Rachel Hynson’s Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959-1971 examines how the Cuban government engaged in socially engineering Cuban families in order to remodel them. There is four main engineering occurrences over 1959 to 1971 that Hynson highlights. The Cuban government tried controlling women’s reproductive rights, limiting women’s labour to the domestic sphere, controlling women’s autonomy, especially sexually, and the government forced men into state-sanctioned employment while women were controlled by their husbands or the state. Other historians have ignored the conservative family norms the Cuban government pushed during 1959-1971. Hynson shows Socialist Cuba did not oppose the intact family unit but embraced it. Focusing on how state policies shape gender ideology, the four government programs show how the Cuban government wanted to give rise to a patriarchal, European family unit.    

Hynson uses newspapers, government documents, travel narratives, plays, laws, oral histories, and interviews. Citing a lot of secondary sources throughout the text, Hynson shows she’s done her research drawing from various historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other professionals. Laws are used extensively to show how the Cuban government push their ideology onto the general population. Through legislating morality, the Cuban government tried to hone the family unit into a narrow patriarchal unit. 

Approaching the text with a thematic and bottom-up methodology Hynson writes with three ideas in mind: Feminist gender analysis, discourse analysis, and a theory of hegemony. Hyson herself says Laboring for the State gives a voice from those below who are under threat of whitewashing from the Cuban government narrative. It seems like throughout the Cuban revolution the government would decide on a course and then double back from the decided course. As seen in Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance and A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics if a government policy was not working the Cuban government would either pretend it did not happen or quickly turn to something else. 

It seems the Cuban government was trying to present itself as a great nation. Nation-building starts at home, if you control the family then you control the next generation. Particularly women are the primary focus because women nurture the children. The ideas they impart to their kids help to shape children’s ideology. By trying to create a nuclear, patriarchal family society the Cuban government was essentially targeting people of colour in Cuban society as Cuban, and largely Caribbean, family norms were common-law unions with matrifocal kinship units. While Hynson briefly mentions it throughout the text this plays into the racist undercurrents of Cuban society.

Rachel Hynson’s Laboring for the State sets out to prove her theory and provides enough evidence to do it. A nuanced look at Cuban history, the text is a great addition to Cuban historiography. Highlighting underrepresented areas of history, Hynson’s work is a great read.