Re: Cuban Women: Randall's Reassessment

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou:

>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.

I would have advocated offering family stipends, educational
opportunities, better economic alternatives, etc. _without_
threatening prostitutes with imprisonment and medicalization.  At the
same time, both men and women in general, not just prostitutes, would
work on anti-sexist efforts in the family, at work, in school,
everywhere, without dismissing feminist insights as "bourgeois."  Why
should these be incompatible with the building of socialism???

What you say above, though, basically confirms oft-cited feminist
complaints that socialist men are not interested in women's
emancipation _unless_ it is good for socialist men's notion of the
good & transient necessities (actual or perceived) of national
exigencies.  Now, negating women's self-emancipation or subordinating
women's needs & desires to the program of national survival (e.g.,
denying women reproductive rights & freedoms in the interest of
pro-natalist policy in order to increase labor supply, especially in
Romania) may look convenient in the short term, but in the long term
it is counter-productive, threatening not just women but also the
very viability of socialism.  Denial of women's self-emancipation
sows the seeds of counter-revolution & capitalist restoration.

BTW, being under the guns of imperialism does not explain changing
Cuban attitudes to prostitution.  The government tried to abolish it
then; now it tolerates it shamefacedly, without regulating it in the
formal economy, because it has come to rely on tourism.  At both
points in history, Cuba has been under the guns.

Lastly, shamefaced toleration is as bad as top-down abolition with a
threat of imprisonment.  Since Cuban prostitutes exist under the
shadow of informal economy, they do not enjoy government protection.
If the government is going to tolerate it, it might as well bring it
into the light of formal economy where prostitutes would be safer &
less exploited.

Yoshie