Chase writes: "Our official recognition of the Cuban government after
fifty-five years of isolation, open aggression, and clandestine
destabilization is extremely important and must continue. Yet what already
seems clear is that the renewal of U.S. relations will not automatically
bring widespread prosperity, much less social equality, to Cuba."
Cuba. (photo: Flickr)
Cuba After the Thaw
By Michelle Chase, Boston Review
07 February 16
Will the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations mean worsening inequality for
Afro-Cubans and women?
n December 2014 President Obama made the stunning announcement that he had
used his executive power to negotiate with Cuba and would reestablish
diplomatic relations with our erstwhile enemy. Throughout the subsequent
year, the U.S. media focused on the more exciting aspects of reestablishing
diplomatic ties: the long-overdue removal of Cuba from the list of state
sponsors of terrorism; the moving act of raising the flag above the
reinstated U.S. embassy in Havana; and most recently, the sudden
announcement of big business interests sitting down with U.S. and Cuban
officials to negotiate compensation for properties expropriated by the
revolution a half-century ago. Our official recognition of the Cuban
government after fifty-five years of isolation, open aggression, and
clandestine destabilization is extremely important and must continue.
Yet what already seems clear is that the renewal of U.S. relations will not
automatically bring widespread prosperity, much less social equality, to
Cuba. The December 17, 2014 rapprochement between Cuba and the United States
came on the heels of several years of Cuban internal reform that have
deepened inequality, stacking the deck of the new political landscape in
favor of some Cubans. Not surprisingly, race and gender figure prominently
in Cubas growing disparities.
Even the most measurable change so far this yearthe spike in American
visitorsmay contribute to the islands deepening inequality. The growing
flood of U.S. tourists will inevitably provide new clientele for the
restaurants, home-stays, and other urban services that are the bread and
butter of Havanas new upwardly mobile class of business owners, who tend to
be light-skinned and often male, threatening to leave Afro-Cubans, women,
and vulnerable groups, such as the elderly, behind.
Why has inequality gradually returned despite the revolutionary governments
stated dedication to creating an egalitarian society? The problem has deep
roots. Far from being an island frozen in time, Cuban society has changed
rapidly over the past fifty years.
In the heady revolutionary year of 1959, expectations ran high. Although
Havana was known as the Paris of the Caribbean, much of the island was
impoverished, a legacy of its history as a sugar colony where fortunes were
raised on plantations fueled by African slave labor. With the revolution in
power, historically oppressed Afro-Cubans and their allies pushed for
redress, as historians Alejandro de la Fuente and Devyn Spence Benson have
shown. An unprecedented national debate on race and racism followed in the
mass media, at conferences and roundtables, and among new pro-revolutionary
anti-racist organizations. Similarly, throughout 1959 women
activistsincluding many affiliated with the Communist Partyformed new
revolutionary womens groups, sponsored conferences to discuss womens
rights, and presented their demands to the revolutionary leadership. It was
exciting, effervescent, a time when it still seemed that the revolution
might accomplish anything.
But by mid-1960, fearful of any social cleavages that might be exploited by
growing internal opposition or the United States, the revolutionary
government began to demand unity. In its drive to centralize political
power, it shuttered independent organizations, even those that did not
oppose the revolution. In mid-1960, all autonomous womens groups were
collapsed into the Federation of Cuban Women, a top-down mass organization
that served mostly to transmit directives to women and mobilize them for the
revolutionary cause. Autonomous Afro-Cuban associations of various kinds
were dismantled by the mid 1960s. (Unlike the womens groups, they were
never replaced by a government-sanctioned Afro-Cuban mass organization.)
These closures effectively removed formal organizational channels for
dissenting or merely independent opinions on race and gender equity.
Afro-Cuban religions, too, were pushed underground, where they survived and
reemerged to flourish in the 1990s.
By 1962, the revolutionary government confidently asserted that it had
eradicated all discrimination based on race or sex. Thereafter it became a
political tabooin fact, virtually counterrevolutionaryto suggest
otherwise. It is true that the social programs undertaken by the government
during the first few years of the revolution benefitted Afro-Cubans and
women disproportionately, especially the expansions of healthcare,
education, and professional opportunities. Yet certain underlying ideas and
social practices were left intact. The more robust, widespread questioning
of race and gender inequalities and ideologies that might have been spurred
by Afro-Cuban and women activists in 1959 was a lost opportunity. These
fault lines would reemerge in the 1990s...
