By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Mar 7 2003 (IPS)

The Catholic Church is concerned about the growing number of female-headed households in Cuba, although others see the phenomenon as just one aspect of a trend towards more flexible models of the family.

”In Cuba a matriarchy is taking shape, and the ‘crisis of fatherhood’ is increasingly affecting” our children, said the Archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, in a recent pastoral letter.

The family is suffering the ”devastating weight” of the ”extraordinary number of divorces and couples living together out of wedlock,” and the paternal figure ”is becoming more and more ill-defined and blurry,” due to physical absence or a lack of authority, he wrote.

”The outlook for the future is not promising, because there is a lack of paradigms or models to inspire new generations,” said Ortega.

But Manuel Cuesta, the head of the Democratic Socialist Movement (CSD), said Cuban society was moving towards ”a new kind of family,” in the framework of new forms of social organisation, and that ”this does not necessarily have to be negative, as many other nations have demonstrated.”

The CSD forms part of the Moderate Opposition’s Round-Table on Reflection, a coalition of dissident groups that are illegal but tolerated to some extent by the socialist government of Fidel Castro.

According to official statistics, in the late 1990s, more than one-third of households in this Caribbean island nation were headed by women, most of whom simultaneously worked outside the home, took care of the domestic duties, and raised their children.

In 2001, a total of 37,260 divorces were registered in Cuba, a country of 11.2 million. In the past 10 years, the largest number of divorces were seen in 1992 (63,432) and 1993 (64,938), the worst years of the crisis that broke out in Cuba after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the east European socialist bloc.

But weddings also increased during that period, to 191,429 in 1992 and 135,138 in 1993.

The 1990s also produced many partnerships in which people decided to live together without marrying – an increasingly popular arrangement in Cuba.

In 1994, a study by the National Office of Statistics found that of 147,265 mothers in Cuba, 63,000 were married and 77,494 described themselves as ”accompanied” – in other words, involved in a relationship without being married.

Divorces undermine the institution of the family, but they can also indicate advances, said psychologist and university Professor Patricia Arés, the author of several books on the subject.

”People know when things aren’t going right, and they try to make their relationships satisfactory. They don’t want to see life as a couple as something irremediable, but as a source of happiness, and that reflects the development of the individual,” she said.

Carmen Rodríquez, a 55-year-old divorcée who works in advertising, told IPS that although she does not profess any religion, she ”fully” concurs with Ortega’s concerns.

”There are too many children of divorced parents who have no concept of the ‘family’, and when they reach adult life they don’t want to assume responsibilities of that kind,” she said.

Rodríguez is worried about her daughter, a 22-year-old university student, who does not plan on getting married or having children. When they talk about the issue, her daughter asks why she would want to ”have kids just for their father to leave the house and abandon us.”

Rodríguez’s ex-husband asked for a divorce when his daughter was 11, and did not maintain a close relationship with her.

”It was very difficult for her, and she always says she doesn’t want others to have to go through that,” said the divorcée.

Rodríguez believes the main reasons that many young women in Cuba today are avoiding marriage and motherhood are the economic difficulties, including the shortage of housing.

But experts say those are not the decisive factors. They point instead to elements like the high educational level of women and the increasing number who decide to postpone or opt out of motherhood for the sake of their careers.

Furthermore, informal living arrangements are widely accepted in Cuban society today, and children born to unmarried couples have the same rights as those born in wedlock, they point out.

”Rather than a crisis of ethics, couples who live together without being married reflect a new conception of the family,” said the head of the Centre for Population and Development Studies of the National Office of Statistics, Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga.

For her part, university Professor Olga Mesa, a jurist, maintained that the high divorce rate is part of ”the archetype of the new family, free of all hypocrisy and authentically based on new conceptions of how life should be lived.”

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