the cuban family code

1970s 1980s 1990s

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Some estimates suggest that women made up at least forty percent of the waged labor force in Cuba in the 1990s.

 

 

Despite the negative impact of the US blockade and the passage of the Helms-Burton Act (1996), many Cuban women continue to support the current Cuban social and political system and its philosophical underpinnings.

If recent delegates to the United Nations are any indication, Cuban women link any decline in their ability to work for a living wage and to have unfettered access to health care directly to the consequences of the blockade.

HIV infections are rampant in an environment in which a key source of wages in a service economy for women has become the sex trade.

 

In the 1990s, the FMC has initiated a number of grassroots programs to improve the social position of women. Among these efforts is the creation of the Casas de Mujeres all across Cuba. The purpose of these sites is to educate children, both boys and girls, on the merits of gender equity. One aim is to ensure better implementation of the Cuban Family Code in the future.

 

Sources for this content:

Report on the status of women in Cuba, United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women Twenty-third Session 474th Meeting (AM), available at http://www.un.md/reference/press/wom1222.htm

Flax, Jane, "A Look at the Cuban Family Code," Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men, Jaggar, Alison M. and Rothenberg, Paula S., eds., New York: Mc Graw Hill Book Company, 1984.

 

1970s 1980s 1990s

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