Women and the Cuban Insurrection : How Gender Shaped Castro's Victory

By documenting the centrality of women rebels and Castro's hearts and minds campaign, this book shatters the Cuban War story's mythology of an insurrection waged and won by bearded guerrillas alone. Rebels used gender as a tactic to protect themselves, attack enemy morale, and attract public support.

Using gender analysis and focusing on previously unexamined testimonies of women rebels, political scientist Lorraine Bayard de Volo shatters the prevailing masculine narrative of the Cuban Revolution. Contrary to the Cuban War story''s mythology of an insurrection single-handedly won by bearded guerrillas, Bayard de Volo shows that revolutions are not won and lost only by bullets and battlefield heroics. Focusing on women''s multiple forms of participation in the insurrection, especially those that occurred off the battlefield, such as smuggling messages, hiding weapons, and distributing propaganda, Bayard de Volo explores how gender - both masculinity and femininity - were deployed as tactics in the important though largely unexamined battle for the ''hearts and minds'' of the Cuban people. Drawing on extensive, rarely-examined archives including interviews and oral histories, this author offers an entirely new interpretation of one of the Cold War''s most significant events.