Women and the Cuban Insurrection
How Gender Shaped Castro's Victory

Reveals the centrality of women rebels to Fidel Castro's Cuban insurrection in the 1950s.

Lorraine Bayard de Volo (Author)

9781107178021, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 February 2018

280 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.1 cm, 0.51 kg

'Women and the Cuban Insurrection: How Gender Shaped Castro's Victory centers on women who heretofore were rarely acknowledged but whose contribution makes this text a very inclusive history of the mid-twentieth-century Cuban insurrection. Bayard de Volo provides a rich and detailed account of the political activities of women from the 1930s onward that in fact shaped and facilitated Castro's success when he entered Havana on January 1, 1959. In doing so, Bayard de Volo recounts the thirty-year struggle from an intersectional perspective, using gender, class, age, region, and race as key points of her examination.' A. Lynn Bolles, American Historical Review

Using gender analysis and focusing on previously unexamined testimonies of women rebels, political scientist Lorraine Bayard de Volo shatters the prevailing masculine narrative of the Cuban Revolution. Contrary to the Cuban War story's mythology of an insurrection single-handedly won by bearded guerrillas, Bayard de Volo shows that revolutions are not won and lost only by bullets and battlefield heroics. Focusing on women's multiple forms of participation in the insurrection, especially those that occurred off the battlefield, such as smuggling messages, hiding weapons, and distributing propaganda, Bayard de Volo explores how gender - both masculinity and femininity - were deployed as tactics in the important though largely unexamined battle for the 'hearts and minds' of the Cuban people. Drawing on extensive, rarely-examined archives including interviews and oral histories, this author offers an entirely new interpretation of one of the Cold War's most significant events.

1. Revolution retold: what a gender lens tells us about the Cuban insurrection
2. 'How can men tire when women are tireless': women rebels before Moncada
3. A movement is born: military defeat and political victory at Moncada
4. Abeyance and resurgence: sustaining rebellion in prison and exile
5. Gendered rebels: barriers and privileges
6. War stories celebrated and silenced: tactical femininity, bombing, and sexual assault in the urban underground
7. 'Stop the murders of our children': mothers and the battle for hearts and minds
8. Gendered rebels: the Guerrilla war of ideas
9. Women noncombatants: multiple paths and contributions
10. Las Marianas: even the women in arms
11. Past is prologue: victory and consolidation.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions [HBTV], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW]