LABOUR-CUBA: The Return of the Domestics

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Apr 28 2002 (IPS) - Domestic help began to reappear in Cuba during the economic crisis of the 1990s, after virtually disappearing for more than 30 years in what was considered a victory in this Caribbean island nation’s socialist struggle for equality between men and women.

It has become more and more common to hear the expression “the girl who helps me” or “the lady who washes up,” in allusion to domestic labour hired to do the household work – a situation that has brought about a change in mentality among the women who offer their services, as well as the families who hire them.

But for many Cuban women, domestic service is a better option, in terms of wages, than many other jobs – unlike what occurs in other countries in Latin America. However, domestics here suffer the same lack of labour guarantees and social security as their counterparts in the rest of the region.

“If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would have a maid who cleaned and washed and ironed, I wouldn’t have believed it, because for me that was degrading,” said Milagros Castañeda, a 39-year-old professional.

However, with the economic crisis, “everything has changed, and I came to see that if I was going to do the housework, I would not be able to keep up at work, and I would not only lose my salary in pesos but also a good quantity of dollars as well,” she explained.

Castañeda, who works for a foreign firm in Havana, added that this way she could also help someone she cared about, and “who wasn’t as fortunate as I have been.”

After deciding to hire a domestic, Castañeda talked to a young neighbour she had known since she was a child, and who was in difficult financial straits. The young woman is a single mother of a two-year-old.

“I offered her 25 dollars and 100 Cuban pesos a month, and she immediately agreed,” said Castañeda.

Yamilé Rodríguez, a domestic, said it did not take her long to weigh the pros and cons. “I didn’t think twice. I resigned from the (public) copmany where I worked, where I earned 180 pesos a month. Now I work more than before, but I also earn more,” she said.

The average salary in Cuba is around 250 Cuban pesos a month – barely enough to scrape by on in a country where some basic articles, like toilet soap, can only be found at the government chain of stores that sell only in dollars. (The peso trades at 26 against the dollar in the government exchange bureaux).

Although the rates of utilities and other public services are low in Cuba, and health care is free, the prices of food, clothing, shoes and home appliances are high in comparison with the average income.

The supremacy of the dollar over the local currency, the peso, was one of the direct consequences of the 34.8 percent drop in Gross Domestic Product registered between 1990 and 1993 in the wake of the collapse of the east European socialist bloc and the break-up of the Soviet Union – a pit the country has not yet crawled out of.

Cubans have turned to a variety of survival strategies, including self-employment in occupations legalised by the government in the 1990s, providing services to foreign tourists, and a number of activities on the black market.

A significant number of people also count on the remittances sent home by family members living abroad, mainly in the United States, which total around one billion dollars a year.

A study by the governmental Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research (CIPS) concluded that the strategies to which Cuban families have resorted to survive the economic crisis have brought “a return to the past in terms of family dynamics.”

Many women have chosen to pull out of the job market in order to “confront the complexity of daily life,” while others, including elderly women as old as 80, have decided to find jobs as domestics in private households or work as “cleaning ladies.”

The near total disappearance of maids was considered one of the achievements of the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959, in the field of equal rights between men and women.

According to Cuba’s 1953 census, domestics represented 63.5 percent of all women in the labour force at that time.

But the number of servants shrank considerably when Castro’s socialist government fostered women’s access to education and established the principle of “equal wages for the same job,” to promote equality between men and women.

Under the socialist revolution, domestic servitude began to be seen as exploitation of one social class by another, which ran counter to a political process aimed at eliminating all discrimination on the basis of race, class and gender.

Official data indicates that women now hold over 40 percent of all state-sector jobs in Cuba, and that they account for 66 percent of the country’s technicians and professionals and nearly 52 percent of its scientific researchers.

Domestic labour is not one of the occupations of private initiative that have been authorised by the government in Cuba, which means there are no statistics on the number of people who have opted for that alternative.

Furthermore, the preliminary questionnaires being drawn up for the next census on population and housing, to be carried out in September, contain no questions on domestic labour, an expert who preferred to remain anonymous told IPS.

“In the end, the government will have to recognise this process and provide guarantees of social security for these women. But for the moment, no one even wants to talk about the subject,” he said.

Domestic employment opportunities are offered in homes with high incomes, who look for maids among neighbour families or even relatives in a difficult financial situation, according to the preliminary results of a study by the University of Havana.

The study adds that the domestics are women who hold steady jobs in a household or who charge at least 100 pesos for a weekly house cleaning as a second source of income, while they hold onto their public sector jobs or continue their studies.