In 1961, as U.S.-Cuban relations definitively ruptured, Cuba drifted into
the Soviet orbit. The alliance with the USSR buoyed the Cuban economy for a
time. But the relative abundance of the Soviet years, especially the 1980s,
was supported by massive subsidies. The fall of the Soviet Union prompted an
epic depression in Cuba in the 1990s, known as the Special Period, a
traumatic decade that scarred the population and prompted thousands to
attempt the dangerous passage to U.S. shores on rickety homemade rafts. The
redistributive efforts of the Cuban stateroughly equal salaries, rationed
foods, universal access to healthcare and education, and free or highly
subsidized serviceswere eroded or rendered insignificant by the economic
shock of the 1990s, never to recover.
Alejandro de la Fuente was among the first to document the return of racial
inequality during the Special Period. The social schisms wallpapered over in
the 1960s now returned with a vengeance in the 1990s. In the early 1960s
much of the islands middle and upper class, which were overwhelmingly
white, decamped for Miami. There they established a powerful exile
community, still largely white if now less affluent. In the 1990s they sent
remittancesa crucial lifelineto their family members on their island, who
were also mostly light-skinned. The historic patterns of race and residence
that the urban reforms had failed to disrupt were now monetized, as
predominantly white neighborhoods converted their better housing stock into
lucrative rentals. White, formerly middle-class Cubans mobilized the
cultural capital still embedded in their social networks to jostle for jobs
and scarce goods. Afro-Cubans were elbowed out of increasingly competitive
positions in the tourist industry, one of the only ways to access hard
currency (as opposed to Cuban pesos or convertible pesos, which have no
convertible value). Racist ideologies, prohibited in public since the 1960s
but maintained in private, now reemerged.
At the same time, the historic limitations of revolutionary measures to
liberate women also came back to haunt Cuba. The revolutionary government
had emphasized womens entry into the public sphere yet did little to
proactively remold the practices of the domestic sphere. Although the Family
Code of 1975 stipulated that women and men should share domestic burdens
equally, women continued to undertake the vast majority of domestic labor.
Womens double shift was taxing enough before the 1990s but, as the Spanish
anthropologist Isabel Holgado Fernández documented, the hardships of the
Special Period were particularly punishing for women. The shortages of
necessary goods elongated reproductive labor excruciatingly. Cooking,
Childcare, Standing in Line: this was the new socialist triad for women.
When I first began traveling to Cuba in the early 2000s, it felt like a
society slowly recovering from a war or some other collective shock. The
country was stabilizing, partly due to economic support from the government
of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Cars and buses returned to the streets; market
and store shelves were replenished. But survival stories were still fresh on
peoples minds. My friends recounted how their families had made it through
the darkest days of the Special Period. They told harrowing stories of the
relatives and friends who had fled on rafts or even run over the land-mined
border to the military base in Guantánamo. They shared memories of entire
families sleeping camped along the water to weather the unbearable heat
during long summer blackouts. Although life was improving for most Cubans,
economic liberalization also slowed down, and many of the private
restaurants and family-run bed-and-breakfasts lost their licenses and closed
shop.
When Fidel Castro stepped down in 2007 following an illness, Raúl Castro
began to slowly implement social and economic reforms. For a weary populace,
many of these were welcome: the removal of restrictions on travel abroad; an
open market in houses and cars; less emphasis on political mobilization and
more on increasing efficiency and production.
The most recent round of reforms announced in 2011, know as the Lineamientos
(Guidelines), marked a major economic restructuring: the state would
gradually and permanently shed up to 40 percent of its workers. The private
sector, once seen as something of a necessary evil, was now encouraged. The
government released a number of newly approved private professions for which
Cubans may solicit small business licenses. These recent reforms are
consolidating the social inequalities that began to grow during the Special
Period.
