubans ever since the fall of the socialist bloc eliminated the possibility for educational and labor exchanges. In his trips to the Caribbean, and particularly to countries like the Dominican Republic, he had been shocked by the levels of crime, as well as economic and racial inequality. Many Cubans, he believed, distrusted government propaganda about the virtues of socialism because they had never known anything else. Had they had the opportunity to travel, he argued, many of the disgruntled would recognize the tremendous accomplishments of the revolution. Thus, while Maidol’s friends urged her to embrace the increased social and economic capital that the job in a mixed enterprise represented, her father was committed to supporting revolutionary priorities, and felt that loyalty to such political projects would pay dividends in terms of future opportunities. More pragmatically and immediately, however, laborers at the escuela de superación would receive first priority in enrolling their children into state daycare. The family was in agreement about the importance of Maidol maintaining her position in the state labor force. Yet for reasons that appeared to reflect an unspoken familial tension, Maidol’s mother was reluctant to become Mikela’s

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full-time caregiver. This is a common solution in other households; as Francesca Espinosa, a 43-year-old university professor, recalled of the years when her daughter was young, “My mother did everything—shopped, cleaned, cooked, cared for the baby . . . I know lots of women whose households continue on the backs of their mothers.” Some fifty years after the revolution, women’s participation in paid labor is still often enabled only through the sharing of reproductive work along gendered generational lines (Núñez Sarmiento 2001). Maidol’s decision making thus represented a calculated gamble. Describing the factors that had influenced her, she explained, “It doesn’t pay much. If I have to buy shoes [usually only available outside the ration system] for Mikela, it costs me a whole month’s salary! But it’s part of a [political] mobilization and my father thought it would help me in the future. For example, when Mikela turns two, I want her to go to day care, but many children are not going to get in because there’s such a shortage of places. But because I work in a political organization, I expect to be one of the first to be offered a spot.” In this commentary, Maidol made clear her strategic negotiation of a terrain shaped, on one hand, by historic and contemporary state policies with respect to (female) labor and childcare and, on the other, ongoing economic difficulties and the continued gendering of nurturance. Despite the longstanding recognition of the importance of affordable childcare in permitting women to remain in the labor force, chronic shortages in daycare facilities have persisted throughout the revolution (Smith and Padula 1996). In 1997, only 20 percent of working Cuban women had access to state childcare (Jennissen and Lundy 2001), and in 2001, the government raised the age for admission into state day care from three months to one year while extending partially paid maternity leave by the same period.2 Underscoring again the strategic role of Cuban reproductive health policies in the international arena, government and health officials stated that the rise in age requirements for admission into daycare and the expanded maternity leave would facilitate women’s compliance with the U.N.-recommended four-month breastfeeding period. The women with whom I discussed this reform, however, interpreted the state’s motivations very differently. Reflecting the difference between strategic and practical analyses of women’s gender interests (Molyneux 1985), they almost universally welcomed the extended maternity leave as time to bond with their infant as well as a much-needed respite from the burdens of juggling work and domestic responsibilities (the only critic of the policy defined herself under the socialist labor category of “intellectual worker,” a university professor who chafed under the monotony of what she saw as forced reproductive labor). Yet many believed that the real impetus for the measure was in fact the economic drain that state childcare facilities represented; it was more cost-effective for the state to pay mothers to care for their own infants than to

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construct and staff the additional daycare centers necessary to allow working women to participate in the state work force during this period. Maidol’s strategy thus reflects the strategic negotiation of various gendered opportunities and constraints; in essence, she hoped to navigate the state’s chronic shortage of daycare facilities by taking advantage of longstanding policies that give priority to female state laborers for daycare spots, as well as systems of socialist prestige that assign greater value to jobs (even unqualified positions) in organizations that are considered politically significant. Her ability to make claims upon the state for reproductive support is thus deeply shaped by Cuban labor policies designed to support working mothers. Yet for many other young single mothers, even the promise of priority placement in childcare could not justify opting for a state waitressing job (around 220 pesos, or nine CUC a month) over a better-paid but less politically prestigious position; as Maidol points out, even partially supported by state rations, the purchase of a child’s pair of shoes would represent a crisis in her monthly expenditures. Maidol’s ability to remain in the state sector, however, was underwritten by her father’s access to both CUC and goods as a merchant marine, as well as his willingness to assume primary financial support for Maidol and Mikela. Put another way, while her alliance to the state provided much-needed benefits in the form of access to childcare, it was Maidol’s ties of kinship to her father—and in turn, his connections to a more lucrative economic sector—that provided the material goods they needed to survive. Any changes in his labor status would thus also jeopardize the well-being of the female kin who depended on him for support. For now, though, Maidol was content with this arrangement, trusting both in the strength of her kinship bonds and in the state’s continued loyalty to those who labor in its prized political organizations. Although she admitted that her friends thought she was “crazy” to have passed up an opportunity to earn hard currency outside the peso economy, she was confident in her decision. Once Mikela entered kindergarten, Maidol told me, she would then be free to look for a betterremunerated job outside the constraints of her need for reproductive support.

Dr. Marisa Sánchez: Caregiving and the Burden of State Gifts After a six-week trip to consult libraries and colleagues in the U.S. in late 2005, I returned to Havana eager to follow up with my friends and informants. When I stopped by the polyclinic where I had routinely observed prenatal ultrasounds to visit my friend, Dr. Marisa Sánchez (introduced in chapter 3), I was surprised to learn that she had taken a leave of absence. I decided to pay her a visit at her home instead, walking down the cracked and uneven pavements away from the polyclinic and towards Marisa’s zoned area in Central Havana.

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The environment changed subtly but distinctly: the buildings with their faded, peeling paint became noticeably smaller and more rundown, and in some, lines of flapping laundry suspended across balconies parted occasionally to reveal the horizontal subdividing of apartments, creating a low-ceilinged second floor known colloquially as the “barbeque.” Some women were picking through the few yams available at the neighborhood agromercado (open-air produce market), which stood in stark contrast to the bustling but more expensive agro stocked with guava, green beans, yams, papaya, and other fruits and vegetables just a few blocks away. When I arrived at the white-painted concrete apartment building that housed Marisa’s clinic and apartment, I ducked into the tiny ground-level clinic where she normally worked. Ascertaining that it was now staffed by a doctor unknown to me, I rounded the corner and knocked on the door of the attached apartment. Marisa answered the door looking haggard, her normally sleek black hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. We greeted each other affectionately, but I noted with concern her pallor and the dark circles under her eyes. We sat in the rocking chairs in her dimly lit living room, where the blinds were perpetually lowered to discourage patients from seeking medical advice by calling through the window. Marisa chain-smoked, sipping her coffee and rocking furiously. Shortly after I had left Cuba, she told me, her mother had suffered a severe stroke and required a lengthy hospitalization. Although she was expected to be released soon, the stroke had incapacitated her, and it was unlikely that she would ever fully recover. Until her illness, she had also been the primary caregiver for Marisa’s father, who suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s disease, with increasingly frequent and disruptive displays of dementia-related violence. With both her parents in critical condition, Marisa had been forced to take a leave of absence to care for her mother in the hospital while her sister cared for her father at his home. The family crisis had been compounded by the recent emigration of Marisa’s new partner, who had taken advantage of the fact that he was still legally married to his former wife to accompany her to Miami when she was granted a U.S. visa. Her eyes filling with tears, Marisa confided, I don’t know what we’re going to do, I haven’t worked for two months . . . I’ve tried to get [my father] into an old age home, but they’re all full. But when the day comes that they pressure me [to return to work], I’m going to go to the PCC [the Cuban Communist Party] at Revolution Plaza, plant my feet and say to them, “We’re on a full count [estamos en tres y dos, ‘We’re three and two,’ a baseball reference], what do you want us to do?” Because there’s no one else who can care for them, if we pay someone, they’ll charge four hundred pesos a month for eight hours a day, and I earn five hundred, and you know that with a hundred pesos you can’t live. If it weren’t for the house, I’d leave my job and work in the informal

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economy or something, but the house belongs to the state and to stay here I have to work for them. I don’t know what we’re going to do because I don’t see a solution. We’re a small family, it’s just me and my sister, me and her, all the time. It’s not easy, my dear, and that’s the truth.

Marisa’s moving portrayal starkly reveals the complex web of obligation and dependence forged between her and the state. Like many women of her generation, Marisa had entered the medical profession supported by socialist policies and attitudes that simultaneously advocated gender equality through women’s education and participation in the labor force while maintaining an entrenched gender conservatism; medicine, with its associations of nurturance, was considered an eminently appropriate female profession. As a doctor, Marisa had achieved both social status and a relatively comfortable level of material wellbeing. In exchange for her medical services to the community, the state had provided her with a comfortable two-bedroom apartment that was occupied only by herself, her partner, and her teenage son. While by no means luxurious, these living conditions were far superior to the overcrowded conditions of many households in Havana. Even with the emergence of the dual economy and its pressures on doctors, Marisa had never second-guessed her profession, proud of the labor that she performed in the community and of the moral prestige that it brought her (Andaya 2009b). This tenuous balance, however, collapsed with her parents’ simultaneous medical crises. Under the pressure of caring for frail elderly dependents, the historical reciprocal relationship between doctors and the state forced an impossible choice between caring for her parents and retaining the apartment that housed herself and her son. In stark contrast to the proliferation of maternity homes that exist to reproduce the revolution’s superb birth outcomes, there are very few nursing homes for the incapacitated elderly. Prior to the Special Period, the need for elderly care had been partly satisfied by a variety of geriatric services and so-called grandparents clubs that took place in local hospitals, parks, and community centers. The crisis undermined these social supports: grandparents clubs closed and construction on new geriatric day-care facilities ceased. While many grandparents clubs have recuperated in recent years, the more expensive investment in constructing nursing homes has not been a state priority. Widespread cultural beliefs about the immorality of “abandoning” older kin militate against their placement in nursing homes (Núñez Sarmiento 2004), and those nursing homes that exist are generally intended to care for elderly who are left without family to care for them. Even so, many maintain long waitlists for placement. The outcome of this convergence between the state’s economic priorities and cultural ideologies of filial obligation and reciprocity mean the care of elderly kin takes place almost exclusively in the home. Given the gendering

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of caregiving, it is thus women who are responsible for the senior adults in their families—an additional burden noted by both Cuban and outside observers (Center for Democracy in the Americas 2013; Núñez Sarmiento 2004). While Marisa’s mother was healthy, the family had been able to manage with her labor as the primary caregiver for her ailing and violent husband, while her daughters alternated providing nighttime and weekend help. Her sudden stroke, however, left her daughters with few alternatives. In the absence of either state support or extended family willing to take on caregiving, Marisa would need to hire a paid caregiver if she hoped to continue working. Yet her state wages, even as a highly credentialed doctor, were inadequate to pay for a caregiver and still support herself and her teenage son. On the other hand, if Marisa were to leave her profession for a more lucrative job in the informal or mixed economy, she would also lose the right to her stateprovided apartment. This was a major concern: given Havana’s chronic housing crisis as well as the bureaucratic and politicized procedure by which recipients for new housing are prioritized, families (particularly those without particular claims to the state) face long, and potentially unsuccessful, waits in obtaining their own living quarters. Yet despite Marisa’s flippant assertion that she would leave her profession if not for the apartment, such a move would be extremely unlikely. Like many professional women in Cuba (Núñez Sarmiento 2001), she took great personal pride in her career achievements. Moreover, given the money that the revolutionary state has invested in training doctors, as well as the immense importance of healthcare for its moral claims, doctors are under particular constraints and may not simply be able to leave their practice at whim (until 2013, they were also restricted from leaving the country, even temporarily, except when on international service). One of the few authorized avenues for doctors to garner additional income is thus through their service on international medical missions where they can double their salaries and bring back goods that are very expensive or unavailable in Cuba—in essence, a form of lucrative and prestigious state-sanctioned remittance economy. Yet even here, women’s continuing responsibilities for the labor of reproduction and nurturance has resulted in different opportunity structures for men and women. These gendered contours of internationalism were made apparent to me one afternoon when Janet, the family doctor, invited me to a party thrown at a nearby clinic for a male family doctor who was on temporary leave from his post in Venezuela. Many of the doctors present were unknown to me, and as I stood on the edges of the party looking around, I noticed that with the exception of the guest of honor, all the other doctors present were women. Even given the feminization of family medicine typical in Cuba and other countries with a highly educated female workforce, the gender imbalance at the party was striking. When

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I commented to Tami, the student doctor on rotation at Janet’s clinic, that all the family doctors I had met during my fieldwork were women, she nodded, explaining, “Before, there were a lot more men, but they’ve all gone overseas on missions, and the ones who stay are women who have small children or elderly parents that they have to care for, so they can’t leave.” Overhearing this exchange, Janet added that she was under pressure to join international service, but had so far refused because she was neither willing to leave her three-year-old son for several years nor confident that her husband could take care of him alone. Only those women who had a mother or sister willing to participate substantially in childrearing, she commented, could realistically take advantage of this opportunity to garner the additional money to make improvements on their house or purchase needed goods for their families. Yaína, the obstetrician-gynecologist assigned to her clinic zone, Janet pointed out, had eagerly awaited her international posting to Nepal. For her, as with other remittance-sending mothers (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Parreñas 2001), the emotional sacrifice of leaving her five-year-old son was justified by her maternal responsibility to provide him with appropriate “conditions.” As a single mother, Yaína’s ability to accept her international mission was underpinned by her own mother’s willingness to assume primary responsibility for her grandson. Yet, and perhaps contrary to the perceptions of Tami and Janet, 64 percent of Cuban international health workers are women (Ravsberg 2013). Since many Cuban women who serve internationally are also mothers, this statistic suggests that a considerable amount of the reproductive labor of sustaining children and households is being shared among female kin who remain on the island. Without discounting the emotional turmoil that men undoubtedly experience when leaving family behind for international service, Janet and Tami’s observations highlight the constraints that women in particular may feel given the cultural perception that associates women—whether mothers, grandmothers, or aunts—with the labor of nurturing small children. For Marisa, given her multiple responsibilities as single mother, head of the household, and caregiver for her incapacitated elderly parents, these gendered obligations on the home front limited her ability to leave for the front lines of Cuba’s international medical service. Marisa is thus bound in an uneasy alliance with the state, underscoring the gendered and often unintended consequences of Cuban social policies as they are re-signified in the nexus between cultural values of gendered nurturance and the new post-Soviet economy. On the one hand, she is a beneficiary of socialism’s commitment to affirmative labor and education policies, as well as its provision of living quarters for doctors (intended both as a reward for service and to ensure that doctors are constantly available to the community). On the other hand, her status as a doctor—and perhaps most importantly, the

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incalculable value of an independent home in an economy in which all housing construction is technically subject to state rational planning and merit systems that have never kept pace with demand3—now binds her to a devalued peso economy and the low state wages that are insufficient to cover her responsibilities for both her young and her elderly dependents. In addition, the gendered ideologies and economies that assign women to the labor of nurturance restrict her ability to participate in one of the prestigious and lucrative areas that have flourished in post-Soviet Cuba. Although the state’s generous leave policies had thus far permitted her to delay any final decision making, Marisa was adamant that any summons to return to work would push her to confront her superiors with the impossibility of fulfilling the demands on her time and labor of both the state and her kin. Now, stubbing out her cigarette, Marisa summarized her situation with her typical wry humor and determination, “I can’t live with my job, I can’t live without it. But what option do I have?” Several weeks after this meeting, I visited Marisa again at her home and was surprised to find her in much improved spirits. She informed me with palpable relief that her husband, now resident in Miami, had found a good job as a construction worker. This new economic situation had allowed him to begin remitting to her and other members of his family in Cuba. With this desperately needed money, Marisa had been able to hire a caregiver who would take over the primary care of her father and provide assistance to her still-fragile mother, newly returned home from the hospital. Marisa’s sister had already returned to work; Marisa was scheduled to return the following week. In the meantime, she was taking advantage of the time and the unexpected financial boon to buy paint and other materials on the black market, in order to make repairs to her apartment in case one or both of her parents would eventually have to reside permanently with her.

