The program to eliminate female prostitution (1959–1966) is the subject of Chapter 3, which examines the broad negotiation that occurred amongst revolutionary representatives, leadership, and prostitutes themselves, all of whom made claims to women’s bodies and labor. The chapter also argues that regional reformers helped initiate the anti-prostitution campaign, operating freely and without state support until 1962, when the Ministry of the Interior assumed greater control. These revolutionary representatives adopted a flexible definition of prostituta, one that allowed them to target for reform the behavior and labor of all Cuban women. Furthermore, the methods for reforming these women were premised on a belief in the superiority of elite, white cultural norms and contrasted with the more repressive methods for reforming marginalized men, at least until 1966. During the five years of the campaign, this chapter shows, the government transitioned from viewing prostitutes as victims of capitalism to “criminal manifestations” who rejected the Revolution’s economic opportunities. When Fidel announced the successful end of the campaign in 1966, his pronouncement overlooked the persistence of prostitution and the continued resistance of women who challenged government claims that citizenship was to be earned by subverting economic autonomy to the state (or to their husbands).

Chapter 1 explores the gradual introduction of family planning to Cuban women, highlighting the Revolution’s centralization of state authority as well as its rejection of medical plurality. The chapter argues that medical leadership implemented policies that ultimately increased state control over women’s labor and reproductive decisions. Early public health models failed to include access to abortion and helped fuel rumors that the government had criminalized the procedures. But revolutionary leadership never responded to these popular rumors and instead emphasized the benefits of hospital births and the ideological dangers of birth control; evidence suggests that poor Afro-Cuban women and rural women were specific targets of this effort to regulate reproduction. By 1965, following an unexpected baby boom, the Ministry of Public Health began to provide women with some contraceptive options. But reproductive autonomy was not the goal of these reforms, and Cuban women’s persistent reliance on unauthorized abortions to regulate reproduction reveals that state health programs were not meeting the needs of all its citizens. The chapter shows that it was only after 1971 that both contraceptives and abortions became more available to Cuban women, reflecting a shift to bring the ideology more in line with that advanced by the Soviets.

The government’s early use of discipline and forced labor to reform male work practices reveals the close link between physical labor and citizenship. In 1961, Law 993 eschewed due process and gave the Ministry of the Interior authority to evaluate and sentence chulos and other “states of dangerousness.” Increasingly, agricultural labor was used to compel chulos and other antisociales to overcome prerevolutionary handicaps and gain revolutionary citizenship through economic utility. But between 1962 and 1964, Fidel and Che resolutely denied the existence of the rumored Guanahacabibes work camp and asserted instead that the Uvero Quemado rehabilitation center was the only institution bearing the name “Guanahacabibes.” In their refutations, these leaders promoted an alternative version of truth to that advanced by ordinary Cubans, who challenged the state narrative by spreading rumors. Contemporaries also identified the Guanahacabibes work camp as a precursor to the infamous UMAP work camps. But for all the state’s efforts, early attempts at reforming chulos and vagos were largely ineffective. The 1971 Law Against Idleness, which focused with renewed interest on the country’s unconventionally employed, illustrates how legislative changes replaced extralegal raids and contributed to the ever-narrowing definition of appropriate and legal revolutionary labor.

The Epilogue explores the legacies of the state campaigns and shows that the New Family never succeeded in capturing Cubans’ lives and labor. It is for this reason, I suggest, that the Revolution’s official narrative has omitted many of the early campaigns to regulate the Cuban family, specifically women’s labor practices. Yet these silences in the grand narrative reveal how government goals and discourse have transformed over the past sixty years to meet the changing needs of the state. The government explanation for the country’s high rates of abortion and divorce and low rate of official economic productivity is ordinary Cubans’ laziness and lack of commitment to the Revolution. The epilogue argues, on the contrary, that these trends are in fact a direct consequence of government efforts to advance its own version of socialism. Specifically, the very state policies intended to construct the New Family inadvertently contributed to non-nuclear family forms and labor practices. Ordinary Cubans have responded to the discourse of the state with counter-narratives, which frame their non-normative actions as noble and legitimate. Laboring for the State, then, provides evidence of the historical continuity of Cubans’ exercises in autonomy and resistance to the government and its grand narrative.

Chapter 2 contends that the seemingly innocent attempt to document citizens through Operation Family (1959–1965) developed into an instrument for consolidating state power. This Ministry of Justice campaign to legalize extra-legal unions and register undocumented Cubans provoked a surge in marriage, a direct consequence – this chapter demonstrates – of fixed-term laws that concurrently restricted the power of the judiciary. The chapter also argues that Cuban leadership advanced legal matrimony in order to supplant female heads of household, whose participation in the paid-labor force could support men engaged in illegal or counterrevolutionary activities. Las Villas and Matanzas, provinces where counterrevolutionaries most threatened revolutionary government authority, had the highest rates of legal marriage during the peak years of the marriage campaign. These two provinces were also predominantly white, suggesting that MINJUS prioritized the regulation and reformation of rural, Hispanic white couples over those of Afro-Cubans. The second half of the chapter examines the inauguration of Wedding Palaces and material benefits meant to incentivize marriage. Popular discourse suggested that Cubans were marrying (and divorcing) in high numbers in order to take advantage of the increased purchasing power allocated to newlyweds. In these ways, couples showed themselves reluctant to acquiesce to the state’s marital expectations.

The Introduction outlines revolutionary leadership’s liberal view – pervasive at the time but little recognized by scholars to date – that all Cubans should be absorbed into a nuclear family, for their own good and to advance the goals of the Revolution. In order to telegraph this redefinition of morality – and its consolidation around the nuclear family – leadership and the state media sought to mobilize and modify the meaning of words related to family and identity. Using feminist gender analysis, discourse analysis, and the Gramscian concept of hegemony, the Introduction highlights how ordinary Cubans responded by constructing alternatives to the narrative espoused by the state. This analysis of how power was consolidated throughout the first decade traces two intersecting developments: the state’s steady progression from a democratic to authoritarian movement and its increasing attempts to monopolize morality, albeit with some resistance from ordinary Cubans that has heretofore been obscured from the grand narrative of Revolution. Indeed, a focus on the inconvenient truths of the government’s own past reveals how utterly the Revolution failed to impose a normative definition of morality and how reluctant citizens were to comply with state models of morality.