There aren’t many things I remember from the late 1970s, when my mother started attending the Ana Betancourt School. I was too young, not even ready for kindergarten, but I can clearly picture her making the tiny samples she had to bring to her night classes, one block away from our Pastorita apartment in the Vedado neighborhood, sitting in front of her electric Singer sewing machine that always smelled of the North American lubricating oil she regularly poured on it.
One of the household appliances that Cuban exiles have recently started to buy for their relatives in the country is the sewing machine. I have even gotten notice of online stores, specialized in selling goods for emigrants to purchase for delivery in the island, where sewing machines are featured prominently. A Singer machine goes for two-to-three hundred dollars (that’s twice as much what I paid for mine in New York!); importing one from abroad—even as personal luggage—is more expensive, as Cuban customs tax up to $50 per machine. Sewing machines might be a symbol of a bygone era for young people in New York, where I live, but in Cuba they are valued means for both economic independence and creative self-expression.
Some years ago, a CNBC journalist was taken aback by the rackety Singer sewing machines with which a new cuentapropista produced clothing for Yoruba ceremonies. The fact “that a store which uses 1950s-era Singer sewing machines is the shining star of a government-backed tour,” the author noted then, “highlights just how far behind the country is economically speaking and how far it has to go.” If for the North American journalist the vintage Singer sewing machines the cuentapropista owned were quite the opposite of the idea of economic progress she had, this was not always the case. In On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (1999), famous Cuban American historian Louis A. Pérez describes the impression received by a 19th century Spanish traveler upon discovering how ubiquitous the sewing machine was in the Antillean colony, even in sparsely furnished rural homes.
By the 20th century, Singer sewing machines had become a fixture in many homes. Middle and upper-middle class girls pedaled to the metal to add variety to their weddings’ trousseaus, while lower-class women sewed not only to complete their wardrobes but, mostly, to feed themselves and their families. Late in the 1950s, Singer sewing machines contributed to the secret manufacturing of the fatigues and armbands donned by the Sierra Maestra rebels, gaining the entrance of this North American invention into the Museum of the Revolution.
Even during the Soviet era, when modernizing discourses pervaded everyday life and promised ready-made clothes for all, old sewing machines made possible the private production of clothes. They allowed individual creativity to challenge the fashion styles favored by the socialist regime, compensated incomes, and completed wardrobes. Those Cubans old enough to have memories from this period will remember how badly people dreamed of foreign clothes or, alternatively, custom-made ones inspired by foreign styles: home-made Lee pitusas [jeans] and aqua-marine polyester stirrups that (in the summer months) wreaked havoc on your thighs.
My mother and grandmother had, each one, a portable electric Singer. Yet in a corner of my grandparents’ house, the dusty pedal sewing machine that had belonged to my great-grandmother seemed to yearn for another chance. It was on this last one that I learned to sew, while my mother and grandmother dreamed up the latest models for my sister and me. For us, the sewing machine became both a means for self-expression and making do; it allowed us to be who we wanted to be in the eyes of others, while also guaranteeing that we would always have something “decent” to wear.
Sandra Gómez’s 2009 documentary El futuro es hoy (The Future is Today) features a graduate of the first cohort of the Ana Betancourt Schools that taught peasant girls sewing techniques, contributing to the expansion of self-made clothing on the face of stores’ limited offerings. Fidel Castro himself had ordered 14,000 Soviet sewing machines to award them, asking the students to teach ten more women when they returned to their homes. The former graduate now lives in a run-down building in the once-modern Malecón. Fifty years after her graduation, the dilapidated sewing machine is still her home’s centerpiece. Facing the camera, she compares it to Fidel Castro: as long as the machine functions, Fidel Castro will too, she says. Sadly for her, the machine fails.
Today, the imagery of the sewing machine is beginning to take center stage in Cuba’s emerging petty capitalism. Even in New York City, my daughter and I each have a modern portable sewing machine and, like in the days of my youth, an old hand-crank handle Singer decorates a corner of my living room. Every time I dust it, memories come to my mind. I think of today’s Cuban cuentapropistas, of all those anonymous individuals who have made my country’s history, and of the lubricating oil my mother poured in her electric Singer when she was attending the Ana Betancourt School.
All images, property of Maria Antonia Cabrera Arús.