Search

This article presents a gender analysis of power and culture in post-revolutionary Cuba, using Bohemia magazine as a source. It argues that despite the relative paucity of historical research on the subject, gender was integral to the identity, legitimacy and popularity of the Cuban Revolution. This article examines Bohemia as a communicatory tool and a site of dissemination and contestation to demonstrate how the Cuban Revolution both endorsed and criticised the cultural ideals it inherited. Bohemia elucidates a dynamic between grassroots enthusiasm, institutional mobilisation and popular disenchantment, whereby gender discourse functioned to encourage and regulate behaviour. The article first focuses on the construction of national identity through historical narratives in Bohemia, exploring the uses of José Martí and Mariana Grajales to create an ambiguous discourse framing behaviour, both domestically and internationally. It then shifts to the discursive construction of the individual Cuban woman, analysing the multiple contentious identities that existed in this post-revolutionary cultural framework, using this incongruity to evidence fundamental shortcomings in the revolution's approach. The final section bridges the national and the individual to understand how these discursive frameworks were used to encourage female participation in the workplace, in political organisations and social campaigns. This analysis also highlights that the central dissonance within the revolutionary project's cultural framework prevented the realisation of gender equality. This article therefore argues that a gender analysis is integral to understanding the nature, legitimacy and longevity of the Cuban Revolution on both a national and international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the first days of the triumph of the revolutionary process on January 1, 1959, the Cuban Revolution has been subject to various forms of confrontation. In the course of the first thirty-two months the hostility of media power increased with the enactment of the First Agrarian Reform Law, on May 17, 1959. A hostile press campaign was unleashed by the traditional press media led by the Diario de la Marina and Prensa Libre using the opposition to communism as a pretext; other periodicals that represented dissimilar interests joined the debate. In the ideological polemic unleashed around the character of the Cuban Revolution, the classist position of the media involved in the debates was defined, among which Bohemia, Noticias de Hoy, Revolucion, Informacion, El Mundo and La Quincena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]