We argue that the Cuban transition has created three economies with their own motives and mechanisms of mobilisation and valuation (Table 1). The motives and methods of the paternalistic statism that characterised society during the period of Soviet dependency and led to the crisis of the "Special Period" have largely been left behind. Emerging from the crisis and its structural origins, Cuba has gone through two interconnected transitions: one, top-down, in which the post-socialist elites have reorganised various state monopolies as commercial enterprises that enable the power apparatus to survive and fund a reduced range of social services (Morales, 2009); and another, bottom-up, in which the population has reorganised everyday relationships, both inside and outside the state, in order to allow households to survive.

2 Thiemann and Spoor (2019) addresses similar issues to this chapter, but focuses on agricultural production and rural livelihoods.

#### *Interactions between Cuba's multiple economies*

Table 1 summarises our analysis of the three subsystems that make up the Cuban socio-economic space. The first column contains all the surviving operations of the paternalistic state: a state that intends to feed its inhabitants (regulated and unsubsidised food), offers them clothing, assigns them a job (social service), provides them with subsidised education, health and cultural options, assists in case of unexpected events (Civil Defense) and even provides household appliances (as during the "Energy Revolution" of the mid-2000s). This social economy has been of particular political utility in sustaining egalitarian assumptions and legitimating a stagnating "revolutionary process". It has functioned as a strategy for social cohesion and signification around the semantics of "socialist equality". This economy uses state philanthropy to prioritise social concerns and includes several forms of distribution, such as rationing, subsidy, gratuities and loyalty incentives.

Source: Authors' compilation

This social economy survived the transition, but only just. Pressed by the economic crisis of the 1990s and 2000s, the government approved cuts to general spending, reductions to state services and subsidies, and began raising funds from previously free services. Thus, in both practical and symbolic terms, the discursive constructs and egalitarian underpinnings of the hoped-for "construction of socialism" were liquidated (Espina et al., 2011: 59–75; Mare, 2019). Thirty years after losing its position as a subsidised "outpost" of the Soviet Union, Cuba's paternalistic state depends more than ever on the sacrifice of its workforce of specialised professionals, local bureaucrats, manual workers and technical personnel. State-sector workers are the social actors that are both the "natural" allies of the perpetuation of state paternalism and the most vulnerable to its changes. After three decades of inflation and wage stagnation, the 3.1 million full-time workers in the state sector received an average monthly salary of \$32.38 in 2018 (ONEI, 2019), a token amount even in the Cuban context.3 Several authors have calculated that real wages in 2011 reached only 26%–27% of their 1989 value (Vidal & Everleny, 2012: 9; Mesa-Lago, 2012: 8); Mesa-Lago gives the figure for 2016 as 39.3% (2017: 5). State wages, along with pensions, social security and other redistributive payments, account for just 3.5% of Cuban GDP.4 Although the monetary reform announced for January 2021 promises to considerably raise nominal wages in CUP, we estimate that inflation, the dollarisation of many domestic markets, and the impacts of the pandemic, will mean real wages will not rise in 2021–22.

When it comes to household sustenance, the post-socialist transition has already taken place. While state employment is still formally the norm on paper, for most state employees their formal salary is only a secondary (or tertiary) source of income. By upsetting the relative balance between wages and consumption that characterised Cuba's social-centralist economy under Soviet tutelage (1972–1991), the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) reduced its paternalistic obligations. By sending Cubans out to fend for themselves, however, it oddly insisted that they continue to fulfil their part of the social contract between the paternalistic state and proletarian society. The state continues to regulate the economy in a way that means citizens must almost exclusively work, sell, buy from and respond to the demands of its omnipresent apparatus. Hence, rather than seeing it as a deviation from the script of command economics, the PCC's response to the economic crisis of the Special Period constituted a *radicalisation* of the

3 In the official press, the secretary general of the Cuban Workers' Confederation acknowledged that wages were not enough to meet needs (Granma, July 31st 2017). We estimate that fewer than 10% of Cuban households are able to meet the costs of their basic monthly food basket solely through salaries and pensions (those earning over \$50 per household member at the informal exchange rate) (see also Belyea, 2018). This percentage falls even further when daily costs for transportation, utilities, basic home maintenance and medical care are calculated.

4 Authors' calculation based on ONEI data (2018), taking into account the GDP deflator calculated by Vidal (2017: 12).

Guevaran model of voluntary work based on morality rather than payment. The result is that both the elites and the working population have been obliged to seek other, informal ways of sustaining themselves.

In spite of this generalised sacrifice, the social economy is becoming increasingly limited in scope. Every year since 2008, the "*libreta*" (ration booklet) has offered a smaller variety of subsidised products, with some of the remaining ones habitually substituted or missing from stores. The paternalistic state today guarantees food at subsidised prices for the first week of every month (a policy that appears to end with the January 2021 monetary reform). After that, the population must find solutions on the black market or succumb to the military's highpriced supermarkets.

In the absence of a new social contract, and rejecting the radicalisation of voluntarism, the vast majority of Cubans reformulated their obligations to the state as opportunities for day-to-day privatisation, increased participation in black and grey markets, and rely on remittances and their domestic recirculation. Rather than trusting the macrodynamics of nation-construction and institutionalised redistribution, their economic lives have shifted to the microdynamics between unsustainable dependencies and illegal autonomies.

