Cuban rural women: praise and more

Probably Irene has already seen a traffic light, a washing machine, the beach…now, but twenty years have passed since. When I first met her, on the hills of Tercer Frente, Granma province, she knew about these and other things “by hearsay.” Up there, there was only her and her shoulder bag, which every morning she filled with the coffee beans from the harvest.

As the ripe coffee beans do not make a sound when they fall into the basket, and she collected them in total silence. She was almost a kind of ghost when I ran into her among so many green leaves and cold humidity.

But her surprise was perhaps greater than mine, and, between scares and smiles, she let this reporter dive into her life as a rural woman:

“I remember myself as an eight or nine years old girl in a place called La Laguna, standing next to a small basket to pick coffee. I practically spent my childhood and youth picking coffee; I didn't like it, but I had to do it out of necessity. Afterwards, I already liked it, and I did also any kind of work as well. People ask me why I am like this, like a worker ant, and loving the plants, the fruits..., it may be because I am the daughter of peasants.”

I have lost track of Irene, but there are many like her who surely continue to lean out among the green landscape as a magical surprise, either in the mountains or the plains, and they all deserve the best round of applause on this International Day of Rural Women.

In fact, that "all" means almost a quarter of the labor force in the agricultural sector, where women are found in agriculture in general, tobacco, coffee, livestock, working for the forestry company... and from all these and other profiles, contributing directly or indirectly to food production, agroecology…So that life can be better.

Rural women are, according to the most updated report on human development published in Cuba, Ascenso a la raíz. La perspectiva local del Desarrollo Humano en Cuba 2019, 46.3% of the rural population, but only 26.1% of the economically active population in that area.

They make up just over 15% of the labor force directly employed in agriculture, almost a third (32%) of the total number of landowners, and 16% of usufructuaries.

They represent around a third of the human resources employed within the state sector in agriculture, where there are women in administrative positions as in the rest of the productive forms, as well as union responsibilities, dedicated to scientific research, innovation and seeking solutions to the problems and needs of their communities.

Not for nothing, on the occasion of the International Day of Rural Women celebrated last year, the general secretary of the Union of Agricultural, Forestry and Tobacco Workers, Néstor Hernández Martínez, "highlighted the capacity and leadership of rural women, who have shown greater efficiency, organization and productivity in most of the tasks of agriculture,” according to the ACN.

Well-deserved praise, but…

Even though the contribution of Cuban women from the rural context is indisputable, scientific studies and articles by Cuban specialists agree that it is still mandatory to give greater visibility to this sector, taking into account its specificities marked —among other factors— by the specific characteristics of the environment, significantly different from urban areas.

Dr. Ana Isabel Peñate Leiva, professor and senior researcher at the Latin American School of Social Sciences FLACSO-Cuba Program, published last December a valuable article on the subject: “Gender and territory as axes of inequality. A look at the situation of women rural in Cuba.”

In this text, the expert aims to answer these questions: How is the gender/rurality relationship perceived in Cuba? What are the main inequalities experienced by rural women in the country? And how can public policies and academia contribute to reversing this situation?

To do this, it takes among its sources scientific texts derived from the Policy Scenarios and Vulnerable Groups Forum: Rural Women, which was attended by 16 experts, who, from their different professional profiles, explored the inequalities faced by rural women. Cuban rural women from the economic, cultural, housing, habitat and health contexts, while a particular forum made up of rural women enriched the analyzes with their experiences.

Dr. Peñate Leiva assures in the conclusions of the aforementioned article that "the analysis of the economic inequalities viewed from the gender perspective in the rural area in Cuba, reinforces the persistence of the distances between rural/urban spaces, and emphasizes forms in which social inequalities are (re)constructed. The territory constitutes a differentiating axis that promotes inequities in the subjects, with women being the most vulnerable.”

Consequently, she recommends that “studies on rural women should move from a reductionist perspective, essentially focused on rural women as peasant producers or cooperative members, to one that assesses them as a plural subject; and in aspects related to economic well-being, towards a more complex vision that considers absent or insufficiently treated dimensions, such as health, housing conditions and their perceptions, which account for the complexity of the current situation of rural women . In this way, social research must move from the agrarian field to that of the new rurality.”

Coffee women on the spotlight…

Coinciding with the aforementioned ideas and, at the same time, bringing to the spotlight the real daily life of coffee-grower women in the municipality of Tercer Frente, the Santiago magazine, from Universidad de Oriente, in its special issue for the 75th anniversary of that university, published a research that shows the diagnosis of gender gaps in the cooperative coffee production process of that eastern territory.

The group of authors of the research detected, among other results, that there is a failure to take advantage of the real and potential capacity of women, as well as a lack of training actions that promote them to administrative positions, even when it has increased the participation within the territory of women leaders of peasant associations, cooperatives.

This study also made it possible to show that "cooperative women have difficulties with access to information, work, resources and the benefits of coffee production."

They also informed that male landowners tend to transfer the knowledge and inheritance of the land to the man who is most involved in its production; which reproduces a sexist division of labor. Of a total of 32 farms processed in family inheritance from 2018 to 2021, only 3 were inherited by women, even though there were feasible conditions for the figure to be higher.

"Since women are the ones who carry out a large percentage of the productive activities —refers the research—, men are the ones who obtain the most benefit, both from the training programs on sustainable practices that are applied in the municipality, as well as inputs, income and other benefits generated by the commercialization of coffee.

Added to these and other shadows is the excessive workload of coffee-grower women due to the double shift, work and home, which falls on their shoulders, which is similar to women’s in urban areas and from very different occupations.

In this case, the group of scholars reports that this excessive workload causes a tangible drop in the possibilities of these women to participate full time in the work in the cooperatives, to access technical training opportunities and to move to positions of greater responsibility within the cooperatives.

They recommend the need to promote specific policies and measures aimed in particular at rural women, in which their importance in the sustainability of the production process is recognized.

In addition, they suggest that economic stimulation mechanisms are needed for companies that have incorporated the gender approach into the practice of all their economic management, and thus have managed to reduce the gaps between men and women.

Similarly, they suggest working on the policy making that promotes intra-organizational or intra-company management practices in favor of equality.

…And yet it moves…

Undoubtedly, it is much less complex to develop strategies, plans and programs based on gender equality, than to bringing the concepts that lead to these designs to subjectivities. It is a well-known reality, which, among other authorized voices, Dr. Mariela Castro Espín has also ratified:

“The most difficult challenge of socialism is to transform subjectivities; it is to generate that new political subject that will be capable of generating changes in society.”

The many efforts and the political will that encourage the country's leadership in favor of gender equity are well known, the new Family Code is a very recent example, to which are added the Program for the Advancement of Women and many others.

And rural women benefits from them all, as well as those who reside in urban environments. However, as they are different contexts —even not all rural areas are the same, same with the cities—, it would be necessary, as the experts indicate, to continue adapting the general strategies to the particularities of these contexts.

Thus, it is likely that the Irenes of the future, will give some different answers to those offered to the reporter by that coffee grower with whom I began these lines, the one who justified her gaps, arguing, without a hint of disagreement: “The life of the mountain is the way it is.”

And when questioned about her status as a woman, she replied: "I am the only woman in my brigade, and they care about me a lot: they won't let me go to a very high place."

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff