El Caballo y las Camaradas: Political Policing, Sexual Austerity, and the Role of Women in Purging the Cuban Revolution, 1965–70

This paper explores the period of the Cuban Revolution that most scholars and contemporary citizens of Cuba understand as both the most repressive and the most idealistic. Spanning the build-up to and implementation of what Raśl Castro, the chief of Cuban intelligence and military forces, called "The Revolutionary Offensive," this work considers how Cuban state agencies and Fidel Castro himself crafted his image as a super-macho stud (Caballo) whose sexual appeal to Cuban women was matched only by his own sexual abnegation, self-denial and monastic, selfless lifestyle. It argues that women who promoted unconditional support for the Revolution through their activism in surveillance committees and related opportunities for political policing contributed to the image of Fidel as a sexually celibate and therefore ideologically pure model of the New Man for average Cubans. Ironically, women's degree of liberation under the new heteronormative patriarchy represented by Cuban-style Communism entailed multiple forms of submission to the state and the "Comandante en Jefe" that left aside and undermined the power of male citizens. Thus, regardless of its effect on the overall social condition of women, the process of lending support to the state in its efforts to purge Cuban society of bourgeois weaknesses (such as homosexuality and non-Marxist forms of consciousness) granted women the power to contest the sources of gendered oppression in their daily lives. This reality serves to explain why Cuban women were and continue to be a major column of support for the Cuban state as much as fifty years after "El Caballo" came to power.