Mass Weddings Cuban Fashion

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29767, 9 March 1962, Page 2

Mass Weddings Cuban Fashion

(From a Reuter Correspondent) HAVANA. Multiple “revolutionary weddings” between young Cuban couples are now being encouraged by full publicity from the Government-controlled press. No fewer than 80 couples were married simultaneously at a recent ceremony at the headquarters of the Cuban Women’s Federation m Santiago de Cuba.

All the grooms and most of the brides wore the uniform of the National Militia, or of one of the Voluntary Teachers’ brigades mobilised against illiteracy. The municipal magistrate heard the mass responses of the couples during the short civil ceremony, which took place in the presence of the representative of the Cuban Ministry of Justice for Oriente Province. A smaller ceremony, the double wedding of four “graduates” of a school for revolutionary instructors at a village near Havana, was typical of the approved “revolutionary marriage.” Instead of the traditional flowing dresses and white veils, the two brides wore the olive-green shirts, worsted trousers and black boots of the Militia. Their bridegrooms, who had previously been ceremoniously “ducked” in the village swimming pool, were also in olive-green uniform with the shoulder -badge of the school A revolver hung in its holster at their hips, and they walked with their brides under an archway of rifles held by fellow militiamen. One newspaper report called the new form of wedding dress “a reflection of the way in which Cubans integrate every one of their acts into the socialist revo-

lution” and quoted with approval, a wedding guest's comment: ‘Tor once, vanity is absent from such an oc* casion.” As the director of the school conducted the civil ceremony, the two couples were attended by six children, aged about seven, wearing the white shirts with red berets and sashes of the Rebel Pioneers, the junior branch of the Young Rebels movement.

This type of group wedding is fast replacing traditional church marriages among Cuba’s teen-age bridal couples.