The program to eliminate female prostitution (1959–1966) is the subject of Chapter 3, which examines the broad negotiation that occurred amongst revolutionary representatives, leadership, and prostitutes themselves, all of whom made claims to women’s bodies and labor. The chapter also argues that regional reformers helped initiate the anti-prostitution campaign, operating freely and without state support until 1962, when the Ministry of the Interior assumed greater control. These revolutionary representatives adopted a flexible definition of prostituta, one that allowed them to target for reform the behavior and labor of all Cuban women. Furthermore, the methods for reforming these women were premised on a belief in the superiority of elite, white cultural norms and contrasted with the more repressive methods for reforming marginalized men, at least until 1966. During the five years of the campaign, this chapter shows, the government transitioned from viewing prostitutes as victims of capitalism to “criminal manifestations” who rejected the Revolution’s economic opportunities. When Fidel announced the successful end of the campaign in 1966, his pronouncement overlooked the persistence of prostitution and the continued resistance of women who challenged government claims that citizenship was to be earned by subverting economic autonomy to the state (or to their husbands).

Chapter 1 explores the gradual introduction of family planning to Cuban women, highlighting the Revolution’s centralization of state authority as well as its rejection of medical plurality. The chapter argues that medical leadership implemented policies that ultimately increased state control over women’s labor and reproductive decisions. Early public health models failed to include access to abortion and helped fuel rumors that the government had criminalized the procedures. But revolutionary leadership never responded to these popular rumors and instead emphasized the benefits of hospital births and the ideological dangers of birth control; evidence suggests that poor Afro-Cuban women and rural women were specific targets of this effort to regulate reproduction. By 1965, following an unexpected baby boom, the Ministry of Public Health began to provide women with some contraceptive options. But reproductive autonomy was not the goal of these reforms, and Cuban women’s persistent reliance on unauthorized abortions to regulate reproduction reveals that state health programs were not meeting the needs of all its citizens. The chapter shows that it was only after 1971 that both contraceptives and abortions became more available to Cuban women, reflecting a shift to bring the ideology more in line with that advanced by the Soviets.

The government’s early use of discipline and forced labor to reform male work practices reveals the close link between physical labor and citizenship. In 1961, Law 993 eschewed due process and gave the Ministry of the Interior authority to evaluate and sentence chulos and other “states of dangerousness.” Increasingly, agricultural labor was used to compel chulos and other antisociales to overcome prerevolutionary handicaps and gain revolutionary citizenship through economic utility. But between 1962 and 1964, Fidel and Che resolutely denied the existence of the rumored Guanahacabibes work camp and asserted instead that the Uvero Quemado rehabilitation center was the only institution bearing the name “Guanahacabibes.” In their refutations, these leaders promoted an alternative version of truth to that advanced by ordinary Cubans, who challenged the state narrative by spreading rumors. Contemporaries also identified the Guanahacabibes work camp as a precursor to the infamous UMAP work camps. But for all the state’s efforts, early attempts at reforming chulos and vagos were largely ineffective. The 1971 Law Against Idleness, which focused with renewed interest on the country’s unconventionally employed, illustrates how legislative changes replaced extralegal raids and contributed to the ever-narrowing definition of appropriate and legal revolutionary labor.