A Tale from the Autonomous Women’s Liberation Movement or How the Sydney Women’s Liberation Banner Went to Cuba by Margot Oliver

In 1978, I travelled to Cuba from Sydney. Even now over 40 years later that’s still a long way. I was part of a group of Australian lefties and the event we attended was the extraordinary World Festival of Youth and Students. When I try and describe it in terms that anyone I know now might understand, I say “Think of a cultural Olympic Games, staged every 5 or so years by a country from the old Socialist Bloc, with delegations coming in from all over the world.” 

‘International’,  it certainly was, though as we looked around at the motley collection of delegates arriving from all parts of the globe it was evident that ‘youth’ was a considerably elastic category, but at the age of 31 I had no trouble understanding myself to be well within reasonable parameters. As for ‘students’, well we are all students of life, no? 

Here’s the story of how I got there.

Throughout the 1970s the Sydney Filmmakers’ Cooperative was a vibrant site of independent 16mm film distribution and exhibition. I was very involved in both, and true to the time, we had various activist collectives, including the Sydney Women’s Film Group (such imaginative naming) and Filmaction. Much to my surprise I was voted by Filmaction members to take a number of social action films to this World Festival of Youth and Students.

Before I left Australia, we held an excellent fund-raising dance in a local Town Hall. (In the days before the internet that was how you did it.) Here some gay liberation activists proposed that I really should think carefully about not going to Cuba because of Cuba’s dreadful record of locking up male homosexuals. I did indeed think carefully about this and came to the conclusion that probably no one in Cuba would notice my conscientious absence, but if I did go, I would definitely raise the issue once I got there. 

I was also by now aware that a Grand Parade of all 100 or so national delegations would be a feature of the festival – and I came to another important conclusion. If I was going to be obliged to participate in such a display of flag and slogan waving nationalism, with all the groupthink Big Brother overtones such an event proclaimed, then I should at least be carrying a message that I could happily march behind. 

In a brilliant fit of enthusiasm, I made a lightning strike on Women’s Liberation House in Regent Street, which netted me the impressively wide Women’s Liberation banner used at IWD for the last several years, complete with raised fist women’s symbol. I also cleaned out their stock of women’s symbol badges.

The first leg of the long journey to Cuba was to Singapore, during which several men of the Australian delegation distinguished themselves by their continuous consumption of alcohol and increasingly offensive behaviour towards the air hostesses. As I was walking towards the back of the plane, the arm of a very impressive Maori woman blocked my passage as she enquired with considerable irritation “Haven’t you got any feminists in the Australian delegation?”

Perhaps a little paradoxically, I was flooded with relief that the New Zealand delegation at any rate contained at least one feminist - and Donna Awatere and I became firm allies in challenging the ongoing sexism of the Australian men for the duration.

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I’m afraid I’ve never had much success at explaining the internecine politics of the Left to those who don’t already know about them, but I’ll give it a go.

Our delegation to Cuba was auspiced, organised and dominated by members of the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA), whose political cues and beliefs were in sync with the Cuban hierarchy, since they both followed the ideology of the Russians (the old USSR). This involved the following articles of faith: 

The real fight is the struggle for Socialism. Once this has been achieved the emancipation of women will automatically follow. There is absolutely no need for an autonomous Women’s Movement – indeed, such a thing is counterproductive and to be opposed. 

Once Socialism has been achieved then there will be no such thing as racism any more, since everyone will be an equally emancipated worker. 

Nuclear power under Socialist control - for example in Russia - was in no way an environmental or political threat. 

For reasons I am unaware of, the group from Australia also contained some half a dozen Communist Party of Australia (CPA) members, who were firmly independent of Russian influence - the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 having provoked the final breaking point. And there were even two or three of us who belonged to neither party, progressive social activists who were keenly interested to experience socialist Cuban society firsthand. And, of course, I had a bunch of lovingly crafted independent films to screen that highlighted our Australian issues and our activism. 

