ABSTRACT
Cuban national character portraits (e.g., Blutstein et al. 1971; Bosch 1966) anticipate well the types of changes among Cuban refugee women in the United States, 30 years after the 1959-60 revolution. First-generation Cuban women who came to the United States as teens or young adults are now in their 50s, 60s and 70s. They have changed in ways that are consistent with their cultural heritage, and their experiences provide a useful, longterm, temporal perspective on the effects of gender on the adjustment of refugees in American society. The changes in their cultural beliefs, their roles, and their economic circumstances are the result of the joint action of social history, class position, and the unique combination of conflicting beliefs about men, women, sex, children, and the family. Cuban women have an unusually rich cultural inventory which they use selectively in fashioning new roles. The extended changes found in the children of Cuban women (especially their daughters), in refugee women who arrived after the initial wave in the early 1960s, and in adult women who came as children, all point toward the combined influence of culture, class position, and the history of Cuban society in the Caribbean, This chapter will examine some of the more intricate aspects of the broad generalizations that constitute the Cuban national character profile. The goal here is to “tease apart” and explain the nature and strength of Cuban cultural beliefs about appropriate relations between the sexes.
