Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James and this is our second bonus episode of season two.

This episode will feature interviews with two guests and the theme of the episode, the subject of the episode,

is the role of women in the Cuban Revolution and in Cuban society during the period of the victory of the revolution.

In many ways, Cuba today reflects greater equality when it comes to gender than does the United States.

Major study from 2008, for example, showed that women accounted for two-thirds of all Cuban university graduates.

Even the United Nations has noted that as of February 2021, a slight majority of the seats in Cuban parliament are held by women.

But these are not facts that square easily with the US government and its media and their official line about life,

in supposedly backward to Talitarian Cuba.

So how did Cuban women achieve these gains?

And what is their historical context? How are they related to other causes of Cuban social liberation?

For this episode, we have a couple of guests to help us understand and explore these ideas.

The first guest will be assistant professor of history at Pace University, Michelle Chase, who has extensively studied and written about this topic.

In fact, she wrote a book on the topic published by the University of North Carolina Press titled,

Revolution Within the Revolution, Women and Gender Politics in Cuba.

And our second guest, listeners might already know, friend of the show, Marta Nunez Sarriento, Cuban sociologist and feminist,

who has been engaged with these issues, all of her life.

So let's get started first with Noah's interview with Michelle Chase.

Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. And if you could just give a quick introduction of who you are for our audience.

My name is Michelle Chase. I'm an assistant professor of history at Pace University. And I'm the author of the book,

Revolution Within the Revolution, Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952 to 1962.

On the eve of the Cuban Revolution, what rights and privileges did Cuban women enjoy?

I think a lot of people who are interested in the Cuban Revolution, they sometimes have a really polarized view of pre-revolutionary Cuba.

...