Women and Revolution in Cuba: The Fight for a Thirdspace

Abstract: This article examines how Cuban women have negotiated access to cultural, political, and intellectual agency within a revolutionary project that has historically presented itself as egalitarian while reproducing patriarchal structures. Drawing on Edward Soja's theory of thirdspace and Michel de Certeau's notion of tactics, I argue that Cuban women intellectuals and artists have created alternative zones of cultural expression that disrupt state-sanctioned visions of the "new revolutionary woman." Through a comparative, generational analysis of works by filmmaker Sara Gómez, short-story writer María Elena Llana, novelist Karla Suárez, and a brief coda on twenty-first-century Cuban women filmmakers, I explore how these creators tactically inhabit and reshape the ideological and aesthetic spaces assigned to them. Their interventions reveal the tensions between symbolic inclusion and structural exclusion that have shaped gendered citizenship in revolutionary Cuba. By foregrounding women's self-representation across different historical moments, this article contributes to expanding the cultural and political genealogy of feminist thought and praxis on the island.