Constructing Delinquent Mothers: Criminality, Fertility Control, and the Neocolonial Cuban State

During the political turmoil of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century, heightened state surveillance of women’s fertility control practices emerged as a cornerstone of governance in Cuba. As early as the U.S. military occupation (1899-1902), but especially between the stillbirth of the Cuban Republic in 1902 and the abrogation of the sovereignty-limiting Platt Amendment in 1934, Cuban political elites struggled to prove themselves capable of self-government, while navigating periodic U.S. military interventions that undermined their claims to political authority. Simultaneously, these same political elites increasingly turned their attention to women’s role in the Cuban republic, limiting their political participation, circumscribing their employment opportunities, and promoting the male breadwinner/female homemaker model of family through gendered public education.

One of the most understudied aspects of this resurgence in state patriarchal control was the growing surveillance over women’s reproductive practices, particularly the criminalization of fertility control strategies such as abortion and infanticide. I argue that state initiatives targeting women for practicing reproductive autonomy came to buttress Cuban men’s claims to masculinity on the basis of their role as protectors and providers of women in a period in which U.S. interventionism doomed most Cuban political elites to flounder as sovereign statesmen. However, criminalizing women’s fertility control practices proved more complicated than Cuban political elites could anticipate, in part because it clashed with prevailing views of crime as a predominantly male domain. Ultimately, scientists and legal practitioners attempted to reconcile the criminalization of abortion and infanticide with male-centered notions of crime by masculinizing women who practiced fertility control.