For reasons that were already becoming apparent in the 1990s, Afro-Cubans
are far less able to take advantage of the current round of economic
reforms. They more frequently lack family abroad to send remittances that
could be used to either offset their low salaries in the state sector or to
start a small business in the private sector. As anthropologist Katrin
Hansing has recently argued:
Most successful, private businesses, whether paladares [family-run
restaurants], bed and breakfasts, beauty parlors, nightclubs, yoga studios
and gyms etc., are owned . . . by white Cubans. Homes in exclusive,
overwhelmingly white, neighborhoods, such as El Vedado, Miramar and Siboney,
are being bought and sold for exorbitantly high prices and being restored to
their former glory with capital from abroad, furthering the association
between wealth and whiteness.
Recent studies by Cuban sociologists such as Dayma Echeverría, Teresa Lara,
and Ileana Díaz suggest that the current restructuring may also
disproportionately affect women. Women tend to be overrepresented in the
ongoing layoffs from state-owned businesses because they are clustered in
services rather than in the strategic sectors of mining, agriculture,
manufacture, or pharmaceuticals. Even when women are not laid off but
instead reassigned internally within state entities, some sociologists
speculate that women may be getting shuffled downward toward positions of
lower pay and responsibility. In general, womenespecially younger and less
educated onesare being left out of the formal workforce at greater rates
than men, producing a pool of women the Cuban government dubs inactivas:
neither employed nor seeking work, and not enrolled in school.
Once unemployed, women have a harder time than their male counterparts
finding new jobs either in the state sector or the growing private sector.
There are a number of reasons for this. Existing state-run job placement
programs target certain groups that tend to be male, such as people
finishing military service (which is mandatory only for men) or those
recently freed from prison (mostly men).
In the private sector, men tend to be the licensed owners of the assets that
form the foundation for most small businesses: agricultural plots, trucks,
cars, and other goods. (An important exception to this rule is the large
number of mostly white women proprietors who run small bed-and-breakfasts.)
Men moreover may have easier access than women to private sources of credit
and to the black market networks often essential to running a business in
todays Cuba. In addition, most of the state-approved occupations for small
businesses are traditionally seen as masculine, such as taxi driver, farmer,
or construction worker. Finally, many of the newly approved small business
categories involve manual or artisanal labor, making them less attractive to
professionals. The revolutions much-lauded accomplishments in raising
womens rates of educationwomen are now 60 percent or more of college
graduatesmay have perversely left them ill-equipped for the niche markets
of the new Cuba.
These discrepancies are reflected in statistics on the growing private
sector. As of August 2011, less than a quarter of small business
(cuentapropista) licenses were in the hands of women. Women are most likely
to enter the private sector as employees, not business owners. Clearly, many
women are also working in the private sector without licenses, probably
mostly in food preparation, childcare, and as domestics. While this shelters
them from the burden of paying taxes, it also prevents them from taking
advantage of social security, which was updated recently to cover private
sector employees. We may thus be witnessing a gradual feminization of
unemployment, underemployment, and informal employment in Cuba.
The 2011 economic reforms have helped consolidate the emergence of a more
dynamic and higher-paid private sector, largely male and light-skinned, part
of a new elite that is best positioned to take advantage of the economic
changes looming on the horizon. Recognizable patterns of poverty are also
consolidating, marked by decrepit housing in far-flung neighborhoods with
poor infrastructure, subsistence-level caloric intake, and lack of contacts
to find job opportunities. Afro-Cubans are vastly overrepresented among the
new poor, and single mothers and the elderly are especially vulnerable
within this group.
As the United States and Cuba further their rapprochement, there is a danger
that the future influx of investment capital, foreign companies, and
American tourists will further these patterns rather than disrupt them.
Ironically, the revolutions long-overdue recognition by its northern
neighbor may also hasten the demise of its fundamental project of social
equality. December 17 may mark a Pyrrhic victory after all.
It is unclear what the next few years will bring. Between the electoral
defeat of the Venezuelan left in December and the U.S. presidential
elections slated for next fall, new developments may come haltingly.
