REVIEW BY KIM BULLIMORE
Marianas in Combat: Tet Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Women's Platoon in the Cuban revolutionary war, 1956-1958
Edited by Mary-Alice Walker
Pathfinder Press, 2003
97 pages, $22.
"How can we give rifles to women when there are so many men who are unarmed?", asked some of the men. "Because they are better soldiers than you are", Fidel replied. "More disciplined."
On September 4, 1958, at the height of the revolutionary war against the brutal US-backed Batista regime, the Mariana Grajales Women's Platoon came into being. The platoon, made up of 13 women, was the first women's combat unit to serve in the revolutionary war and helped lay the ground work for revolutionary transformation of women in Cuban society in the years that followed.
Marianas in Combat tells the story and significance of the women's platoon through the eyes of one of its leading combatants, Tet Puebla who served as the platoon's second in command. A compilation of two interviews with Puebla conducted by editor Mary-Alice Walker in 2000 and 2002, the book not only gives an invaluable insight into struggle against the Bastista regime, but also the struggle of Cuban women to overcome discrimination, sexism and oppression.
Puebla, who has since become a Brigadier in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces (RAF), first joined the July 26 Movement as a 15-year-old school student. Like many other young men and women of her generation, Puebla was from a poor peasant family and was horrified by the savageness of the Batista regime.
In my village, she tells Waters, the infamous Masferrer's Tigers death squad would "tie victims up and put them in a sack .... pour gasoline on them and set them on fire". Puebla also recalls, how many of the young women in the village, including a relative, were gang raped by 50 or more of Batista's soldiers from the nearby Manzanillo barracks. It was this brutality which propelled Puebla, her two brothers and her uncles to join the Rebel Army.
During her first year in the July 26 Movement (J26M), Puebla helped transport weapons, raised money by selling bonds and assisted in the underground network by helping fellow revolutionaries to reach the Sierra Maestra. It was only when the identity of a number of J26M members, including hers, were revealed by a fellow member who had been captured and tortured, that she was forced to flee to the Sierra Maestra.
Many women, including women combatants such as Hayde Santamar¡a and Melba Hend ndez, who took part in the Moncada Barracks attack in 1953, as well as Celia S nchez were already serving with the J26M. The majority of women, however, were not organised as combatants. Puebla remembers that in the beginning the women, "helped with cooking, sewing, tending for the wounded. We also helped the companeros to read and write", but we all wanted to "fight for the revolution in the same way [as] our men".
As the atrocities of the Bastista's forces became more extreme and the women began to take up more key roles such as transporting weapons and acting as negotiators in the exchange of prisoners, they won the support of key revolutionary leaders to take up arms and fight on the front line. Puebla recounts how Fidel Castro championed the right of the women against more conservative leaders in a seven-hour meeting on whether or not the women could take up arms. Castro argued that the women were more disciplined soldiers then their male counterparts and had the right to bear arms. At the end of the discussion, he told the meeting, "I'm going to put together the squad, and I'm going to teach them how to shoot".
Castro, who went on to make the platoon his personal security detail, named the platoon for the heroine of Cuba's war of independence from Spanish colonial rule, Mariana Grajales, a black woman of peasant stock.
Less then a month after they were formed, the Marianas saw their first combat during the Battle of Cerro Pelado. In this and subsequent battles, the Mariana's won the respect of the men they fought with.
Eddie Sunol, one of the key July 26 commanders, wrote to Castro in October 1958 saying "I have to tell you that after having been one the main opponents of women's integration, I'm now completely satisfied... beforehand I believed that you were mistaken ...[but] ... when the orders were advance, some of the men stayed behind, but the women went ahead in the vanguard. Their courage and calmness merits the respect and admiration of all the rebels and everyone else".
As the revolutionary war wore on, the women's platoon became reknown not only for their discipline but also their courage. "We were never behind. We were always beside or ahead of them [the men]. There was no difference", recalls Puebla. As a result, the Mariana's became "the forerunner, setting the example of women defending our homeland".
On January 2, 1959, in speech in Santiago de Cuba, the day after the triumph of the general strike which precipitated Batista's flight from Cuba, Fidel Castro spoke of not only the need for Cuban women to be freed from the discrimination and oppression they suffered, but also the importance of their participation in the defence of the revolution. "A people whose women fight alongside men â that people is invincible...", he told the Cuban people.
Despite winning many of the men of the J26M to their cause and the triumph of the revolution, many prejudices against women still needed to be broken down. The first place this began to happen was in the militias formed to defend the revolution, and later the neighbourhood Committees in Defence of the Revolution (CDRs).
Thousands of women were drawn into the militias and CDRs, providing a means for women to actively take part in the revolutionary process, to develop their confidence and to challenge old stereotypes. In 1960, the Federation of Cuban Women was set up to provide a forum to discuss the problems Women face and to organise against their oppression.
Women's revolutionary role became increasingly visible. Puebla recalls that "Cuba was the first in the world to eradicate illiteracy. Women were part of that struggle, young women especially... women made up over half of the literacy volunteers".
A conscious effort was made by the revolutionary leadership, she recollects, to place women at the forefront of the workforce and to challenge the old prejudices against women. In 1969, Fidel Castro told Puebla that "he was putting me in charge [of the Guaicanamar Cattle Plan] to demonstrate that women could lead as well as men, to show that women could lead an agricultural project, that women could head up any front and carry out any task of the revolution".
Despite having the backing of the revolutionary leadership, Puebla still had to win the confidence of the people. "The peasants, there [in the Jaruco zone] said they wouldn't work with me", she recalls. "She might be captain they said, but she's not working with me ... but after I had been there a month, the peasants were working with me".
They laid the ground work for the revolutionary transformation of women in Cuban society. Today, women in Cuba not only continue to serve in the front line of the Cuban military, but now make up 43.6% of the Cuban workforce (compared to 19.2% in 1953) with the majority of women employed in highly skilled technical and professional roles.
Despite now being a Brigadier in the RAF and holding numerous key positions in the Cuban military and civil society between 1959 and today, Puebla says: "We don't like to talk about what we have done since it is our daily work and daily lives. We've lived the revolution so intensely that we can't separate it from ourselves. It is our reason for being... From the days of the war of liberation up to the present, we work and live for the people".
From Green Left Weekly, April 21, 2004.
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