Review by Choice Review
According to the authors, this book "is an examination of one nation's efforts to conceptualize, prioritize, and implement sexual equality, and it offers an assessment of the successes, failures, and dilemmas of that process." Smith and Padula made this assessment by examining official sources, primarily those produced by the Federation of Cuban Women and in interviews with its director, Vilma Espin--the estranged wife of Cuba's second most powerful man, Raul Castro--and a few other women in key official posts. Thus, the emphasis of the study is on the history of Cuban revolutionary social policy as it this applies to elite women and how it has been implemented--or failed to be implemented--during 30 plus years of revolutionary rule. The quality of the chapters varies with the availability and sources of data. For example, one learns much more about women in prerevolutionary Cuba (chapter 1) from a reading of chapter 2, which documents the struggle against the Batista dictatorship as remembered by a few of the women who are today high government officials. Chapters 3 and 4 provide a wealth of data on the Federation of Cuban Women. The chapter on health could have been strengthened by concrete comparative data instead of vague generalizations about Third World health. The same may be said about the chapter on education. Finally, there is little in the book that would prepare readers to understand the recent surge of prostitution in Cuba. The strength of this study lies in reminding readers that knowledge of Cuba is seriously limited by the lack of rigorous data collection on the actual experiences and opinions of the Cuban people. Undergraduates and above. E. Bastida University of Texas--Pan American
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
