domestic social policy

women, education, youth movement, race

从个人风格来做

Woman

Background

vote 1934, 1940 constitution equality: could not be discriminated against at work and were to receive equal pay for equal work

traditional value: Only a few occupations, such as teaching and nursing, were considered to be appropriate for women in the pre-revolutionary years. 其实是存在歧视的, especially in high-class elites, better jobs(higher salary) → men

This implied having to fight against two main problems: discrimination against women at work, and finding how to make women’s role in the workforce and the household compatible.

Policy

Castro: new legislation was passed reinforcing the equal rights of men and women to access all types of jobs

Women were offered training at technical and professional levels to prepare themselves for posts with greater responsibility. They entered fields that had so far been almost exclusively all-male, such as construction, biotechnology, and IT. In the rural areas, the Agrarian Reform acts opened the opportunity for women to work in areas that had also been limited to men, such as driving and repairing tractors + “cut cane and harvest coffee and other crops” In the towns and cities, an increasing number of day-care centres for working mothers were made available so that women could become part of the workforce.

limitation: There was pressure on women to be efficient workers, participate in political life, volunteer to serve the revolution while at the same time fulfill their responsibilities as wives, mothers, and housewives.

In the 1970s, ==a new ‘Family Code’== was put in place. It stipulated equality of sexes both at home and at work. Men were to share in the household duties and the education of children; not doing so was seen as the exploitation of women. The presence of women in the workforce, however, remained lower than government expectations, a fact that even Castro was forced to admit.

==The Cuban Women’s Federation (FMC)== - was created by Vilma Espín (wife of Raúl Castro) in 1960

The FMC played a crucial role in getting an egalitarian Family Code adopted in 1975. This was designed to equalise the status of spouses in the family and obliged husbands to do half of all family chores. It trained women to take up new jobs in farming, construction, and teaching, among others. The FMC also organized many aspects of the campaign against illiteracy, and created and ran successful health programs. FMC women joined ‘==Sanitary Brigades==’ that travelled to the rural areas to deliver vaccination campaigns, and they also served as social workers. The FMC worked with the Ministry of Education in the design of new textbooks to be used in revolutionary Cuba. In them, women were portrayed as committed workers and soldiers. Former domestic workers were trained to work as seamstresses or cooks, and they received education in history, geography, and the new laws of revolutionary Cuba. Housewives were also taught in FMC headquarters so that they could complete their schooling.

limitation: Yet despite the work of the FMC, the government could not achieve the levels of female employment it had hoped for. Furthermore, the low number of women in decision- making positions and in the higher levels of the PCC leads us to question whether the government really intended equality between the sexes, or if it was merely creating policies to reach its economic goals.

Women’s participation in politics has been significantly less equal than in the workplace.

evidence: By the mid 1980s, ==only 19% of the PCC members== and candidate members and only 13% of the PCC’s Central Committees were women. There were ==no women in the party secretariat or the top government organ==, the Council of State. ==However, by 2003, women formed over 30% of the active membership of the PCC== and 16.1% of the Council of State, and five ministries were headed by women. Women also held 52.5% of union leadership positions, and 31% of all managers of state enterprises were women. According to historians such as Saney, Cuba compares favorably with other countries and ranks fifth in the Americas in terms of overall equality for women. In the 1988 elections, 27.6% of delegates were women; in 2003, this rose to 35.9%. Female representation in the National Assembly puts Cuba tenth in the world. Despite some problems, the Cuban Revolution maintains a strong commitment to achieving full equality between women and men.

male chauvinism/gender stereotyping doing 36 hours of household work per week, compared to 10 hours for men

There has been an impressive increase in the number of women throughout the education system. Cuba has one of the highest rates of school enrollment of young girls. Also, ==more than 60% of university students are female==, and 47% of university instructors are women – in medicine, women actually outnumber men, forming 70% of students. Although they remain under-represented in engineering, and over-represented in primary and secondary school teaching and in the humanities, a fundamental shift has nonetheless occurred.

Education

Background

low literacy

游击战时期，许诺education reform，并且已经开始教了

Policy

==The literacy campaign==

Under the slogan ‘If you do not know, learn; if you know, teach’, 1961 was declared ‘==The Year of Education==’ and Castro promised to end illiteracy within the year. To achieve this aim, he needed to solve two initial problems: the lack of schools and the lack of teachers.

