Edith García Buchaca (1916–2015) was one of the highest ranking members of the Communist Party in Cuba from 1935 to 1964. Active in leftist politics and women's issues as a teenager in Cienfuegos, she joined the Communist Party in 1935 and strove to organize the women's wing, which was active in initiatives to improve workers' conditions. She joined and became a leader in the Union of Radical Women and participated in the Third Congress of Cuban Women in 1939. She was a successful candidate in the 1940 general election and served on the Constitutional Convention. García successfully introduced women's rights issues raised by the women's congress for consideration and inclusion in the 1940 Constitution.
Supporting anti-fascist measures during World War II, in 1941 García co-founded the National Anti-Fascist Front. She was a co-founder and the first president of the Democratic Federation of Cuban Women, formed in 1948 as an affiliate of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). García was a delegate to the WIDF 1948 Congress in Budapest, the 1949 Conference on Asian Women held in Beijing, and was elected to the 1953 Executive Council of WIDF. She was a leader in the Hands Off Korea campaign of the 1950s, a Cuban protest to the Korean War.
From 1945, García worked at the Institute of Cuban-Soviet Cultural Exchange, encouraging intellectuals to share their knowledge. After Fidel Castro's failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, her husband was arrested along with other leftists who opposed the regime of Fulgencio Batista. Upon his release the couple and their children went into exile, finally settling in Mexico in 1956. From there they were active in Communist initiatives against various dictatorships in Latin America and the Caribbean, but did not support insurrection. When the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, they returned to Cuba. García worked as the secretary of the National Institute of Culture, until the National Council of Culture was created in 1961, where she was also secretary.
Appointed as the head of cultural initiatives for the Communist Party, from 1961 to 1964, García was instrumental in institutionalizing cultural programs and establishing schools and facilities to promote the arts. Her pamphlet (The Theory of the Superstructure: Literature and Art, 1961) was influential in the development of policies adapting the arts to meet socialist goals. Debates about whether the purpose of art was aesthetic or utilitarian led to the government's cultural censorship program, although in her era no forms of artistic expression were banned as long as they supported revolutionary ideals. In 1964, García was accused of protecting Marcos Rodríguez Alfonso ("Marquito") who had informed on activists behind the Directorio Revolucionario 13 de Marzo, leading to the Humboldt 7 massacre. She denied involvement and was exonerated by Castro. After her husband was accused of being a CIA informant, which she denied, the couple were arrested in 1964. From 1965 until her death in 2015, she lived under house arrest, despite never being tried for a criminal offense.
Early life and education Edith García Buchaca was born in 1916 in Brooklyn, New York. During her childhood, she lived in Cienfuegos and met Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, who later became a lawyer, intellectual, and a high ranking member of the Cuban Communist Party. García was raised in a middle-class family and studied socio-economic and political science, before completing her studies in law. In the 1930s, she was involved in radical student leftist and feminist political activities. She and Rodríguez were founding members of the (Ariel Group), which was created in 1933 to allow young radicals to explore revolutionary thought. The Student Left Wing opposed the dismissal of professors during the Ramón Grau presidency and were generally critical of his administration. Grau was eventually replaced in 1934 by Carlos Mendieta in an attempt to quell the radicals. That year Rodríguez moved to Havana, and the couple joined the Cuban Communist Party in 1935, which later became the Popular Socialist Party. Around this time, she and Rodríguez married and had two daughters, Annabelle and Dania.
Career Women's rights (1935–1953)
García worked with María Luisa Soler to organize the women's wing of the Communist Party. Their initiatives included proposals for equal pay, anti-discrimination legislation in the workplace, and measures in support of the right to sit. When the party was renamed in 1937 as the (Revolutionary Communist Union), she and ten other radical women, including cigar industry organizer Teresa García and poet María Villar Buceta, actively opposed the policies of President Federico Laredo Brú. She joined the (Union of Radical Women), a group which had formed in 1933 as a labor organization. García Buchaca became a leader of the group, working to legalize workers' unions and have employers recognize their arbitration rights, to nationalize Cuba's large agricultural estates, and to generally improve socio-political rights. In 1939, she served on the executive committee for the third Congress of Cuban Women. Working with other leading women, such as , Ana Etchegoyen de Cañizares and Concepción Castañedo, she brought together two thousand women to discuss women's and children's issues, such as child labor, equal pay, land distribution, maternity rights, racial discrimination, and sex education. They also discussed the rise of fascism in Europe, interference of the United States in the Caribbean and Latin American states, and the politics of peace. García was a successful candidate for the in the 1940 general election, and became a participant in the Constitutional Convention. She brought forward the issues raised at the Women's Congress, demanding firm guarantees in the constitution for gender and racial equality. Among the provisions included were Article 20, which barred discrimination based on class, color, race, or sex; Article 43, which guaranteed married women equality; Article 44, which eliminated discrimination based on legitimacy; and Article 172, which established provision for a yet to be created tribunal to resolve legal conflicts with existing legislation, such as the family code, which vested family authority in the husband and father. The constitution required enabling legislation to be passed, yet although a commission was formed to draw up a new Civil Code in 1939, lawmakers failed to adopt the draft. It took another decade before women's rights were fully realized, with Law 9, (Women's Civil Rights Equalization Law) being passed on 20 December 1950.
