Fidel Castro and the M-26-7 succeeded in taking power from the Cuban government in 1959, after years of fighting. The M-26-7 nationalist movement succeeded in ousting corrupt leader Fulgencio Batista from power, and in 1961 Castro deemed the revolution officially Marxist in nature. Throughout his 40-year tenure as president, Castro did not let his revolution stall, but rather allowed it to progress and adapt as he saw fit. In relation to the Castro revolution in Cuba, there was another revolution, that of Cuban women. Castro himself described the changes in women's public and private lives as "a revolution within a revolution." In a true system of equality, as in the one Castro considers his ideal, equality reaches all individuals, regardless of race, class, or gender lines. Throughout Castro's campaign, starting in 1953 with the failed Moncada bombing, Castro used historical reference to appeal to the Cuban population. The historical figure most often mentioned by Castro is none other than the national hero José Martí. Although Martí's views on women are up for debate, his views on equality are very clear. Martí once said: "Respect for the freedom and ideas of others, even of the most miserable being, is my fanaticism. When I die, or if I am killed, it will be because of this." The essence of this prophetic quote was borrowed by Castro on a broader level when he came to power and based his entire social structure on equality. Women in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba Gender differences were enormous in Cuba before the Cuban Revolution. The prototypical woman of the old republic, according to a prominent journalist of the revolution, Mirta Rodríguez Calderón, was Yina the prostitute. A poor woman...... middle of paper ......reigns against the colonizers who exterminated the indigenous population, the interventionists who sought to take over our island, the dictators and governments in power under the shameful servitude of transnational mandates impoverishing the country. Resolute and courageous patriotic women engaged in all necessary periods of the national liberation war. When the people took power, women identified the revolution that was beginning as their own Revolution, which immediately established free education and medical care for all without distinction, land and urban reforms, measures of great popular benefit clearly showed what the revolution intended to do. they did, and that is why they immediately agreed to participate intensively in all the construction and defense work of the new society which opened its doors with all the rights and opportunities they had never had previously..