CU women status
6 January 2003

HAVANA, Cuba - They were expected to build a new society alongside their fathers, husbands and brothers, a goal still reflected in the symbol of Cuba's foremost women's organization: a female soldier with a rifle slung over one arm and a baby cradled in the other. Forty-four years ago, it was called "a revolution within the revolution." It included massive countryside literacy campaigns, new nurseries for working mothers, free prenatal care and schools to educate maids and prostitutes, the years following the 1959 revolution brought radical changes in Cuba's society and unprecedented opportunities for women. Cuba's universal education system moved women from traditional roles as seamstresses, telephone operators and teachers into new, higher-paying arenas such as agricultural engineering and electronics that had been male domains. Women today represent two-thirds of the island's professionals and technical workers, 60 percent of the University of Havana's faculty, and more than half the island's physicians and scientists. But while Cuban women have had many educational and professional achievements, they are left short of the social equality they were promised. Many blame machismo, male cultural dominance embedded in Cuban life, for preventing further gains. "You can change the law from one day to another but not the subjective thought process of a person," said Norma Vasallo, head of the women's studies program at the University of Havana. Like women throughout the world, cubanas bump against the glass ceiling in their careers. In addition to responsibilities in the workplace, most of the shopping, cooking, housekeeping and child care falls to them. For all the differences in their countries' economic structures, Cuban and American women share some of the same complaints: their husbands don't pull their weight at home. "Women moved into public life more fully than men moved into home life," said María López Vigil, a Cuban-born journalist living in Nicaragua. Women hold fewer than one-third of all management positions, forgoing the professional challenge because they aren't able to balance late-night meetings and demanding schedules with the "second shift" at home. Nor are many women found in the top echelons of power. The island's parliament is 27 percent female and only four of 32 government ministers are women, according to the Federation of Cuban Women, which has worked since its founding in 1960 to promote gender equality while instilling socialist principles. Cuba's post-Soviet economic freefall, dubbed the "special period," has forced many families into a daily struggle to subsist and the burden has fallen especially hard on women. In the 44 years since Celia Sánchez, one of Fidel Castro's most trusted confidants, fought alongside the bearded rebels in the Sierra Maestra mountains, women continue to balance their needs and those of their families and society in innovative, sometimes contradictory ways, as relayed by the six women profiled here.

WOMEN IN THE WORK FORCE
1959: 13 percent
1970: 19 percent
1989: 39 percent
1996: 37 percent
2001: 42 percent

PROFESSIONALS AND TECHNICIANS
1977: More than 50 percent
1999: 66 percent

EDUCATION
Proportion of female and male workers who are university graduates:
1978: 5 percent female to 3.5 percent male
1996: 16 percent female to 11 percent male

MISCELLANEOUS
Sugar industry workers - 19 percent women
Agricultural industry workers - 21 percent
Physicians - 51 percent