The bride, her mother-in-law and guests look on in this picture as the groom signs Cuba’s Family Code, a culminating moment in all island weddings since the mid-1970s. Passed in 1976, the Family Code responded to Fidel Castro’s admission two years earlier that the Revolution had not “yet” achieved full equality between men and women: part of the law mandated that all husbands agree in writing on their wedding day to share 50% of domestic chores and childrearing responsibilities. At the time, feminist observers abroad celebrated this provision as a unique solution to “the double shift”— that is, the expectation that women cook, clean and care for kids upon arrival at home after a full day of work outside the home. However, as many scholars have shown, while Cuban husbands did sign the Code, most subsequently chose to ignore it, a factor that surely prompted Cuba to exhibit one of the world’s highest divorce rates by the 1980s. CITY OF PINAR DEL RIO, MARCH 1997