To solve the shortage of buildings: - military barracks were turned into educational complexes, while new schools were built all across the country, particularly in the rural areas. Over ==3000 schools were built in 1961== and over ==300,000 children== attended school for the first time. Between 1959, when Castro began his policy of school expansion, and 1962, ==more schools were built than in the previous 58 years of Cuban history==.

To produce more educators for the literacy campaign: - Castro implemented ==a training program for 271,000 teachers==.

To reach all areas, they were sent across the country to teach people in their homes. Literate citizens were expected to act as ‘literacy volunteers’ in their free time. They were dressed in an olive-green uniform and were also sent to the countryside to teach the peasants. Over 100,000 volunteer student teachers, recruited into brigades, took part – most were teenagers. They were often the target of US- sponsored counter-revolutionaries, and over 40 were killed in these terrorist attacks. These brigadistas, as they were known, lived with rural families during the campaign.

The revolutionary government took over all private and Church schools and, after some difficulties, achieved virtual universal attendance at primary schools.

1961, all private schools were nationalized, boarding schools opened, and a large scholarship program for gifted and committed students was established. Participants were selected by the government who often decided the subject areas in which particular students should specialize. Free time had to be used in ‘intellectually valuable choices’, such as volunteer work.

Teachers who did not support the revolution lost their jobs, and the new ones who came to replace them soon realized students acted as spies. On the other hand, teachers who supported the regime were rewarded with training in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where communist values were reinforced.

New textbooks were adopted and teaching focused on the history of the revolution and the lives of heroes: Fidel, Che, and Camilo (on first-name terms).

Libraries were purged of what was considered to be inappropriate material. In Castro’s words: ‘The task of the schools… is the ideological formation of revolutionaries, and then, by means of the revolutionaries, the ideological formation of the rest of the people.’

Effect: The Year of Education brought the entire Cuban population into a joint patriotic effort. ==By 1962, illiteracy had dropped to 4%.== The success of the campaign was spectacular and, as such, it increased the hopes in the revolution.

提高中产阶级的革命意识

Average levels of education in the labour force jumped from bare literacy in the 1964 labour census to sixth-grade level in the 1974 census, and to eighth-grade level by 1979.

limitation: However, differences in access to quality education between urban and rural Cubans – though greatly reduced – did not completely end; but the improvements made in the late 1960s were built on in the 1970s. Many people deserve credit for these improvements: apart from Castro (who pushed for it as a priority), José Ramón Fernández played a key role.

Improvements in higher education were more limited. Departments were at first hit, both by the early emigrations and by the dismissal of ‘politically unreliable’ staff. There was a strong bias towards technical education, with engineering being prioritized over the humanities and the liberal arts; and academic study of the social sciences was neglected.

Religion

Religion - Cuba is considered a Catholic country. However, along with Catholicism, Afro-Cuban religions also have a great influence. There are also minorities of Protestants and Jews. - When the revolution triumphed in 1959, some sectors of the Catholic Church welcomed the opportunity to achieve social justice. Others looked at it with suspicion, particularly as the revolution began to move to the left. - Castro thought many of the congregations in Cuba represented foreign interests, as their members were Americans or Spaniards. Whenever bishops criticized the policies of the revolution, Castro accused them of abandoning their pastoral duties and getting involved in politics. The nationalization of schools following the Bay of Pigs incident, and the government’s decision that religious education could only take place in churches, increased tension between the state and many religious leaders.

‘internal exile’, that is, as invisible groups with limited or no influence. Some pastors, however, thought that the only way to attract people back to their churches was to participate in the campaigns of the revolution as volunteers, so they joined the zafra, health campaigns, and other forms of voluntary labour.

In an attempt to show there was no room for putting religious beliefs before the revolution, the constitution of 1976 stated that ‘It is illegal and punishable by law to oppose one’s faith or religious belief to the Revolution, education or the fulfillment of the duty to work, defend the homeland with arms, show reverence for its symbols and other duties established by the constitution.’

The hardships experienced during the Special Period – which seemed to augur the end of the revolution – strengthened attendance of people in their churches. In 1998, Pope John Paul II paid a historic visit to Cuba. A strong anti-communist, the pope addressed the lack of political freedom in Cuba but he also criticized the US economic embargo. As a sign of improved relations, the government modified the PCC statute and allowed religious people to join. The separation between state and Church, however, continued to exist, and religious education remained forbidden in all schools.

Race

Black people

In March 1959, he made his ‘==Proclamation against discrimination==’ speech, calling for a campaign against racial discrimination and making it clear that differences in skin colour were of no significance.

their living standards improve considerably after 1959

Background

The leaders of the 1959 revolution were overwhelmingly white, and white people have continued to fill the top political positions.