Coexisting with the paternalistic state but much less visible is a second sphere: the corporate state. Here, we find the main actors in the top-down post-socialist transition: conglomerates that belong to the military leadership, their loyal managers and professionals, and a small number of international companies associated with this elite. They operate within an opaque environment with little balance of power (Tedesco, 2018; Klepak, 2012; Pedreira, 2013).5 Indeed, this capitalist sphere has become the main "fortress" of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR): "defending the system" has evolved from military tasks of territorial defence to commercial operations for economic survival. Siddiqa (2017: 1–2) suggests that an economy's degree of militarisation is not measured only by the size of its defence budget, but by the political economy of its "military capital": "Profit-making ventures conducted by the military, with the involvement of armed forces personnel or using the personal economic stakes of members of the defence establishment". So while 1952 marks the beginning of the military dominance over politics in Cuba, which was cemented after the Rebel Army entered Havana in 1959, the military economy we now know is more recent. It was fostered in the 1990s with the unification of the various operations carried

5 The nature of its organisation and members means that it operates with no direct (or even partial) oversight, that the information on its assets and budget is neither public nor accessible and that its managing officers do not grant interviews or reports. Its military status is justified by the economic strategy in the name of national security and its secrecy on the premise that "the enemy" should not be given access to such information.

out by agents of the Ministry of the Armed Forces (MINFAR) and the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) to provide the country with foreign exchange (Sweig, 2016: 71, 135–6). From that point on, military-led entrepreneurialism expanded to manage tourism, the domestic foreign exchange market, air transport, mining, biomedicine and various exports of profitable products such as tobacco and rum (Tedesco, 2018: 113).

The military's activity in the post-socialist economy therefore differs categorically from the arms and military construction companies set up in the 1960s and 1970s. There are four essential differences: 1) military corporations today react to business opportunities rather than matters of defence; 2) they have embarked on the open pursuit of surplus value rather than defined national security objectives; 3) military companies compete with civilian companies that could perform the same business activity; and 4) the FAR have created informal hierarchies that exist in parallel to those designated by the constitution. During the presidency of Raúl Castro (defence minister since 1959 and main architect of the corporate transition) this elite took control of key ministries and public agencies in order to command the main sources of surplus value (the commercialisation of medical services, tourism, revenues from remittances and the trading of imported products, exports of sugar, tobacco and rum, among others) and capital (e.g. the national spatial planning system, the Banco Financiero Internacional (BFI), and the corporation that manages Cuba's protected areas, Flora y Fauna). The most profitable company in Cuba is currently the multisectoral conglomerate Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA in its Spanish initials). Its sales are estimated at between \$4 and \$5 billion per year, a figure that represents over 10% of GDP (González et al., 2018).

Through GAESA and other smaller conglomerates, the corporate state concentrates and controls almost all profitable economic sectors. Institutionally separate from the social state's egalitarian, redistributive motives, it seeks to maximise its margins by recasting citizens as paying customers. However, its profitmaking is only possible due to the monopoly it exercises over key economic sectors and the unfavourable regulation of possible competitors. No foreign company can sell its products and services without the participation of the corporate state, while unaffiliated Cuban citizens are only granted licenses and economic spaces that do not interfere with established monopolies. To protect the exclusiveness of its export markets, for example, the government refused the Barack Obama administration's proposal to allow small Cuban businesses to export to the United States as part of the intent to thaw bilateral relations. Crucially, several key monopolies originally established to facilitate the role of the paternalistic state now serve the corporate state. High subsidies have thus become high margins.6 In these conditions, GAESA's projects and those of similar corporations can grow very rapidly, and despite being companies with severe operational inefficiencies, they manage to invest in their value chains and establish branches (for example, of the supermarket chain aptly named "Currency Collection Stores" (Tiendas de Recaudación de Divisas) and the Panamericana chain throughout the country.

In part, the corporate restructuring of parts of the state is based on the transition from one mode of international dependency to another. In the 1990s, Cuba was disconnected from what Cubans called the "pipeline" of donations from countries governed by PCC sister parties. Though Hugo Chávez's taking power in Venezuela allowed a new setup of dependency on this (initially) much more productive sister-economy, Cuba's model of intergovernmental dependency appears to have ended conclusively with the collapse of the Venezuelan economy between 2014 and 2017. Rather than unleashing major productive forces at home, the state has since focused on reconnecting with another external benefactor – the diaspora of Cuban refugees in wealthier countries. Rather than opening a new "pipeline", the state now faces a multitude of irregular "hoses" into the country, typically extended by family members abroad. In the period from 2008 to 2018, remittances (as a flow of subsidies to Cuba) exceeded the value of the goods, credit, fuel, knowledge, investment and weapons sent annually by the USSR and its satellites in the 1980s.7 The main difference between the two periods of external dependence is that the state had direct access to the first, while today it needs to develop commercial mechanisms to seize a share of the second. In order to participate in the transfer and domestic redistribution of remittances, the entrepreneurial state has extended its trade networks so as to be able to buy cheap

6 One sector that reveals how the corporate state's interest in increasing commercial margins often prevails over the paternalistic state's endogenous development interests is the policy applied since the 1990s to the import and sale of tools in state stores. One interviewee, a representative of a foreign firm with a long-term presence in Havana, explained how basic electric and hand tools are rendered inaccessible to the population: "They proposed that we open a shop to sell electric and hand tools to the public, and we were very interested because there is a large market for these products. We gave them our proposal with the prices at which we'd supply the products to the store, which would be run by Habaguanex. At the next meeting they showed us the list of prices they would set for the public, and they were triple the cost. Nothing would sell that way, and we can't bear the investment costs for a store that will be ghosted" by the population (# 5, Havana, 30.11.17).

