The United States’ economic blockade against Cuba has lasted for more than six decades, seeking to weaken the island’s permanent revolutionary process — which continues to resist. The military and imperialist assault of Donald Trump’s government intensifies the pressure on Cuba: more sanctions, financial isolation, and the permanent attempt to destabilize Cuban sovereignty. In this context, Cuban women continue to be central political subjects in building and defending the revolution. It is their work that sustains much of the island’s collective life.
The gallery below brings together photographs from the cultural magazine La Tinta, by Vladimir Molina, and other sources, compiled by Marilys Zayas, director of the magazine Mujeres. The images reveal a diversity of everyday practices: women conducting research in laboratories, ensuring access to healthcare and education, dancing and practicing sports, caring for and feeding communities, making art and mobilizing politically, living their spiritualities, strengthening culture, and organizing to defend the country and its revolutionary model, chosen and renewed by the people for decades.
“When we recognize that Cuban women not only bear the effects of the crisis, but are also creators of solutions, community leaders, producers of thought, and protagonists of everyday life, we better understand the strength that sustains the country,” Marilys states in a recent article.
The photographs portray a grassroots and revolutionary feminism that is built daily: in community food initiatives as a collective commitment to care in times of blockade; in health and scientific work as contributions to the Cuban social model; in art and spirituality as forms of resistance. They show that the Cuban revolutionary process is not something confined to the past. It is a process under dispute, strained by the blockade and by imperial pressure that systematically attacks territories across the Global South.
This photo gallery, like numerous other initiatives, is part of an international campaign of solidarity with the Cuban people. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, and around the world, grassroots movements are raising the call: “Let Cuba live!”
