“I love coming home from work and my wife is waiting for me at home when everything is done.”
“I don’t want to take young women into the company, because once they’ve been taught and given responsibilities, they have kids and start to leave.”
“If you got an engineering degree with a gold title, why are you working as a secretary?”
“No one believes that you, as a division director, will be able to achieve better results in production.”
And I could remember other lines from the Cuban telenovela script. Unresolved issues, Yamila Suarez and director Felo Ruiz, which began broadcasting two weeks ago. There are quite a few of them, and I’m glad that a highly sought-after audiovisual product has become visible in common situations that many women face every day in their lives.
Without commenting on the photographs, the quality of the workmanship, the sound, or any other aspect that can be discussed from an artistic point of view, the telenovela put on the small screen some of the scenes that we all know exist around us. Then they asked: how much machismo we still have to expel from our society?
Others may be questions arising from the realities presented: how many Cuban men have recently adopted Decree-Law 56/2021 on employee maternity and family responsibility? How many older people are cared for by daughters, granddaughters, nieces, aunts and other relatives who gave up their professional lives because “no one” could do it? How many women as directors of schools, hospitals, media, factories, hotels and agricultural cooperatives have three or four working days a day because they still do everything at home? How much more women’s empowerment still needs to get in the country?
It’s not about uniting the two sides and raising flags: macho against feminists. It is about social coexistence based on respect, admiration and justice. We must overthrow the archaic mandates of the patriarchy and expand our horizons. Would you stop your daughter from wanting to grow up professionally because someone ruled that the apron and broom were hers? As a mother, you shouldn’t tell your son that his wife should give up her cultivation “because she should take care of you like any other family man.”
Roles that are built and designed to be sustained no matter what hurt, cut, hurt. And note that the mark on the back of Patricia, who arrived in the capital on the run from Cienfuegos, has not yet been clarified in the telenovela, and this is another issue that is often shrouded in silence.
I invite you to watch the telenovela, which, although it may have errors, like any other work, has already touched upon the neuralgic aspects of the role of women in today’s Cuba. This, in principle, can cause you to detect such events in your immediate environment and encourage you to think about what to do to avoid them.
Do it now, don’t put it off until tomorrow. “Unfinished business” we fill the path leading to a better country.
Source: Juventud Rebelde