7 According to Mesa-Lago (2018), between 2008 and 2018, Cubans on the island received \$57.3 billion from the diaspora. Of this, \$29.9 billion was in cash and \$27.3 billion in goods. In the space of 11 years, this form of external subsidy surpassed the aid Cuba received from the USSR in almost 30 (estimated at \$30 billion), as well as the estimated \$40 billion it received from Venezuela over 17 years.

merchandise on the (overproduction-driven) international market, multiply its value in Cuba's scarcity-driven domestic markets, and thus obtain exceptional commercial margins.

This favourable context for Cuba's fledgling state capitalism is explained by its leaders' direct access to power. While the Soviet central planning model is maintained in the ministries, a parallel hierarchy now controls most of the assets and investments needed to actually implement planning. The Ministry of Domestic Trade (MINCIN), for example, may decide to improve its outdated refrigeration and transport capacity in order to improve the effectiveness of its tasks to collect and distribute domestic products to stores and agricultural markets. In practice, however, these resources are invested elsewhere – primarily in GAE-SA supermarkets that sell imported luxury products (Thiemann & Spoor, 2019). Given their close (often family) relations with the main leaders of the PCC and the FAR, it is likely that in certain cases the directors of the corporate state have more power to make key decisions about the economic sectors they participate in than the (civilian) ministerial cadres whose job it is to plan and regulate the same sectors.

This capacity of the business elite to establish political interests means they may be conceived of as a new class: a social sphere where profit motives and protective power converge with new and exclusive entrepreneurial autonomies from the state's tax and redistributive system that have conclusively divorced from the PCC's egalitarian ideals (Riggs, 2001). This class benefits from access and entrepreneurship opportunities, clientelistic ties, political power and financial leverage far beyond those of the other economic agents we present here. It accepts economic reform, yet retains a Cold War mindset in its political thinking, coupled with an acute need to maintain the ideology of statism on which its monopolies rest. To do so, the entrepreneurial FAR preserves its hegemony in state security matters and encourages military supervision of political processes. In short, a class that is "increasingly despotic in its relations with workers, and which in the course of its consolidation and development begins to self-recruit and to maintain production/appropriation relations of an exploitative nature" (Quijano, 2014: 580–581).

A third sphere of the mixed economy counterbalances the first two, and grows in their contradictions. This is the popular or autonomous economy in which a large variety of black and grey markets, perks and bribes coexist with semi-legal self-employment. Although wages in some state sectors nominally rose in 2018, most of the labour carried out in Cuba takes place in a subaltern context, as an "ongoing struggle for autonomy and progress in a context characterized by multiple patterns of dependency and associated processes of exploitation and marginalization." (van der Ploeg, 2008: xiv). The origin of this

definition lies in debates over non-capitalist relations in agriculture (the "peasant condition"), but in the Cuban context it is notable far beyond the specificities of agricultural work. Through a broad portfolio of economic subversion and resistance strategies, state workers have transformed their jobs into platforms for the "everyday privatisation" of state assets and inputs. Large parts of the population have accepted and normalised their at least partial dependence on illegal transactions and practices. The macroeconomic weight of these practices has increased and – we argue – jumped category: initially supplementary channels for scarce goods, black and grey markets have come to represent the main source of income for a significant majority of households. They are also key markets for many goods and services, from gasoline to cement.

Extensive illegal economies existed in all countries that followed the Soviet central planning model, including the Cuba of the 1980s (Loś, 1990; Smart, 1993; Smart & Hsu, 2007). Within these supplementary economies, citizens set about correcting the clumsy movements of the planned economy (shortages of some products and services, and overproduction of others). Since the Special Period, however, the provision of basic needs and the search for progress in Cuba have become individualised and displaced into the underground economy on a scale that exceeds both the Soviet *blat* and the Chinese *guanxi*. The imbalance between the increasingly limited agency of the paternalistic state and the exploitative practices of corporate monopolies leads many Cuban households to participate in this third economy on a much larger scale and daily basis: when they buy groceries, hygiene products or newspapers; when they pay electricity bills; when they require transport; when they build or repair their houses; when searching for jobs, medical treatment, legal permits or documentation. The lack of official data means that it will remain difficult to quantify this economy, but from our observation the autonomous economy has already become the largest of the three, and the one that "*resuelve*" (solves) most problems and needs in the daily life of Cubans (Ritter, 2015; Hirschfeld, 2006).

Most state workers rely on alternative activities to supplement their wages. Many of these activities take place during their working hours, at their workplace and at the expense of their companies' social or business purposes. Necessity has led Cubans to legitimise a day-to-day life of illegal trade, misappropriated resources, petty bribery and tax evasion. "*La lucha*" (the struggle) is the name commonly given to illegal (trans-)actions that are performed in order to subsist. But "*la lucha*" also constitutes an area of collective agency that transforms the country from the bottom up, as it allows the practice of resistance to a government that gives no space to other, more explicit manifestations. Lacking serious political platforms, people demonstrate economically.

The praxis of autonomy is rolled out in a series of informal economies that resist power, yet also avoid confronting it (Scott, 1985).  We propose to frame the vast majority of self-employment within what Shanin (1990) calls "expolary economies" – spaces of subsistence practice and motivation that lie outside the socialism–capitalism dichotomy.

Grey markets can also describe civil servants who improve their salaries with what Riggs (2001: 817–818) calls "prebendary income": personal income or advantages deriving from access to state assets (vehicles, machinery), scarce goods and services, privileged information and administrative powers (cf. Katsenelinboigen, 1977). Even the majority of legal businesses (state-run, cooperative and private) routinely engage in opaque transactions, source from the black market, hire unlicensed labour and evade taxes. Most of these activities take place in a regime of "tolerated illegality", whereby the government avoids explicit prosecution of most illegalities so as not to incur economic and political tensions, thus effectively permitting these activities within a legal limbo and limiting itself to selective interventions (Bloch, 2018).

