Seven Women and the Cuban Revolution

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

In 1959, when Fidel Castro overthrew Batista’s corrupt dictatorship in
Cuba, one of the results was the mass exodus of the bourgeois and upper
classes, mostly to Miami. However, not all of the privileged members of
society chose exile. This book presents a fascinating portrait of some
of the women who stayed. The authors/compilers, an American and a
Canadian living in Cuba, interviewed two of the subjects in 1976, and
then again in 1994 when the project was expanded to include five other
representative women. By 1994, Cuba was being throttled by the U.S.
embargo and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuba’s main supplier.

Of the seven interviewees, almost all have come to accept the
revolution, even if they are not official members of the Communist
Party. Laura Gуmez Tarafa, one of Cuba’s wealthiest sugar heiresses,
continues to live a life of comparative luxury, despite the
nationalization of the family mills. Emilia del Campo, a “poor little
rich girl,” has come to accept her new life. Margot del Pozo is a
successful government architect, while the painter Gloria Gonzбlez
became director of the San Alejandro School of Art in Havana. Celia
Ponce de Leуn, another heiress (tobacco), has become an important
theatre and TV director. Natalia Bolнvar, an aristocrat who opposed
Batista, is a published expert on Afro-Cuban religions, while Conchita
Freyre de Andrade, also from a distinguished family, became a university
professor.

Despite the privileged backgrounds of these women, their stories tell
us much about the achievements and sufferings of all Cubans over the
last four decades of Cuba’s socialist experiment.