Rachel Hynson provides an engaging and well-structured examination of postrevolutionary policies in Cuba that emphasized the nuclear family and put Cubans’ labor at the service of the state. Hynson focuses on the concept of the “New Family”: a legally married couple with a male breadwinner working in state-approved employment outside of the home and a wife whose reproduction followed state directives (2). Hynson focuses on four programs used to create the New Family: controlling women's reproduction, promoting legal marriage, eradicating prostitution, and employing men in state-sanctioned jobs.
Drawing from newspapers, government documents, laws, and oral histories, Hynson explains how these programs acted as a form of social engineering connected to a moralizing discourse about labor, reproduction, and productivity. She links this discourse to the Castro regime's increasingly authoritarian tendencies, which she proves existed from the revolution's early stages. Hynson demonstrates that socialist Cuba did not oppose the family unit, that the Cuban government held differing expectations for how men and women could serve the state, and that the New Family was a liberal model, rather than a radical or socialist one. The book engages in direct conversation with the work of Lillian Guerra, Michelle Chase, and Carrie Hamilton on Cuba and the scholarly literature on gender and revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is an excellent addition to our understanding of how state policies shape gender ideologies.
Each chapter details a different initiative. Chapter 1 examines state attempts to regulate fertility, especially that of poor, rural, non-white Cubans. Specifically, the state's desire to decrease abortions was at odds with the island's growing birth rate; therefore, women continued to seek out abortions through doctors who controlled access to abortion care until contraceptives imported from Chile and the USSR became available. Chapter 2 focuses on Operation Family, broken into two specific programs. The first, Operation Matrimony, sought to formalize common-law unions through the use of mass weddings, wedding palaces, and material benefits for newlyweds, such as the right to buy otherwise unavailable products. The second, Operation Registration, aimed to register all citizens in the civil registry. Operation Family helped consolidate government power, especially in the countryside and rebellious or counterrevolutionary provinces, and reinforced the gender hierarchy by creating traditional households and sanctioning male authority over women's labor.
Chapter 3 addresses the attempts to eradicate prostitution and describes how the government shifted from seeing prostitutes as victims of capitalism and economic inequality to seeing them as “criminal manifestations” (152) who rejected state-provided work opportunities. “Prostitute” was a broad category, equally applicable to women not engaged in sex work, that targeted women engaging in labor that did not benefit the revolution. Reform efforts, modeled on elite white cultural norms, emphasized the nuclear family, legal unions, cohabitation, registered children, and women within the home, and, like Operation Family, they reinforced traditional gender norms.
Chapter 4 looks at the use of forced labor as a means to funnel men into state-sanctioned employment. Policies such as the Law Against Idleness (1971) targeted men in the informal labor sector, men who were economically supported by women, and pimps and homosexuals. Through arrests and forced labor in agricultural camps, these policies aimed to rehabilitate men, make them primary breadwinners, and ensure that their labor benefited the state.
The conclusion explains that these policies were ultimately ineffective, that Cubans pushed back against them in creative ways, and that the Cuban Revolution was surprisingly conservative in relation to gender roles. The end result is a highly readable and informative narrative about how the Cuban Revolution affected gender ideologies, labor practices, and family structures. It is useful for Latin American specialists as well as anyone interested in the use of state programs to shape gender roles.