When I visited the island in October, my first visit after almost four
years, most of my Cuban friends flatly declared that nothing had changed
since I had last seen them. Yet I could sense subtle differences percolating
in their lives, especially in the various entrepreneurial schemes they had
in mind. One friend contemplated opening a small juice stand in front of her
house to take advantage of the morning commuters walking by. It would be a
Cuban peso business, not a high-earning one, but something to complement her
pension during her coming retirement. Another hoped to take advantage of the
more relaxed travel regulations for a quick fundraising trip to Ecuador,
in which he planned to bring back a light motorbike and some cell phones to
resell at a large markup. (The Ecuadorian governments recent decision to
reinstate visa requirements for Cubans will likely have dashed his plans.)
On my last night in Havana a friend took me on a long walk past the dark and
desolate piers where large cruise ships hailing directly from U.S. ports
will soon dock. Beyond that, he gestured, was the port of Mariel, once best
known for the mass exodus of 1980, and where an economic free zone is now
in development. I was reminded of my very first visit to the island in 2000,
when a woman I met recalled with a sudden burst of nostalgia the Soviet
cargo ships you could see docking daily before the collapse of the Soviet
Union left Cuban ports quiet. Havanas sheltered baythe raison detre for
the citys original settlementwill gradually be repurposed for mass
tourism, waterfront condos, and high-end restaurants.
There are some Cubans who view the current moment as one of opportunity as
well as risk. In November I attended a talk given by Afro-Cuban cultural
critic Roberto Zurbano, who was visiting Rutgers University in Newark. He
discussed various ways to inject conversations about race and Afro-Cuban
empowerment into the current bilateral thaw. He was enthusiastic about
future exchanges between civil society groups and institutions of higher
education. He saw such exchanges as an opportunity for Cubas anti-racist
struggle to find more transnational allies.
Later I asked him what, if any, changes he had noticed since D-17. He
cautioned that it was too early to tell; most change so far has been at the
level of discourse. But he mentioned one unexpectedly positive effect of
U.S. tourism, explaining that the uptick in African American travelers had
already changed the dynamics of street-level policing. Havana cops were
easing off their notorious harassment of black youths out of fear they might
be North American tourists. Its a small detail, but for us its important.
Because the authorities perceptions of blackness will keep changing as
African American tourism grows. It is an example of the kind of
unanticipated effects that the coming years may bring.
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o-cuban-inequality
Cuba After the Thaw
By Michelle Chase, Boston Review
07 February 16
Will the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations mean worsening inequality for
Afro-Cubans and women?
n December 2014 President Obama made the stunning announcement that he had
used his executive power to negotiate with Cuba and would reestablish
diplomatic relations with our erstwhile enemy. Throughout the subsequent
year, the U.S. media focused on the more exciting aspects of reestablishing
diplomatic ties: the long-overdue removal of Cuba from the list of state
sponsors of terrorism; the moving act of raising the flag above the
reinstated U.S. embassy in Havana; and most recently, the sudden
announcement of big business interests sitting down with U.S. and Cuban
officials to negotiate compensation for properties expropriated by the
revolution a half-century ago. Our official recognition of the Cuban
government after fifty-five years of isolation, open aggression, and
clandestine destabilization is extremely important and must continue.
Yet what already seems clear is that the renewal of U.S. relations will not
automatically bring widespread prosperity, much less social equality, to
Cuba. The December 17, 2014 rapprochement between Cuba and the United States
came on the heels of several years of Cuban internal reform that have
deepened inequality, stacking the deck of the new political landscape in
favor of some Cubans. Not surprisingly, race and gender figure prominently
in Cubas growing disparities.
Even the most measurable change so far this yearthe spike in American
visitorsmay contribute to the islands deepening inequality. The growing
flood of U.S. tourists will inevitably provide new clientele for the
restaurants, home-stays, and other urban services that are the bread and
butter of Havanas new upwardly mobile class of business owners, who tend to
be light-skinned and often male, threatening to leave Afro-Cubans, women,
and vulnerable groups, such as the elderly, behind.
Why has inequality gradually returned despite the revolutionary governments
stated dedication to creating an egalitarian society? The problem has deep
roots. Far from being an island frozen in time, Cuban society has changed
rapidly over the past fifty years.
