“There [in Europe] it is normal not to give birth, but here everybody gives birth,” said Sunami when we were discussing her recent miscarriage and the fact that at 33, she was the only childless woman in her workplace even though all her colleagues were younger than her.
As has been repeatedly noted in ethnographies on the Caribbean (e.g. Clarke 1974: 95-96, 107, 142-180; Simey 1996 [1946]: 39; Evans 1996 [1989]: 423), in Cuba as well everyone wants to have children. The very high number of abortions
(Andaya 2007: 156-158) might suggest otherwise, but these reflect a reaction to inadequate timing and conditions of the pregnancy rather than unwillingness to have children. In the Caribbean, becoming a parent is significantly tied to becoming an adult: a mature, full person. This adulthood is crucially gendered: only as a parent is a person considered to be a real man or a real woman (e.g. Wilson 1973: 149-151; Clarke 1974: 95-96; Smith 1974: xxii; Smith 1988: 147; Sobo 1993; Barrow 1996: 397-398; Gussler 1996 [1980]: 129; Manyoni 1996: 22). Parenthood is thus an essential institution that creates gender difference both in Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean.
Nevertheless, Cuba has had very low fertility levels and high abortion rates for quite a long time ( Eckstein 1994: 144-145; Alfonso Fraga 2006; Andaya 2007). Andaya points out that the policy of free and easily accessible abortions to all women was created only in 1979 (2007: 176, 180). According to Andaya, after the state initially embraced high rates of fertility in the 1960s, low fertility became a marker of socialist modernity, whereas high fertility (more than two children) and teenage pregnancies became attached to tradition, irresponsibility, and irrationality. (Andaya 2007: 59, 74-75, 107, 114-116).
However, at the time of my fieldwork, the Cuban government was preoccupied with the country’s aging and declining population (Alfonso Fraga 2006) and the very liberal abortion regulations were tightened as a state measure to tackle these problems. A reportage in the daily TV news complained that women no longer want to have children until they have reached a satisfactory educational and income level (6 April, 2008; see also Andaya 2007: 158, 168-171, 249). There were rumours that the government had restricted its previously very liberal abortion policy in order to incite more women to give birth to more children at a younger age in an attempt to both increase the population and decrease its average age. Consequently, some young girls had children at an earlier age than they actually would have wanted because they were only allowed to have a certain amount of abortions conducted within a certain time frame. (I was unable to verify the official regulations on this, but the gossip in the neighbourhood stated that the number was two within a year.) Two teenaged girls in my neighbourhood were refused abortion on the basis that they had undergone too many during too short a time, and had no other remedy but to keep their babies.
Andaya (2007: 155-200) argues that Cubans’ great reliance on abortion as a form of contraception was produced by the state’s neglecting women’s needs and failing to provide other forms of contraception in its endeavour to achieve socialist modernisation. Abortion is considered a normal means of contraception and there is absolutely no stigma whatsoever attached to it.
Nearly all the women I knew had undergone at least one abortion, some even ten or more. Many women do not want to eat contraceptive pills because they feel that they harm them.
For older women who have already had their children, sterilisation is a common means of contraception. Like abortion, it is conducted free of charge in public healthcare facilities. Both of these methods place responsibility for contraception on women.29 Furthermore, state campaigns against STDs and promoting the use of condoms centre on women. Cuban men are often unwilling to use a condom, let alone undergo sterilisation.
A person who is unable to have children – a woman in particular – is pitied and considered to never reach full adulthood (see also Clarke 1974: 95-96; Sobo 1993 for Jamaica). Having nieces and nephews is considered an alleviation to such a tragic situation, helping a person to avoid the saddest faith anyone could have, which is “to die alone.” Children are seen as the ones a person can truly count on, the ones who will care for them when they are old and sick. Thus, for a childless person, the issue is usually not whether to have a child, it is when and with whom.
Most of my informants considered it best for a woman to have children at the age of 25 and in any case, before turning 30. However, at the time of my fieldwork, while I was told that it was fashionable for women to have their children very young (before turning 20), this does not reflect the experience of most of my informants. For men, it was considered good to have children at the latest by the time they reach their mid-thirties. Persons who were still childless beyond this age were either pitied or, in the case of foreigners, considered as the peculiar cultural features of capitalist countries.
These same concerns of when and with whom enter into consideration when a person who already has a child considers having another child, although in somewhat distinct ways. The tendency for women to have only one child seems to be on the rise (see ONE 2009: 48-50, table 5), even though most of my female informants had more than one child. However, men who had children
29 However, there is a way in which the Cuban state tries to involve also men in the abortion process. A female informant told me that before the abortion, a woman receives a card from her local policlinic to donate blood. She has to give the card to the man with whom she has had sex. He has to go to donate blood because in the operation women tend to lose a lot of blood. If the man is under 18 years old, someone else may go to donate blood in his place, for instance his brother. With the receipt that the man receives after the donation, the woman is allowed an abortion. If the man refuses to donate blood, the woman has to find someone else to do it in his place in order to gain access to the abortion. Ideally, this process installs a certain type of reciprocity between the woman, the man, and the state: the man gives his blood to the state so that the woman may receive blood during the abortion. This procedure – unlike the general contraception policy in Cuba – connects with state egalitarianism in the sense that both the woman and the man are seen as responsible for ‘the consequences’ of their sexual encounter, although the man in a far lesser degree.
Another interesting aspect of such state practices is that they embrace a socially embedded view of the body in this process: what happens inside the woman’s body becomes the concern of the woman, her partner, and possibly a wider range of kin if her partner is underage.
frequently had more than one child. On the other hand, some men did not have any children at all. A similar tendency is visible in Cuban national fertility statistics (ONE 2009: 48). In the Caribbean, the birth of children has traditionally been an important indication of a couple’s compatibility that is crucial for the continuity of the union (Clarke 1974: 95-96, 107). This suggests that children have been seen as an important proof of the couple’s love. It has thus been typical to have a child with various different partners (Clarke 1974: 92, 95-108; see also Goode 1960: 30). However, the significantly declined fertility in the area (Hill 1992: 80; Guzmán et al. 2006: 526-527, 530, 536; Bryant 2007: 109) suggests that such patterns may have been changing for quite some time already. These tendencies suggest that the potential shifts in Cuban fertility are in many ways gendered, bringing changes to the lives of both men and women.