Yenislaidis Martínez: Returning to a “Private” Domesticity I was accompanying Teresa Villa, the social worker, on her rounds in the community one afternoon when she suddenly turned from the street down a narrow alley that ended in a low brick dwelling, explaining that she wanted to introduce me to a friend. She called a greeting through the open window and a minute later, Yenislaidis opened the door. She was a young woman in her mid-twenties whose simple T-shirt and shorts contrasted sharply with the gold chains draped around her wrists and neck. Teresa greeted her warmly, introduced us, and then left to continue her own house visits. The house, small and unassuming from the outside, proved to be well furnished within, boasting a new stereo system, a DVD player, and comfortable stuffed armchairs—signs of an above-average family income. In one of the

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armchairs sat a young woman, Mora, who smiled warmly when I entered. Yenislaidis explained that she was a teacher at the local high school where they had previously worked together, and had stopped by on her way home from school for a coffee and a quick chat. As with all of my interviews, I began by collecting basic demographic and household information. When I asked about her current employment situation, Yenislaidis volunteered that she had decided not to return to her state job as a teacher after bearing a child with her husband, a self-employed taxi driver. She explained, “I don’t have to work because we’re in a good economic situation. Not great, you understand, but we’re not tight for money. My husband works for himself and there’s no need for me to work. And why should I? I’m not going to work for ten dollars [CUC] monthly . . . with the transportation problems, the bad conditions at work, the hours, arriving home late every day! Listen, if you buy a pair of pants, it costs twenty dollars and that’s two months’ salary! Nodding, Mora added, “It’s true, if you dress yourself, you don’t eat, and if you eat, you can’t dress yourself.” “You see?” Yenislaidis exclaimed emphatically. “She’s a teacher—we worked together—and she makes 320 pesos, about fifteen dollars, a month. And us? We spend twenty-five or thirty dollars every weekend, going to the pool, out to eat, or going somewhere to relax. And you think I’m going to work for ten dollars when that doesn’t suffice for anything? It’s a lack of respect!” Yenislaidis and Mora here articulate one instance of the burgeoning social and economic inequalities that have emerged in the wake of new economic policies aimed at filling the need for goods and services that the state can no longer provide. During the Special Period, the state’s acknowledged inability to fulfill the transportation needs of its citizens forced the “liberation” of private taxis as one of the state-sanctioned categories for self-employment. In the following years, business boomed. For those with some money to spare, the ancient 1950sera American cars and the Soviet-made Ladas that rattle and bang their way along fixed routes through the city of Havana, and its outer neighborhoods, are a welcome alternative to the chronically delayed and overcrowded bus system. For twenty pesos, travelers can be sure of a seat and a relatively speedy arrival at their destination—something that could not be said for the far cheaper but universally hated camellos (“camels”), the tractor-trailers introduced during the gas crisis of the Special Period to move large numbers of passengers. Conditions on the camellos were notorious; as friends commented in an often-told joke, a trip on a camello was like the Saturday night television movie (always a popular American production) because one could be sure of seeing instances of violence, sex, and bad language. As one of the first generation of Cuba’s new entrepreneurial class, Yenislaidis’ husband, Esteban, took advantage of this opening to launch his own

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business. Together with a friend, he had cobbled together sufficient money to purchase a battered 1954 Chevrolet in which they shared rights and profit, alternating driving days throughout the week.4 Despite the indispensable service they provided, relations between the state and these new entrepreneurs were fraught with tension. Fidel Castro viewed private taxi drivers as a necessary evil, frequently accusing them of hoarding scarce gasoline and of enriching themselves at the expense of socialist egalitarian values. In 1999, he suspended applications for new licenses, a prohibition that was only lifted in 2008 by his brother, Raúl. Far from limiting the growth of new taxi enterprises, this decadelong measure simply resulted in thousands of unlicensed drivers plying the streets at the risk of hefty fines, seizure of their cars, or even arrest.5 Fidel’s concerns about the consolidation of wealth in the growing private sector, however, were not unfounded. By the end of the 1990s, a collective taxi driver could make a monthly income of around 128 dollars compared with an average monthly state salary of around fifteen dollars (LeoGrande and Thomas 2002). As Yenislaidis and Mora pointed out in their exchange, Esteban’s job in the entrepreneurial sector allowed them to spend, every weekend, twice the monthly income that Mora earned as a state-employed teacher at a high school. Indeed, Esteban’s earnings went far beyond basic needs of household reproduction, which allowed his family the means to participate in Cuba’s new economies of leisure, marked by consumption in the tourist-oriented hotels and clubs that have become new symbols of wealth and status. These strategies of household and familial reproduction may also shape gendered ideologies and practice in post-Soviet Cuba. Linked by marriage to a prosperous entrepreneurial economy that provides a far more privileged lifestyle than that possible with a state salary, Yenislaidis has now reassessed the benefits of balancing waged work with the reproductive labor of caring for her young child and domestic chores. Citing a list of factors from transportation problems to poor labor conditions, she argued that the difficulties she encountered in her working life were not worth a remuneration that was insufficient to cover basic needs. “I was always so tired when I got back from work [as a teacher],” Yenislaidis went on during the course of our conversation. “It was hard to keep the house tidy, cook dinner, do all the other things I had to do. So when I had my son, we decided [it was] better that I stay here with him, rather than sending him to my mother’s house—because you know the day-cares around here are totally full. And that way I could take care of things here around the house without so much stress.” In essence, she suggested, her time is better spent in her capacities as wife and mother rather than in labor for the state. By contrast with socialist orthodoxy that posited public labor as a means to women’s emancipation, Yenislaidis’s description of the stress of balancing productive and reproductive work, as well as her interpretation

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of her low state salary as a profound lack of respect, implied that her withdrawal from the state work force allowed her to reclaim a sense of personal autonomy and well-being not experienced in her state job. “Respect” in this case came not from the self-realization putatively available through waged labor and the economic independence it presumes, but rather from the ability to dictate the terms and conditions of her own labor. But this new freedom may have gendered consequences that run counter to early state declarations that partnerships in the new society would be founded on gender egalitarianism and material disinterestedness—a vision that was never fully realized, even in the so-called golden years of Soviet subsidization (Rosendahl 1997; see also Andaya 2013). About an hour after leaving me with Yenislaidis, Teresa returned to ask if I wanted to accompany her to lunch. I called a goodbye to Yenislaidis, who waved a farewell from her bedroom where she was carefully styling her hair and applying makeup before leaving the house to conduct some household errands. When the door closed behind us, Teresa nudged me and said quietly, “Did you notice that? The way she makes herself up just to go to the agro? She has to take care of herself because she knows that she has a good situation. With a husband with a good business like that, there’s plenty of girls that would jump at the chance to be with him if he gets tired of her.” The actual dynamics of the relationship between Yenislaidis and Esteban are of course unknown to me, and perhaps to Teresa as well. Yet Teresa clearly implies that the relationship is founded at least partly on a tacit exchange: as long as Yenislaidis continues to be sexually attractive to her husband, he will continue to support her in their comfortable lifestyle. If this attraction were to falter, Yenislaidis would risk being supplanted by one of the many young women eager to forge a relationship with him—and through him, to Cuba’s entrepreneurial economy and its promise of a material well-being far beyond that possible under normal conditions of state labor.

The Engendered Economies of Households and States As Raúl Castro acknowledged in his 2012 speech to the Cuban Congress, socialism’s longstanding “woman question” has proved far more difficult to resolve than the early revolutionaries could ever have predicted. Cuba’s “new woman” has been produced by socialist policies of education, labor, and social supports, as well as progressive social attitudes around women’s equality and autonomy. Yet the continued association between women and the labor of reproducing children and households, reinforced not only at the level of the family but also at times by state policy, has also shaped women’s options and molded gendered subjectivities over the course of the revolution.

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While the early revolutionaries imagined that state support for women’s labor would secure the conditions for their emancipation, the cases of Maidol (the teenaged mother) and Marisa (the doctor) suggest the possibly Faustian nature of this bargain in the post-Soviet economy. Given the continued feminization of caregiving (especially after the dissolution of a conjugal relationship), those women who depend most heavily on the state to share their reproductive responsibilities must often accept a compromise that ties their labor to an increasingly devalued state sector. In the case of Marisa’s tightly woven ties to the state, the apartment that housed herself and her son, granted to her in exchange for her medical labor, bound her to a state job in which wages were insufficient to support herself and her multiple dependents during the crisis of her parents’ concurrent illnesses. For Maidol, the need for state childcare meant giving up a well-paid job in the mixed economy for a poorly remunerated state position, a decision influenced by her father’s commitment to revolutionary ideals and his willingness to support her. State policies aimed at supporting working mothers also reinforce the longstanding linkage been women and the nurturance of children, inadvertently constraining their economic and social flexibility—a consequence surely very different than that imagined by state policy-makers. Admittance into scarce childcare facilities is contingent upon women’s status as state laborers, a reality which severely circumscribes the options of those women who work in nonstate sectors. Even when the conjugal relationship remains intact, it is women, not men, who must take childcare into account when deciding between labor options. Moreover, given the chronic shortage of state childcare facilities, access usually depends on women maintaining an uninterrupted state labor record. For example, one married mother of a three-year-old son—who left state employment after the expiration of her maternity leave—told me that she was now desperate to return to work to help support the household. However, since she did not currently work outside the home, she was now classified as a housewife, and therefore at lowest priority for state childcare. If she could not find a relative willing to take on childcare, she told me, they would have to survive on her husband’s earnings as a state-employed construction worker until her son entered school. Long-standing policies intended to prioritize the needs of working mothers may thus be a burden for some women, constraining their choices and reinforcing their ties to a state sector that may offer symbolic capital in the form of social or political prestige, but yield little in the way of paid remuneration. The ongoing association between women and reproduction, both in state policy and in familial ideology and practice, thus informs the gendering of the various labor sectors flourishing in the new economy, and has implications for the reemergence of gendered economic inequalities. Scholars of Cuba have long

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noted that, as in many countries, women’s responsibility for reproductive labor has limited their ability to rise to more prestigious and better-remunerated positions in state employment (Áres Muzio 1996; Randall 1981; Smith and Padula 1996). Today, a nascent gendering of labor markets may compound this pattern. Cuban women comprise only 38 percent of the labor force, a figure that lags far behind the rest of Latin America—despite decades of socialist rhetoric about the emancipatory potential of public labor—and that reflects the historic convergence of state policies of universal nurturance and the well-known overburdening of working women. Despite this low overall workforce participation, women hold over 70 percent of the state-sector jobs in education and health care, and are also the majority in positions such as finance and insurance. While these state positions often require advanced qualifications, they are generally remunerated as part of the poorly paid peso economy. Moreover, women are underrepresented in the potentially more lucrative non-state sectors where men comprise three out of four legally registered small business owners (Center for Democracy in the Americas 2013).6 Further research is necessary to track these developments, as well as the implications of the gendering of labor sectors for kinship and household arrangements. Yet these numbers imply that women are tied to the lesser-paid state sector as a consequence of the feminization of certain job categories and the need for reproductive support (however limited), while men are better positioned to take advantage of the legal small-scale business economy burgeoning in contemporary Cuba (Núñez Sarmiento 2001; Vasallo Barrueta 2001). Even within the entrepreneurial sector, gender ideologies that associate women with reproductive labor shape forms of economic practice, as well as women’s perception of their engagement in it. Women’s entrepreneurialism tends to be concentrated in those occupations that reproduce domestic work, such as home-based food and beverage vendors, beauty stylists, or domestic help (Áres Muzio 1999). Moreover, although most of the entrepreneurial economy operates out of the home, Ana Cristina Pertierra (2008) argues that Cuban women tend to consider their home-based informal businesses as part of their broader responsibilities of managing the reproductive sphere, whereas men are more likely to define themselves as entrepreneurs. In so doing, these men embrace a masculine identity that is directly opposed to both reproductive labor and labor for the state. In the interstices of these gendered opportunity structures, women’s greater responsibility for caregiving shapes other labor arrangements within kin groups, albeit with varied and unequal consequences. Cuban sociologist Marta Núñez Sarmiento (2004) found that female heads of households in particular frequently took on additional jobs in the private sector while retaining their position in the state work force. Through increasing their labor and spreading

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it across multiple sectors, they can access a basic safety-net salary and benefits that accrue to state workers while earning additional money from private enterprises, an income which may in fact surpass their state wages. The rise in female-headed households from 28 percent in 1981 to over 40 percent in 2002, primarily in Havana (Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas 2005), strongly suggests that women are experiencing an intensified demand on their time and labor as they struggle to sustain children and households, a phenomenon shared with other low-income groups in the United States and Latin America.7 In this context, as in many other global sites, some Cuban scholars (Zabala Argüelles 2009) worry about an emergent feminization of poverty given the contraction of state support in the post-Soviet economy. In other reproductive strategies, women like Maidol and Marisa rely on other family members to provide access to hard currency while they commit to the state work force for the benefits and support they need to care for their dependents. Such economic arrangements, including the conjugal and intergenerational pooling of resources, are extremely common in a social context where no single income source—particularly within the state sector—is usually sufficient to sustain a household. These economic support systems are not always men; some of my informants indicated that female kin, especially mothers, contributed essential money and resources, both within and across households, whenever possible. Yet it is notable that the economic well-being of the three women described in these case studies was supported by their ties to men: Yenislaidis to her entrepreneurial husband, Maidol to her merchant marine father, and Marisa to a husband who, despite migrating with his former (although still legal) wife, continued to demonstrate his care and commitment by remitting to Marisa in Cuba. Critically, these male partners also participated in labor markets, both inside and outside Cuba, which provided them very comfortable earnings and allowed them to contribute substantially to the support of their kinswomen. As women navigate the often unanticipated consequences of the intersection of state policies, engendered economies of reproductive and productive labor, and economic difficulties at the level of both households and the state, the “new woman” that is produced is one who is all too familiar with the creative and flexible strategizing needed to fulfill the various demands of kin and state. Indeed, the situations of Maidol and Marisa, and the other women presented in this book, powerfully demonstrate women’s gendered labor as reproductive bricoleurs, who must assemble a far-from-seamless patchwork of kinship relations, state policies and institutions, and other resources at their disposal to solve the pressing problems of caring for dependents. Of course, there are many forms of gendered practice and gendered subjectivities emerging in the multiple contradictions of the post-Soviet economy.

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Studies in many countries have argued that the effects of neoliberal policies have brought women into the workforce as a cheaper and presumptively more malleable alternative to male labor.8 In Cuba, by contrast, the contraction of the state and the expansion of the entrepreneurial sector has made the move out of the state labor market and into the private domestic sphere an alluring one for many women. While Marisa and Maidol have struck a precarious balance between laboring for the state in return for benefits and relying on kin networks for money, Yenislaidis chose to withdraw from her job as a teacher to concentrate exclusively on reproductive labor within the family. For her, this decision (supported by her husband’s earnings) provides a sense of freedom from balancing the gendered demands of house work and child care with the demands of a poorly paid job. Yenislaidis is not alone in her calculation of the benefits of withdrawing from state labor; my sample of informants, supported by the data about her neighborhood contributed by Teresa, the social worker, suggests that women whose partners earn a comfortable living (generally through the private or CUC-remunerated sectors) often leave state labor to help their husbands in home-based businesses or to dedicate themselves exclusively to homemaking. Such practices reveal contested definitions of emancipation, as women with economic options choose unremunerated labor in the patriarchal family over poorly paid work for the paternalist state. In a reemergent interweaving of class and gender, women in prosperous households can return to a newly valorized domesticity.9 Underscoring the interaction between engendered household and labor economies, concerns around familial reproduction, and the production of gendered subjectivities, feminine withdrawal from the public sphere of state labor may become an important marker of economic prosperity that in turn ossifies the connection between women and reproductive work.10 Some Cuban studies already suggest the resurgence of older ideologies of gendered labor: in 1989, researchers found that women were extremely dissatisfied with the unequal distribution of household chores, pointing to the disparity between socialist ideals and their own realities. After the crisis of the 1990s, Yohanka Valdés Jiménez (2010) found that when women withdrew from the state work force, both men and women uncritically accepted traditional gender roles and division of labor. The phenomenon of working women opting out of paid labor is of course not unique to the Cuban case. Observers of both socialist and capitalist countries have noted that for many women, waged labor—in the absence of considerable reproductive support from kin and state—is not the liberating force that both socialists and feminists once predicted. In the United States, women’s ongoing double burden of paid and domestic work, as well as inflexible work schedules and the considerable cost of childcare, has pushed many professional women from the paid workforce. In other cases, women have opted for

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the “mommy track,” taking on less prestigious (and lesser remunerated) positions in exchange for a more manageable work schedule, or accepting less lucrative jobs in state or government institutions that offer benefits such as flexible schedules, fewer hours, health insurance, or childcare. In both situations, women’s constrained ability to choose these options often depends upon the presence of a partner, usually male, whose paid labor supports the household and family economy, while women take on a greater portion of daily reproductive labor. In this sense, the situation of many American women is not so different from the Cuban women that I describe here. Yet in Cuba, these solutions to reproductive dilemmas in the post-Soviet economy trouble old assumptions about the nature of gender and kinship relations under socialism. Most immediately, the continued feminization of the reproductive domain and the unequal sharing of caregiving and domestic labor overburden women who also work outside the home, leading many to withdraw from the paid workforce and further reinforcing gendered divisions of labor (a problem acknowledged throughout the revolution). Second, as Teresa suggests in her pointed assessment of Yenislaidis’s conjugal situation, the inequalities of the post-Soviet economy and the difficulties of maintaining children and households may reinforce gender ideologies that valorize men as primary provider; strategies of partner choice may thus prioritize material incentives over “spiritual” values (Rubio 2004, 2008). Focus group interviews about partner choice conducted by journalists for the magazine Bohemia found that women in particular were likely to be encouraged to seek out relationships with men in economically comfortable situations; as one young woman noted, “These days, mothers, aunts, cousins, they say to you, ‘Look, my dear, find yourself a boy who can give you all that we haven’t been able to have’” (Rubio et al. 2004, 33). Underscoring yet again the role of kinship in shaping perceptions and experiences of the revolution, this comment complicates easy distinctions between a supposedly revolutionary older generation and the ambivalences of their younger kin. As older women—those raised during the heyday of the revolution—advise their daughters to take material considerations into account in the formation of romantic ties, they challenge orthodox beliefs about the separation of kinship and economy under socialism. Further, they suggest that it is through the economic benevolence of men, rather than through women’s own efforts or through state support, that their younger kin will enjoy the material comforts that they themselves have never known. Yet these practices should not be read as a simple return to prerevolutionary patterns of gender and kinship or as a rejection of the ideals of socialism’s new woman. Rather, they illustrate what Brotherton (2012) has called “pragmatic subjectivities,” the reemergence of both new and old subjectivities as people negotiate the contradictions of the state in post-Soviet Cuba. The always

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constrained choices made by Yenislaidis, Maidol, and Marisa are practical responses—both new and familiar—to the demands of nurturance in the novel social, economic, and political terrain carved out by past and present state policy, the post-Soviet economy, and gendered ideologies and practice.

