There’s nothing superfluous or exaggerated in her extremely short Wikipedia page, so it’s not fair to say the article’s content is bad so much as it is unspecific and lacking. It’s talk page is even shorter, with most of the entries being about careful wording (Changing the word “venerated” to “revered” to avoid overly religious overtones, i.e.) and conjecture about whether Sánchez and Fidel Castro were romantically involved. The page is part of the Military History, Biography, Caribbean, Women, and Cuba WikiProjects.

This particular article does a good job at staying neutral while conveying the revery pro-revolutionaries in Cuba have for her. That being said, while it highlights her importance within post-Batista Cuba, it fails to communicate to the reader why she is truly important. The Cuban Revolution subheading talks about her role in the conflict as a messenger for guerrilla forces, but this discussion of it never transcends basic historical summary.

The Post-Revolution, Death, and Legacy subsections are far worse in terms of their lack of specifics, stating how she held the position of Secretary to the Presidency in addition to serving in the Council of State without mentioning any of her accomplishments or policies that greatly impacted Cuban society. The latter subsection was the most glaring case of this in my opinion. The article discusses her as an influential figure for post-revolutionary feminism without contextualizing it via the social, economic, and material gains women made after Batista’s government was ousted.

This brings me to my broader problem with the article: the lack of specifics and the emphasis on her ties to Castro give off the implicit understanding of her as a minor figure in the life of the infinitely more famous president. Its emphasis on the late leader makes her seem unimportant, though reading Becker and seeing the Wikipedia subsection about her life in the revolution suggest that this is far from the case.

There were a few books without links and articles specifically about Sánches, but sometimes even those only mention her in the context of Castro. I was frustrated there were no links to the biographies about her – even though this makes sense practicality – though I was happy to find an article about her influence on post-Batista female identity in Cuba, which highlighted her role as a sort of nationalist folk legend far more eloquently than the Wikipedia page citing it. The Becker page, while even briefer and summary-centered, gives the reader a far greater picture of her role as a revolutionary organizer and messenger and how her influence improved the social and material conditions of Cuban women.