Strategic Solidarities: Cuban Feminist Activism and Racial Politics, 1920s–40s

This article examines the evolution of racial politics and the Cuban women’s movement between the 1920s and 1940s. In particular, it traces the evolution of the feminist leadership between the 1923 First National Women’s Congress and 1939 Third National Women’s Congress, with specific consideration of how elite and middle-class white organizers formed alliances with black women from a range of class backgrounds. Though scholarship has emphasized the increasing collaboration of elite and working-class women in support of suffrage, labor reform, and social welfare programs during the rise of popular movements in this period, this article argues that race played a critical role in how many feminists re-imagined their platform. By 1939, black female leaders emphasized their disparate experiences before national audiences while attempting to unify all Cuban women on behalf of democratic reform. The article thus shows how African-descended women helped build a cross-racial political alliance that would achieve full legal equality with the ratification of the 1940 Constitution. It demonstrates how this alliance remained fraught with contradictions and ambivalence as black women sought to hold the government accountable for enforcing civil rights and to obtain social equality during the 1940s.