Hynson's work focuses on the attempts of post-revolutionary Cuban governments to design a project of social engineering in various areas related to women, motherhood, and the family between 1959 and 1971. These projects did not overlook attempts to impose a “respectable” morality that often contradicted the speeches, manifestos, and dictates drawn up by these same authorities, in which they declared the transformation of the bourgeois models that had prevailed in Cuban society before the revolution.
We could situate this work in a line of studies promoted by authors such as Lillian Guerra (Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (2012)), Michelle Chase (Revolution Within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952–1962 (2015)), and Elise Andaya (Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era (2014)). These works mix analytical perspectives – to varying degrees – from various social sciences, from anthropology to history.
Hynson analyses the deployment of initiatives promoted from different spheres and institutions of the Cuban state aimed at extending and consolidating a model of the home considered acceptable by the revolutionary state on a heteronormative basis rooted in male primacy. The ideal of the “New Man” implicitly carried an ideal of the “New Family” and, far from eroding the Eurocentric nuclear family model – which some highlighted as a fundamental objective to be destroyed by Fidel Castro's regime – the state, as Hynson shows, merely reproduced that same model. The supposed socialist family model which, it was said, they aspired to implement did not translate into the programmes developed by the state: the nuclear family remained the “respectable” model on which to build society. The ideal of the “New Family” continued to be based on the traditional breadwinner model in which the man provided economic support for the family, worked in a job/occupation regulated (or accepted) by the state itself. The man had a heterosexual partner, who, as a woman, had to abide by the reproductive and labour guidelines laid down by the state itself, in which a link was established between morality and work.
The author's analysis of these initiatives of the revolutionary Cuban state focuses on four programmes implemented throughout the 1960s: the reproductive control of women; the legalization of marriage for “informal” couples; the eradication of prostitution; and the linking of male household heads to occupations that the state placed under its control. Each of these programmes, individually or as a whole, reproduced a gender ideology in which moralizing discourses were combined with an alleged social engineering, seasoned with the projection of a supposed revolutionary ideal in which what was moral and acceptable was what the state itself provided.
Thus, in the first chapter, Hynson focuses on analysing the measures put in place to regulate Cuban women's fertility with the explicit aim of reducing the number of abortions. Although these measures were surrounded by a whole discourse of liberation and female empowerment, their implementation resulted in quite the opposite: it was the medical establishment, not the women themselves, that ultimately decided whether a pregnancy could be terminated. Moreover, as Hynson repeatedly emphasizes, the regulation of abortion was accompanied by a series of non-explicit objectives related to the racialization of the measures imposed: the main target was women from rural areas, from poorer backgrounds, who were generally non-white.
In the second chapter, the author focuses on the family model that the Cuban state tried to impose as normative. “Operation Marriage” was designed to regularize the large number of Cuban couples whose relationships were without legal recognition. To this end, mass celebrations were promoted, spaces were made available for couples to hold ceremonies, and material benefits were offered to those who accepted regularization. This measure was accompanied by “Operation Registry”, with the aim of incorporating into the Civil Register all those Cubans who were not registered. Here again, Hynson highlights the social and gender-based nature of the measure in order to extend political control and consolidate the power of the state itself. On the one hand, rural areas were the main target of these programmes, especially in those regions where sympathies with the counterrevolution were deepest; on the other, this reinforced the ideal of the respectable family mentioned previously, in which a gender hierarchy was imposed in which male authority prevailed over female labour.
The third chapter focuses on programmes aimed at eradicating prostitution. It highlights the different perceptions of the implications of economically mediated sexual relations. As this book points out, for some of the women involved it was a means of earning a livelihood, of obtaining resources that allowed them to live in conditions otherwise difficult to achieve. Faced with this, the state that emerged from the revolution put forward a discourse in which prostitutes were victims of capitalist exploitation, of the conditions of misery that capitalism had generated, and which claimed that women had been forced into prostitution by socioeconomic conditions. Later, in the face of the resistance that officials encountered, a discourse was developed based on the criminalization of women (“criminal demonstrations”), who went against the principles of socialism and to which they were not committed. It is also worth noting Hynson's assessment of the multiple meanings that the authorities conferred on the term “prostitute”, encompassing all those women who transgressed and did not conform to the moral, family, and labour model that the state tried to impose.
The last chapter analyses forced labour as a means of eradicating not only political dissidence but also all those practices that resisted the models that the state itself considered morally acceptable within the framework of the revolutionary socialist ideal. The author focuses on the use of forced labour as a mechanism for imposing on men the labour standards that the state established as normative.
These four chapters highlight the tensions that arose when it came to imposing the aforementioned measures between state authoritarianism and the resistance (generally seen in terms of individual attitudes) that developed among the Cuban population. The author should perhaps have gone on to develop her approach in relation to the debate on the extent to which these individual manifestations, related to personal implications, can be considered resistance. The concept of everyday resistance, developed in the mid-1980s by James C. Scott, as the weapon of the weak could perhaps have served as a framework for these approaches. In this regard, the author could have included the counter-narratives that citizens were spreading and which, on occasion, forced governments to respond.
Throughout the book, Hynson offers an analysis of how the reform programmes proposed by the Cuban revolutionary authorities between 1959 and 1971 were constructed according to the cultural ingredients of a white elite, with profound racial and social implications, elaborating a suggestive reinterpretation of sexuality and the question of gender in the formulation of a supposedly socialist state that aspired to overcome the bourgeois and capitalist model.
Laboring for the State is, in short, in line with those works that question the Cuban government's self-congratulatory account of its own revolution, blaming the failures of its policies on Cubans’ (or at least some Cubans’) lack of commitment to the revolution. When this transfer of responsibility was not possible, the state itself erased the past, diluting it as if it had never existed.
Finally, it is worth trying to insert Hynson's analysis within broader reflections on “the revolutionary” nature of the Cuban state after 1959, the weight of liberal principles in the early Fidelista programme, and the 1940 Constitution as the framework within which the projected transformations could be carried out. Rafael Rojas's reflections on the concept of revolution in Cuba can help shed light on the confluence of different ideological traditions on which the proposals for change were based, however contradictory they may have been.
