Through my life, I have been called feminist by some people, sometimes decidedly, but with the passing of years, I have asked myself whether I am becoming a male chauvinist beyond remedy…

Going over my life briefly, I get to know that little by little it has passed from the protestant feminism to the mute tolerance before machismo. My feminist struggles began during my childhood, there in Colon, when, because of my own claim, I used to share with my brother all tasks, which my mother, a male chauvinist par excellence, assigned to me for being female.

Ya teníamos 10 años yo, y nueve mi hermano, cuando mi mamá comenzó a darme

responsabilidades hogareñas. Pero ahí estaba yo, con ideas sacadas no sé de

dónde, para explicarle a mi mamá que mi hermano también tenía que limpiar la

casa, que tender su cama, que ser organizado.

I was already ten years old, and my brother nine, when my mother began to assign me household responsabilities. But there was I, with ideas taken from I do not know where, to explain to my mother that my brother also had to clean the house, do his bed, be organized

In my little head there was not room to understand, that if both of us studied equally, that we had learned the same things, we played the same games, and were almost of the same age, we suddenly had to separate our roles.

My fights were hard, but going through my childhood, I understood that I certainly, did not win.

I learned together with my father to prepare the mixture and plaster up the wall, to fix wall plugs, breakers, to change bulbs, and to fix some other gadgets. I never stopped playing baseball with boys of the neighborhood, although already being an adolescent they called me mannish woman.

But my brother did not develop abilities in the household work and today he is a headache to the woman who lives together with him. Who was to blame? Perhaps my mother was, or I, who stopped insisting on equality.

Because there was a time when I stopped quarreling with my brother, for him to do the same things I did. Now I do not have real consciousness, but going through time, I see myself washing the clothes of both of us when we came back from the Vocational School, already being sixteen or seventeen.

My mother used to work on Saturday. She would teach at the Peasant Worker School in the Arabos. My washing the clothes of both of us would relieve her of her duties. I remember that   sometimes I would get very angry, because while my brother slept, I had to rub away all the dirt we brought from our school in the countryside, stuck on the sheets, towels, the socks, the country clothes or from self-service, and the uniform, which luckily was blue.

By then, I would work in the house without uttering a word, now and then, I would do the closets, and would do a general cleaning. Everything without too much requirement on the part of my parents, who would worry more about my studies.

My feminist ideas have not changed. I still continue to think that men and women have to prepare themselves exactly the same for life, that boys and girls should share their toys, that we both have the same responsibility before our children…. And I do not believe that there exist female tasks and male work.

The matter is when I try to take those ideas to practice. As I review my life, It has been very difficult, because wherever I go, I am surrounded with male chauvinism. My grandparents are male chauvinists, above all my grandmother; my father and mother, the same, and my brother is the ideal model of the male chauvinist …

And when I found my couple, with whom I live for more tan ten years, I stumbled against another ideal model of male chauvinism, son of hardened male chauvinists. It is so, that one day, my mother-in- law told that Fidelito, my husband, would not enter the kitchen as long as she were alive.

Machismo-joke. And so it was, unfortunately, but my husband has had to enter the kitchen and has had to clean the washroom and the house, and has even had to iron, because it is very difficult for me to get in charge of all the chores of the house where only we two and our eight-year-old child live. Still, it is difficult and it costs blood and sweat to give education to a person who grew up under male chauvinist canons, and he is nineteen years older than me.

So, if I am asked whether I am a male chauvinist, I would have to answer that I am, that it is impossible not to be a male chauvinist ,in my country and in my family, that in spite of not sharing the ideas of that reactionary position, one gets to be that because of tiredness, or because not always you can be fighting all the time with people to change.

I am a male chauvinist because I have given up, because I have not fought enough when my husband, for example, protests when I want to better myself or when I am proposed to have a head position.

I am a male chauvinist because I have had to carry the main responsibility in my house tasks, including to change the breakers, the lamps, to fix what breaks down, to care for the yard and even to act as a mason helper.

I am definitely a machista with feminist ideas, who repoduces unconsciously the model learnt during childhood…The worst of it is not to have become a machista in order not to keep myself in troubles. Something to worry about is that my husband and I are educating our Cesar under a strange model of machismo.

We have got him mixed up to the extent that Cesar believes that women cook, clean and wash, while men wash the dishes, iron and put out the trash. He also believes that women fix things when they break down, and that only men have cars and can drive.

Therefore, I have not other way out than recognize that I am nothing but another machista Cuban woman, who will fight again for her ideas, if she does not want her son to be another hardened Cuban machista.