Consequently, as with women, black people are still significantly under-represented in the top organs of both party and state.

By 1979, only five of the 34 ministers were black; there were only four black members of the 14-strong politburo of the PCC; and only 16 of the 146 members of its Central Committee.

So, at the party congress in 1986, Castro declared it a priority to increase the black share of top political jobs.

LGBTQ+

After 1959, same-sex relationships were at first seen as aspects of ‘bourgeois decadence’ resulting from capitalism. Such early attitudes were strengthened in the 1960s and 1970s as Cuba moved closer to the Soviet Union, whose laws reflected such prejudices.

In 1971, the government described same-sex relationships as incompatible with the revolution – gay men and lesbians were expelled from the Communist Party and several artists, actors and teachers lost their jobs. However, this was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1975, and Armando Hart, head of the new Ministry of Culture, began to promote a more liberal approach.

As a result, during the second half of the 1970s, attitudes towards same-sex relationships were questioned in various ways. In 1977, the Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CNES) was founded on the initiative of the Cuban Women’s Federation (FMC) – this encouraged a more enlightened outlook on sexual orientation and started to undermine traditional sexual prejudices and taboos.

The work done by the CNES has contributed to changes in attitudes and laws. In 1979, the law was changed to remove same-sex acts between consenting adults as a criminal offense from the Penal Code. More recently, the age of consent for same-sex relations was equalized to that for heterosexual relations.

There have been further reforms, often emanating from Raúl Castro and his daughter Mariela Castro. These reforms include free hormone therapy in 2008 and free state-sponsored gender reassignment surgery in 2010. However, there is no recognition of same-sex marriage or civil partnerships or unions. Gay and lesbian organizations and publications are banned, as are gay pride marches. Yet since 1995, gay and lesbian groups have been allowed to participate in – and even lead – the May Day parades. Castro more recently criticized machismo and urged acceptance of same-sex relationships, describing these as a ‘natural aspect and tendency of human beings, that must simply be respected’.

HealthCare

Healthcare is one of the most successful social policy areas for Castro’s government. Healthcare services were quickly established as the right of every Cuban citizen, and the system of free healthcare, which had existed before the revolution of 1959, was greatly expanded. This was especially true of the rural areas. However, the various political and military mobilizations – resulting from real or imagined threats from the USA – disrupted the expansion of medical services. The improvement in the economy in the 1970s meant great advances were made.

Achievement

By 1981, the infant mortality rate had fallen to 18.5 per 1000 while pre- 1959 diseases especially associated with poverty (such as TB and diarrhoeal disease) had been greatly reduced.

Housing (Optional)

Housing: Before 1959, only 15% of rural inhabitants had running water (it was 80% for urban dwellers), and only 9% of households had electricity.

However, the revolutionary government’s performance in housing was less successful. There were inefficiencies in the construction and construction-materials industries, and insufficient production, as the government gave higher priority to the building of hospitals and schools.

From 1949 to 1959, when the Cuban population was half of the figure for the late 1970s/early 1980s, about 27,000 housing units were built each year. In the 1960s, figures dropped considerably, although they rose to 16,000 units per year during the first Five-Year Plan (1976–80). In 1973, a high of 21,000 units was reached, but by 1980 figures had declined again.

Media

After taking power in January 1959, Castro was quick to silence anti-revolutionary media. This was intended as a temporary measure and would, he promised, be revoked shortly.

However, with the communists inciting outspoken criticism from his own supporters, Castro reneged on this promise, using the excuse given by dictatorial governments throughout history (and still used today): the interest of public security. In Cuba in 1959, the real threat of a US invasion or US-sponsored counter-revolution meant that the public security argument was probably valid, at least to some degree.

University professors and journalists who voiced their dissent at the increase in communist influence were threatened with dismissal and arrest. Newspapers, magazines and radio stations that spoke out against Castro or the communist influence were often threatened with closure unless they changed their political stance. Even former Castro allies (such as Carlos Franqui, who had run the invaluable Radio Rebelde during the Sierra Maestra campaign) disliked his leanings toward the communists. Castro’s treatment of his critics, however, was not as brutal as that of Batista. For example, rather than being imprisoned or killed, Franqui was able to go into exile with his family. Nonetheless, Castro’s methods still ran counter to his professed aims of establishing the long overdue fair and free Cuba of José Martí’s dreams.