The mixed economy produces bifurcations and gaps that are undesirable but latent in the country's day-to-day life. According to Bloch, they form the basis of the balance of power between the PCC and society, developed over the last three decades of post-socialism. If the paternalistic state were to enforce its own laws, leaving the population with only the token salaries it provides legally, a mass exodus from state jobs would result (including from the bureaucratic and executive bodies) and the PCC would face more serious threats to its absolutist retention of political power. And yet its operations, alongside the military's margin's, have shaped the state into a double-edged presence in people's lives. It has, in short, come to unite two contradictory functions: improving people's conditions (in CUP), and sharpening their exploitation (in \$).

#### *Subversion and everyday resistance in the autonomous economy*

In the contemporary context of globalisation and the centralisation of commercial and state hierarchies, studies of the popular economy have highlighted invisible forms of resistance and autonomy reproduced in everyday practices. These resistances are not merely considered forms of reaction or explicit confrontation, but also of production, affiliation and action. Authors such as Negri (2006), van der Ploeg (2013) and Schneider and Niederle (2010) consider that, while open, direct organised resistance (political movements, armed struggles) tend to

be most visible, often everyday, indirect, disorganised resistance processes have a larger impact on countries' political and economic evolution. In his theory of "everyday resistance" (1985) James Scott engages with a phenomenon that may be applied to the Cuban reality. He analyses the set of disorganised, covert and generally depoliticised acts that subvert the norms, laws and economic and social structures imposed from above. In Scott's theory, everyday resistance begins where compliance with what is established ends, and any action against the system is considered an act of "rectification". Far from being a deliberate act of speculation to defend apparently selfish personal interests, it may be understood as a subaltern initiative to survive and reproduce under difficult conditions. Although these exercises occur by altering economic relations, they avoid open and organised confrontation with political power (Scott, 1985: 290). In this sense, everyday resistance is incapable of overthrowing a government, but quite capable of overriding its policies.8 Linz and Stepan (1996: 9) suggest that in systems that more severely restrict economic rights, the strength of illegal practices that empower the population on a broader scale (i.e. without creating new hierarchies) can be seen as de facto democratisation. Everyday resistance can thus promote greater economic plurality, as well as the development of forms of association and exchange that oxygenate the status quo. That is why it is common for "illegality" to spike in periods of political decadence, societal realignment and transition.

The informal mechanisms and structures of everyday resistance in Cuba not only comprise an economy that is larger than the official one, they also represent a more widespread socio-cultural phenomenon than the top-down culture of voluntarism, and a sphere of everyday politics that draws more citizen participation and discussions about what is legitimate and what is not than the PCC's mobilisations and the debates around the "socialist model". Since the 1990s, the effects of everyday resistance have become more and more pervasive; they have accumulated and amalgamated. The internal policies of state companies and agencies are no longer what ensure that their employees remain at their jobs. In many sectors, achieving a living wage means adjusting to activities that have largely lost their stigmata and are considered essential to basic sustenance: theft from the state, misappropriation, bribes and commissions are thus justified and sanitised.

In Scott's terms, "infrapolitics" are socio-economic actions that have political weight while occurring in a depoliticised way (Scott, 1990: 183–201). His integrated vision of infrapolitics explains how different practices and discourses of resistance can sustain each other. Everyday resistance as a behind-the-scenes

8 In *Everyday Politics* (2005), Benedict Tria Kerkvliet describes how acts of everyday resistance in the predominantly peasant societies of Vietnam and China managed to defeat communist collectivisation projects and lead to a legitimatory opening to private initiative from the bottom up, which the government began to institutionalise in the 1970s and 1980s.

phenomenon of societal readjustment can also be assimilated within the study of "free spaces". These are meeting places where close association fosters collective identity, shared grievances, frameworks of opposition and tactical innovation (Johnston, 2005: 108–137). From a sociolinguistic point of view, such legally porous livelihoods tend to shape a lexicon as elusive and cryptic as the practice it accompanies. In this lexicon the "hidden transcripts" of everyday economic culture are expressed, revealing forms of a resistance that often remain invisible. Thus, the study of infra-resistances is not limited to a range of practices that contravene the public transcripts of the dominant group. It also involves deciphering speech acts that may include rumours, urban legends, jokes, euphemisms, codes and rituals, as well as other symbolic, relatively passive covert acts that have immediate effect but lack an explicit identification with the political sphere. In fact, not only do the vast majority of the subjects interviewed not link their actions to an explicit political objective, they deny any (potentially dangerous) relationship to politics at all.

In Cuba, "to live and let live" has become the basis of the language between workers and those meant to monitor them (inspectors, police, company managers, etc.). As one interviewee said, referring to the inspectors with whom he has a bribery agreement: "I know what they want and they know what they are coming for" (# 67, Camagüey, 22/1/20). The popular saying "*invento, luego resisto*" (I invent therefore I resist) is an example of the enigmatic language that as a metaphorical operation accompanies daily activities to the point of representing essential business communication. Several small traders we interviewed – intermediaries between the source of misappropriation in an official institution and the clientele of families and small businesses – said that they communicate with their buyers via mobile phone, always calling and never via messages, in order to avoid surveillance. In the calls they use an alternative language: for example, beef – a product whose commercialisation is still a criminal offence – is referred to as "tomato" for these purposes. In such circumstances, good relations must be maintained with partners to ensure no one reports you ("*echar pa´adelante*"), which would lead to being caught ("*te llevan*") because, after all, as one interviewee comments, "if you don't screw, you get screwed, and if you don't go there, they take you" (#10, Havana, 03/2/17). This cause and effect relationship seems to reduce the impact of illegality on daily life and normalises theft, fraud and the misappropriation of goods. A popular saying gives a clue to the perceived acceptability of this practice: "Thief who robs thief [read: the state], a hundred years pardoned". This language becomes highly functional for everyday resistance not only in strategic terms, but also to create common references around a social space, to open up opportunities and accompany contentious political action. In this sense, social learning takes place via extrinsic motivations that nevertheless have a normative sense: by observing social models, these mechanisms are reinforced by repeating what is legitimate and refraining from what is sanctioned in public life.

