The Epilogue explores the legacies of the state campaigns and shows that the New Family never succeeded in capturing Cubans’ lives and labor. It is for this reason, I suggest, that the Revolution’s official narrative has omitted many of the early campaigns to regulate the Cuban family, specifically women’s labor practices. Yet these silences in the grand narrative reveal how government goals and discourse have transformed over the past sixty years to meet the changing needs of the state. The government explanation for the country’s high rates of abortion and divorce and low rate of official economic productivity is ordinary Cubans’ laziness and lack of commitment to the Revolution. The epilogue argues, on the contrary, that these trends are in fact a direct consequence of government efforts to advance its own version of socialism. Specifically, the very state policies intended to construct the New Family inadvertently contributed to non-nuclear family forms and labor practices. Ordinary Cubans have responded to the discourse of the state with counter-narratives, which frame their non-normative actions as noble and legitimate. Laboring for the State, then, provides evidence of the historical continuity of Cubans’ exercises in autonomy and resistance to the government and its grand narrative.

Chapter 2 contends that the seemingly innocent attempt to document citizens through Operation Family (1959–1965) developed into an instrument for consolidating state power. This Ministry of Justice campaign to legalize extra-legal unions and register undocumented Cubans provoked a surge in marriage, a direct consequence – this chapter demonstrates – of fixed-term laws that concurrently restricted the power of the judiciary. The chapter also argues that Cuban leadership advanced legal matrimony in order to supplant female heads of household, whose participation in the paid-labor force could support men engaged in illegal or counterrevolutionary activities. Las Villas and Matanzas, provinces where counterrevolutionaries most threatened revolutionary government authority, had the highest rates of legal marriage during the peak years of the marriage campaign. These two provinces were also predominantly white, suggesting that MINJUS prioritized the regulation and reformation of rural, Hispanic white couples over those of Afro-Cubans. The second half of the chapter examines the inauguration of Wedding Palaces and material benefits meant to incentivize marriage. Popular discourse suggested that Cubans were marrying (and divorcing) in high numbers in order to take advantage of the increased purchasing power allocated to newlyweds. In these ways, couples showed themselves reluctant to acquiesce to the state’s marital expectations.

The Introduction outlines revolutionary leadership’s liberal view – pervasive at the time but little recognized by scholars to date – that all Cubans should be absorbed into a nuclear family, for their own good and to advance the goals of the Revolution. In order to telegraph this redefinition of morality – and its consolidation around the nuclear family – leadership and the state media sought to mobilize and modify the meaning of words related to family and identity. Using feminist gender analysis, discourse analysis, and the Gramscian concept of hegemony, the Introduction highlights how ordinary Cubans responded by constructing alternatives to the narrative espoused by the state. This analysis of how power was consolidated throughout the first decade traces two intersecting developments: the state’s steady progression from a democratic to authoritarian movement and its increasing attempts to monopolize morality, albeit with some resistance from ordinary Cubans that has heretofore been obscured from the grand narrative of Revolution. Indeed, a focus on the inconvenient truths of the government’s own past reveals how utterly the Revolution failed to impose a normative definition of morality and how reluctant citizens were to comply with state models of morality.