During World War II, García became involved in anti-fascist and anti-imperialist activities. She joined organizations, such as the (League of American Women in Defense of Continental Democracy), and was a co-founder of the (National Anti-Fascist Front) formed in 1941. The became the (Popular Socialist Party) in 1944, and García began serving on its National Committee. In 1945, she produced the Radio Mil Diez program (Cuba in the Post-War), interviewing politicians and dignitaries about political issues. That year, she also helped establish the (Institute of Cuban-Soviet Cultural Exchange), in an effort to encourage intellectuals in the two countries to share their knowledge. In 1946, García's affair with Joaquín Ordoqui Mesa triggered a scandal because of the high positions in the Communist Party of each member of the love triangle. Carlos Rafaél Rodríguez, García's husband was a former cabinet minister during the presidency of Fulgencio Batista and the editor of the Communist Party's newspaper (Today). Between 1944 and 1948, Ordoqui was a high-ranking party member and the vice president of the Cuban Chamber of Deputies. According to writer Carlos Alberto Montaner, what should have been a private matter became a public spectacle when the Central Committee of the Popular Socialist Party ordered a tribunal composed of Aníbal Escalante, Nicolás Guillén, Blas Roca, and Lázaro Peña to rule on the matter and make a statement about the high moral conduct expected of party members. The lengthy trail resulted in reprimands and sanctions for the deception by García and Ordoqui against Rodríguez.
García and Ana M. Hidalgo joined with activists Mirta Aguirre, María Argüelles, Celia Machado, Candelaria Rodríguez, Caridad Sánchez, Cipriana Vidaurreta, and María Josefa Vidaurreta to found the Federación Democrática de Mujeres Cubanas (Democratic Federation of Cuban Women, FDMC) in 1948. García was elected as president of the organization which was an affiliate of the Women's International Democratic Federation. She became director of (Cuban Women), the monthly magazine of the FDMC. She was one of the Cuban delegates to the 1948 Budapest Congress of WIDF and to the 1949 Beijing Asian Women's Conference. That year spoke at the (National Congress for Peace) held in Havana, advocating for the development of democratic systems promoting peace by eliminating militarism, racism, and ideological persecution. In 1953, she was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the WIDF. In 1950, she organized with Candelaria Rodríguez, who participated in the 1951 investigation of conditions in North Korea, an anti-war initiative known as "Hands Off Korea". The campaign aimed at preventing Cuban troops from participating in the Korean War and was successful in changing public opinion from favoring Cuban involvement. García and Ordoqui married in 1952, the year when Batista staged a coup d'état to return to power. García had a son, Joaquín Ordoqui García, in Havana in May 1953, and in July Fidel Castro organized an attack on the Moncada Barracks, which sparked the Cuban Revolution. In the aftermath of the attack, rebels as well as political opponents were arrested by the (Military Intelligence Service, SIM). Ordoqui was among the communist activists arrested on the day of the attack and denied any involvement. He was incarcerated in the same cell block as Castro in the Boniato Provincial Prison. At the September trial, Ordoqui was acquitted.
Exile (1953–1959) Soon after Ordoqui's release in 1953, because of continued pressure on communists, the couple went into exile with the children. They temporarily lived in Paris, Prague, Moscow and Beijing, before settling in Mexico at the end of 1956. During their time abroad they had taken party instruction in China and the Soviet Union and attended a peace conference in Vienna in 1954. While in Mexico they collaborated with those trying to oust Batista from power, but adhered to the position of the Popular Socialist Party between 1952 and the end of 1958, namely that resistance should be peaceful and not an insurgency. García, Ordoqui, and other exiles in Mexico who were members of the Popular Socialist Party actively worked with the Central Committee of the Mexican Communist Party and politicians throughout the Caribbean against regimes of Batista, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela. The Communist International did not support revolutionary action in Latin America. Influenced by a major famine in the USSR in the late 1940s as well as the political repressions under Stalin and the effects of McCarthyism in the United States, Castro did not believe communist policy would be able to resolve Cuba's socio-political and economic problems.