In a report on the blog *Generación Y*, the independent journalist Yoani Sánchez describes the inevitability of living with the black market from the perspective of consumer:

I try to imagine an incredible 24 hours when I don't have to resort to the informal market. How about one day without the milk bought from those knocking on my door […] I can't imagine a day without delving into the black market to buy eggs, oil or tomato sauce. Even to get a cone of peanuts, I have to cross the line of illegality […] Not to mention the wide range of underground workers I have to call upon when the washing machine breaks, the gas burner clogs or the shower stops working. All of them – in the shadows – support my day-to-day and supplement the limited services provided by the state […] But the most amazing thing is the infinite capacity for regeneration informal sellers show after one of the frequent raids on them. I don't know about you, but I can't live a day without the black market (Sánchez, 2008).

Without "*la lucha*" or access to the opportunities it provides, the vast majority of Cubans would struggle to survive, let alone prosper. They thus overwhelmingly choose a livelihood over a political voice. They invest their dissatisfaction, effort and aspirations in constructing black and grey markets, in underground production and suitcase-based importation, in the spontaneous and concealed privatisation of state resources, in the expansion of practices beyond those authorised by "self-employment" licences,9 in the evasion of controls and taxes, among other ruses to avoid the law. These practices are so prevalent that their motives, ethics, structures and consequences far exceed the rationale of proletarianisation and voluntary work. In place of orders and slogans, a more informal activity that is individualistic but family-based and self-directed predominates, but with the fears and insecurities that are natural to the subaltern sphere.

One interviewee, a storekeeper in a hospital, explained the social dynamic created so that a specific job may be used to meet family demand. His fundamental expenses are food, and in his position he is able to "*resolver*" the needs

9 Since 1993, certain specific economic activities have been legalised under the unlikely common legal denominator of *cuentapropismo* (self-employment) (Mesa-Lago et al., 2016). The portfolio of approved private businesses includes a range of businesses, from those that generate liquid assets and have privileged access to imports and neo-patrimonial ties to the corporate state (e.g. non-agricultural "cooperatives" formed by former cadres with connections), to small-scale individual or family production.

of his six-member family in terms of dairy, meat and eggs. While his boss does not know exactly how he does it, he turns a blind eye to him taking some things because "he knows how bad the situation is and he does it himself – so I should have my turn as well … Then I help out the caretaker with a packet of milk or a bag of yogurt and I leave with the products in the trunk" (# 49, Havana, 11.18.19). To supplement his 750 CUP wages, the interviewee also sells some of the stolen products. Taking one example from his account – the powdered milk intended for hospital patients – we learn that the respondent misappropriates approximately 20% of the total stock and sells it for 2,200 CUP per month. This product alone thus raises his salary by 293%.

As it is safer to involve other workers in the product extraction chain (shift manager, caretakers, colleagues), the practice of this so-called "*búsqueda*" (search for resources to misappropriate) has collective traits in many workplaces. This relationship is described in popular parlance as "*sociolismo*", a jovial inversion of the term socialism (*socio* in Spanish means associate/partner). In (and between) workplaces where "*sociolismo*" reigns, the people involved do not necessarily like each other, but everyone keeps up appearances. Relations based on bribery thus become small theatres of friendship, as the word "*socio*" shows – a partner is someone you ask for help and who helps as if you were a friend, concealing the fact that they are really helping you in exchange for a bribe, money or protection.

Masha Gessen's *The future is history: How totalitarianism reclaimed Russia* includes a popular saying from the Soviet Union that attempts to describe this balance: "We pretend to work, and they [the state] pretend to pay us" (2017: 64). Several interviewees underlined that as well as offering higher earnings, self-employment allows them – albeit temporarily – to overcome the stagnation and inefficiency of work in state hierarchies. For professionals, state jobs continue to offer a desirable and necessary source of social status, while non-state work in their sectors is more strictly outlawed and stigmatised. Many professionals therefore maintain themselves by working in both spheres, gaining status and tranquillity in the one and monetary sustenance in the other. An interviewee who works as a journalist described it:

The reason I don't leave journalism to dedicate myself entirely to online marketing is not just because of the facilities the first gives me to achieve the second, like the internet connection, but because promoting private business has no legal recognition. I live in an endless ethical conflict: run the risk of being caught, with the professional consequences that would bring, or continue to financially support my family (#71, Camagüey, 11/3/20).

That said, everyday resistance cannot be analysed as an exception that can be located and eradicated, but rather as an endemic and functionalised element of the Cuban system. Any future regulatory or legislative change – in any direction – will face an economic reality created by millions of Cubans "*luchando*" (struggling within/against) the law, normalising and legitimising their economic countercultures. Aware of this reality, the government has nonetheless not embarked on structural changes that could free the population from the illegalities they practice every day and from the uncertainty, inefficiency and dependency they generate.