In the heady revolutionary year of 1959, expectations ran high. Although
Havana was known as the Paris of the Caribbean, much of the island was
impoverished, a legacy of its history as a sugar colony where fortunes were
raised on plantations fueled by African slave labor. With the revolution in
power, historically oppressed Afro-Cubans and their allies pushed for
redress, as historians Alejandro de la Fuente and Devyn Spence Benson have
shown. An unprecedented national debate on race and racism followed in the
mass media, at conferences and roundtables, and among new pro-revolutionary
anti-racist organizations. Similarly, throughout 1959 women
activistsincluding many affiliated with the Communist Partyformed new
revolutionary womens groups, sponsored conferences to discuss womens
rights, and presented their demands to the revolutionary leadership. It was
exciting, effervescent, a time when it still seemed that the revolution
might accomplish anything.
But by mid-1960, fearful of any social cleavages that might be exploited by
growing internal opposition or the United States, the revolutionary
government began to demand unity. In its drive to centralize political
power, it shuttered independent organizations, even those that did not
oppose the revolution. In mid-1960, all autonomous womens groups were
collapsed into the Federation of Cuban Women, a top-down mass organization
that served mostly to transmit directives to women and mobilize them for the
revolutionary cause. Autonomous Afro-Cuban associations of various kinds
were dismantled by the mid 1960s. (Unlike the womens groups, they were
never replaced by a government-sanctioned Afro-Cuban mass organization.)
These closures effectively removed formal organizational channels for
dissenting or merely independent opinions on race and gender equity.
Afro-Cuban religions, too, were pushed underground, where they survived and
reemerged to flourish in the 1990s.
By 1962, the revolutionary government confidently asserted that it had
eradicated all discrimination based on race or sex. Thereafter it became a
political tabooin fact, virtually counterrevolutionaryto suggest
otherwise. It is true that the social programs undertaken by the government
during the first few years of the revolution benefitted Afro-Cubans and
women disproportionately, especially the expansions of healthcare,
education, and professional opportunities. Yet certain underlying ideas and
social practices were left intact. The more robust, widespread questioning
of race and gender inequalities and ideologies that might have been spurred
by Afro-Cuban and women activists in 1959 was a lost opportunity. These
fault lines would reemerge in the 1990s...
In 1961, as U.S.-Cuban relations definitively ruptured, Cuba drifted into
the Soviet orbit. The alliance with the USSR buoyed the Cuban economy for a
time. But the relative abundance of the Soviet years, especially the 1980s,
was supported by massive subsidies. The fall of the Soviet Union prompted an
epic depression in Cuba in the 1990s, known as the Special Period, a
traumatic decade that scarred the population and prompted thousands to
attempt the dangerous passage to U.S. shores on rickety homemade rafts. The
redistributive efforts of the Cuban stateroughly equal salaries, rationed
foods, universal access to healthcare and education, and free or highly
subsidized serviceswere eroded or rendered insignificant by the economic
shock of the 1990s, never to recover.
Alejandro de la Fuente was among the first to document the return of racial
inequality during the Special Period. The social schisms wallpapered over in
the 1960s now returned with a vengeance in the 1990s. In the early 1960s
much of the islands middle and upper class, which were overwhelmingly
white, decamped for Miami. There they established a powerful exile
community, still largely white if now less affluent. In the 1990s they sent
remittancesa crucial lifelineto their family members on their island, who
were also mostly light-skinned. The historic patterns of race and residence
that the urban reforms had failed to disrupt were now monetized, as
predominantly white neighborhoods converted their better housing stock into
lucrative rentals. White, formerly middle-class Cubans mobilized the
cultural capital still embedded in their social networks to jostle for jobs
and scarce goods. Afro-Cubans were elbowed out of increasingly competitive
positions in the tourist industry, one of the only ways to access hard
currency (as opposed to Cuban pesos or convertible pesos, which have no
convertible value). Racist ideologies, prohibited in public since the 1960s
but maintained in private, now reemerged.
At the same time, the historic limitations of revolutionary measures to
liberate women also came back to haunt Cuba. The revolutionary government
had emphasized womens entry into the public sphere yet did little to
proactively remold the practices of the domestic sphere. Although the Family
Code of 1975 stipulated that women and men should share domestic burdens
equally, women continued to undertake the vast majority of domestic labor.
