An Army of Educators: Gender, Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961

Herman, Rebecca A.

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0424.2011.01670.x

Cited by 35 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…35 Scholars have debated the extent to which the Federation furthered women’s emancipation. 36 But there is little doubt that the mass organizations promoted women’s political involvement in the pueblo , and many women reported feeling empowered by their experiences in la calle (Herman 2012; Murphy 2012).…”

Section: Paving the Way For The Political Womanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 to 1969

Triplett

2021

Am Sociol Rev

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How do political actors forge social solidarity across preexisting axes of social difference? This article investigates how political elites undertaking projects of political articulation—understood as linking together diverse constituencies to create integrated political blocs—contend with preexisting cultural constraints embedded in the social fabric. I do so by tracing how the post-1959 Cuban regime attempted to build a population-wide revolutionary identity despite persisting cultural understandings of women primarily as apolitical housewives. Through systematic analysis of a large corpus of state discourse in the form of speeches and women’s magazines, I show how regime leaders negotiated, with varying degrees of success over time, the cultural constraints that gender posed to their unifying project. Ultimately, the regime’s initiatives to politicize women through including them in mass campaigns and radicalizing their traditional household tasks were relatively successful, but cultural backlash against women’s increasing presence in the labor force prompted the institutionalization of a gendered division of labor in the economy that traditionalized their initially radical entry into the workplace. Analyzing how political elites confront and manage social differences within political blocs promises to contribute to a better understanding of the political production of social solidarity and its downstream effects on categorical inequalities.

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Section: Paving the Way For The Political Womanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 to 1969

Triplett

2021

Am Sociol Rev

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“…Castro called upon the Federation of Cuban Women to help in the nation-wide literacy campaign where the rhetoric was that literacy was as important to the Revolution as the insurrection that preceded it (Herman, 2012). In a speech on April 9, 1961, titled, "Education and Revolution," Castro further paints a picture of the importance of education to the revolution, "There can be no revolution without education because a revolution means profound changes in the life of a country" (paragraph 1).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Intersection of Values and Social Reproduction: Lessons from Cuba

Bridges

2020

jise

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This article will examine how various socialist values are promoted through the Cuban educational system. The voices represented vary generationally, racially, and gender. This research is not meant to generalize about all educational experiences in Cuba; rather, it represents a variety of experiences in the educational system. The research represented in this article was gathered in June 2015 in Havana, Cuba. This article begins with a brief historical background on education in Cuba after the triumph of the revolution in 1959, followed by data collection methods, representation of the data through vignettes and poetry, and finally an analysis of the diverse experiences through the framework of intersectionality. The primary finding was that Cuban society taught socialist values overtly within the educational system through school-based activities, such as the Junior Pioneers from the primary level, and through its emphasis on values formation as part of teacher training. The inculcation of these revolutionary values through the education system kept the revolutionary ideology alive across generations.

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“…5 Moreover, I complement extensive work on gender and sexuality in Cuba, which has focused largely on women immediately after 1959 and men who experienced state homophobia in the late 1960s. 6 Like recent scholarship, I shift attention to the 1970s, Cuba's 'forgotten decade', and its curious mixture of traditional ideas about gender and sexuality alongside important shifts in policies regarding sex, women and the family. 7 While mostly focused on developments within Cuba, I touch on the international reach of psicoballet, which became an early (and heretofore overlooked) programme in Cuba's medical internationalist campaigns for people with disabilities.…”

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confidence: 99%

Prescribing Ballet: A History of Gender and Disability in Cuban Psicoballet

Schwall¹

2020

Gender & History

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A 1974 article about child psychology in the main Cuban weekly Bohemia introduced the wider public to a new ballet therapy programme called psicoballet, a neologism combining the Spanish root psico ('psycho' in English) and ballet. The article featured interviews with the two leaders of the collaborative programme, Cuban ballerina Laura Alonso and Cuban psychologist Georgina Fariñas. 'Psicoballet began with the original idea to soften the movements of girls [compañeritas] with masculine tendencies', Laura Alonso explained. However, from the beginning, psicoballet included boys and girls with varied conditions, such as asthma, hyperactivity and 'tics', in the inaugural 1973 session. 1 To rationalise this decision, organisers claimed that ballet made girls more feminine, but did not feminise boys. 2 Regardless of condition or gender, the treatment involved young patients in months of ballet classes, a final performance and sessions for the parents about raising children with special needs. Ballet therapy proved effective, according to organisers. As Fariñas reported, 'In girls with masculine tendencies, less brusqueness and greater integration into feminine activities has been noted'. After treatment, girls happily sewed, 'made feminine drawings. .. and favourably accept[ed] males into the group, willingly occupying their feminine role'. Fariñas also detailed how other children from the timid to the hyperactive became more confident and communicative as a result of the treatment. 3 As the language of such observations indicates, the history of psicoballet, a therapeutic technology that brought together diverse individuals under the same regimen, provides insight into Cuban ideas about gender, disability and ballet as a form of healing. Although the highly technical art of ballet, which originated in middle-and upper-class sociability and retained elite connotations, may seem a surprising, even counterintuitive, psychological treatment for children in revolutionary Cuba, this article explains how and why this programme consolidated in the 1970s. I examine the longer historical relationship between ballet and disability in Cuba that forged a prerevolutionary foundation for psicoballet. Then, I consider ballet and gender after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, when ballet teachers and company directors insisted that the form cultivated 'healthy' boys and girls who exhibited a specific able-bodied physicality and able-mindedness hinging on normative gender expression. After decades of entwinement between ballet, disability, gender and health, dancers and psychologists invented psicoballet in 1973. As the distinguished art of ballet went from the vocation

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An Army of Educators: Gender, Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961

Cited by 35 publications

References 3 publications

Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 to 1969

Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 to 1969

The Intersection of Values and Social Reproduction: Lessons from Cuba

Prescribing Ballet: A History of Gender and Disability in Cuban Psicoballet

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