Ritter and Henken (2015) locate the cause of widespread illegalities precisely in their statist critique. They write that the state's monopolies that structure legality according to unpopular expectations and the exercise of rigid central planning create chronic bottlenecks, inefficiency and missing incentives for workers. The authors consider that this creates a perfect environment for rentseeking, for the theft and private use of scarce state resources, for corruption, the black market and the underground economy. Given that the vast majority of civil servants and state employees (including the managers, ministers and generals) participate extensively in the illegal economy and that the systematic repression of this illegality would worsen the situation in the country, the state is obliged to tolerate it and restricts itself to drawing red lines. This approval is also the foundation of the post-socialist political system: the state limits the application of its own laws against the illegal economy, but firmly maintains the power to grant or prohibit access to each individual or profession. Instead of universal economic rights, subsistence thus depends on individual favours that are conditioned, personalised and come with certain obligations:

Virtually every instance of personal domination is intimately connected with a process of appropriation. Dominant elites extract material taxes in the form of labor, grain, cash, and service in addition to extracting symbolic taxes in the form of deference, demeanor, posture, verbal formulas, and acts of humility. In actual practice, of course, the two are joined inasmuch as every public act of appropriation is, figuratively, a ritual of subordination (Scott, 1990: 188).

Cubans give up their political and civil rights on a daily basis in order to maintain their economic rights – in other words, their carte blanche to continue acting outside the law. As apolitical individuals, they are permitted to "*luchar*" in their state or private jobs. Individuals and projects that express dissident opinions or seek to escape the web of imposed loyalties, however, are quickly stifled by the application of dormant legal and administrative regulations. Vincent Bloch quotes a source that describes this relationship succinctly: "You *suffocate*, then you start to *invent*, meaning you *mark yourself*, then you have to *clean yourself*, and then you fall into Fidel's machinery" of self-censure or token participation (2015: 34).

Notions and experiences of power and subordination are renewed via this daily ritual of defining, committing and absolving illegal acts, more so than by explicitly political deliberation. One the one hand, power, in the state–society hierarchy, shows a capacity to disregard and repress economic processes of great importance to the people, but on the other it cements that capacity as a legal necessity, establishing illegality as normality. The deference, tributes and perks that buy and maintain the powerful's benevolent tolerance thus become a necessary daily condition for the subaltern. On a personal level, the application of the many prohibitions in force is highlighted by close, public experiences of confiscations and convictions that have an intimidatory effect (also resulting in the world's second-highest rate of incarceration).10 These may be avoided in exchange for voluntary un(der)paid labour, as well as symbolic work, ranging from participation in official demonstrations to public non-dissent. At the sectorial level, it ensures that most members of each trade (whether they are artists, taxi drivers or plumbers) tend to abstain from association and criticism.

Another great value of Scott's ontology of the relationships that interweave domination and submission lies in his attention to the fact that, far from a simple application and affirmation of power, they represent a field of mutual negotiation and inhibition. Here lies both the key to the continuity of the Cuban order of domination-by-prohibition, as well as the explanation of its futility in development terms:

The bond between domination and appropriation means that it is impossible to separate the ideas and symbolism of subordination from a process of material exploitation. In exactly the same fashion, it is impossible to separate veiled symbolic resistance to the ideas of domination from the practical struggles to thwart or mitigate exploitation. Resistance, like domination, fights a war on two fronts. The hidden transcript is not just behind-the-scenes griping and grumbling; it is enacted in a host of downto-earth, low-profile stratagems designed to minimize appropriation. In the case of slaves, for example, these stratagems have typically included theft, pilfering, feigned ignorance, shirking or careless labor, footdragging, secret trade and production for sale, sabotage of crops, livestock, and machinery, arson, flight, and so on. In the case of peasants, poaching, squatting, illegal gleaning, delivery of inferior rents in kind, clearing clandestine

10 According to official data in *Granma*, May 22nd 2012, and the international list by Warmsley (2012), from which micro-nations were excluded.

fields, and defaults on feudal dues have been common stratagems (1990: 188).

Although the PCC retains the nuclei of control and loyalty necessary to perpetuate its position of absolutist power (single party, tactical control over large companies, tight censorship of the press and academia, etc.), everyday resistance has significantly limited its ability to set agendas and priorities. In other words, everyday resistance has made Cuba an often economically ungovernable country. The vice president of a Havana municipality shared an interesting parable with us. In his experience as a state manager, "the country is like a person with an open belly. Everything slips out, the organs cannot function, and the effect of any order we may give them is overriden" (#1, Havana, 2/3/18).

#### Conclusions: How can a new social contract be developed?

What do we learn from a society in which the usual study of economic statistics, publicly expressed opinions, laws and formal powers, and open and organised resistance is intertwined with the study of the hidden transcripts inscribed in its fabric by illegal, informal and everyday transactions, hierarchies and practices of resistance? Much has been written about how alternative spaces for expression and subsistence developed in so-called illiberal or "closed societies" (e.g. Gessen, 2017: 47–64; Fitzpatrick, 2000). Several authors have traced how these previously illegal practices have been formalised during post-totalitarian transition processes, and how they have affected the course of these transitions (Thelen, 2011; Polese & Rodgers, 2011). Little study (and even less comparison), however, has been made of countries where the political transition – with its fundamental basis in the legalisation and normalisation of existing popular economies – was abandoned half-way. Cuba's paternalistic system conclusively collapsed in 1992–3, causing (and for wages we might say formalising) the need for a bottom-up transition that has been carried out over the subsequent three decades without legal and political recognition, but with even more force and dominance in everyday life and livelihoods.