Womens double shift was taxing enough before the 1990s but, as the Spanish
anthropologist Isabel Holgado Fernández documented, the hardships of the
Special Period were particularly punishing for women. The shortages of
necessary goods elongated reproductive labor excruciatingly. Cooking,
Childcare, Standing in Line: this was the new socialist triad for women.
When I first began traveling to Cuba in the early 2000s, it felt like a
society slowly recovering from a war or some other collective shock. The
country was stabilizing, partly due to economic support from the government
of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Cars and buses returned to the streets; market
and store shelves were replenished. But survival stories were still fresh on
peoples minds. My friends recounted how their families had made it through
the darkest days of the Special Period. They told harrowing stories of the
relatives and friends who had fled on rafts or even run over the land-mined
border to the military base in Guantánamo. They shared memories of entire
families sleeping camped along the water to weather the unbearable heat
during long summer blackouts. Although life was improving for most Cubans,
economic liberalization also slowed down, and many of the private
restaurants and family-run bed-and-breakfasts lost their licenses and closed
shop.
When Fidel Castro stepped down in 2007 following an illness, Raúl Castro
began to slowly implement social and economic reforms. For a weary populace,
many of these were welcome: the removal of restrictions on travel abroad; an
open market in houses and cars; less emphasis on political mobilization and
more on increasing efficiency and production.
The most recent round of reforms announced in 2011, know as the Lineamientos
(Guidelines), marked a major economic restructuring: the state would
gradually and permanently shed up to 40 percent of its workers. The private
sector, once seen as something of a necessary evil, was now encouraged. The
government released a number of newly approved private professions for which
Cubans may solicit small business licenses. These recent reforms are
consolidating the social inequalities that began to grow during the Special
Period.
For reasons that were already becoming apparent in the 1990s, Afro-Cubans
are far less able to take advantage of the current round of economic
reforms. They more frequently lack family abroad to send remittances that
could be used to either offset their low salaries in the state sector or to
start a small business in the private sector. As anthropologist Katrin
Hansing has recently argued:
Most successful, private businesses, whether paladares [family-run
restaurants], bed and breakfasts, beauty parlors, nightclubs, yoga studios
and gyms etc., are owned . . . by white Cubans. Homes in exclusive,
overwhelmingly white, neighborhoods, such as El Vedado, Miramar and Siboney,
are being bought and sold for exorbitantly high prices and being restored to
their former glory with capital from abroad, furthering the association
between wealth and whiteness.
Recent studies by Cuban sociologists such as Dayma Echeverría, Teresa Lara,
and Ileana Díaz suggest that the current restructuring may also
disproportionately affect women. Women tend to be overrepresented in the
ongoing layoffs from state-owned businesses because they are clustered in
services rather than in the strategic sectors of mining, agriculture,
manufacture, or pharmaceuticals. Even when women are not laid off but
instead reassigned internally within state entities, some sociologists
speculate that women may be getting shuffled downward toward positions of
lower pay and responsibility. In general, womenespecially younger and less
educated onesare being left out of the formal workforce at greater rates
than men, producing a pool of women the Cuban government dubs inactivas:
neither employed nor seeking work, and not enrolled in school.
Once unemployed, women have a harder time than their male counterparts
finding new jobs either in the state sector or the growing private sector.
There are a number of reasons for this. Existing state-run job placement
programs target certain groups that tend to be male, such as people
finishing military service (which is mandatory only for men) or those
recently freed from prison (mostly men).
In the private sector, men tend to be the licensed owners of the assets that
form the foundation for most small businesses: agricultural plots, trucks,
cars, and other goods. (An important exception to this rule is the large
number of mostly white women proprietors who run small bed-and-breakfasts.)
Men moreover may have easier access than women to private sources of credit
and to the black market networks often essential to running a business in
todays Cuba. In addition, most of the state-approved occupations for small
businesses are traditionally seen as masculine, such as taxi driver, farmer,
or construction worker. Finally, many of the newly approved small business
categories involve manual or artisanal labor, making them less attractive to
professionals. The revolutions much-lauded accomplishments in raising
womens rates of educationwomen are now 60 percent or more of college
graduatesmay have perversely left them ill-equipped for the niche markets
of the new Cuba.