Conclusion The dilemmas of reproduction as women and men choose partners, care for children, and make decisions about labor arrangements in the home and in the workplace thus profoundly shape and are shaped by gendered ideologies and subjectivities, in ways that may both support and subvert the goals of the socialist state. As these case studies demonstrate, ideologies of gender and reproduction are always situated within policies and economies that are themselves gendered, both in their ideological representations and in their consequences (Freeman 2000, 2001)—a point that both socialists and feminists have long made in various contexts. Just as gendered practices and subjectivities cross over into the realm of public labor, the public realms of markets and jobs powerfully inform people’s gendered identities and private relationships (Wilson 2004). In turn, these complex arrangements of labor and nurturance paint a fuller picture of the range of concerns that women must take into account when they evaluate the “conditions” necessary for childbearing. Attention to the effects of state policies as they interact with gendered ideologies and economies thus provides a fertile site for analyzing the shifting relationships between families and the state as both work to sustain their members, resulting in the diverse array of gendered subjectivities and practices emerging in post-Soviet Cuba. In the final chapter, I follow the threads of reproduction and kin-making outward into transnational fields, examining their implication for the biological and social reproduction of families and the state.

6 Having Faith and Making Family Overseas

Near the end of my fieldwork, I sat in the modest living room of a small, lowceilinged building with Lisette Fuentes, a young homemaker in her late twenties. Periodically interrupted by the antics of Lisette’s rambunctious young son during the interview, I posed once again my routine question about changes in familial life since the fall of the Soviet Union. As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, this simple question elicited complex narratives in which women reflected upon the problems of reproducing children and households, as well as the shifting relationship between the socialist state and its citizens. Lisette’s response came without hesitation: “Now, everyone has family . . . overseas that help them because here the salaries don’t suffice. And if they don’t have family overseas, people go looking . . . for a partner with money, and that’s the way it goes. Relationships and money, money and relationships. I’m telling you, girl, you have to survive and with the problems we have, it’s not easy. It’s the truth, unfortunately, but the person who doesn’t have family overseas, can’t live in Cuba.” Her comment, echoed in various ways by other women and men I came to know, opened up an unforeseen line of analysis. I had initially viewed migration as beyond the purview of my research, and I was months into fieldwork before I fully considered the implications of migration for sustaining Cuban families and society. But in post-Soviet Cuba, signs of el exterior (“the outside,” often meaning “overseas”) are everywhere, belying ubiquitous tourist and foreign media portrayals of the island as closed or stuck in time. In the pillared shade of Infanta, one of Central Havana’s main arteries that passed directly in front of my home, men and women wearing clothing emblazoned with incongruous American slogans and institutional affiliations strolled by doorways where women sold miscellaneous sponges, lighters, and nail polish received from abroad through 114

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transnational networks. On one particularly memorable occasion, my field notes record a truck spewing black diesel fumes thundering by with a neatlylettered plea in English on its windshield: “I need a foreign girlfriend,” while just two doors down the road, a pregnant woman strolled toward the clinic in which I conducted fieldwork, towing a small child whose colorful shirt proudly declared in Spanish, “Someone who loves me very much went to Miami and brought me this T-shirt.” These ubiquitous connections between overseas kin and families living on the island challenged the geographic and conceptual limits that I had imposed on my fieldwork, broadening my analysis beyond the site of the clinic, gendered family relations, or even various labor economies to locate Cuban reproductive relations within a profoundly stratified transnational field. In the post-Soviet economy, many families engage in the work of biological and social reproduction supported by goods and capital obtained through links with family “outside” rather than through avenues provided by the socialist state (Fernandez 2010; Safa 2009). Yet the import of these transnational kinship ties are not only in the material benefits that they may provide. For many Cubans, as for the families of emigrants in many other contexts, overseas kin have come to symbolize the elusive promise of a life that will be emotionally and materially fulfilling in ways that they see as no longer attainable in post-Soviet Cuba.1 This symbolic and material importance of overseas kin is captured in an often-told pun, which asserts that the only real faith (fe) in Cuba is in family overseas (F.E.; Familia en el Exterior). Echoing the joke about sending fetuses to a better life in “the exterior,” this wry quip slyly references Cubans’ storied ambivalence about both Catholicism and socialism, to underscore the hope invested in transnational kinship networks as people imagine different kinds of possible lives. These complex economies of kinship and yearning are shared with migrants and their families in many sending countries. In Latin America and the Caribbean, an established body of research has demonstrated the intertwining of family and economies as people and capital move along transnational kinship networks.2 Strategies of transnational kinship and economics are entangled in other ways as well. In the Dominican Republic, Denise Brennan (2004) has examined how, in the absence of other overseas kinship networks that may yield highly desired remittances or visas, female sex workers—usually single mothers abandoned by previous partners—work to form long-term relationships with foreign men as a means of improving their own and their children’s lives (see also Kempadoo 1999). Among a far more privileged group, Aihwa Ong (1999, 113) depicts the interwoven practices of kinship and capital accumulation of elite diasporic Chinese, proposing the term “flexible citizenship” to describe, in part, the “strategies of subjects who, through a variety of familial and economic practices, seek to evade, deflect,

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and take advantage of political and economic conditions in different parts of the world.” As both nation-states and families seek to regulate and manage their members to optimize their own interests, she argues that the gendered subjectivities that emerge through this geographic and social flexibility (local women and mobile men, for example) are effects of new articulations between political rationalities, cultural practices, and capital flows. This chapter follows concerns with biological and social reproduction as it expands to encompass transnational fields. As Cubans negotiate a post-Soviet order, transnational kinship forms both a resource for sustaining children and households as well a key strategy through which people hope to navigate both Cuban and foreign laws to forge durable links across national borders. In turn, practices of transnational kin-making show the contested visions of social reproduction as many Cubans imagine lives more securely connected with the “outside” than with the socialist state. I first outline how state and familial policies, politics, and economies, as well as individual aspirations, intersect to shape transnational family-building strategies as Cubans both reinvigorate ties to lost family and forge relations of romance and marriage with foreigners. Building on these analyses, I then draw on two case studies to demonstrate an often-overlooked aspect of transnational kinship: strategies of making kin abroad do not only involve management of relationships to existing persons. They also involve the regulation of biological reproduction—the making and breaking of potential kin ties—as people hope to position themselves favorably within the various state and foreign policies that constrain them. Attention to the strategic management of fertility across national borders thus suggests new spaces for the analysis of the intertwined practices of biological and social reproduction as people envision new cultural and social futures across kin groups and national borders.

When Worms Become Butterflies: Migratory Policies and the Politics of Family Overseas The afternoon was slowly drifting towards evening as I sat on the wide expanse of the Malecón, the sweeping promenade that borders Havana’s bay, with Carlos Novoa, my 25-year-old friend and occasional research assistant. After some time, the conversation turned to his memories of his teenage years during the nadir of the Special Period. “I was fourteen when the government finally allowed the sending of remittances [in 1993],” he recalled, “Suddenly, you saw differences among the people. We had all been equal when we suffered, but now you could see who received remittances just by looking at people’s skin.” Marveling at the rapid transformations of this new economic order, he described how the burgeoning economic stratifications were literally embodied in the contrast

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between the soft, supple flesh of those who could afford adequate nutrition and nourishing lotions and the cracked and brittle skin of those who could not. “For us young people,” Carlos continued, “it seemed that there were only two options for survival. Either you found a way to leave, or you found a way to get remittances. Everyone started looking for family overseas.” As Cubans increasingly looked to transnational networks as resources to navigate the crisis, the opening of the remittance economy marked a seachange in both the global political landscape and in Cuban kinship and migratory relations. Prior to the crisis of the Special Period, Cuban emigration was virtually synonymous with political dissent in the hostile tug-of-war that characterized the Cold War. In stark contrast to their Caribbean and Latin American neighbors, any Cuban arriving in the United States was (and continues to be) welcomed as a political exile and set on an immediate path to citizenship. Countering this pull from the United States, the Cuban government restricted legal migration apart from discrete situational apertures.3 In the context of firebombings conducted by Miami-Cubans, the 1961 CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, and assassination attempts on the Cuban leadership, those who left the island were labeled “worms” (gusanos; traitors), stripped of their Cuban citizenship and property, and prohibited from returning to their families in Cuba.4 Their remaining families, regardless of their actual feelings, frequently sought to distance themselves from their “counterrevolutionary” kin, at times making public denunciations for fear of reprisals. The global divisions of the Cold War were thus reproduced within the core of many Cuban families: as members were forced to choose rigidly defined political sides, many emigrants were lost to their families for decades. The economic and political shifts brought about by the Special Period transformed this social and familial landscape. While hostile political and economic policies, enacted by the United States and the international lending bodies over which it wields substantial influence, denied the Cuban government vital international funding, a subterranean landscape was etched out as money flowed through transnational networks founded on alternative ideologies of kinship, reciprocity, and mutual aid, creating a remittance economy that has recently been estimated at over a billion dollars per year (Orozco 2012). Viewing Cuban migratory practices through the lens of reproduction throws into sharp relief the vexed intersection of familial politics and state biopolitics—the governmental technologies of the modern state aimed at securing the well-being and the reproduction of its population—as both attempt to secure their own stability and well-being across the generations. For the Cuban state, long-standing restrictions on travel and emigration were intimately tied to concerns around population management. Until 2012, would-be travelers were required to solicit official approval to leave the country even temporarily;

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this restriction on population movement took on heightened political importance given U.S. policy that welcomed the emigrant Cubans which successive administrations have viewed as political exiles. Whereas retirees considered at the end of their productive (and reproductive) years were granted travel licenses relatively freely, young Cubans—particularly those in professions, such as medicine, into whom the revolutionary government had invested considerable resources—were often barred from leaving the country. Even if they were granted these coveted travel approvals, their migratory possibilities were often constrained by the political rationalities of the receiving states, as governments made strategic decisions about the future composition of their national bodies through regulations governing emigration, the rights and status of foreign spouses and non-resident family, and selective granting of visas to the applicants considered most desirable. On the island, the growing importance of family overseas as a source of remittances, visas, and other forms of support fostered wide-spread practices of transnational kin-making as a means of navigating the wider structures that limited people’s economic, social, and geographic mobility. In so doing, people, like states, actively worked to shape the composition and membership of their family. For many families, making transnational kin meant initiating processes of re-connection and reconciliation with those who had left during the first years of the revolution. For others, it meant familial debates about which member would leave so that their remittances might help the others to survive (Hernández et al. 2002). With families increasingly reliant on transnational kinship networks as vital resources to cover the shortages of the state system, migration became for many an emotionally fraught but desirable life trajectory: the “worms” had become butterflies. The critical role that overseas kin can play in supporting the reproduction of children and households on the island is evident in the case of Idaly Santos, whose transnational family enabled her to leave the state work force and bear a child on her own, as well as that of Marisa Sánchez, the doctor, whose partner’s remittances paid for her parents’ caregiver and allowed her to return to work. Yet simply having connections to family abroad does not necessarily guarantee access to desired financial or migratory support, and the work of kin-making and kin-sustaining can involve sometimes fraught negotiations. While family solidarity is upheld as a central value, migrants’ frequently limited resources and the number of potential dependents in Cuba means that access to transnational flows of goods and capital often depends not only on the financial position of overseas relatives in their adopted countries, but also on their assessment of the quality of their relationship with remaining family members. As Cuban scholars Consuelo Martín and Guadalupe Pérez note (1998), the willingness of family abroad to provide ongoing financial support or to initiate visa applications is

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usually dependent on assurances that these transnational relationships are not simply self-interested (por interés), but are founded on the deep affective ties assumed to bond those considered “family.”5 Research also suggests that this flow of capital along kinship lines is deeply gendered, with women more likely than men to send remittances to family on the island, thereby reproducing cultural patterns of nurturance and responsibility for caregiving across transnational fields (Blue 2004). Relationships between emigrants and their kin on the island are thus deeply informed by issues surrounding generational or genealogical distance, temporality (as many migrants who initially send remittances may drift away from their Cuban families over time), and the brittleness or flexibility of the gendered kinship networks through which both affective and material support is expected to flow. Moreover, given the particular history of migratory politics in Cuba, lapsed transnational familial ties may require significant social labor to revitalize them. Javier Ruíz was a 26-year-old desvinculado (unemployed person) who regularly visited me to chat and to painstakingly type out emails to an emigrant uncle. In 1980, this uncle had taken advantage of his position as an airplane mechanic to smuggle himself onboard a flight destined for Canada. Over twenty years passed with little communication, but by the time I met him in 2004, Javier was convinced that better opportunities were available for him off the island. On the advice of an aunt who had herself migrated to Paris, Javier located and reinitiated contact with his uncle. Yet such precarious contact with a long-absent family member did not permit him to request aid immediately. Several months of letter writing and email exchange ensued, in which he assured his uncle of his Cuban family’s continued affection and well-wishes. Finally, Javier broached the topic that had precipitated this reinvigoration of kinship relations, asking his uncle to write the formal invitation letter that was at that time still required to apply for an exit visa. Even after the Canadian embassy denied his visa application a year later (probably correctly suspecting that he intended to cross the border into the United States, where he would be eligible to become a citizen), Javier maintained contact through email and occasional remittances with his Canadian relative who had once again become family. Javier’s continued efforts at sustaining this new kin tie proved successful: several years later, in a bid to populate some of nation’s less developed regions, the Canadian government approved his visa and resettled him in Manitoba. Anthropologists studying kinship in such diverse contexts as gay families (Weston 1991), child fostering (Leinaweaver 2008), and the new reproductive technologies (Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Rapp 1999) have underscored how people actively engage in what Charis Thompson (2001) has called “‘doing kinship.” Unsettling, often contrary to the beliefs of participants, the notion of kinship as a static architectural framework, and of family as a transparent

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reflection of biology and bloodlines, this perspective reveals kinship as the product of material activity in which participants may strategically privilege either social and affective relations or biological inheritance in making claims to relatedness. As Javier’s case demonstrates, biological proximity is just one dimension that individuals call upon when they selectively foreground certain kinship relations as a basis for making claims for economic or migratory support. Through emails, telephone calls, and recognition of events such as birthdays and anniversaries, they assure distant family of the emotional attachments that should underlie the reciprocal obligations of family. They thus actively engage in transnational kin work—the mental and physical labor of maintaining kin ties through phone calls, visits, and ritual celebrations (di Leonardo 1987)6—as they strive to reinvigorate familial networks that may have lapsed under the pressures of space and time. Practices of transnational kin-making are also shot through with the flux of global and state policies as other nation-states work to manage the reproduction of their own populations; the ultimate success of Javier’s application for emigration, for instance, was a result of the convergence of familial politics (the genealogical kin work performed by Javier’s aunt in reconnecting Javier and his uncle, Javier’s labor to revive this old kin tie, as well as his uncle’s willingness to support his visa for reasons of family solidarity) with the biopolitics of the Canadian state and its desire to increase the number of subjects living in provinces it considers underpopulated. Moreover, shifting national policies and priorities also shape which kin count, in the context of migratory aspirations. To give one salient example, Spain’s migratory policies allow the repatriation of any foreign citizen who can trace his or her ancestry to a single Spanish grandparent (reflecting the preference of the Spanish state, in the context of its own below-replacement fertility, to populate its nation with people of Spanish descent rather than relaxing migratory restrictions for applicants from countries seen as racially and culturally “other”). In a generationally delayed example of return migration now common in Cuba, many Cubans whose grandparents fled the Franco dictatorship in the 1930s have appealed to this past kinship connection as a means of emigration. On any given weekday, a long line of waiting visa applicants stretches around the block from the ornate Spanish embassy on Havana’s Malecón, supporting a busy industry of coleros (“people who wait in line”) comprised mainly of retirees who rise at dawn to wait in line and sell their spot for a few dollars to those with money to spare and little inclination to spend hours in what could turn out to be fruitless waiting. While many of these aspiring emigrants have neither previously set foot in Spain nor maintained relations with their distant family still living there, their legally acknowledged claims to connections of biology, or shared blood, permit the inheritance of a highly coveted foreign

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citizenship. This new national citizenship allows them to remain within the European Union, or—in an increasingly popular strategy given the E.U.’s own economic difficulties—to enter the United States and eventually claim the permanent residency accorded to all Cubans (Burnett 2013). But global geopolitics and national policies can also undermine claims to kinship.7 In Cuba, the 2004 amendments to the embargo (overturned in 2009 by the Obama administration) restricted visits and remittances from CubanAmericans to “immediate” family members only, defined as parents, grandparents, children, and siblings.8 By narrowing the definition of family, the Bush administration sought to undermine the Cuban state by directly attacking the basis for the reproduction of many Cuban families—their kinship networks abroad. In response, the popular Cuban magazine Bohemia published an article entitled, “The Aunts and Uncles that No Longer Count” (Suardíaz 2004), that described the close-knit ties characteristic of many Cuban extended families, and archly pointed out that the new measures undermined the kin tie of the central figure of U.S. nationalism—Uncle Sam. These actions explicitly made Cuban transnational kinship a political issue.