We conclude with four themes that are both implicit interpretations of our ongoing research and questions/hypotheses for further inquiry:

1. *The importance of the popular economy*: The series of transactions that make up the popular economy, including black and grey markets for products, services and access to opportunities, remittances arriving via irregular channels, everyday resistance and illegal activity, constitute essential supports for the Cuban population. From being a supplementary space for exchange, black and grey markets have become the main economy. The proliferation of digital markets, including sites such as *revolico.com*, the different "*paquetes semanales*" (compilations of digital information that reach every corner of the island, cf. Dye et al., 2018) and promotional applications will continue to offer new routes for illegal everyday activities, while avoiding both state control mechanisms and the physical monopolies of its corporations.

2. *The political dimension*: Every economic transaction, especially those committed in spite of the risk of sanctions from the state, is an expression of people's opinions and preferences. The more deficient a population judges the economic system imposed on it to be, the more intense, ingenious and obstructive will be the acts of resistance to which they resort to defend themselves from scarcity, stagnation and inequalities of access. In a setting in which virtually all inhabitants depend on illegal activities, the system of governance perpetuates a vulnerability among its citizens (subalternity) that privatises their discontent and dissent. Acts that constitute theft, illegality and corruption from a legalistic perspective are in Cuba above all acts of disobedience of the military-controlled corporate state's attempts to extract foreign exchange. They also show disobedience of the paternalistic state's demands that its employees work in exchange for insufficient wages and subsidies. Hence, when the leaders of the party-state carry out campaigns against corruption, they do so from their position as employers who manage projects of exploitation as well as projects of development.

Rather than accusing the self-employed and participants in black markets of corruption and moral deficiency, policymakers should rethink the core issues hindering transparency in internal market relations. In Cuba, an intolerable gap has opened up between the narrative of continuity promoted by the government and the daily experience of a population navigating the transition, seeking terms for its analysis, means to express interests and spaces for association. Trust – in the government, in the legal system, in the perception of justice – is a shared perception variable that will not grow through official propaganda, but from a project to formalise the popular economy.

3. *The socio-cultural dimension*: The rational response of a society that faces a series of uncertainties lives on in its social imaginary. For the time being, it is difficult to imagine how, after decades of generalised and legitimised theft, Cuban society can re-develop codes of citizenship, tax discipline, a mutually beneficial relationship with state institutions and societal agreements about acceptable and unacceptable levels of inequality.

4. *The social contract and formalisation*: The absence of a social contract which the majority of society subscribes to and upholds is due to the state – in its laws, proclamations and interactions – failing to recognise the real economic relations the population is developing, thus leaving them in a legal, cultural and political limbo. According to Gauthier (1986), a social contract is founded when the different classes that make up a society enter into a sufficiently transparent, credible and majoritarian commitment on how to conceive, generate and distribute a country's wealth and opportunities. The PCC has not been able to reproduce the social contract of the Soviet period – "a tacit agreement" between the regime and the workers "to exchange political obedience for social security" (Cook, 1993: 1–18) – without massive donations of economic means from a sister country. Cuba's fledgling state capitalism will not result in a new pact between the social classes because its low productivity and focus on recirculation economies (receiving remittances, tourism and the sale of imported goods) prevent value creation that is broad enough to improve wages at a societal level and thereby forge a new consensus based on capitalist development – as in the case of Chinese and Vietnamese post-socialism. The PCC would face difficulties reinventing its "historic mission" and monopoly of power in this setting. Most importantly, current inter-

national conditions – most importantly the technological shift away from cheaplabour driven manufacturing – will likely prevent a repetition of the "Chinese transition". In Cuba, a new social contract can only be conceived by reengaging with the motives, mechanisms and (de)legitimacies of the popular economy.

A social contract is a basis for cooperation (Rawls, 1971; Gauthier, 1986). As long as the motives behind the three economies remain unreconciled within a tacit societal commitment, and as long as post-socialist transitions (from above and below) continue to advance in a disconnected manner, it is hard to imagine how the entrenched mutual inhibition between the three economies could turn into beneficial cooperation and competition. In order to achieve a dynamic of endogenous development in Cuba (i.e. development not driven by donations from sister countries or the diaspora), participants in the popular economy must limit theft and the subversion of the law, the paternalistic state must limit its outlawing of actions that contribute to subsistence, and the military-run business system must limit the over-exploitation of the country's human capital and resources. Neither of these developments appears likely at this point.

#### References

**Louis Thiemann.** PhD researcher in Development Studies with a focus on economic anthropology. Recent publications include *Beyond the "Special Period": Land reform, supermarkets and the prospects for peasant-driven food sovereignty in post-socialist Cuba (2008*–*2017)* (2019) alongside Max Spoor; and *Formas de sobrevivencia en Cuba: "Resistencias cotidianas" en La Habana, Matanzas y Sagua la Grande* with Sergio Ángel and Claudia Mare. ORCID: 0000-0002-0995-9643

**Claudia Mare.** PhD in Cultural Studies and Associate Researcher at Gobierno y Analisis Político A.C. (Mexico). Her recent publications include *Literature, Politics and Society: Four Representations of Imaginaries in the Cuban Revolution*  (2020) and *Memes, Satires and Tropes in Cuba: Digital Humor as Infrapolitics in the Post-Revolution* (2020, Bogotá). ORCID: 0000-0003-4465-4770

#### *Ruxandra Ana*

## *Bailarín, Bailador, Callejero, Inflador:* **Being/ Becoming Professional on Cuba's Dance Scene (An Ethnographic Approach)**

On New Year's Eve 2019, halfway through my eight-month fieldwork in Havana, I found myself at a house party organised by Isabel, one of my closest and dearest acquaintances in the city. Her son, Ernesto, had been my first dance teacher when I started travelling to Havana in 2011, and even though he had given up teaching tourists, we would still dance together occasionally and talk about my experiences with different salsa schools in the city. On the night of the party, Ernesto told me: You see how this became good business in the past years? How many dance schools do you remember from the first time you came here? And look how many you have now. It's easy money, and any good dancer will have more knowledge than most of the tourists coming here, so what they do is they keep dancing with you during class, like I did with you tonight, but they call it teaching and they take your dollars.

