By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Mar 7 2000 (IPS)

They are university students, successful professionals, scientists, business leaders and parliamentarians, but when they reach age 30 – though they do not lose all hope – these Cuban women are often convinced they are destined for the single life.

“There are no more men in Cuba,” say some women, over- simplifying the situation. Others believe it is “better to be alone than to be in poor company,” and treat the difficulty in finding an adequate partner as the price they must pay for their economic and professional independence.

There is no accurate data on the number of women who are single and looking for a partner on this Caribbean island. Official statistics only include marriages, divorces, births to unwed mothers, or women heads of household – who could live alone or with a partner.

The number of classified adds placed by women or how many are searching for love in cyberspace do not give an accurate picture of the situation either. In Cuba, newspapers do not print such adds and Internet access is so limited and regulated that it is not a source worth checking.

But the problem of single women searching for a partner is real, and instead of improving, it is likely to grow more difficult in the first decades of the 21st century.

Journalist Mirtha Rodríguez Calderón says that 41 years after the triumph of the Fidel Castro-led revolution, “Cuban women are looking for a man that does not yet exist, and Cuban men are after a woman that no longer exists.”

Take the case of Annet Gutiérrez, 39, an engineer who graduated from a university in the former Soviet Union in 1985. Since returning, she has searched unsuccessfully for a Cuban man with whom she can share “something more than a few hours of sex on a Saturday night.”

“Going to bed (with someone) is easy. The difficult part is finding someone who has something in common with me, somebody with whom I can talk openly and, most importantly, someone who is not sexist and doesn’t think that just because I give him a kiss he can decide everything for me,” Gutiérrez told IPS.

The phenomenon, which some experts have begun to designate as the “disjuncture” between women and men, seems to have its origins in Cuba’s dominant male culture and in the fact that Cuban women have gradually been conquering more space in society.

A 1996 study by María Isabel Domínguez, an expert from the Centre of Psychological and Sociological Research at the Cuban Academy of Sciences, warned of the tensions that this gender contradiction could incur for society and the family.

In her work, “The Young Woman of the 1990s,” Domínguez says that higher levels of professional training have made women more demanding when it comes time to seek a partner and when they define roles within the nuclear family.

Women make up 66.6 percent of the technical and professional labour force in Cuba, and 58 percent of university graduates, but they occupy just 32 percent of managerial posts, according to the National Office of Statistics (ONE).

ONE data published in January indicate that Cuba has a population of approximately 11.1 million, with 1,001 men for every 1,000 women, a close gender balance.

During the last decade, 44.2 percent of the employees at the four most prestigious scientific research centres – in bio-technology and pharaceuticals – were women and 46.6 percent of the technical posts were filled by women.

In the legal sphere, women attorneys were hired 74 percent of the time, and occupied 34.6 percent of leadership posts, 65 percent of public prosecution jobs and 47 percent of the People’s Supreme Court bench.

Women hold 27.6 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, and make up 16.1 percent of the members of the Council of State, the Cuban equivalent of the Executive branch.

Women head the ministries of Domestic Commerce, Foreign Investment and Science and Technology, while 19 are assistant ministers and 36 more serve as directors of government offices, enterprises and institutions.

The Communist Party, the only legal party under the Cuban socialist system, has just two women in its Policy Bureau, the party’s highest authority. And only two of 12 secretaries of the island’s provinces are women.

While access to power may still be limited, it is not the case for education. Since the early 1980s, Cuba began to see the “feminisation” of its higher education systems, a trend that was accentuated by the island’s economic crisis of the 1990s.

At the University of Havana alone (one of 46 higher learning institutions in the country), from 1990 to 1995 women made up two- thirds of the student body in 15 of its 25 academic departments.

This high level of professional training for women “may create certain tensions if one considers that, traditionally, the predominant trend is to form couples within one’s own social group, and often the man has higher educational and occupational levels,” explained Domínguez.

Now, reality is running up against tradition, says the expert, and “could lead to postponement of marriage, as well as a greater number of single women and single mothers, or a change in the model of how couples are established.”

She said this change could lead to relationships that are practically unimaginable today. Couples will involve “a woman with a higher educational level and an intellectual occupation and a man of less education who works with his hands.”

But this theory is a far cry from what the average single Cuban female is looking for today.

A large portion of professional women think that “men have to change,” but then only unusually strong feelings would convince them to accept a man with a cultural level much beneath theirs.

Men, for their part, fear accepting a woman who could provide more then they could for the household. In the Cuban “code,” and even while many men assert that “machismo” is passe, “having a wife that earns more means a man is not a real man.”

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