POPULATION-CUBA: Bill to Introduce Paternity Leave

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 31 2001 (IPS) - A draft law under consideration would make Cuba the first country in Latin America to meet a long-standing demand by women for child-rearing to be the shared responsibility of mothers and fathers, by turning what is now exclusively maternity leave into parental leave.

The initiative would create paternity leave, thus giving couples the option to decide who will stay home with the baby until its first birthday. Fathers would be able to assume partial or total responsibility.

The bill, which is still under debate, according to Granma, the daily newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, would complement the maternity leave enjoyed by mothers in Cuba, which was extended from six months to one year last May.

If the new law is passed, Cuba will become the first Latin American country offering the option of parental leave to both fathers and mothers. Only a handful of European countries like France offer paternity leave.

Maternity leave is the norm in Latin America. Mothers have 84 days of leave in Mexico and Peru, three months in Argentina and Uruguay, four months in Brazil and four and a half months in Chile and Venezuela.

Cuban mothers are given fully paid leave six weeks before birth and 12 weeks after. Female employees who are unable to return to work after that period receive 60 percent of their wages until a year of leave is completed.

Dixie Edith, a 30-year-old reporter pregnant with her third child, said the new measure would partly resolve one of the biggest hurdles standing in the way of gender equality at a social and family level.

Edith told IPS that she decided to have another baby only because her husband took equal responsibility in raising the children. “If he has to get up in the wee hours of the morning, he gets up, and if he has to take care of the girls so I can go to work, he does that too.”

But studies carried out in Cuba indicate that Edith’s husband is an exception, and that most men either do not share the burden, or merely “help out,” without assuming real responsibility. Many take refuge in the fact that Cuba’s laws only provide leeway for mothers, not fathers, who need to take time off from work to take care of sick children, for example.

According to Cuba’s labour legislation, female employees are allowed to miss work if their children are ill, and they are given one fully-paid day off each month to take their children to the doctor.

Men, however, do not enjoy similar rights. Some pediatric hospitals, in fact, insist that only the mother stay by the bedside of a hospitalised child.

“They demand a lot of us, but only mothers have privileges. If my wife is pregnant I am supposed to accompany her to the doctor, but she is paid while my pay is docked,” said Rosendo Pantoja, a 42-year-old engineer and father of two.

“This is a day-to-day problem. Kids don’t only get sick before their first birthday, but afterwards too. If we want the responsibility to be shared, mothers and fathers have to enjoy the same rights,” said Pantoja.

Patricia Arés at the University of Havana faculty of psychology said all public and social measures that put a greater accent on maternal responsibility than on paternal responsibility stand in the way of gender equality.

In Cuba, “mothers are automatically given custody of the kids in divorce cases, as a universal right. And women are given more social consideration and leeway to miss work in order to take care of the kids,” said Arés.

After the Jan 1, 1959 triumph of the Cuban revolution, women were widely incorporated into the workforce and educational system, in equal conditions.

Women now hold 43.5 percent of civil posts in the government, 34.3 percent of managerial level posts, and more than 66 percent of technical positions, according to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.

Men are “having a hard time continuing to function with the traditional gender stereotypes, while they feel social pressure not to change. If they ask for permission to stay home with their sick child, the labour administration staff asks ‘doesn’t that child have a mother?’, said Arés.

The State of the World’s Mothers 2001 report put out by the international lobby group Save the Children ranks Cuba in first place in Latin America and the Caribbean on its Mothers’ Index , which measures and ranks the “status of mothers” – a composite of indicators of the well-being of women and their children.

Cuba is listed in 12th place among the 94 countries studied. The ranking was led by the countries of Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the United States. Haiti, listed 78th overall, was given the lowest ranking in this region.

When maternity leave was extended from six months to a year, President Fidel Castro explained that the measure would benefit mothers as well as children, who would be better cared for at home than in the public child-care centres.