Migratory Politics and Reproductive Dilemmas These uneven migratory policies and possibilities have shaped opportunities for Cubans on the island and impacted the state’s ability to reproduce its vision of socialist egalitarianism. A study of familial inequality in Havana by Cuban geographer Luisa Iñíguez (2001) found that 63 percent of the wealthiest families received remittances compared with just 5 percent of the poorest families. Identifying the stratifying effects of these transnational relationships, Dr. Laura Castellanos, the community psychologist who conducted periodic rounds in Janet and Tatiana’s clinic, commented on the social changes that she had seen as a consequence of remittances and the dollarization of the economy. “You see it particularly in the children,” she said, “Most families can provide food for their children, at least the basics, but shoes, a backpack for school? Those cost money, and most of it comes from overseas. You can tell a family’s income by looking at these aspects of a child’s clothing.” While Cuban adults are resigned to “making do” when necessary through carefully repairing clothing, shoes, and household goods, children’s constant need for new clothes and possessions as they develop can represent a substantial burden in some families’ budgets—a point that Maidol, the teenage mother of the previous chapter, highlighted in her description of the cost of providing her daughter with new shoes. In identifying families’ unequal ability to care for their children in proper “conditions” as a central indicator of the new economic disparities, Laura underscores the implications of familial reproductive efforts for state

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ideologies of egalitarian citizenship in post-Soviet Cuba. Given the state’s inability to maintain historic commitments to universal provision, those families with family overseas now turn to transnational relationships to nurture children and support households. In contrast, those without links to the transnational or entrepreneurial economies—like the pregnant and underweight Gisela Navarro, who chose to give her additional food rations to her daughter—must make difficult decisions about the distribution of resources to sustain various family members. These practices of household reproduction both reflect and heighten the economic inequalities that undermine historic socialist promises of egalitarianism. The emergence of the remittance economy has also exacerbated the racial inequalities that have persisted throughout the revolution (Fernandez 2010). The vast majority of Cuba’s early emigrants were socially identified as white; their families on the island today thus often enjoy privileged access to transnational money, goods, and visas that are less available to Afro-Cuban families, who generally have fewer kinship relations abroad (Blue 2007; Brookings Institute 2008). Moreover, darker-skinned Cubans, who made up a greater proportion in the later waves of economically driven migration, tend to be found in the lowest levels of racial hierarchies in both the Miami-Cuban community and in broader U.S. society (de la Fuente 2001). Characterized as black within U.S. racial categories, they frequently have little access to the institutionalized support networks that had welcomed earlier (and whiter) emigrants to the U.S., and many find it difficult to save enough money in the lower-paid and insecure jobs that they obtain to fulfill the expectations of the family left behind. With the flow of visas and remittances through kinship lines, racial and economic inequalities experienced in the United States thus have profound repercussions in Cuba as well. Such experiences are shared among many Afro-Caribbean migrant groups (Yelvington 2001), yet take on particular significance in Cuba, where the leveling of economic differences across racial lines has constituted one of the chief goals of the socialist government. In what my informants often described as a mundo al revés (world upside down), those who left the revolution are often in a position to offer their families much-needed aid, while those who remained committed to its ideological precepts often find themselves struggling to stay afloat. These changes now resonate throughout contemporary Cuban society; since the economic and ideological crisis of the Special Period, both scholars and lay people have expressed concern about the attrition from the socialist project. Like so many aspects of life in socialist Cuba, an often-told joke—in which a child who is asked what he wants to be when he grows up declares, “A foreigner!”—captures these fraught questions about the biological and social reproduction of the revolution when so many of its young generation aspire to lives “outside.”

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For young Cubans in particular, who have grown up knowing nothing but constant shortages and economic difficulties, migration forms both an interpretation of the possibilities of life inside the revolution and a field of social action. Ricardo Montes was a 28-year-old former tour guide who had made a lengthy and circuitous trip to Miami that included bribing an official for a visa to an Argentina stricken by the post-structural adjustment economic crash, a marriage of convenience to an Argentinian woman, and an arduous journey on foot across the Mexican-U.S. border. When he visited me in New York, however, he readily admitted that he left not for political or even strictly economic reasons. Rather, he wanted to “see the world, to travel. For better or for worse I wanted to know what life was like outside Cuba.” He thinks often of his family, but with few regrets. “I send a hundred dollars every month, enough to live well in Cuba, but they had their chance to leave in the 1980s. They had family that would bring them here, but they were revolutionaries and they decided to stay. That was their decision, and this is mine.” In this interweaving of kinship and migratory politics, parents who chose to remain with the revolution often watch with resignation and sadness as their children choose different life trajectories. Ricardo’s narrative thus foregrounds the generational distinctions that often—although not always— inform experiences and expectations of the socialist project (Borneman 1992; Rofel 1999).9 Many of the older generation have vivid memories of the yawning social, economic, and racial gaps that characterized prerevolutionary society; they actively fought for the socialist vision of national sovereignty, egalitarianism, and social progress. Their historical ideological commitments often stand in tension with those of the younger generation who, knowing little outside the economic desperation of the Special Period and the burgeoning social stratification of contemporary Cuba, are imagining “protonarratives of possible lives” (Appadurai 1996). When I visited Ricardo’s family in the outer neighborhood of Regla, his mother’s eyes filled with tears as she told me of the aspirations of Ricardo’s younger sister, Ana, who hoped to marry her boyfriend and accompany him when his mother reclaimed him from Germany, where she had herself migrated. Having considered various options, Ana considered this kinship and migratory strategy faster and more reliable than waiting for her brother to obtain the U.S. citizenship necessary to facilitate her visa application. “It’s so sad that we will be left here to grow old without our children,” their mother told me, “but life changes, everything is changing, and children have to grow up and take the opportunities that come.” Ana nodded in agreement. Her migratory plans were no spontaneous decision; she had even refrained from going to law school in favor of a university degree in economics (and currently worked as a manager of a bodega, or state

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rations dispensary). Since law graduates are required to perform between two and five years of public service in return for free tuition, she knew that her application for an exit visa would be denied should she pursue a career in law. “Yet,” she emphasized, “I will be an economic migrant, not a political one. I don’t have anything against the state—I’m even a member of the UJC [Union of Communist Youth] because it’s useful to get a job, make contacts. But I want to live better than this, have a car, an apartment, have money, things to spend it on, and I’ll work hard to get it. When you’re in a socialist system, you have to live like a socialist. But this is a capitalist world, so you have to live like a capitalist.” Many Cubans engage in such parallel planning as they simultaneously engage in the activities required to forge a life on the island while also aspiring to, and working toward, a life overseas. Like many young people today, Ana feels that to choose to live “like a socialist,” with its implications of volunteerism, dedication of time to political commitments, and labor in the state work force, may be a situationally strategic, but ultimately short-lived, tactic for social and economic advancement. With the undermining of the state’s promise of cradleto-grave nurturance, socialist avenues of opportunity no longer guarantee a higher status or standard of living for those who invest in education or in membership in the UJC than for those who seek material prosperity elsewhere. Evaluations of the material difficulties of life in post-Soviet Cuba and the near impossibility of obtaining many of the symbols of middle-class life have thus led many young people to imagine life trajectories abroad rather than with the socialist revolution. Yet given the migratory policies and politics of both Cuban and foreign states, those hoping to emigrate without the aid of transnational kinship networks must turn to other avenues. Some religiously apply to the U.S. green card lottery, explaining their extremely low rates of success (due in fact to backlogs in American bureaucracy and political concerns about the effects of wholesale Cuban immigration) by trading rumors of secret rooms in the Cuban postal system allegedly stacked to the ceiling with undelivered yellow envelopes, the signature stationery indicating notification of a dreamed-of U.S. visa. Others try their luck crossing the Miami Strait, lured by the promise of U.S. citizenship for those lucky enough to put one foot on dry American soil. While numbers of attempted sea-crossings have declined since the worst years of the Special Period, this perilous form of migration is etched on the Cuban collective imagination. During my fieldwork in 2004, after a summer of shortages marked by heightened discontent and several rumored interceptions of intended rafters, the popular Saturday night television slot featured the U.S. film Open Sea in which a couple drown after being stranded by their scuba diving boat. The next morning, street chatter was rife with analyses of the political “meaning” of the film, which most interpreted as a renewed state warning of the perils of attempting an illegal sea migration.

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The explosion of the international tourist sector since the 1990s has also created new opportunities for relationships to the outside, as growing numbers of young people look to practices of love, romance, and kinship to develop the relationships with foreigners that have become for many an “escape hatch” out of the country (Fernandez 2010).

Escapist Fantasies: Sex, Marriage, and Migratory Desires Any casual visitor to Cuba is likely to notice the number of transnational and often interracial couples on its famous resort beaches and in Havana nightclubs: older European men squiring a much younger Cuban woman, or a Cuban man in an embrace with a female tourist from Europe, North America, or Australia. Since the opening of the tourist sector in the 1990s, Cuba has become a novel site for sex and romance tourists of both sexes. Fed by global structures of inequality and desire that draw foreigners in their millions to the Caribbean islands (e.g., Brennan 2004; Kempadoo 1999, 2004), an industry of young Cuban men and women known as jineteros, or jockeys, for the way they are seen to “ride” tourists, has sprung up to cater to visitors’ needs. Reframing the political rhetoric of struggle (la lucha) to describe their own efforts at economic and geographic mobility, jineteros may provide romance (in many cases, sex may not comprise part of the relationship at all), as well as companionship, translation and tour services, facilitators for the purchase of black market cigars, dance partners, and other miscellaneous services. In return, they may receive gifts of clothes and money, as well as access to the restaurants, hotels, and nightclubs out of reach of most Cubans. While most of these relationships last only the duration of the tourist’s stay, some are maintained after the departure of the foreign partner and may result in remittances, return trips, and highly sought-after visas to the tourist’s home country. For a few, these commitments may culminate in marriage and the possibility of permanent migration. A body of ethnography in various global sites has documented how individuals and families may strive to improve their life prospects through making connections with foreigners in relationships ranging from sex and romance tourism to marriage migration.10 These are not necessarily exclusive; sex or romance work is often explicitly conceived as a strategy for individual or familial advancement in which marriage and migration are key goals (Brennan 2004). In many cases, the creation of these temporary or permanent alliances can provide an avenue to needed currency and goods on which a whole family may depend, as well as migratory opportunities for both individuals and extended kin networks. In other cases, researchers have found that both partners are highly invested in portraying their relationship as based on love rather

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than instrumental interests, and emigration as a natural consequence of this romantic attachment rather than an end goal in itself (Constable 2003; Fernandez 2012). While marriage migration in many sites is distinctly feminized, both Cuban men and women are represented in these complex global “cartographies of desire” (Pflugfelder 1999) in which Cuban fantasies about life in el exterior meet tourist fantasies about sex and romance with the racially exoticized and sexually eroticized “other” of the Caribbean. Given the historic centrality of the eradication of prostitution to state claims to socialist morality, the emergence of female jineterismo has generated particular attention and debate.11 Some scholars—echoing Fidel Castro’s 1992 speech during which he asserted that women engaged in sex work not out of necessity but because they “like it”—have characterized sex tourism as “tourist imperialism” and linked it to the defiling of the socialist project to emancipate women (Strout 1995). Others have underscored the austerity of the Special Period and provocatively argued that sex and romance work provides women with an (always constrained) opportunity to regain control of their sexuality and pleasurable consumption after years of state puritanism (Fusco 1998). Still others highlight how sex and romance work blurs the lines between labor and love in these often racialized encounters, as well as the fact that the state itself is implicated in the local and transnational reproduction of sexualized and racialized stereotypes of the Caribbean, particularly in the depiction of the “beautiful mulata woman” as part of its international advertising to attract tourism to Cuba.12 It is not my intention to weigh in on this debate. Rather, I offer this brief overview to suggest that relationships considered jineterismo are simply the most visible and controversial face of widespread social practices in which transnational kinship, migration, and local/global economies are inextricably intertwined. Indeed, researchers frequently note the difficulty of classifying which relationships and which participants actually count as jineterismo, noting that definitions of sex and romance work are contingent on established hierarchies of space, race, and gender. In my own social encounters, I soon realized that Cuban friends and informants resisted characterizing known individuals as jineteros even if they engaged in practices that—to me, at least— appeared to fall into this category: young men with a succession of foreign girlfriends or women who married foreign lovers twice their age and emigrated with them. Instead, these relationships were almost universally described through discourses of friendship and compatibility. Scholarly observers also note that efforts to police jineterismo through detaining Cubans interacting with foreigners in highly touristed areas overwhelmingly target darker-skinned individuals, while efforts to control and punish prostitution focus almost exclusively on women (although this may be changing with the new visibility

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of male jineteros) (Allen 2010; Cabezas 2004; Hodge 2005). Thus, while a white male strolling the campus of the University of Havana with a foreigner may be construed as in a relationship of love or friendship, a dark-skinned Cuban woman accompanying a tourist in the resort beach of Varadero will almost automatically be considered a jinetera and may be detained or questioned (Fernandez 1999, 2010). Critics thus charge that these practices reproduce historic gender and racial ideologies that portray the sexuality of Afro-Cubans as licentious and profiteering, and that erotize mulata women in particular. In a social context in which transnational relationships represent a highly desirable resource, and where many people across all sectors of society consider marriage as one of several possible means of emigration, accusations of jineterismo are arguably more accurately seen as a moral discourse about racialized and sexualized others than a description of fact. Of course, many of these transnational romances and relationships do reproduce longstanding gender, class, and racial stereotypes, both locally and in the global tourist market. As in other Caribbean contexts, Cuban men and women may strive to embody tourists’ gendered and racialized stereotypes through presenting themselves as the sexualized mulata or as a dreadlocked Rasta (Fusco 1998; Phillips 1999). These eroticized ideologies of race and gender are in turn deeply intertwined with hierarchies of kinship and citizenship; on a flight back to Miami, I encountered two young American businessmen who were discussing the Cuban women they had met during their trip. When one described his new girlfriend’s desire to get married and migrate to the United States, the other scoffed at him, declaring, “It’s OK to have a Cuban girlfriend in Cuba, but you can’t turn a horse into a housewife.” In defining American women as suitable for marriage and domestic labor and Cuban women as pleasurable sexual companions (to be ridden, as his equine image implies) within clearly demarcated temporal and geographic limits, his comment underscores the reproduction of these historic race, gender, class, and kinship hierarchies along transnational lines. Practices of transnational kin-making and family-building strategies are thus profoundly shaped by: global flows of capital; national and local hierarchies of race, gender, and region; and economic inequalities between nations and families. Yet, both in Cuba and elsewhere, scholarly interest in the interweaving of kinship and transnational economies has tended to focus on the relationships between existing persons. The issue of transnational fertility (and its limitation) and its entanglement with migratory politics has received far less attention.13 As the following sections describe, decisions about whether to reproduce and with whom can become deeply intertwined with considerations around transnational connections and the possibilities opened or foreclosed by state and international policies and politics.

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Mislaidy García: The Transnational Reproduction of Children and Households Wending through a labyrinth of small, makeshift concrete bungalows in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, I arrived at the scheduled time outside the dilapidated home of an interviewee to find it empty—an all-too-familiar situation to which I had become accustomed over the course of my fieldwork. As I settled in to wait, a serene woman rounded the corner laden with plastic shopping bags. I was struck at once by the unusual quantity of products. As she came close enough for me to see the brand name packaging through the thin plastic bags, I also noted that everything had been purchased at the dollar stores rather than acquired at the agro or through the ration system. Mislaidy invited me into her small but clean living room and began unpacking the groceries on the kitchen counter while we talked. Beginning the interview in my accustomed way, I described my interest in understanding the factors that influenced reproductive decision making. Without waiting for further elaboration, she immediately responded, “I have a complicated history. I don’t know if you will understand it. I have four boys, but the father of my youngest is also the father of my second son.” When I nodded my comprehension, she continued, MG:

You see, what happened is that my second son is mentally disabled, but he was the only son of his father. Well, six years ago my ex-husband left for the United States. The Special Period had cured him of being a socialist, he said . . . [Now he] has another wife, an older American, but they don’t have children. And he wanted to have another child because, well, this other son isn’t really a son, because he’s mentally disabled. So . . . he called me up [from the United States] and said, “Listen, I have a favor to ask you,” which was that he wanted to have another child. So I said to him, “Look, I’d like to, but I don’t have the conditions” . . . So he said, “Let me see what I can do for you,” and he worked it out so he got me this house. It’s small, and not fancy, but it’s mine. So we came to an agreement and he came on holiday . . . and now we have our child.

EA:

How did you decide that you wanted to have another child, even though the

MG:

You know, I think I was always in love with him, even when we separated. I

father was abroad? just didn’t realize it. Her complex narrative highlights how tensions around familial reproduction serve as critical moments in which people conceptualize their relationship to the social state, as well the centrality of kinship as a strategy of mobility in post-Soviet Cuba. During the Special Period, Mislaidy’s second husband, Ángel, had become increasingly frustrated with the difficulties of sustaining a

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family in a state in economic freefall. For him, as with Celia Peña, the formermilitary-turned-salsa-teacher and many others, the unprecedented austerity of the Special Period forced a reevaluation of the state’s narratives of progress and modernity and his own commitment to the socialist project. His growing political disillusionment and his determination to leave the island at any cost heightened their marital discord, as the stress-induced arguments between Mislaidy and Ángel about the family’s dire economic predicament became interwoven with competing understandings of the state’s decline in economic and ideological power. In the late 1990s, Mislaidy and Ángel separated. Some months later, Ángel met an older American tourist (Mislaidy was not sure of the details of this encounter, nor did she know whether Ángel’s American wife was aware of his renewed relationship with Mislaidy). They married after a short courtship and he emigrated to the United States. But Ángel fervently desired another child especially, as Mislaidy put it, a “real son” who would symbolize a gendered continuity across the generations. His hopes were thwarted by his new wife’s inability or reluctance to raise a family. With little possibility of realizing his reproductive desires within his marriage, he turned to his previous relationship in Cuba where he found Mislaidy in a fraught situation. The relationship with the father of her third child had ended, but Havana’s housing shortage had forced them to continue cohabitating, a situation not uncommon in overcrowded urban areas. “If it were up to him,” Mislaidy added darkly, “he would have thrown me and the boys onto the street, but he could never have gotten away with it.” Her situation illustrates the complexities of life in a state with strong affirmative social policies and an embattled economy: while Mislaidy’s options were severely constrained by the chronic crisis in urban housing, she and her children were nonetheless protected by Cuban laws that complicate eviction, particularly of mothers and children. Ángel’s proposal was simple: in exchange for the chance to father a child, he would resolve her lack of “conditions” for childbearing by obtaining a house for her. Mislaidy had always wanted another child, and the offer represented a desperately desired opportunity to escape from her present situation by circumventing state policy around housing exchange. (While intended to eliminate the free market sale of housing, this policy severely disadvantaged those who did not already have rights to a house.) With the American dollars earned as a contract laborer, Ángel was able to buy this small concrete house in an outer suburb (a transaction that was then still illegal). The new independence afforded by possession of her own home enabled Mislaidy in turn to reclaim her disabled son from the institution where he had been placed after her third husband objected to residing with him.

