Re: Cuban Women: Randall's Reassessment

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Xxxx:

>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?

I've already posted an excerpt from _Sex and Revolution: Women in
Socialist Cuba_ on this list, but here goes again.

*****   By claiming that North American visitors were the principal
exploiters of Cuban women, the revolution avoided any serious
analysis of sexuality and social power.  In truth the principal
clientele of Cuba's sex industry was Cubans themselves.  Indeed the
euphoria of the revolutionary triumph of 1959 reportedly brought a
boom in business for Cuba's thirty to forty thousand prostitutes. [37]

Law 993 of 1961 outlawed any form of prostitution and stipulated that
anyone associated with it could be identified as socially
"dangerous."  Authorities had three options in sentencing: therapy,
reeducation, or imprisonment. [38]  Pimps were sent to prison or to
work farms.  The government at first did not treat prostitute
harshly.  It viewed them as hapless victims of the old system and
sent them to schools to be rehabilitated.  These schools provided
ideological and vocational training and taught the women basic
etiquette, table manners, and how to avoid "overly ornate" hairstyles
and clothes. [39]  Prostitutes with families to support were given
stipends, and FMC volunteers minded the children while their mothers
attended classes.

Many, but not all, of Cuba's prostitutes were grateful for the
opportunity to study.  Although the rehabilitation program was at
first voluntary, it soon became compulsory.  Some prostitutes left
the country.  Those who refused to give up their profession were
ultimately imprisoned.

[37]  Oscar Lewis, Ruth M. Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon, _Four Women_
(Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977), p. 277.
[38]  "La eliminacion de todas las formas de discriminacion contra la
mujer en Cuba," _Boletin FMC_ (Havana, 1984), p. 12.
[39]  Lewis, Lewis, and Rigdon, _Four Women_, p. 279.

(Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula, _Sex and Revolution: Women in
Socialist Cuba_, NY & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996, pp. 40-41)   *****

By medicalization, I mean the modern tendency to treat those who are
labeled by authorities to be "deviants" or political "dissidents" as
psychologically impaired and prescribe them some kind of therapy.

It's a wonderful thing to offer sex workers an option of going to
school & give family stipends, and many did like this option, *but*
compulsion & imprisonment should not be necessary here.  Also, the
content of "rehabilitation": basic etiquette, table manners, style
tips???  Attacks upon prostitution didn't really amount to attacks
upon sexism at all -- the program simply schooled ex-prostitutes into
another kind of sexism. Unwillingness or inability to fully confront
sexism in marriage, family, etc. made the Cuban "reeducation" of
prostitutes sexist as well (schooling ex-prostitutes into
domesticated femininity), despite the Party's undoubtedly good
intention (but where were reeducation camps for ex-johns???).
Perhaps paternalism got in the way of serious thinking, too, in that
Revolutionary Cuba, as well as middle-class feminist reformers,
thought of prostitutes as "hapless victims" to be "rehabilitated,"
not as *subjects* of labor who make history though not under
circumstances of their own making (as I explained, here the double
consciousness is at work, in that if the Cuban government had truly &
fully believed that only the women who got victimized by pimps or
capitalism would become prostitutes, it would not have made
"rehabilitation" compulsory on pain of imprisonment or
medicalization).  However, on the subject of gender equality, male
leaders of the revolution, alas, weren't in a position to "reeducate"
ex-prostitutes at all.  They needed "reeducation" themselves....

>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 womenís
>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 Iíd never
>heard the kind of language they used; the first day I got there one of the
>women was angry about something, I donít remember what it was, and she started
>fighting right there. Words, blows, kicks.., that was something! I just froze,
>but I thought that I shouldnít do anything right then, because she was so
>upset. I thought if I said anything to her then sheíd just turn on me, so I
>just walked by and left her.
>
>You left her and didnít 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 didnít feel bad that she wasnít trying
>to get people to respect her, now that she had the chance to have another kind
>of life? We talked a long time.

I'm afraid that to Mirna as well, Marx's question "who is to educate
the educators" applies.  Self-emancipation of women does not come
without conflicts among women, since women, just because of our
gender, do not hold the same opinions (just as you and I have
disagreed here & elsewhere).  Likewise, women of Mirna's social
position & women who used to be prostitutes under capitalism must
have had differing conceptions of good, both of them only possessing
partial truths.  Socialists must create space in which women can
discuss various questions _as equals_ (not as "rehabilitators" and
"rehabilitated"), as well as space for discussion between men and
women.

Yoshie