"Gender and Democracy in Cuba traces the progress of women's social and economic rights brought about by the early revolutionary government. Drawing on interviews with high-ranking Cuban officials and research gathered during visits to the island, Luciak argues that democracy cannot be successfully consolidated without the full participation of women in the political process - and the support of men - both at the party and societal levels. Gender and Democracy in Cuba also provides a foundation for understanding the evolving role of women and the meaning of democracy in the transition period of post-Castro Cuba."--BOOK JACKET.

Offers new insights into both the successes and the limitations of Latin America's left in the twentieth century.

The Cuban revolutionary government engaged in social engineering to redefine the nuclear family and organize citizens to serve the state.

A handful of celebrated photographs show armed female Cuban insurgents alongside their companeros in Cuba's remote mountains during the revolutionary struggle. However, the story of women's part in the struggle's success has only now received comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a "revolution within the revolution," Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process. Tracing changes in political attitudes alongside evolving gender ideologies in the years leading up to the revolution, Chase describes how insurrectionists mobilized familiar gendered notions, such as masculine honor and maternal sacrifice, in ways that strengthened the coalition against Fulgencio Batista. But, after 1959, the mobilization of women and the societal transformations that brought more women and young people into the political process opened the revolutionary platform to increasingly urgent demands for women's rights. In many cases, Chase shows, the revolutionary government was simply formalizing popular initiatives already in motion on the ground thanks to women with a more radical vision of their rights.

Between 1920 and 1940, Cuba underwent a remarkable transition, moving from oligarchic rule to a nominal constitutional democracy. The events of this period are crucial to a full understanding of the nation's political evolution, yet they are often glossed

From Cuba with Love deals with love, sexuality, and politics in contemporary Cuba. In this beautiful narrative, Megan Daigle explores the role of women in Cuban political culture by examining the rise of economies of sex, romance, and money since the early 1990s. Daigle draws attention to the violence experienced by young women suspected of involvement with foreigners at the hands of a moralistic state, an opportunistic police force, and even their own families and partners. Investigating the lived realities of the Cuban women (and some men) who date tourists and offering a unique perspective on the surrounding debates, From Cuba with Love raises issues about women’s bodies–what they can or should do and, equally, what can be done to them. Daigle’s provocative perspective will make readers question how race and politics in Cuba are tied to women and sex, and the ways in which political power acts directly on the bodies of individuals through law, policing, institutional programs, and social norms.

In this book, Marvin Leiner analyzes the practice of quarantine in the context of the Cuban Revolution. He also focuses on efforts by Cuban educators to introduce sex education in the schools and to change sexist and homophobic attitudes, discussing their successes and failures with candor and examining the explicit and implicit linkages between machismo and homophobia.