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With the necessary conditions fulfilled, Ángel and Mislaidy began to synchronize labor and reproductive cycles. Making plans according to Mislaidy’s projected ovulation dates, Ángel requested vacation leave and arrived in Havana at the prearranged time. When he left ten days later, Mislaidy was already convinced that she was pregnant, even though she was already forty years old at the time. Her intuition was confirmed two weeks later through an ultrasound at her local polyclinic. “They took such good care of me,” she recalled, “And I was at that polyclinic almost every week asking for an ultrasound! I just wanted to see him, know that he was there and doing alright.” This visual confirmation of the pregnancy initiated, as agreed, a flow of remittances from Ángel. Supported by these funds, Mislaidy left her state job as an administrative secretary and dedicated herself to domestic obligations and the care of her children. When I met her three months after the birth of her son, she told me that her only sadness was that Ángel was not able to meet his child: although he called when he could and she knew how happy he was to have fathered a “real son,” the then-extant embargo restrictions meant that he would only be able to visit every three years. For Mislaidy and Ángel, the entangling of transnational kinship and economies encompassed not only past and present family relations, but also the conception of future kin. As both worked to achieve very different but convergent goals—Ángel toward the birth of a son that he considered a full member in his family genealogy, Mislaidy toward the possession of a house and the financial ability to support all of her children—they turned to the transnational management of fertility to negotiate the various familial politics, state policies, and economic inequalities that shaped their options. In many ways, this strategy of reproducing children and households, enabled by transnational flows of capital and the distant locations of Ángel’s American wife and Mislaidy, the Cuban mother of his children, resonates with the cultural logic of Cuba’s colonial past and the gendered inequalities that they produced. In colonial Cuba, the establishment of an “outside” or “illegitimate” family with a woman of lower class or racial status was an accepted practice for men from the creole (white) elite. For these “other” women, these relationships of sex and reproduction provided the hope of economic stability and an avenue for social mobility for themselves and for their children, but also the threat of increased economic hardship should their lovers abandon them. In entering this reproductive arrangement, Mislaidy has similarly achieved a degree of personal and economic well-being that was impossible in her previous situation. Yet she has also become dependent upon Ángel’s continued remittances to support both herself and the three sons still living with her (her oldest son having long since moved out to live with his father). This dependence is tempered by state policies of social support; despite its retreat from promises of full nurturance, the Cuban state still guarantees many of the basic conditions for the

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reproduction of its citizenry. Mislaidy paid no rent, nor did she have to consider the expenses of health care and education. In addition, she received a small stipend from the state to care for her disabled son, the result of a 2001 policy that aimed to deinstitutionalize children and move their care back into the private realm of the family while subsidizing mothers whose caretaking obligations now limited their ability to work. Without remittances, however, this stipend would not suffice to support her daily caregiving obligations, and her own and her family’s well-being would be extremely compromised should Ángel fail to fulfill his financial responsibilities in the future. The apparent similarities between relations of kinship and reproduction as forms of mobility in the colonial past and the post-Soviet present are not lost on local observers: Vladamira Núñez, a 44-year-old whose work as a secondhand bookseller at a busy street corner gave her ample opportunity to observe and comment on the movement of neighbors, declared, “In the nineteenth century, marriages were made for material interests, like unifying family property. That doesn’t happen now, but you see so many young girls who want to marry foreigners, and their families encourage it. To me, it’s the same dog with a different collar.” Evoking the strategizing of middle- and upper-class families in colonial Cuba to secure the most advantageous marriage for their daughters, Vladamira suggests that Cuban families today similarly view relationships with foreigners as an opportunity for familial economic advancement. As in the colonial past, fertility often plays a key role in the solidification of these desired transnational kin ties: after one 41-year-old woman returned to the family doctor clinic month after month to request the ultrasound scans used to detect early pregnancy, Janet quietly speculated, “She’s in a relationship with a Canadian man and it seems that she wants to get pregnant so she can tie him down and he’ll marry her. It’s the traditional Cuban way!” In these assessments, contemporary practices of transnational marriage and reproduction as a means of individual and familial upward mobility are little different from the kinship strategies central to the reproduction of the gender, class, and racial hierarchies of Spanish colonialism, as well as to individuals’—particularly women’s—limited mobility within them (Martínez-Alier 1974). Yet, as with the case of Yanislaidis Martínez, the homemaker of the previous chapter, it would be oversimplifying to view these relationships as evidence of a slippage back into a capitalist past or as evidence of the overt materialism of the post-Soviet era. Rather, these reproductive practices, and the gendered subjectivities that emerge from them, result from new formations and articulations between families and the Cuban state. Both Mislaidy and Ángel illustrate the creative and strategic ways that both women and men are working to position themselves as “flexible citizens” (Ong 1999), both on the island and off, by negotiating the opportunities and contradictions produced in the intersection

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between state policy (both Cuban and foreign), familial politics, and national and transnational economies.14 Moreover, the politics and processes underlying Mislaidy’s reproductive decisions are far more complex than simply “rational” calculations of risk and benefit. In describing her reasons for deciding to bear another child with Ángel, Mislaidy declared that she was “always in love with him.” Her assertion stands as an invitation to multiple interpretations: a transparent statement of her affective connection with Ángel, a rationalization of economic pragmatism in the more socially acceptable idiom of “love,” or as “false consciousness.” While ultimately unknowable, her declaration highlights the complex interplay of affect, power, and economy in shaping gendered persons and economies. In spite of the complexity of Mislaidy’s transnational family and the potentially fragile nature by which it was sustained, Mislaidy assured me in our interview that she was perfectly content. When I asked about her own longterm hopes, she evinced little interest in emigrating herself, expressing her happiness with her house and her sons in the country she loved. Despite the material difficulties of life in post-Soviet Cuba and the unorthodox nature of her familial relationships, she declared her full commitment to the island and the social achievements of its revolution. Yet underscoring the creative and open-ended decision making that had characterized her reproductive arrangements, Mislaidy’s desires and plans for herself and for her family may also shift in time as she negotiates the changing terrain of domestic and familial politics and policies.

Lili Menéndez: Reproductive Control and the Biopolitics of States and Families Reproductive strategies thus span past, present, and future relations as individuals seek to position themselves within a constantly shifting international and familial landscape. While Mislaidy turned to childbearing to create desired bonds to transnational people and economies, migratory aspirations may also demand the management of fertility to prevent the potential offspring that might create unwanted ties to people and places. Lili Menéndez, introduced in chapter 4 when she sought a regulación, had been raised by her paternal grandmother after her father, Luis, emigrated to Miami when she was fourteen years old. Despite the distance between them, Luis maintained his strong emotional and financial commitments to his daughter through frequent telephone calls and the constant flow of remittances. Five years later, when Lili was nineteen, Luis was granted U.S. citizenship. With this new citizenship status, Luis was able to begin the lengthy process of reclaiming Lili and to embark on the first of many return visits to the island. To his grief, he discovered that Lili had

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become pregnant. Over his objections, she decided to keep the pregnancy and gave birth to her son, Manuelito. Despite his initial anger and disappointment, Luis continued with his bureaucratic efforts and a year later succeeded in obtaining U.S. visas for Lili and Manuelito. Since Lili and her boyfriend were not legally married, Luis could not invoke any direct kin tie that would allow him to apply for a visa on the boyfriend’s behalf. Moreover, Lili’s boyfriend was far from certain that he wanted to leave the island to settle in Miami. Yet when Lili told him that she wanted to emigrate with Manuelito, he refused to sign the renunciation of parental authority that Cuban law requires from both parents before a minor may leave the country. Lili, for her part, refused to leave without her son. The family feud that ensued effectively ended Lili’s relationship, yet without resolving her partner’s contested claim to their son that prevented Lili from migrating. Seven years later, when I met her in the midst of her tumultuous relationship with Alfredo that culminated in the traumatic regulación, Lili was growing despondent over what she saw as the unlikelihood of ever being able to reunite with her father. Besides her deep emotional attachment to her father, she was also becoming anxious about the future financial well-being of the family. As a single mother and state-employed office worker, Lili was only able to provide a comfortable standard of living for her son and her grandmother with the support of Luis’s steady flow of remittances from his job as a desk clerk at a Miami hotel. “But if he has to retire, or something happens to him, then what will happen to us? There’s nothing for me here, no way to improve our conditions,” she confided, adding only half-jokingly, “unless I marry someone with money!” By that time, Luis had unsuccessfully applied for several temporary visas that would allow Lili and Manuelito to “visit” him in Miami, where she intended to settle permanently. Blocked from this avenue of migration, he had again decided to pursue the more expensive and prolonged application for a permanent visa. This time, aware that the 2004 restrictions had significantly decreased the number of successful reclamations, Luis planned to mobilize several avenues of kinship to support his cause. Having heard that the U.S. approval process prioritized applications to reclaim Cuban spouses over applications filed on behalf of adult children hoping to join their emigrant parents, Luis was also working within networks of friends in Miami to locate a Cuban-American to marry Lili and to reclaim her as his wife. In this intersection between family politics and state biopolitics, subjects are disciplined and regulated, mobilized or immobilized, through both political rationalities and cultural forms and practices (Ong 1999). Given the idiosyncratic nature of U.S. policy towards Cuba, Luis’s movements were differently enabled and constrained in various moments as political administrations moved in and out of office. Drawn to America, like so many Cubans before

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him, by its geographic proximity and a guaranteed path to citizenship, Luis had become accustomed to traveling freely to see his daughter in Cuba after his legalization as a U.S. citizen. He was thus heartbroken by the short-lived restrictions, instituted under the administration of George W. Bush, which limited Cuban-Americans’ visits to family on the island to once every three years. In contrast, Lili’s Cuban citizenship positioned her as an “inflexible citizen” in the global arena. Not only would she require an entry visa into virtually any country in the world but, given Cuba’s then-extant policies of population regulation, would also have to petition for government approval to leave the island. Lili’s “inflexibility,” however, stemmed not only from national policy and international geopolitics, but also from gendered cultural norms around the nurturance of dependents. After her relationship with Manuelito’s father disintegrated, she had become the sole caregiver for her son. With Cuban laws requiring renunciation of parental authority prior to the exit of minors, this reproductive and emotional bond complicated her efforts to migrate, and anchored her to the island. This is not to claim that all women would choose to remain if they could not take their children with them; some do leave, hoping for a change in policy or circumstance that would allow them to reunite with their children, just as some men turn down opportunities to emigrate in order to stay near their children. Yet given gendered expectations that make women predominantly responsible for the care of children after the end of a relationship, it is likely to be women more than men who experience these constraints on their mobility if partners refuse to renounce their paternal rights. For Lili, the idea of leaving her son was unthinkable. She well knew the pain of losing a parent to migratory politics; after all, her own father had left almost two decades earlier when she herself was little more than a child. Thus, while Luis strategized to create new kin ties as a basis for legal claims to reclamation, the success of his application depended on curtailing the reproductive relationships that bound Lili to the island. While Lili and Luis continued to plan for her future emigration, Lili was under strict instructions from her father to refrain from forging further kinship relations in Cuba that might present obstacles to their hopes (undergoing, as described in chapter 4, several abortions to prevent further childbearing). The management of these reproductive bonds did not simply involve Lili’s control of her fertility; in 2005, Luis paid a special visit to Cuba to plead with his daughter’s ex-boyfriend to renounce his paternal authority over Manuelito. This time, his appeal was successful, although Lili speculated that her ex-boyfriend’s change of heart derived less from sympathy for her plight than to his changed marital circumstances. Reflecting a perception of men’s less permanent commitment to paternal responsibilities, Lili told me, “My father offered money and everything, but I think the real reason [my ex-boyfriend] signed is because he wants to have a baby with his new wife, and he wants to rid himself of the responsibility for Manuelito.”

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Such shifting assertions of relatedness underscore—once again—the materiality of kinship and the centrality of time as a variable in the politics of conceiving people and new life trajectories. Kin ties once considered irreplaceable may be de-emphasized or truncated as other kin and other possible lives come into being, just as these hoped-for futures may morph with constantly changing familial and state politics and economies. When I returned to Cuba in 2009, Luis’s efforts had not yet borne fruit, although Lili’s separation from Alfredo and her establishment of a new relationship with a well-off professional had tempered her impatience to leave the island. Yet when I asked her if she hoped to settle down with her new boyfriend, she whispered fervently, “No, no Elisa! I’m not doing that! I can’t marry again nor have another child, not if I want to leave Cuba.” In their strategic management of kinship ties, Lili and Luis’s efforts underscore the critical importance of reproduction and its management in the transnational politics of families and states.

Conclusion Given the difficulties and lack of opportunities that many perceive in postSoviet Cuba, transnational kinship has become a crucial resource for “getting by” on the island or imagining lives overseas. Practices of kin-making and kinbreaking are thus key sites in which to see social debates around reproduction as they take place within the policies and economies of families and states, and the attempts of both to manage the movement and make-up of their membership. Transnational kinship claims are staked in a social field shot through by politics and processes that may make certain forms of kinship relations more viable or valuable than others; practices of familial and household reproduction may thus involve the revitalization of dormant kin ties, the establishment of new kinship ties through marriage, and the management of fertility through childbearing or curtailing fertility. Such an analysis may risk representing its subjects as overly calculating, manipulating social categories and relationships that are often idealized as beyond material concerns. As Caroline Bledsoe and Papa Sow (2011, 188) argue, however, in the face of restrictive migratory and family reunification policies, “people seeking to ensure the well-being of their families must try to fit into whatever categories are available . . . State attempts to enforce compliance with the letter of law merely intensify efforts to maneuver around them” More broadly, these strategies of transnational kinship underscore the importance of ongoing theoretical attempts to bridge the ideological opposition between love and materialism by viewing love as part of a broader political economy of emotion in which the “meaning, values, and very experiences of sentiment are shaped not only by culture but also by material structures of power” (Hirsch and Wardlow 2006).15 In this view, deeply felt emotional attachments

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are developed and experienced within material conditions that simultaneously shape, enable, and constrain individual choices. Making and sustaining kin across time, space, and generation is always both labor and love; kinship and domestic/transnational economies are shot through by local and global hierarchies of race, class, gender, and citizenship, but may also bring about their transformation and reformulation. As Cubans young and old imagine new individual and familial futures in a world apart from that which they or the state predicted, their practices and desires are central to broader debates about the nature of socialist citizenship and the socialist project in Cuba today.

7 Conclusion Reproducing the Revolution

This project was initially conceived as a study of the local practice of reproductive health care in Havana. As feminist scholars have long reminded us, however, reproduction is intricately enmeshed in broader cultural, social, and political-economic systems. Following the threads of women’s reproductive narratives and practices led me far beyond the medical clinic to consider how concerns about familial and household reproduction articulate with broader tensions around the stability and transformation of gendered citizens and the socialist revolution in a post-Soviet economy. This book has argued that attention to the range of social reproduction in post-Soviet Cuba casts a bright light on the gendered organization of society and the shifting relationship of the state to its citizens. As Susan Gal and Gail Kligman assert (2000, 28), debates about reproduction can be understood as coded discussions in which “the morality and desirability of political institutions is imagined, and claims for the ‘goodness’ of state forms are made.” In Cuba, state policies have explicitly intervened to shape reproductive practices (in the realm of both prenatal care and abortion) in order to achieve the desired reproductive health indices that form a central pillar in its international claims to moral modernity. More broadly, the socialist state has also attempted to shape its population and produce a new socialist citizen, by equalizing the terms for the reproduction and nurturance of children through policies targeting education, health, and other forms of social life. Yet discourses around reproduction are also a key forum through which women and men evaluate the state’s claims to nurturance and socialist progress. Reflecting Cuba’s impressive human and financial investment into reproductive health care, the women I came to know almost universally extolled the tremendous accomplishments of this aspect of the socialist experiment. At 137

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the same time, the ongoing reproductive difficulties reflected in Cuba’s high abortion rates, low fertility, and the struggle to bring children into appropriate “conditions” form the basis for questioning the state’s ability to nurture its citizens adequately in an often-hostile global economic environment. Tensions in household reproduction in turn shape practices of childbearing, with repercussions for the future shape of the socialist state. In 2006, after decades of below-replacement fertility, Cuba recorded its first absolute population decline, four years ahead of projections. This demographic shift has raised grave concerns among Cuban demographers and economists, and has been addressed by Raúl Castro himself in speeches to the National Assembly, Cuba’s governing body. As its population steadily ages (the current median age is over thirty-nine years, well above any other Latin American country), Cuba will face many of the social and economic challenges of so-called developed countries, only with the limited resources of an underdeveloped one. Predicting that Cuba will have to import a labor force within twenty years, a prominent Cuban demographer told me in 2004, “Those who should be working in 2025 should be being born now, and if they aren’t born, who will work?” While developed nations look to immigration, albeit not without reservations, for solutions to labor crises and low birth rates, Cuba’s embattled economy makes it a less desirable migrant destination. Moreover, as the narratives in this book underscore, Cuban women themselves are unlikely to significantly raise their fertility, given the constraints posed by limited household economies, chronic overcrowding of homes and childcare facilities, and familial pressures. At stake as well are women’s own desires to be modern female citizens, not only in the productive sphere of education and professional labor, but also in the reproductive realm, through bearing only the children for whom there are adequate “conditions.” These observations have policy implications. While social scientists tracking Cuban fertility have argued that the state must focus on improving the conditions for familial life through constructing desperately needed housing in urban areas, channeling more funding into childcare and other support services for women, and reducing the disparities between the peso and the dollar economies, the Cuban leadership has at different moments also blamed high abortion rates for population decline, linking women’s individual reproductive decision making to the future of the socialist state. Whether state policy makers attribute falling birth rates to reproductive practices or to the economy will make all the difference for the women who are considered responsible for reproducing the nation’s demographic strength. These debates are not unique to Cuba (cf. Krause 2001; Paxson 2004), but they take on added significance as the Cuban state projects a social and economic future in which socialism’s “new” men and women are increasingly likely to be elderly citizens.

