During the pre-revolutionary period, engagement with the WIDF exposed Cuban left-feminist activists to an international network of women activists with roots in European anti-fascist movements and Asian anti-colonial movements. By attending WIDF congresses in socialist countries, FDMC leaders observed first-hand the conditions and aspirations of their counterparts there. By reading news dispatches from the WIDF and its many affiliate groups worldwide (which were reproduced in the FDMC’s local publication), members gained a comparative sense of women’s rights and challenges, as well as a sense of belonging to global struggle to secure women’s rights as “mothers, workers and citizens.” A relationship with the WIDF thus provided some Cuban women on the left with a geopolitical critique of gender inequality that located Cuba within a broader landscape of similarly underdeveloped, former colonial nations.
After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the FMC used the WIDF as a platform for its own internationalist solidarity, in which it pronounced support for women engaged in anti-imperialist struggles in Cold War hotspots such as Vietnam and the Congo. The WIDF, meanwhile, positioned Cuba and the FMC as a vanguard in constructing new postcolonial subjects and as a positive model for women throughout Latin America, the socialist bloc, and the non-aligned nations. By analyzing these conversations and interactions, this paper seeks to recover a history of Cuban left-feminist internationalist engagement stretching from the postwar period through the 1960s.