These discrepancies are reflected in statistics on the growing private
sector. As of August 2011, less than a quarter of small business
(cuentapropista) licenses were in the hands of women. Women are most likely
to enter the private sector as employees, not business owners. Clearly, many
women are also working in the private sector without licenses, probably
mostly in food preparation, childcare, and as domestics. While this shelters
them from the burden of paying taxes, it also prevents them from taking
advantage of social security, which was updated recently to cover private
sector employees. We may thus be witnessing a gradual feminization of
unemployment, underemployment, and informal employment in Cuba.
The 2011 economic reforms have helped consolidate the emergence of a more
dynamic and higher-paid private sector, largely male and light-skinned, part
of a new elite that is best positioned to take advantage of the economic
changes looming on the horizon. Recognizable patterns of poverty are also
consolidating, marked by decrepit housing in far-flung neighborhoods with
poor infrastructure, subsistence-level caloric intake, and lack of contacts
to find job opportunities. Afro-Cubans are vastly overrepresented among the
new poor, and single mothers and the elderly are especially vulnerable
within this group.
As the United States and Cuba further their rapprochement, there is a danger
that the future influx of investment capital, foreign companies, and
American tourists will further these patterns rather than disrupt them.
Ironically, the revolutions long-overdue recognition by its northern
neighbor may also hasten the demise of its fundamental project of social
equality. December 17 may mark a Pyrrhic victory after all.
It is unclear what the next few years will bring. Between the electoral
defeat of the Venezuelan left in December and the U.S. presidential
elections slated for next fall, new developments may come haltingly.
When I visited the island in October, my first visit after almost four
years, most of my Cuban friends flatly declared that nothing had changed
since I had last seen them. Yet I could sense subtle differences percolating
in their lives, especially in the various entrepreneurial schemes they had
in mind. One friend contemplated opening a small juice stand in front of her
house to take advantage of the morning commuters walking by. It would be a
Cuban peso business, not a high-earning one, but something to complement her
pension during her coming retirement. Another hoped to take advantage of the
more relaxed travel regulations for a quick fundraising trip to Ecuador,
in which he planned to bring back a light motorbike and some cell phones to
resell at a large markup. (The Ecuadorian governments recent decision to
reinstate visa requirements for Cubans will likely have dashed his plans.)
On my last night in Havana a friend took me on a long walk past the dark and
desolate piers where large cruise ships hailing directly from U.S. ports
will soon dock. Beyond that, he gestured, was the port of Mariel, once best
known for the mass exodus of 1980, and where an economic free zone is now
in development. I was reminded of my very first visit to the island in 2000,
when a woman I met recalled with a sudden burst of nostalgia the Soviet
cargo ships you could see docking daily before the collapse of the Soviet
Union left Cuban ports quiet. Havanas sheltered baythe raison detre for
the citys original settlementwill gradually be repurposed for mass
tourism, waterfront condos, and high-end restaurants.
There are some Cubans who view the current moment as one of opportunity as
well as risk. In November I attended a talk given by Afro-Cuban cultural
critic Roberto Zurbano, who was visiting Rutgers University in Newark. He
discussed various ways to inject conversations about race and Afro-Cuban
empowerment into the current bilateral thaw. He was enthusiastic about
future exchanges between civil society groups and institutions of higher
education. He saw such exchanges as an opportunity for Cubas anti-racist
struggle to find more transnational allies.
Later I asked him what, if any, changes he had noticed since D-17. He
cautioned that it was too early to tell; most change so far has been at the
level of discourse. But he mentioned one unexpectedly positive effect of
U.S. tourism, explaining that the uptick in African American travelers had
already changed the dynamics of street-level policing. Havana cops were
easing off their notorious harassment of black youths out of fear they might
be North American tourists. Its a small detail, but for us its important.
Because the authorities perceptions of blackness will keep changing as
African American tourism grows. It is an example of the kind of
unanticipated effects that the coming years may bring.