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Yet the future of the socialist revolution does not simply depend upon raising the fertility rate. Given the commitment to producing a new socialist man and woman, anxieties around social reproduction also coalesce around the reproduction of socialist gender ideals. Socialism’s new woman has long been on center stage in the unfolding revolutionary drama; as a highly placed official with the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) declared at the inception of the Special Period, “Women in Cuba are more closely tied to the revolution than men; they are more complete revolutionaries because they’ve gained more from the revolution than men” (Aguilar and Chenard 1992). Yet if women were to be the measure of socialist progress, as Bebel declared in the nineteenth century, the women in this book paint a more complex portrait than the FMC official’s declaration suggests. While the early revolutionaries hoped to remake society in part by bringing women out of the reproductive domain and into the public arena, these gendered domains of power and practice have been reshaped but not eradicated. In both policy and practice, women have continued to be primarily responsible for the social labor of reproduction and the nurturance of dependents. Not only does this imply increased burdens on women whose unpaid labor—both individually and across networks of female kin—provides the social supports that the state cannot, but it also constrains their economic and social options. At the same time, the reconfiguration of the Cuban economy and society after the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as over fifty years of embargo by the United States, has re-engendered the public and private labor economies in ways that the early revolutionaries could never have foreseen. With the gathering pace of economic and social changes, these gendered productive and reproductive economies have implications for broader conceptions of socialist female citizenship. Given women’s responsibility for caregiving and their ties to state (i.e., peso-remunerated) labor, the shrinking of the state sector and its declining real wages in the post-Soviet economy impact women in particular (Center for Democracy in the Americas 2013). Moreover, diminished state resources to support caregiving means that women’s ability to participate meaningfully in the labor force, whether for the state or in the entrepreneurial economies, will continue to be severely constrained by their primary responsibility for caregiving for the very young and the very old. During Cuba’s long and uncertain economic recovery, it is thus women who continue to take up the burden of the state’s economic difficulties, precariously balancing the demands on their time and labor by kin and state. In that context, it is not surprising that many women in comfortable household economies are choosing to return to the domestic sphere, challenging assumptions about the emancipatory potential of public labor for women. At the same time, the growth in female-headed households, particularly in Havana, has provoked fears among Cuban observers

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about an emergent feminization of poverty as women struggle to care for dependents (Espina Prieto 2008; Hernández 2010). Debates around the nature of social and economic change in post-Soviet Cuba are thus often articulated in profoundly gendered terms, in which anxieties about the reproduction and transformation of gender ideologies implicate not only the relationship between the sexes but also the relationship between the state and its citizens. In my own interviews, as well as interviews collected by other observers (cf. Center for Democracy in the Americas 2013; Núñez Sarmiento 2010), women frequently argued that efforts to produce the socialist new woman have been far more successful than efforts to produce the socialist new man. In our 2005 interview, Isabel Moya, the director of Mujeres magazine, addressed the widespread perception that socialism has both benefitted and burdened women by posing the only-partly facetious question, “What are we going to do with the new woman if men continue being the same old men?” These are, of course, not just the same old men; ideologies and practices around gender and reproduction today are signified and re-signified in a very different social, economic, and political terrain than that of prerevolutionary society. Yet such commentaries do suggest a profound reimagining of gendered narratives of modernity as socialism’s twentieth-century “woman question” has become the twenty-first century “man question.” Cuba today is far from the society imagined by the early revolutionaries; while it continues to uphold many of its most impressive achievements, particularly in the realms of health, education, and progress towards gender equality (including growing awareness of LGBT issues, primarily thanks to the efforts of Mariela Castro Espín, the daughter of Raúl Castro and the now-deceased president of the FMC, Vilma Espín)1, it does so in the context of a series of contradictions: the reemergence—as well as the exacerbation—of poverty and economic hierarchies; continuing racial inequalities; declining dedication to revolutionary ideals; ordinary desires for material goods and economic benefits unobtainable in the state system; and the state’s inability to deliver on many of its early promises of nurturance and progress. Against the constant backdrop of economic crisis, tensions around household and social reproduction are central to questions about what constitutes socialism and whether it holds the power to shape the hopes and aspirations of Cubans today. Changing attitudes and relationships are particularly evident among the younger generation brought up during the scarcity and crisis of the Special Period; their economic, familial, and imagined worlds may reach far beyond the state’s ideological and geographic borders. In 2007, a survey conducted by the newspaper Juventud Rebelde found that the nearly three hundred youths interviewed were most preoccupied with the economy and the future of the socialist project (El Nuevo Herald 2007). In response to the question,

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“How would you like Cuba to be in 2020?” one interviewee answered, “[I want] a Cuba . . . where laborers, skilled workers, [and] professionals can live better than “business people” [los negociantes; those who engage in the informal economy and illicit enterprise] and the lazy.” Another responded, “I would like a country in which money suffices for necessities, where the prices of products correspond to the salaries of the workers, and where equality among all continues.” Many of the young Cubans who voiced criticisms of various aspects of the socialist state insisted that they are not against the revolution; they value many of its achievements, particularly in the realms of healthcare, education, and social egalitarianism, and see the maintenance of these social gains as critical in the twenty-first century. Contrary to the beliefs of many who protest the Castro government, it is not the absence of capitalist enterprise, private property, or even freedom of leadership that most troubles young Cubans. Rather, they express deep anxiety about the inability of the state to fulfill its promises of provision and social mobility, as well as the growing inequalities between those who abandon the socialist vision and those who remain committed to it. The concerns of young Cubans thus underscore the anxieties around the continuity and transformation of socialist ideals in the twenty-first century. The early revolutionaries envisioned a society embedded in continuous relations of reciprocal solidarity, whereby the state’s ongoing, lifelong gifts of nurturance from cradle to grave would be repaid through the labor of productive citizens and their commitment to the socialist project (Andaya 2009b). Now, many express dissatisfaction at what they perceive as the fracturing of this social contract. With the state’s inability to fully provide for its citizens and the consequent opening of alternative avenues for capital, those who continue to work in the peso-remunerated state economy are among the most disadvantaged, while those living on remittances and in the entrepreneurial economy prosper. Pushed by these observations of both laypeople and social scientists, Cuban state policy is slowly beginning to respond to these social realities by reinterpreting its historic commitment to egalitarianism, not as absolute equality—the provision of identical goods and benefits to all citizens—but as a top-down effort to constrain growing inequalities through selectively supporting its most needy citizens (Espina Prieto 2008). Yet as people point to the ongoing difficulties of sustaining children and households in contemporary Cuba, many are imagining life trajectories in el exterior. “I can’t wait my whole life [for things to change]. I have a biological clock, I have to have kids,” said 29-year-old computer programmer Estela Izquierdo before moving to Montreal with her husband (Franks 2013). By contrast with the mass departures of the past, most Cubans today emigrate not for political reasons or even strictly economic ones. Rather, they hope to achieve a broader social mobility—the ability to travel, own an apartment or car, use

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degrees in higher education in their appropriate fields—that was once possible in Cuba, but that has become essentially unattainable for many since the fall of the Soviet Union. Reframing the state metaphors of kinship for his own purposes, Carlos Novoa, my friend and Cuban research assistant, told me, “The Cuban people have grown up now and we can’t always be watched over by Papá [“Dad,” Fidel Castro]. Sometimes I feel like a statistic—another black man, healthy and university educated, thanks to the Revolution! And I am grateful, but now what is there for me? I love my work and my country, but I’ve got no money, no house of my own, and no prospect of either. We have to be free to make our own decisions, including our own mistakes.” His thoughtful reflection on the accomplishments and limitations of the socialist project highlights the paradoxes that the revolution now faces in securing its own reproduction. The state’s investment in the uplift of all Cubans, regardless of race, gender, or region, has resulted in the superb social and health indices that are the pride of the socialist state. Yet having reaped the benefits of free health care and education, many young people resist the paternalism that they see as overbearing and outdated, looking to migration in the hopes of providing a better material life for themselves and for their families. Concerns around emigration further tie together the productive and reproductive economies. Every year, some thirty thousand émigrés, the majority of working age, leave the island, contributing to the overall shrinking and aging of the Cuban population.2 Such practices threaten the stability of the socialist state, both through the demographic implications for a country with a belowreplacement birth-rate—since the majority of emigrants leave in their fertile years and, particularly in the case of female migration, take their children with them (Núñez Sarmiento 2010)—as well as the “brain-drain” that occurs when highly credentialed professionals pursue lives in other places. Moreover, many Cubans express concern about the social reproduction of the revolution, as educated professionals emigrate and youth invest their energy in developing relationships with the “outside” rather than with the state (Franks 2013). In 2012, officially acknowledging this new reality, the government of Raúl Castro signaled its desire to maintain ties with the growing number of Cubans living abroad by loosening restrictions on return visits and lengthening the time that migrants may remain abroad before losing their property and citizenship. Many Cubans who emigrate today thus leave hoping that changes in both Cuban and U.S. policy will provide them with opportunities for the circular migration that has characterized other countries in the region (Hernández et al. 2002). At the same time, as Cubans hope to secure a visa or a toehold in the new economies, the various politics and practices of kin-making have provoked debates about both the new and reemergent forms of inequality, both on and off the island, in which issues of gender and kinship are at the fore. In an issue of

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Bohemia magazine dedicated to examining changing values around love among the young, Idianelys Santillano, a researcher with the Center for Youth Studies, argued “The formation of spiritual values with respect to [romantic] relationships poses a difficult task in the coming years . . . If the tendency to privilege the material continues, in the long term we will become another species, not humans.3 In this densely layered reflection on the material and ideological crises of recent years, Santillano discursively links practices of love and familymaking to the future of the socialist revolution and of humanity itself. For her, socialism as she knows it relies on encouraging youth to choose partners based on moral and spiritual qualities rather than material assets or instrumentalist desires. Her commentary poignantly articulates Cuban socialism’s utopian ideal about the possibility for a pure and disinterested love between (heterosexual) human beings. Yet it also typifies the moralizing that has characterized revolutionary discourse, in which love is opposed to money and moral rewards are considered antithetical to material gains. In these larger debates over the meaning and continuity of Cuban socialism, questions around the reproduction of children, households, citizens, and the revolution itself are inextricably intertwined. As Cubans marry, end pregnancies or bear them to term, choose to remain on the island or emigrate, or withdraw from the state work force in favor of self-employment or domestic labor, their quotidian practices of biological and household reproduction link gendered global, national, and household economies and forge new relationships to both kin and state. In so doing, they also shape the trajectory of socialist society; it is through the politics of gender and generation, kin-making and kin-breaking, and within family networks that span both space and time, that Cubans conceive the shape of a new society.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: REPRODUCTION, WOMEN, AND THE STATE

1. All names are pseudonyms. 2. At the time of my fieldwork, the official exchange rate was about twenty-four Cuban pesos to one U.S. dollar, although black market rates could be much higher. In 2004, the dollar was replaced by the Cuban convertible peso, or CUC, which the state declared to be the equivalent of the U.S. dollar (an assertion that many Cubans contested, pointing out that CUC could not be internationally traded). However, Cubans often still use the term dólar to refer to CUC. 3. For work on sexual minorities and sex workers, see Allen 2011, Fosado 2004, Hodge 2005, and Stout 2008. For work on Afro-Cuban religious practitioners, see Hearn 2008, Ochoa 2010, and Wirtz 2007. 4. See, for example, Barbara Sutton’s (2010) description on post-crash Argentina and Alexei Yurchak’s (2005) work on the Soviet Union. 5. The excellent work in this field is far too extensive to list in its entirety. Just a few of the notable ethnographies include Ginsburg 1989, Inhorn 1994, Ivry 2009, Kahn 2000, Martin 1987, Paxson 2004, Ragoné 1994, Rapp 1999, Teman 2010, and van Hollen 2003. 6. Some examples are Hirsch 2003, Johnson-Hanks 2005, and Paxson 2004. 7. Some important exceptions include Browner and Sargent 2011, Greenhalgh 2008, Kanaaneh 2002, Kligman 1998, Maternowska 2006, and Morgan and Roberts 2012. 8. See, for example, Chatterjee and Riley 2001, Chavkin and Maher 2010, Tarlo 2000, and Thompson 2000. 9. While such emphases on reproductive health as a centerpiece of socialist morality were evident to varying degrees in other socialist regimes (Rivkin-Fish 2005), no other state has linked socialist morality, women’s well-being, and reproduction so publicly and successfully though its massive investment in reproductive health care. 10. See, for example, Kruks et al. 1989, Petchesky 1990, and Rosaldo et al. 1974. 11. My thinking on this issue has been particularly influenced by Gal and Kligman’s (2000) cogent discussion of gender and the state in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. 12. Jonathon Cohn, in “The Hell of American Day Care” (2013), presents a disturbing look at the unregulated and expensive business of daycare in the United States. 13. The revolutionaries’ experimental praxis in addressing “the woman question” was also built on a long and diverse lineage of international intellectual and political debates concerning women and society. Within Cuba, nineteenth-century revolutionary hero José Martí had famously proclaimed, “Without women, there is no society.” Nationalist ideology, however, in fact portrayed Cuba as a society built on the

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fraternity between men, in which women’s primary role was as the moral mothers of the revolution (Ferrer 1999; Helg 1990; Stubbs 1995). The first part of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a vibrant middle-class women’s movement that fought for the inclusion of many provisions for women’s equality in the 1940 constitution, although most were never enforced. By 1959, socialism’s concern with the position of women in society thus found a receptive audience among many of Cuba’s cosmopolitan urbanites. 14. See Gal and Kligman 2000 for an excellent discussion of this process in Eastern Europe and its effects after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 15. Quoted in Más (2005, 5). 16. “Aniversario 45 de la Federación de Mujeres Cubanas: Ante el Reto de estos Tiempos,” Mujeres 3 (2005): 13. 17. The Mariel boatlift of 1980, during which thousands of Cubans departed after Castro permitted the entry of boats from Miami, marks for many the beginning of an economic rather than a political migration. Since then, emigrants have increasingly been composed of darker-skinned Cubans. Many established Miami-Cubans (who represented the first wave of white, politically motivated migration) view this demographic shift with profound dismay. 18. For the exchange rate between the CUC and the Cuban peso, see note 2. 19. In 2006, the Cuban minister of Economy and Planning stated that the GDP had returned to pre-1989 levels, thus marking the end of the Special Period. For an analysis of different measurements of determining the end of the Special Period, see PérezLópez 2006. 20. For similar experiences in other socialist contexts, see Borneman 1992, Rofel 1999, and Yurchak 2005.

CHAPTER 2

PRODUCING THE NEW WOMAN

1. See Espín 1991, Randall 1974, 1981, and Smith and Padula 1996. 2. See, for example, Álvarez Suárez 2000, Álvarez Suárez and Díaz 1988, Benítez 2003, Díaz 2004, Díaz Tenorio 2008, Fleitas Ruiz 2000, Mesa Castillo 1989, and Núñez Sarmiento 2001. 3. The subject of a long and at times heated debate in feminist literature, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo (1974) originally proposed the public/private dichotomy as a structural framework to explain the apparent universal subordination of women by virtue of their association with the less valued domains of biological and household reproduction. In this division between the public and private spheres, labor in the home or other areas constructed as part of the “domestic” realm is considered a female domain ideologically separated from outside, or public, activity, which is rendered as masculine. Its cross-cultural applicability, however, was almost immediately called into question, including by Rosaldo herself (1980) as contemporaneous feminist scholars charged that middle-class Euro-American conceptions of gender and kinship had been reified as law (Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Reiter 1975). More recent work has underscored the specificity of the public/domestic divide to particular class, race, and historical formations. Prominent feminists of this intersectional school have demonstrated that public labor is not a necessary conduit to female emancipation; poor women and women of color, for example, have historically labored in low-paying and menial jobs to support their families, given high rates of male unemployment in many impoverished communities (Collins 1994; Glenn 1985).

