Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.13.2.0355
• Pages: 355-358
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Eloise Linger

Book reVIeWS 355

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Daliany Jerónimo Kersh, Women’s Work in Special Period Cuba. Making

Ends Meet, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. ISBN 978-3-030-05629-2

255 pages; and 978-3-030-05630-8 (eBook)

Reviewed by Eloise Linger

Why care about “women’s work” during Cuba’s Special Period? Why not eve-

rybody’s work and survival efforts during the most daunting years for nutrition,

family consumption, transportation, even access to simple medicines?

The grand-scale answer assumes that women have been oppressed and iso-

lated from public life over the last five millennia in most societies. Moving to the

local and contemporary in Cuba, the revolution of 1959 aimed to build a more

equal society. That would entail the destruction of patriarchal and macho cul-

tural norms, economic and political inequalities, and other still-existing forms of

privilege, such as those of European-descended over African-descended people.

If more than 30 years later, in the 1990s, Cuban women were still expected

to shoulder responsibilities for family care plus other domestic work, then what

does that say about the elimination (or not) of patriarchal norms? To what

extent had the revolutionary government and the women themselves overcome

patriarchal attitudes and structural barriers? Were inequalities brought into

sharper focus, perhaps intensified, during economic crisis? Those are important

questions for analysing the successes and failures of the Cuban Revolution and

its social transformations.

Daliany Jerónimo Kersh shows how the inequalities played out in one small

town near Veradero, where tourism was the dominant employing industry and

foreign tourists – and one’s neighbours – were a source of extra cash, especially

the “hard” currency necessary for survival. Her contribution includes statistical

data, background and expert analysis by recognised Cuban scholars and com-

mentators.1 She also provides vivid sociological information from micro-level

research into the lives of 30 women the author came to know personally from

numerous visits to their town.

The women, when interviewed, ranged in age from their mid-30s to mid-60s.

They were married, divorced and single. Twenty-nine had at least one child, and

a few helped support and care for grandchildren. Many were born and raised in

various areas of the island and moved to be near Veradero’s booming tourist

industry. The formal interviews were conducted in December 2013 and October–

November 2014, two decades after the worst years of the 1990s.

1 Sociologist Marta Nuñez, journalists Mirta Rodríguez Calderón (Bohemia) and Sara

Más (Granma).