Professor Emerita Carollee Bengelsdorf Publishes Book on Women’s Overlooked Contributions in the Cuban Revolution

Carollee Bengelsdorf, a Hampshire College professor emerita of politics, recently published Clandestinas: Women in the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1955–1959 (Duke University Press). Drawing on years of fieldwork and interviews with more than 30 women insurrectionists, she challenges the official story of the revolution, which tends to emphasize “the role of the guerrillas in the sierra in defeating the Batista dictatorship, thereby diminishing the centrality of the urban underground.”

“Clandestinas” were heavily concentrated in urban areas, minimizing their presence in official histories, and their roles are often portrayed as secondary or complementary to those of their male counterparts. Bengelsdorf’s work details the lives of these revolutionaries during and after the Batista dictatorship.

One reviewer calls the book “impossible to put down. It reads like a novel! Carolee Bengelsdorf’s book is of the utmost importance to those wanting to approach Cuban history from the perspective of the real participation of women insurrectionists and how their contributions have been silenced not only in Cuba but in Latin America as well.”

Bengelsdorf is also the author of The Problem of Democracy in Cuba: Between Vision and Reality and coeditor of Cuba in Transition. She has written extensively on Cuban politics and Cuban women.

She joined the Hampshire College faculty in 1973 and retired in 2015. In 2018, some of her former students established a scholarship fund in her honor.

Bengelsdorf will present at the Faculty Book Celebration with Professor Emeritus of History Aaron Burman 70F on Friday, October 17, as part of the Hampshire College 55th-Anniversary Celebration.