Re: Cuban Women: Randall's Reassessment

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie:
>It is up to women under socialism who oppose sexist & other
>oppressions -- not up to our contemporary feminist entrepreneurs,
>bourgeois moralist reformers, and male leaders of socialism -- to
>decide.  In other words, it is _not_ for _you_ to decide, harsh as
>this may sound.  Women under socialism may decide to abolish
>prostitution, and I'd salute them; women under socialism may want to
>make sex work (as _work, not as a commodity_) a part of socialist &
>feminist economy, _both for men & women_, and I'd applaud them too.

Actually, this is not right. Revolutionary societies in underdeveloped
societies make all sorts of demands on people that transcend all sorts of
democratic rights. There were 100,000 prostitutes in Cuba in 1959. In a
country that was under the gun from imperialism and that had witnessed the
exodus of skilled professionals to the United States, it was urgent to
regulate what work people did and under what circumstances they did it.
While I don't think jailing prostitutes was a good idea (and I'd need more
information on how this actually took place in revolutionary Cuba), it is
completely understandable why there would be social pressure and even
forced 'rehabilitation'. It was a matter of survival to teach not just
prostitutes, but chambermaids and other nonproductive members of society
like shoeshine boys, etc., how to operate a tractor and to shoot a gun.
That's the reality of Cuba and any other country under the gun of US
imperialism when it breaks with the system. It is a big mistake to project
academic feminism into this social reality and in particular it is
ahistorical to project it onto a society that was filled with machismo. In
the context of 1959 Cuba, there is no other society in history that has
done more to liberate women.

Finally, I can't understand why you are using the formulation 'let women
decide'. Put yourself in Cuba back in 1959, Yoshie, and tell us what you
would have advocated.

Louis Proyect
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