Re: Cuban Women: Randall's Reassessment

[Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx <xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> >I would have advocated offering family stipends, educational
> >opportunities, better economic alternatives, etc. _without_
> >threatening prostitutes with imprisonment and medicalization.

This may be true as a supposition, but I would like to see a solid evidence for
it. Has any body written an article on this issue based on stats and reports
from Cuban prisons? or is this just a Human Rights Advocacy news propagated by
the hypocritical west?

What is the issue with  "medicalization" here, for example?



> >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???
>

Apparently, no body argues that it is incompatible with building socialism.
What you are dismissing (or not *appreciating*) is the *Mirna* example, which
was *not necessarily a technocratic, patriarchal or sexist rehabilitation of
Cuban prostitutes. You portray Cuban men as sexist creatures here. On the
contrary,  Mirna project was an attempt by a *woman*  to change the material
circumstances that forced women into prostitution in a formally colonized/
underdeveloped society. Let's be realistic! That rehabilitation got abused or
that it became a male privilege or that it ended up fucking women does not
explain why it existed in the first place. Initially, it was a good idea.
Randall's book says:


***The immediate goal was to set up schools, separate these women from the
population at large and meet their specific needs. Several "farms" were
organized, in different parts of the country. An ideological battle was begun
at the same time as the initial physical and situational needs were met:
special nursery schools connected with the farms cared for the women?s
children; the women themselves were helped to acquire a new attitude towards
themselves and their possibilities, break drug habits, learn new trades and
professions.

MIRNA: Some of the women who worked with me got sick with nervous
disorders. You had to be very strong! You had to be very strong with them and
at the same time you had to understand them and more than anything, beable to
help them. Imagine: the first day I arrived, and as old as I was I?d never
heard the kind of language they used; the first day I got there one of the
women was angry about something, I don?t remember what it was, and she started
fighting right there. Words, blows, kicks.., that was something! I just froze,
but I thought that I shouldn?t do anything right then, because she was so
upset. I thought if I said anything to her then she?d just turn on me, so I
just walked by and left her.

You left her and didn?t say anything at all?

MIRNA: Not then. Two or three days later I called her to my office and we
began to talk and I asked her if she didn?t feel bad that she wasn?t trying
to get people to respect her, now that she had the chance to have another kind
of life? We talked a long time.

--

Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222


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