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4. During the First (1902–1933) and Second (1933–1958) Cuban Republics, middle-class Cuban feminists fought to include hard-won provisions in the 1940 Constitution (the most liberal then extant in the West) guaranteeing equal pay for equal work and the right to maternity leave, as well as banning discrimination on the basis of sex (Stoner 1991). Despite their legal codification, these rights were generally not enforced, and the Constitution was suspended after Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 coup d’etat. 5. Mujeres 6, March 15, 1962, frontispiece. 6. Carollee Bengelsdorf (1985) and others have argued, however, that over the course of the revolution, women’s participation in the labor force was increasingly driven by their own desires and life aspirations rather than the state’s need for laborers. 7. Speech at the close of the Fifth National Plenary of the FMC. Cited in Stone 1981. 8. Gutmann 1996 documents the relatively new history of this term. 9. This sexual double standard continues to be of concern to both Cuban and foreign scholarly observers, and some (e.g., Fusco 1999) have argued that such gendered sexual moralities underlie the greater moral opprobrium surrounding women’s sexual relations with tourists (as opposed to those conducted by Cuban men) in the postSoviet era. 10. Mujeres 20, October 15, 1962, 20. 11. In a society that guaranteed full employment, these policies were intended to open jobs for young people entering the labor market. In the Soviet era, when the state was able to guarantee distribution of basic goods, early retirement policies did not significantly impact the material well-being of retirees. In the post-Soviet economy, however, it has become virtually impossible to live exclusively on a state pension, and reforms adopted in 2008 allow all retired persons to continue to work in other sectors without losing their pensions. 12. Rejecting North American feminism that they viewed as militant and anti-family, early twentieth-century Cuban feminists shared with their compatriots the long-standing belief that women’s moral authority stemmed from their nurturing roles as wives and mothers (Sabas [1930] 2003). 13. Mujeres 3, February 1, 1962, 71. 14. Mujeres 11, June 1, 1962. 15. Mujeres 15, August 1, 1962, 25. 16. Mujeres 5, March 1, 1962, 13. 17. Some anthropologists of the former Soviet bloc (Kligman 1998; Rivkin-Fish 2005) have argued that the state’s investment in abortion rather than contraception was a strategy by which it ensured its control over reproduction and reinforced its monopoly over the distributive economy. While the Soviet Union frequently had a direct hand in Cuban policy, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, I ascribe the state’s neglect of contraception more to a political culture that often downplayed women’s reproductive needs (outside maternity care) rather than to a deliberate tactic for reproductive control. 18. In fact, women in rural areas (considered the most traditional), who relied on local midwives and herbal remedies to control their fertility, were probably better positioned to navigate these profound political and economic changes than those in urban areas.

CHAPTER 3

REPRODUCING CITIZENS AND SOCIALISM IN PRENATAL CARE

1. In 2012, Cuba achieved an infant mortality rate of 4.76 deaths per 1,000 live births https://www.cia.gov/library//publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cu.html.

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2. Initiated after the intense state self-scrutiny known as the Rectification Period in the early 1980s, Cuba’s internationally lauded Family Doctor Program led to a substantial reorganization of the medical system. Its goal was to further Cuba’s ambition to become a world medical power by achieving a ratio of one doctor for every 120 families, placing a doctor on every urban block, and ensuring full coverage of historically underserved rural and mountainous regions. Indeed, prior to the economic crisis of the 1990s, statistics from the Ministry of Public Health indicated that Cuba would achieve its goal of inserting 40,000 additional doctors and nurses into its medical system five years ahead of its scheduled completion in 2000. 3. By contrast with the high rate of infant mortality in developing countries from causes such as infectious disease and malnutrition, congenital malformations are the third leading cause of infant mortality in Cuba—after accidents and perinatal ailments— and are thus a key target in the state effort to continually reduce infant mortality rates. 4. I did not observe this personally since I was not able to observe in a genetic counseling consultation. While I do not doubt that some counseling may be more directive than either the state or medical professionals are willing to acknowledge, high rates of abortion following positive genetic diagnoses should also be contextualized within Cuba’s generally high abortion rate and low birth rate. 5. See Allen 2011, de la Fuente 2001, and Fernandez 2010. 6. See Ivry 2009, Mitchell and Georges 1997, and Taylor 1998.

CHAPTER 4

ABORTION AND CALCULATED RISKS

1. Cuban studies demonstrate that the first pregnancy is the one most often terminated, suggesting that young women are choosing to postpone motherhood in favor of other goals (Benitez 2003). 2. In 1996 the abortion rate stood at about 77.7 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49, or about 2.3 abortions per woman (Bélanger and Flynn 2009). Cuba does not include rates of early-term, vacuum-aspiration abortions (regulaciones) in its official abortion rates (which only include dilation and curettage abortions, or legrados), leading to difficulties in gathering data for total abortions. As a broad ballpark figure, I estimate the annual abortion rate at about 70 abortions per 1,000 women given the reported 2006 rates of 37 legrados per 1,000 women and a 2004 rate of about 36 regulaciones per 1,000 women. 3. Research among Hispanic populations suggests that women often distinguish between fetal development in early and late pregnancy, as determined by the quickening (felt movements) of the fetus, and ascribe different moral values to abortion at each stage (Morgan 1998; Rapp 1990). It is possible that such cultural values influence Cuban abortion policy, but the doctors I interviewed universally referenced only the increased medical risks of dilation and evacuation abortions. 4. This fact drove the 2008 introduction of pharmaceutical (Misoprostol) abortions, which were undergoing testing in selected polyclinics in Havana during my primary fieldwork from 2004–2005, but were not yet in widespread use. 5. This number approximated those of other socialist states. See, for example, Gal 1994, Kligman 1998, and Maleck-Lewy and Ferree 2000. 6. For a literature overview, see Dore 1997. 7. While child-fostering is a common practice in many Caribbean and Latin American contexts, this was far less common in Cuba, perhaps because of the low birth rate. In

NOTES TO PAGES 76–84

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the few cases I did observe, the children remained within intimate family relationships, such as the adoption (permanent or temporary) of a child by his or her grandparents after parental migration. 8. See Barrow 1996, M. G. Smith 1962, and R. T. Smith 1996. 9. For examples of the increasingly global reach of this discourse, see Kanaaneh 2002 and Krause 2001. 10. See Kanaaneh 2002, Krause 2001, and Schneider and Schneider 1996. 11. It is undeniably true that abortion is a remarkably frequent and open practice, particularly from an outsider’s perspective. However, pointing to social tolerance as a primary explanation for high abortion rates is troubling, since it implies that decreasing availability and reinforcing social stigma is one means by which the number of abortions can be reduced. As evidence from around the world has demonstrated, this assumption is ill-founded. 12. This is astonishingly high, given that failure rates for copper IUDs are generally cited at about 0.6 percent for perfect use and 0.8 percent for actual use. Since IUDs are placed and removed by doctors, such a high rate suggests either the widespread use of poor-quality devices or a systemic problem with the dissemination of information about proper placement and timely replacement of devices. 13. For parallel views in other sites, see Paxson 2004 and Lopez 2008. 14. Such ideals of masculinity are enshrined within cultural performances like the rumba. In the countryside, the sugarcane drink, guarapo, is believed to ready men for lovemaking through increasing the production of semen. Ejaculation—as the concrete sign of a man’s sexual and reproductive capacity—is here intimately tied to assertions of male sexual power. 15. See Allen 2011 and Hodge 2005 for discussions of male-male “sex work” in Cuba. 16. In 1989, there were 11 regulaciones for every 1,000 women of fertile age. By 2004, this had risen to 36 per 1,000 women of fertile age (Heredero 2011). 17. Such divergences from the techniques of pregnancy detection familiar in the U.S. thus highlight the peculiarities of Cuba’s medical economy. While international prices and the U.S. embargo limit the availability of reagents for laboratory work, doctors’ time and ultrasound machines are considered part of the “sunken costs” of the public health system. 18. Although based on a study conducted ten years ago, this remains the number cited in both Cuban and foreign studies. I was unable to locate a more recent study on this issue.

CHAPTER 5

ENGENDERED ECONOMIES AND

THE DILEMMAS OF REPRODUCTION 1. This phenomenon has also been noted in non-socialist contexts. See for example, Benería and Feldman 1992 and Sutton 2010. 2. For the first four months, as well as six weeks prior to birth, state-employed women receive their full salary, declining to 60 percent of their salary thereafter. After the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) criticized the law’s assumption that only mothers would properly care for infants, the law was amended in 2003 to allow another family member to assume this leave instead of the mother, after the newborn reached the age of four months. However, since 2009, only eighteen men have taken advantage of this leave policy (Center for Democracy in the Americas 2013). Moreover, despite the generous maternity policy, paternity leaves are not recognized in the Cuban labor system, reflecting a widespread assumption that early infant care is a woman’s domain.

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3. A thriving black market in construction materials always existed, and households denied construction permits often found ways around the impasse. In recent years, the state has lifted the rationing of construction materials, recognizing that attempts to funnel building permits to “deserving” candidates had simply resulted in a culture of corruption and slowed down the construction of much-needed living spaces. 4. Until 2011, laws restricted the free market sale of automobiles to those produced prior to 1959; access to a post-1959 private car was therefore a luxury for well-placed officials and people in professions designated as elite. These restrictions have now been lifted although, as a nod to containing the social and economic inequalities generated by the remittance economy, buyers must demonstrate that the purchase money has been earned rather than obtained through remittances. 5. Yenislaidis did not indicate the legal status of her husband’s business and I did not wish to ask directly. In 2008, recognizing that illegal cabs outnumbered legal ones, Raúl Castro lifted the nine-year ban on the issuing of new licenses. Ironically, this may have resulted in the reduction in the profit margins that had concerned Fidel; one observer reported that taxi drivers felt that they were working harder for less money because of increased competition (Cave 2012). 6. This statistic naturally does not capture the considerable number of unlicensed entrepreneurs, among whom women may be better represented (selling food or beverages from the home, for example). 7. As a comparison, the 2000 U.S. census found that 12.2 percent of households were female-headed, although national differences in statistical collection and definitions between the United States and Cuba mean that this comparison should only be taken as a general guideline. Cuban definitions of female-headed households are not synonymous with monoparental households: a male partner may be in residence, yet the designation of the woman as the household head indicates her position as the central figure around which other kin relations are clustered, as well as her status as primary income earner. 8. See, for example, Freeman 2000, Nash 1990, and Ong 1987. 9. Such choices are clearly not open to all women, nor do all women who withdraw from the state labor force enjoy a comfortable household economy. One of the social categories of considerable concern to the state and social scientists are the social marginals and desvinculados who are considered to neither work nor study. 10. This is suggested in studies by Pearson 1997, Pessar 1994, 1995, and Safa 2009.

CHAPTER 6

HAVING FAITH AND MAKING FAMILY OVERSEAS

1. See, for example, Hernández et al. 2002, Martín and Pérez 1998, and Weinreb 2009. 2. See Basch et al. 1994, Ho 1993, Kyle 2000, and Levitt 2001. 3. Migratory apertures included the 1965 Camarioca boatlift, the so-called freedom flights of 1965–1973, and the 1980 Mariel boatlift (generally considered to mark the onset of a primarily economic migration). For a discussion of the political motivations for, and social consequences of, these migratory openings, see Masud-Piloto 1988, and Martín and Pérez 1998. 4. Exceptions were made for those Cubans living abroad as part of governmentsponsored programs, a category that included diplomats, medical professionals serving on international missions, or scholarly exchanges to the former socialist bloc. The period of time that emigrants may live abroad before undergoing the seizure of any property and withdrawal of citizenship has gradually increased over the course of the

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revolution, from almost immediately in the 1960s to eleven months in the 1990s, to two years in 2013. 5. Fosado 2004 analyzes the meaning of relationships “por interés” in her study of Cuban sex work. 6. A key piece of di Leonardo’s argument is that, given their association with the feminine domestic world of home and family, it is women who are expected to assume responsibility for the work of maintaining kin relations. While this gendered component has been demonstrated in other Caribbean contexts (Ho 1993), more research remains to be done in examining the role of gender in the work of revitalizing and sustaining transnational kin ties in Cuba. 7. Carolyn Bledsoe and Papa Sow (2011) demonstrate this point in the case of polygynous West African families living in France where only one wife can be legally recognized. 8. Under previous regulations, Cuban-Americans could visit family up to and including second cousins for up to a year, while individuals were permitted to wire up to three hundred dollars every three months to any Cuban household (except to select government officials and members of the Cuban Communist Party). 9. Generational discourses hold a powerful emotional and symbolic resonance, particularly in a political context that continually underscores the role of youth in continuing the revolutionary struggle. Yet these distinctions are not always so clear in practice (Andaya 2013). For example, in her discussion of the meaning of socialist victory, Celia Peña explicitly underscores the influence of her sons’ political disillusionment on her own interrogation, and subsequent rejection, of these political discourses. 10. See, for example, Brennan 2004, Constable 2003, Kempadoo 1999, 2004, and Padilla et al. 2007. 11. Research on male sex work is far more recent; whether this reflects researcher bias or the emergence of a genuinely new phenomenon is difficult to say. It is also possible that the 1997 Decree 217, which criminalized undocumented internal migration, has also resulted in the growth of a disenfranchised group of male youth who turn to hustling as a primary means of getting by. For discussions on male jineterismo, see Allen 2011, Cabezas 2004, Fosado 2004, and Hodge 2005. 12. See Allen 2011, Cabezas 1998 and 2004, de la Fuente 2001, Fernandez 1999, and Fusco 1998. 13. Transnational fertility and reproduction has been studied primarily in the context of international adoption (cf. Kim 2010; Volkman 2005), while the recent phenomena of international surrogacy agreements and the flow of gametes across national borders is also emerging as a site for scholarly inquiry (cf. Chavkin and Maher 2010; Pande 2010). Jennifer Hirsch’s 2003 study of changing marital ideals among migrant Mexicans to Atlanta also provides a view into how reproductive practices are affected by migration. 14. Indeed, practices of marriage migration do not only implicate women (cf. Fernandez 2012); in this case, it was Ángel whose marriage to an American tourist created the conditions for these intricate transnational relationships. While marriage migration by women is often thought to place them in subordinate positions both in their marriages and in their adoptive countries, Ángel’s experience demonstrates the complex ways that international geopolitics and gendered structures of power and economy shape domestic and transnational relations. As a Cuban, he enjoys more security in the United States than migrant spouses from other countries, since he is permitted to remain regardless of the outcome of the relationship. Moreover, although Ángel’s work as a contract laborer probably gave him little social capital in the United States,

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the American dollars allowed him to realize desired forms of familial and economic power in Cuba through the creation of an extramarital family. 15. This opposition also exists within Marxist ideology, which constructed “true” love as affective relations free from the demands and desires of patriarchy and capitalism. Marxist feminist theorists, however, have launched a sustained attack on the ideological opposition between love and materialism, persuasively debunking the construction of love and the family as a haven free of calculation and interest. See Kruks et al. 1989 and vanEvery 1996.

CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION: REPRODUCING THE REVOLUTION

1. In 2011, Cuba celebrated its first annual Gay Pride march. Although poorly attended, the very fact that such a march was approved speaks volumes about the government’s changing attitudes to issues of homosexuality and transgender. In 2012, no official march was held, but activists held a “kiss-in,” and sponsored film showings and discussions about LGBT issues. While transsexual Cubans are permitted to apply for free sex reassignment surgery, issues such as gay marriage and the right to adoption are looming issues that will undoubtedly be debated in coming years. 2. “Hasta la Vista, Baby,” The Economist, March 24, 2012. 3. “Los Sentimientos También Salvan la Especie,” Bohemia 96, no. 20 (2004): 35.

