- 26 exhorts us to throw out any stereotype that limits the feminine imprint inside and outside of Las Tunas countryside.

“That brute guajira only gets along with the beasts. She has a genius that doesn't believe in anyone who crosses her at the guardrail. On horseback, she's a fireball... She prefers to look after the bean fields by herself, so she doesn't have to talk. And the poor thing is a plow, it's a miracle she knows how to keep accounts...”

The words spread noisily through a small farm on the Manatí soil, the impact was a bitter grimace that warned that this string of ‘flattery’ was being served repeatedly on the same table.

More quietly, in the heat of everyday life and behind the lens of those who watch from afar, rural women are painted with archetypes and micro-violence, without being able to fully distinguish where the ravages of patriarchal domination begin and where the ill-intentioned notions that society assigns to those who can, want to or have no choice but to live off the land begin. Just to refer to this segment, undoubtedly the most vilified, within a much larger concept.

The indoctrination begins at a very young age: ‘What are you going to study for if you have to come and look after the animals, what “sauce” are you looking for out there? Many grandmothers and aunts fell into this trap, only to be branded as brutes for not understanding laws and decrees when they were not reserved any other space than behind the cooker. There are still those who do not break these chains...

On the contrary, the fields are now adorned with a greater number of empowered women: chairwomen of cooperatives, owners of large tracts of land, and self-employed workers. They have not asked anyone's permission to make their way in a universe plagued by machismo where you are branded as weak without the right to reply, but where your strength is also questioned if you dare to show it.

Even among ourselves, we have a deep-rooted conception that those who work in the fields, tend herds, milk their cows... are coarse, dim-witted, careless, made only for that world... And we continue to reproduce absurd prejudices in the family, in the workplace, and even in the media, which from time to time even show the most archaic and limited vision of the peasant woman on television.

There are other more sly and equally offensive questions: ‘Fulana always wears trousers and high boots, she never wears dresses or heels, she doesn't paint her nails...’. As if we were all the same and lived according to the cultural standards of how to look attractive... How absurd, today you can find the same balayage hair inside as a girl with six centimeters of roots in Havana because she doesn't have the money for a touch-up.

The question is not about appearances or being more or less conceited, it is about defending individual peculiarities, what makes a person happy. The most important thing is to finally break the old myths that surround the peasant woman and not define her, because she is bigger than a stereotype, strengthened by the current challenges, which cannot be more challenging: inflation, scarcity of resources, lack of electricity...

It hurts that when a producer goes to the bank to apply for a loan, she is asked if the land is hers or her husband's; it hurts that, although she is the leader, the farm is in the name of the man of the house; it offends that she defies the dawn by feeding the animals and when they are sold, the money is kept in her husband's wallet. These are also micro-violence born out of false notions of what a woman wants or needs in these rural settings.

There is the other, who is not a ‘guajira bruta’ but ‘un pan’ who has spent her whole life cooking for a battalion when it is harvest time, attending to every worker who passes through the farm, carrying water and snacks at all hours, but does not have a peso of her own, because she does not ‘work’, she is only a housewife.

I hope we learn to see them as they are, beyond the long nails, the keratin, or the work boots. They are making their way in a context that since they were little they were painted as aliens, of men, and they are doing it with so much sweat, with so much strength, that it is a source of pride to see them grow.