In years past it was not uncommon to hear senior scholars express skepticism about the significance of gender and sexuality to the Cuban Revolution. Michelle Chase's Revolution within the Revolution definitively silences this doubt, documenting women's involvement in the revolutionary struggle and the role of gendered discourse in justifying radical politics. The monograph engages with burgeoning literatures on Cuba in the 1960s and gender and revolution more broadly. Eschewing 1959 as the beginning or end point of the project, Revolution within the Revolution extends from 1952, the first year of opposition to Fulgencio Batista, to 1962, when the revolution was centralized. Because of this, the book is uncommonly positioned to examine “the messy phase in between, as one order was dismantled and another erected in its place” (p. 6).
By insisting that gender was central to the revolutionary process, Chase challenges numerous historiographical claims, including the assumption that women's equality...
