The Helsinki Notebooks

The antifascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War robbed Teresa “Teté” Casuso of her imagined children. Widowed when her husband, Pablo de la Torriente Brau, was killed fighting for the Spanish Republic in December of 1936, Casuso confronted the fact that the activism to which they had devoted themselves had now torn them apart. They had chosen a dangerous life as activists in Cuba and beyond, and the choice led to tragedy. In her grief over her husband’s death, Teté mourned the fact that she would not have their children. Instead, she decided, she would devote herself to other people’s children—specifically the children of the Spanish Republic. In so doing, she became a leading antifascist on the island. In this activism, she positioned herself as a mother, even though—tragically—she was childless. 

Psychologist Rose Capdevila argues that recognition of someone as a mother legitimates them as such for political purposes.¹ We can consider the example, for instance, of U.S. radical labor activist Mother Jones, also without children by tragedy after the yellow fever epidemic of 1876 killed all four of her children and her husband. Jones became “a mother to millions of working men and women” after union members began to refer to her as “Mother.”² Capdevila notes many women activists who have mobilized maternal identity—including women in the Irish Republican struggle, Palestinian women, female Zapatistas in Mexico, and women in the Spanish Civil War.³ Indeed, the most iconic woman in the Spanish Civil War, Dolores Ibárruri (known widely as ‘La Pasionaria’) was, according to historian Paul Preston, “a universal earth-mother figure” and “an archetypal mother figure.” Feared by her enemies, she was deeply caring to the Spanish people, who looked to her as “a beacon of certainty in a sea of insecurity.”⁴ Ibárruri, who gave birth to six children, was also beset by tragedy, losing five during her lifetime.  

Jones and Ibárruri were ‘tragic mothers.’⁵ Casuso was, too, despite not being a mother of any actual children. These women’s tragedies and maternal identities fueled massive activist output, making them central figures in their respective labor and antifascist struggles. 

Teté and her husband Pablo had a history in their nation’s struggles to end strongman rule and neocolonial control, efforts sometimes summarized as the fight for a “New Cuba” or metaphorized as a “new dawn.” Members of Cuba’s “Generation of the Thirties,” participants in the Cuban Revolution of 1933, and exiles in New York City following Fulgencio Batista’s transformation in 1934 and 1935 from revolutionary to repressor, Teté and Pablo had spent years fighting to remake their country. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War turned them and many other Cubans to antifascism, a fight they interpreted as a continuation of their domestic struggles. They were well accustomed to risk: living between safehouses, facing off against armed state security forces, seeing friends murdered. They shared an abundance of courage—Torriente Brau’s decision to travel to the warzone in Spain was one more activist choice in a long line of such choices they had both made—and also they shared a devoted romance. First acquainted when they were children of 17 and 7, respectively, Pablo and Teté grew together and fell in love. Married in 1934, the two were still newlyweds when Torriente Brau, then 34 years old, left for Spain in the summer of 1936. They had spent much of Casuso’s life together.  

Teté learned of Pablo’s death in a newspaper.⁶ She was devastated, yet while she mourned, she found her way back to activism in only a few months, seeking comfort in that which she and Pablo had always shared. “I determined,” she wrote years later in her memoir, “to do something to help the unhappy people for whose liberty Pablo had given his life.”⁷ As the founding president of the Asociación de Auxilio al Niño del Pueblo Español (Association of Aid to the Child of the Spanish People, or AANPE), Casuso built from the ground up one of the most important antifascist organizations in Cuba. The group boasted 300,000 members across the island and abroad, sent generous material aid to the Spanish Republic, established a residential school in Catalonia for displaced children, and navigated the Cuban government’s neutrality decree by claiming to be nonpartisan and humanitarian rather than antifascist, though clearly it was the latter. It’s journal ¡Ayuda! (Help!) made little secret about the true antifascist orientation of the AANPE, with frequent articles referencing, for example: “the crime which Fascism commits daily upon the innocent flesh of the Spanish…children”⁸ and “the hell of blood and flames in which fascism has forced the Spanish children to live.”⁹ Much of its daily work appeared to be simply charitable and therefore permissible under neutrality, giving the AANPE sufficient popularity and just enough cover to make it untouchable as it provided significant aid to the Spanish Republic. For the government to shut it down “would have been a scandal.”¹⁰

Thus, Casuso became a leading Cuban antifascist. As her organization mounted its first major children’s clothing drive for the winter of 1937–38, she wrote “Nana sin Niño (“Lullaby without Child”), a poem about unrequited maternal love in which the narrator sits singing lullabies and sewing children’s clothes. She states, “life took my dream, and the child has not arrived.” Yet she transfers her maternal feeling from the never-born child to all children: “I sing my lullabies,” states the narrator, “I sew, stitch and thimble, for the children of the world who are in my heart.” She offers “the children without cradle,” the motherless or displaced children, her “maternal lap.” Turning personal loss into activism was not easy for Teté. The narrator struggles—“some tears singing / to the child who did not arrive”—but she must look towards a new dawn, “a song of the future.” In the bleak night of her personal tragedy, Casuso found the spark of her activist commitment. “My lullaby has no child,” she summarized. “For the earth and for the children, my love has come to sing.”¹¹