It did not take me long to realise that walking in the big parade, proudly exhibiting my Women’s Liberation banner, was unlikely to be approved of by our SPA leaders, so I developed a plan to smuggle it onto the bus and into the parade by wearing it folded as flat as possible under my clothes. Strategically placing ourselves at the very back of the Australian contingent, as we stood around during the inevitable wait in the street for the parade to begin, I magically manifested the very fine banner, and four women (the only women in the Australian delegation of thirty) had it stretched out for all the world to see before you could say …

Well at any rate before our fearless Leaders noticed and sprinted to the back of the contingent to issue the order: “What do you think you’re doing! You are not allowed to carry that!”  

What followed is worthy of a small theatre piece, but in the interests of brevity I will just say that after lengthy consultation amongst the Leaders, it was decided that an open stoush between a couple of muscle-headed men and a few young women holding a piece of cloth, with several thousand Cuban spectators as immediate witnesses, was probably not a go-er. 

We were informed that we were allowed to carry the banner after all – but only this once! We were definitely not allowed to use it again during the rest of the festival.

And so. it transpired that, in front of a crowd of about 90,000 Cubans lining the parade route, four young Australian women discovered the serendipitous advantage of coming from a country whose name starts with A, and the raised fist inside the women’s symbol first saw the light of day in Cuba in spectacular style. 

The Cuban spectators loved the banner, understood it immediately, and yelled encouragement from the crowd: Viva las mujeres! Viva las mujeres!  It was a response I had not anticipated, and I was truly overjoyed. The roar of welcome that went up as the parade entered the packed stadium (complete with Fidel and Raoul I was told), was something to remember, and to this day I choose to think that there was a special cheer for the Women’s Liberation squad as we headed up the parade behind Angola.

Footage of us with our banner was broadcast on Cuban TV – or so we were informed by the workers who were looking after us at our Sugar School accommodation - and since television crews from some of the Socialist Bloc countries of Eastern Europe were also covering the event, I like to think we may have made it to air over there as well.

The only other delegation to display any reference to feminism was the United Kingdom. They were serendipitously placed towards the end of the parade and carried an enormous and beautifully constructed banner proclaiming Solidarity with All the Women of the World / Solidaridad con Todas las Mujeres del Mundo. So, between the two delegations at the beginning and end of the parade, the feminist message of fighting for women’s rights could not be missed. 

So, this was an outcome that far exceeded whatever minor ambitions I might have had for making a personally politically palatable statement in the middle of such a Big Brother parade. 

We never did display the Women’s Liberation banner again during our stay. I think I was afraid that it would indeed get ripped out of our hands and disappeared by the SPA bully- boys and I simply could never have faced the women’s libbers back in Sydney if I was not able to return it safe and sound as promised.

However, there was no prohibition on the other banner I had ensconced in my luggage. WOMEN AGAINST NUCLEAR ENERGY made at least one outing, to an admittedly somewhat bemused audience at one of the many forums of the festival. It was a great conversation starter, but I am not sure that we convinced anyone to think seriously about our point of view. Though perhaps, in the wake of later events at Chernobyl, some ageing delegates from 1978 may have remembered those strange young women from Australia …

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FOOTNOTE: I never did get to screen any of the films I had lugged halfway round the world. Most of my time in Havana was spent trying to surmount the immoveable barrier of Cuban state control: there was no way that festival personnel were going to be authorised to find 16mm projection facilities without the films first being subject to official scrutiny. 

Of course, no one told me this – it was simply what I slowly managed to piece together as I waited patiently for a 16mm film projector to manifest itself.  (Cuban films – some of which I had seen in Australia and loved - were all made and screened in 35mm, and with state imprimatur of course.) I was merely requested to lend the festival personnel one of my precious movies – ostensibly to “test the projector”. Very reluctantly I did so, only to have no film projector appear. In the end, days-worth of dogged occupation of the office foyer ensured that the film I provided was actually given back to me before departure, and I returned home very aware of how much of a ‘people’s medium, we Australians had in the availability of 16mm film technology.