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INDEX

babies, low-birth-weight, 41, 46–48, 49, 54, 61, 64–65 babies, premature, 41, 61 Bebel, August, 11, 24, 139 Bengelsdorf, Carollee, 39, 147n6 birth, medicalization of, 41–42, 61 birth control pills, 43, 84–85, 95 birthrate, 43, 44, 47, 69, 138, 142 birth weight, 41, 46–48, 49, 54, 61, 64–65 Bledsoe, Caroline, 135, 151n7 boarding schools, 32–33, 73–74 Bohemia (magazine), 33, 112, 121, 143 Brennan, Denise, 115 Brotherton, P. Sean, 49, 112 Bush administration, 49, 121, 134 camellos (passenger tractor-trailers), 105

Center for Youth Studies, 143 childcare: Castro on, 36; in productive sphere, 39; provided by state, 13, 22, 31; shortages of, 38, 78, 108, 138; state employment and, 95–99, 108–9; in United States, 8, 12, 111–12, 145n12. See also nurturance children: beliefs about importance of, 75– 76; fostering of, 148–49n7; migration and, 133–34; rations for, 2; remittances and, 121 China, 8, 115 class: culture and, 57; fertility and, 82; gender divisions and, 27–28; occupations and, 21; social reproduction and, 11 Colen, Shellee, 9 colonialism, 26–27, 33, 130, 131 compliance, 55–58, 60 Conceiving the New World Order (Ginsburg and Rapp), 6 conditions (for raising a child), 78–81, 82– 83, 90, 91–92, 121, 128–30, 138 condoms, 42, 85, 89 contraceptives: abortion and, 72–74; access to, 42, 43–44; gender and, 88–89; lack of improvement in, 91; lack of information about, 44, 83, 95; risks of, 83–86; state’s neglect of, 147n17; use of, 69–70 Cuba (magazine), 40 Cuban Communist Party, 25 Cuban Workers’ Union, 39 CUC (Cuban convertible pesos), 15, 63, 96, 97, 99, 111, 145n2

Canada, 48, 119, 120 caregiving: state and, 100–104, 130–31; women’s responsibility for, 139. See also childcare; nurturance Castro, Fidel: on abortion, 71; military masculinity of, 35–36; on public health, 49; on sex work, 126; on taxi drivers, 106; wet foot/dry foot policy of, 15; on women and the revolution, 13, 31, 40; on women in the workforce, 36, 39 Castro, Raúl, 14, 107, 138, 142, 150n5 Castro Espín, Mariela, 140 Catholicism, 71, 115

day care. See childcare desvinculados (unemployed persons), 97, 119, 150n9 diaphragms, 42, 43 diet, during pregnancy, 2, 52, 61, 62 disability, 128, 131 discipline: of doctors, 63–65; governance through, 7; high fertility and, 82; maternity homes and, 62–63; noncompliance and, 56–59; prenatal care and, 48, 52–57; socialist morality and, 28, 40, 55–57, 66–67 divorce, 37

abortions: access to, 42–43; as act of nurturance/responsibility, 77–81; contraceptives and, 72–74; as fertility limitation, 68–70; genetic counseling and, 54; late, 70, 86– 88, 90, 148n3; legrados (dilation & curettage abortions), 70, 71, 73, 87–88, 90–91, 148n2; modernity and, 81–83; openness about, 77–78, 89; pharmaceutical, 73, 148n4; policies on, 70–72; regulaciones (vacuum aspiration abortions), 70, 71, 73, 84, 86–88, 90–91, 148n2, 149n16; risk and, 70–73, 86, 90–91; unnecessary, 88, 90–91; unwanted kinship ties and, 132–33, 134 Afro-Cubans, 4, 57, 122, 127 Alexander, M. Jacqui, 34

165

166

INDEX

doctors: increase in numbers of, 148n2; international service and, 102–3; state’s connection to, 100–101, 102–4; state surveillance over, 63–65 dollar economy, 4, 15–16, 17, 79–80, 105–6, 121 domestic work: gender and, 26–27, 36–38; partial socialization of, 31; during pregnancy, 59–61; in productive sphere, 39; state’s withdrawal from, 15; as unproductive, 28; women’s entrepreneurialism and, 109. See also reproductive labor Dominican Republic, 97, 115 double days of labor, 8, 25–26, 36, 93, 111 dual economy, 4 economies, dual, 4, 15–16 education: boarding schools, 32–33, 73–74; emigration and, 142; escuelas de superación (improvement schools), 96–97; of interview participants, 21; re-education of sex workers, 34; as women’s profession, 39, 109. See also sexual education egalitarianism, 3–4, 24; entrepreneurialism and, 105–6, 141; gender and, 25–26; relationships and, 142–43; remittance economy and, 121–22 elderly: aging of population, 138; care of, 100–102, 103–4; children’s financial support for, 75–76 embargo, 9, 15, 42, 84, 121 emigration. See migration Engels, Friedrich, 11 entrepreneurialism: economic inequality and, 141; gender and, 109, 150n6; opening of, 4, 15–16; in tourist industry, 17; in transportation industry, 105–6 escuelas de superación (improvement schools), 96–97 ethnographies, 5–6 family: children as real family, 75–76; elevation of nuclear families, 34, 38; narrowed definition of, 121; outside/illegitimate families, 130; quality of relationships with, 118–19. See also kinship relations Family Code (1975), 37–38 family doctor clinics, 1–3, 19, 50–51 Family Doctor Program, 51, 148n2 family life: during pregnancy, 60–61; socialism and, 32–33 favors/gifts, 87, 90, 125 Federation of Cuban Women (FMC): abortion and, 69; campaigning by, 29, 30, 32; on maternity leave policy, 149n2; publications of, 29, 41; socialist revolution and, 139; Special Period and, 15; women in the workforce and, 29, 30, 36, 39–40; women’s rights and, 12 feminism: Cuban, 27, 147n4, 147n12; Marxism and, 152n15; public/private dichotomy and, 146n3; reproduction and, 11–12, 22

fertility management: abortions as, 68–70; kinship ties and, 132–35; remittances and, 130–31 fertility rate: economic problems and, 10, 80, 138; migration and, 120; modernization and, 40, 69, 81–82 fetuses, 55–56, 63–64, 83 fieldwork, 18–22 flexible citizenship, 115–16, 131–32, 134 FMC. See Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) food: costs of, 16; prenatal diet, 2, 52, 61, 62; ration system, 2; shortages of, 10, 14 Foucault, Michel, 7 Gal, Susan, 137, 145n11 gender: class and, 27–28; contraception and, 88–89; defined, 11–12; jineterismo and, 126–27; kinship ties and, 76; material provision and, 112; medical service and, 102–3; mobility constraints and, 134; remittances and, 119; sexual education and, 95; socialism and, 33, 93–94, 139–40, 145–46n13; work and, 26–30. See also men; womanhood; women Ginsburg, Faye, 6 grandparents clubs, 101 Granma (newspaper), 44, 48 Greenhalgh, Susan, 7, 73 guajiros (country people), 82 guarantía (state-provided goods for newborns), 80 Guevara, Che, 33 Haiti, 48 Hamilton, Carrie, 33 Havana, Cuba, 18–19 health care: symbolic capital of, 49–50 health clinics. See family doctor clinics; polyclinics heterosexuality, 25, 33–35, 38 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 7 HIV infection, prevention of, 53, 84, 85 homosexuality, 34, 140, 152n1 housewives/homemakers, 21, 28, 29, 80, 81, 104–7, 108, 111, 114, 127. See also domestic work housing, 34, 78, 79, 100–101, 102, 104, 129 immigration. See migration infertility, 71, 74 Iñíguez, Luisa, 121 intensive care units, neonatal, 41 international service, 52, 65, 102–3, 150n4 interracial relationships, 29, 125–27 interviewees, demographics of, 21 IUDs, 43, 84, 85, 87, 149n12 jineterismo (hustling): range of, 125; transnational romance and, 125–27 John Paul II, Pope, 71 jokes/humor, 10, 83, 105, 115, 122 Juan Marinello Center, 21 Juventud Rebelde (newspaper), 48, 140–41

INDEX

kinship relations: economic reliance on, 99, 110; egalitarianism and, 142–43; fertility management and, 132–35; as product of active engagement, 119–20; reproductive labor and, 103; transnational, 115–16, 118, 135–36. See also family Kligman, Gail, 137, 145n11 laundry, 15, 31, 37, 38 legrados (dilation & curettage abortions), 70, 71, 73, 87–88, 90–91, 148n2 Lewis, Oscar, 5 LGBT issues, 34, 140, 152n1 Living the Revolution (Lewis), 5 machismo, 33, 35–36, 72–73, 85, 89, 109, 149n14. See also masculinity Makarenko, Anton, 40 marginales (social marginals), 6, 82, 150n9 marriage, 34, 125–27, 131, 151n14 Martín, Consuelo, 118 Martínez-Alier, Verena, 27 Marxism, 11, 24–25, 44, 152n15 masculinity, 33, 35–36, 72–73, 85, 89, 109, 149n14. See also machismo maternity homes, 2–3, 46–47, 61–62 maternity leave, 8, 31, 98, 147n4, 149n2 media: contraceptive messages in, 83–84; fieldwork and, 22; maternity homes in, 61; migration in, 124; mortality rates reported by, 48; motherhood in, 77; socialist propaganda in, 32 men: child-raising and, 89; interviews with, 20; laundry and, 37; new socialist man, 4, 8, 13, 38, 140; new socialist woman and, 33; opposition of to women in the workforce, 31–32; reproductive labor and, 36–37 merchant marines, 96, 97, 99 Mexico, 48 midwifery, 41 migration: abortion and, 86; demographic shift in, 146n17; desirability of, 118, 141–42; ideological commitments and, 122–23; kin-making and, 118–20; management of kinship relations and, 132–35; marriage and, 125–27, 131, 151n14; as political dissent, 117; race and, 122; by sea, 15, 124; ubiquity of implications of, 114–15; worker shortages caused by, 30 Millennium Development Goals of United Nations, 50 Ministry of Public Health: abortion rates and, 71; contraceptives and, 43, 44; low-birth-weight babies and, 47, 49, 64; maternal mortality and, 50; medical care statistics from, 148n2; patient privacy and, 51 missions, international, 19, 51, 52, 65, 102–3, 150n4 modernity: abortion and, 69–70, 71, 72–74, 77, 88; gender and, 13, 140; prenatal care and, 41–42, 47–48; reproductive policy

167

and, 7–8; reproductive statistics and, 9, 137 modernization: fertility regulation and, 40, 69, 81–83; reproductive culture and, 73 morality, socialist: discipline and, 28, 40, 55–57, 66–67; motherhood and, 40–41, 79–83; prenatal care and, 41–42, 46–48; reproduction and, 137–38; reproductive health statistics and, 9, 47–50, 65 mortality rates, infant: abortions and, 54; causes of, 148n3; municipal health statistics and, 47–48; reduction of, 41, 147n1; socialist morality and, 48–49, 50 mortality rates, maternal: abortions and, 42–43, 71, 90; reduction of, 41, 50 motherhood: author’s experiences and, 22; cultural importance of, 74–77; medical compliance and, 56–57; older mothers, 68–69, 80, 130; single mothers, 13, 31, 68–69, 95–99, 100–103, 132–35; socialist morality and, 40–41, 79–83; teenage mothers, 64, 74, 77, 95–99 Mother’s Day, 74, 77 Moya, Isabel, 140 Mujeres (magazine), 29, 33, 40, 42, 72–73, 140 National Study of the Budgeting of Time (1988), 37 new socialist man, 4, 8, 13, 38, 140 new socialist woman, 25–45; creativity needed by, 110; gender ideals and, 139–40; patriarchal power and, 31–36; production of, 8, 93, 107; reproduction and, 40–44; reproductive labor and, 36–40; socialist policy and, 11–14; work and, 26–30 nuclear families, state’s elevation of, 34, 38 Núñez Sarmiento, Marta, 109 nursing homes, 101 nurturance: abortions and, 77–79, 82–83; of doctors, 63–66; family relationships and, 75–76; migration and, 134; prenatal medical care and, 48–50, 61–63; remittances and, 119; by state, 13, 49, 130–31, 137–38; state’s retreat from promise of, 14, 79–81, 141; as women’s labor, 25, 39–40, 76–77, 93, 102–4, 108–9, 134, 139–40, 147n12. See also childcare Oaks, Laury, 55 Ong, Aihwa, 115 Open Sea (film), 124 Operation Family campaign, 34 Pan American Health Organization, 50 Paxson, Heather, 88 pensions, 76, 147n11 Pérez, Guadalupe, 118 Pertierra, Ana Cristina, 76, 109 peso economy, 4, 15–16, 104, 105, 109, 141 polyclinics: abortions at, 70, 77–78, 86–87, 148n4; birth control information at, 84; services offered by, 51; ultrasounds at, 63, 130

168

INDEX

population management, 7–8, 52–54, 117–18, 137–38 poverty/the poor: discipline and, 19, 57; feminization of, 109–10, 139–40; fertility of, 82; marriage campaign and, 34; maternal deaths among, 9, 42; paid labor and, 27, 29, 146n3; in post-Soviet period, 79–80; remittances and, 121; single mothers as, 13; socialism and, 17 preconceptional risk, 66 pregnancy: confirmation/detection of, 63, 90–91, 131, 149n17; diet during, 2, 52, 61, 62; domestic work during, 59–61; evaluations of, 60; medicalization of, 52–55, 62; migration efforts and, 132–33; weight gain during, 2–3, 46–47, 53, 61, 62 pregnancy tests, 63, 90, 91, 149n17 prenatal care: discipline and, 55–57; at family doctor clinic, 1–3; gendered burdens of, 57–59; maternity homes and, 61–62; socialist morality and, 41–42, 46–48; state’s investment in, 52–54 prenatal leave, 53 privacy, in family doctor clinics, 51 professionals, earnings of, 4 prostitution/sex work, 28, 34, 115, 126–27, 151n11 public sphere: contraception and, 43–44; domestic sphere and, 26–30, 38, 39, 146n3; gender and, 113, 138–39; obstacles to women’s participation in, 31–32, 109; women’s participation encouraged in, 12–13, 24–25; women’s withdrawal from, 94, 111 race: culture and, 57; gender divisions and, 27–28; jineterismo and, 126–27; migration and, 146n17; remittances and, 122; the revolution and, 29 Rapp, Rayna, 6 ration system, 2, 53 reclamation, 123, 129, 132–34 regulaciones (vacuum aspiration abortions), 70, 71, 73, 84, 86–88, 90–91, 148n2, 149n16 relationships: economic incentives for, 107, 112; with foreigners (jineterismo), 125–27; ranked importance of, 76; socialist ideals of, 25, 143. See also kinship relations religion, 71, 115 remittances: caregiving and, 104; egalitarianism and, 121–22; fertility management and, 130–31; gender and, 119; opening of, 4, 15–16, 116–17; reclamation and, 132–33 reproduction: anthropology of, 6–7; policies affecting, 5, 8–9, 138; socialist morality and, 137–38; transnational, 128–32, 151n13 reproductive health statistics, 9, 47–50, 65, 137 reproductive labor: devaluing of, 37–38; gendering of, 59, 93–94, 107–8, 108–9; kinship

relations and, 103; men and, 36–37; new socialist woman and, 36–40; paid work balanced against, 106–7, 111–12; public/ private dichotomy and, 146n3; womanhood and, 76–77. See also domestic work retirement, 38–39, 147n11 revolution of 1959/revolutionaries: FMC and, 139; race and, 29; utopianism of, 24; women in the workforce and, 24–25 risk: abortion and, 70–73, 86, 90–91; assessments of, 57–59; contraceptives and, 83–84, 86; discipline and, 55–56; medicalization of pregnancy and, 52–55; preconceptional, 66 romance work (jineterismo), 125–27 Romania, 8, 40 Rosendahl, Mona, 5 rural populations, 41, 82; fertility control of, 147n18; maternal deaths among, 9, 42; maternity homes and, 61; patriarchal authority and, 33 Sabas Alomá, Mariblanca, 27 sacrifice: abortion and, 88–90; economic crisis and, 15; motherhood and, 57, 77 Santillano, Idianelys, 143 schools: boarding schools, 32–33, 73–74; escuelas de superación (improvement schools), 96–97 self-employment. See entrepreneurialism separation/divorce, 76, 86, 89, 128–29, 134 Se Permuta (House Swap), 79 sexual education, 44, 71, 72–73, 73–74, 83– 84, 90, 95 sexually transmitted sicknesses, 66 sex work, 28, 34, 115, 126–27, 151n11 single mothers, 13, 31, 68–69, 95–99, 100– 103, 132–35 socialism: disillusionment with ideals of, 17; family life and, 32–33; gender relations and, 93–94, 139–40, 145–46n13; migration and, 122–23; population management and, 7–8, 137–38; relationships and, 25, 143; reproduction and, 3–5; on women in the workforce, 26, 28–29; youths’ attitudes toward, 140–41 Sow, Papa, 135, 151n7 Spain, 120 Special Period (1989-2006): domestic work and, 94; effects of, 4, 14–17; elder care and, 101; end of, 146n19; motherhood and, 79– 80; political disillusionment and, 128–29; remittances and, 116–17; transportation and, 105 state culture: masculinity of, 35 state employment: childcare benefits of, 97–99, 108–9; leave policy of, 149n2; withdrawal from, 105, 106–7, 111, 150n9 states: modes of governance of, 7 sterilization, female, 85–86

INDEX

169

stratified reproduction, 9 sugar, 30 Sutherland, Elizabeth, 26

Verdery, Katherine, 94 visa applications, 118–19, 120, 124, 133 volunteer labor, 26, 30, 31, 124

taxis, 105–6, 150n5 teachers, 105 teenagers: IUDs for, 85; pregnancies and abortions among, 73–74; teenage mothers, 64, 77, 95–99 Thompson, Charis, 119 tourism, 4, 15–16, 125–27 Trabajadores (newspaper), 39 travel: commitment to socialism and, 97; desire for, 123; restriction on, 83, 117–18, 134

weight gain, during pregnancy, 2, 46–47, 53, 61, 62 wet foot/dry foot policy, 15 womanhood: motherhood and, 11, 40–41, 74, 76–77, 85–86, 96; paid labor and, 29; in prerevolutionary days, 26–27; reproductive labor as key to, 76–77 women: as heads of households, 100–101, 102, 103, 109–10, 139–40, 150n7; independence of, 33; as nurturing, 25; oppression of, 11–12; socialism and, 145–46n13. See also new socialist woman; womanhood; women in the workforce women in the workforce: childcare and, 108; gender relations transformed by, 26–30; men’s opposition to, 31–32; personal aspirations and, 147n6; reproductive labor and, 36–40, 146n3; revolutionaries’ support of, 24–25; as revolutionary symbol, 12–13; sex-restricted jobs and, 39–40; underrepresentation of, 109; withdrawal from paid labor, 105, 106–7, 111–12 Working Group on the Family, 21 World Health Organization (WHO), 50

ultrasounds, 53, 55–56, 63–64, 130 unemployment, 30, 97, 119, 146n3, 150n9 UNICEF, 50 United Nations, 50 U.N. Population Fund, 83 United States: day care in, 8, 12, 111–12, 145n12; embargo by, 9, 15, 42, 84, 121; infant mortality rate of, 48; migration to, 117, 121, 122, 124, 128–29, 132–34; reproduction in, 8; women in the workforce in, 12; women’s double burden in, 111–12 Valdés Jiménez, Yohanka, 111 Venezuela, 19, 51, 65

Young Pioneers (youth group), 29

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ELISE ANDAYA is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of

Albany, State University of New York.