“Children are the hope of the world,” Cuban independence leader José Martí had declared, as the AANPE reminded readers. “Upon these words—grave and profound—we implore the people of Martí: Save the Spanish children! Save the Hope of the World!”¹² Invoking the powerful figure of the motherless or otherwise endangered child, the organization gave concrete aid to help living, breathing Spanish children; also, it positioned these children, menaced by the darkness of fascism, as a metaphor for a new dawn. These antifascists viewed their activism as being of existential importance. Teté could, perhaps, take some comfort in the immensity and gravitas of the endeavor. Skillfully and effectively, she and the other leaders and activists of her organization wielded the identities of ‘mother’ and ‘child’ both to garner considerable support for their antifascist efforts and to protect these efforts from the “neutrality” demands of the Cuban government. Far from motherhood being relegated to a private sphere, it became the vehicle for the success of the activist AANPE.¹³ And Casuso, the childless mother, was one of the most forceful drivers of the mothers-as-activists position and narrative. 

Casuso was a woman without children—not by choice but by tragedy—who assumed a maternal identity as a central and indeed necessary component of her political engagement and activism. In dying for the Spanish Republican cause, Pablo had become an antifascist martyr; in her grief, Teté became an antifascist leader of a different sort. One a warrior hero in death and one a maternal hero in life, they could be interpreted as having diverged along gender lines. In fact, when he arrived in Spain, Torriente Brau wrote to Casuso “that it was no place for [her], and [she] must not think of going there for the time being.”¹⁴ Although Pablo’s order and Teté’s emphasis on motherhood could both be seen as having consigned Casuso to traditional gender roles contrary to effective public activist leadership, in fact both enabled exactly this antifascist work. Undeterred by risk, government opposition, and personal tragedy, Teté Casuso asserted forceful and effective antifascism from Cuba that made a tangible impact in Spain. 

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1. Rose Capdevila, “Lysistratus, Lysistrata, Lysistratum: Coconstructing the Identities of Mother and Activist,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 34 (2010): 530. ↩︎
2. https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-people/mother-jones ↩︎
3. Capdevila, “Lysistratus,” throughout. ↩︎
4. https://jacobin.com/2020/12/la-pasionaria-heroine-maternal-symbol-spanish-civil-war. ↩︎
5. For one relevant discussion of tragic mothers, “noble victim[s] of suffering,” as activists, see: Roslyn Weaver and Debra Jackson, “Tragic heroes, moral guides and activists: Representations of maternal grief, child death and tragedy in Australian newspapers,” Health Sociology Review 21, no. 4 (2012): 432–440. ↩︎
6. Teresa Casuso, Cuba and Castro, Elmer Grossberg, trans. (Random House, 1961), 79–80. Despite its title, this book is in fact Casuso’s memoir.  ↩︎
7. Casuso, Cuba and Castro, 80. ↩︎
8. Jose Anibal Maestri, “Niños de España,” ¡Ayuda! no. 4 (February–March 1938): 6. ↩︎
9. Francisco Domenech, “El Ejemplo de los niños muertos,” ¡Ayuda! no. 7 (October 1938): 6. ↩︎
10. Jorge Domingo Cuadriello, El exilio republicano español en Cuba (Siglo XXI, 2009), 25. ↩︎
11. Casuso, “Nana sin Niño,” ¡Ayuda! no. 3 (December 1937): 7. The title of a radio address, “The Lullabies Will Be Heard Again,” previewed the subject of the above poem shortly before it was written. Casuso, “Volverán las Canciones de Cuna a Escucharse,” ¡Ayuda! no. 2 (September/October 1937): 6–7. Both the word nana and the term canción de cuna, literally ‘cradle song,’ are translated as ‘lullaby.’ In other texts by Casuso, she drew a connection between herself as the childless mother and the orphans and other displaced children of the Spanish Civil War. See for example: Casuso, “Con los niños que iban en el ‘Mexique,’” ¡Ayuda! no. 1 (July 1937): 12–13. ↩︎
12. Comite Directivo, “Editorial: Asociación de Auxilio al Niño del Pueblo Español,” ¡Ayuda! no. 1 (July 1937): 4.  ↩︎
13. On the relationship between motherhood, the public sphere, and politics, see: Meghan Gibbons, “Political Motherhood in the United States and Argentina,” in Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse, Jocelyn Fenton Stitt and Pegeen Reichert Powell, eds. (SUNY Press, 2010), 253–277.  ↩︎
14. Casuso, Cuba and Castro, 79. ↩︎

To cite this article:

Ariel Mae Lambe, ‘Maternal Identity in Antifascism: The Case of Cuban Activist Teté Casuso,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 2, No. 16 (17 June 2026).

Maternal Identity in Antifascism: The Case of Cuban Activist Teté Casuso © 2026 by Ariel Mae Lambe is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0