His words resonated with my own dancing experience in Havana. Over the years, I took lessons in living rooms, basements, backyards, kitchens, studios, theatres, parks, terraces, rooftops – and this non-exhaustive list does not include the "lessons" I received (sometimes even against my will) in the street, in bars or at parties. Year after year, the lessons started more to resemble my lessons in Europe than my first lessons in Havana: I was making online appointments on the schools' websites, my teachers carried business cards and wore t-shirts with the school name and logo, they discussed their methodology with me before starting the class, made sure I stretched before and after class, offered me discounts after a certain number of lessons, invited me to try out other dance styles, and made sure to check I had left a positive review on Tripadvisor, Airbnb and Google Maps. And, most importantly, I would always be reassured that I was in a "professional" dance school, with "professional" teachers. Almost imperceptibly, a shift had happened.

\*

This paper puts forward a grassroots perspective on Cuban entrepreneurship and newly emerging work models by addressing the increased professionalisation of dance teaching aimed at foreign tourists. By analysing the experiences of dancers and dance teachers in Havana, I discuss the tensions between notions of "professionalism" defined from the point of view of the Cuban state and its institutions that specialise in dance education, on the one hand, and private businesses, on the other, where notions of market, competitiveness and personal branding put forward new understandings of what it means to be professional. My ethnographic fieldwork indicates that professionalism comes to be understood primarily as individual responsibility, ambition and improvement, with internationalisation – whether through social media or more direct relations with foreigners – playing a key role in developing the business. At the same time, the relationship between tourism economies, entrepreneurship and politics of (self) representation reveals ambivalent and shifting attitudes towards the state and the emerging private sector.

The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Havana over 12 months in 2018–2019 in two research stays and draws upon previously conducted research, mainly among dancers, dance instructors, owners of private dance schools, performers and tourists taking part in dance lessons. The main methodological tools I employed were long-term participant observation among groups directly or indirectly involved in the creation, development and commodification of dance-related heritage and ethnographic interviews.

The embodied aspect of dance was key to my fieldwork. I participated in individual and group dance lessons, as well as in workshops organised for tourists and in training sessions before stage performances. Whenever possible, I attended dance events in various locations in Havana, from well-established venues, famous among Cubans and tourists alike, to newly opened spaces or parties organised by the different dance schools I worked with. The first part of the article discusses the reforms introduced by the Cuban government in order to facilitate entrepreneurship and some of the social consequences of these new measures. I focus on the relatively new businesses centred on dance and their position in the processes related to the commodification of heritage. I then move on to analyse the meanings attached to "professionalism" by dancers and dance school owners, discussing the implicit tensions and ambivalence in relation to the state.

#### Cultural heritage and emerging work practices

The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991 determined a series of drastic changes in Cuba, as the country lost the support of its most important economic partner. Cubans faced extreme poverty and changes to the political and economic system became inevitable. Two reforms that occurred in 1993 were particularly significant: Cubans were allowed to own foreign currencies (thus introducing two parallel denominations, access to which would only deepen economic inequalities and social stratification)1 and to take up private initiatives (*trabajo por cuenta propia* or *cuentapropismo*), which would bring supplementary income to the state budget. The country reopened to foreign visitors and the government invested heavily in tourism infrastructure. Small businesses renting rooms to tourists were legalised in 1997. Initially depicted by Cuban authorities as a "necessary evil" (Fernández, 1999), the sector has undergone a dynamic expansion over the past two decades, becoming one of the main sources of foreign currency and investment. At the same time, although a marginal activity after the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 (Carmona Báez, 2004), *cuentapropismo* has established itself as one of the key areas of Cuba's tourism-based economy. This became especially relevant as the financial crisis intensified, tourism and remittances fell as a result of the international crisis (Hoffmann, 2010) and the enterprising strategies used to creatively navigate daily hardships came to signal the island's neoliberal turn (Perry, 2016). The broad body of literature addressing recent economic reforms has emphasised public policy towards entrepreneurship and the informal sector (Ritter & Henken, 2015), the social effects of economic adjustment (Espina Prieto, 2004) and the impact of transition on social policy (Mesa-Lago, 2007). However, the relationship between entrepreneurship, commoditised cultural heritage and the politics of (self)representation remains under-represented in studies of contemporary Cuba.

Self-employment in Cuba allows a shift from the state sector to the private sector, reshaping work relations and becoming a symbol of economic and political transformations. This is due to the meanings attached to the legalisation of independent work, with *cuentapropistas* being regarded as facilitators of the transition from socialism to a free market economy (Phillips, 2006). Self-employed workers remain subject to strict regulations and taxation by the state, but are otherwise characterised by occupying a distinct position outside state-regulated work, defining new market relations that place them between the state sector and the private sector. New spaces and forms of economic activity as well as emerging work practices, common for post-socialist transitions, create the basis for individual explorations of new spheres of decision-making and self-reliance. While self-employment may not necessarily lead to entrepreneurship, the speci-

1 The Cuban convertible peso (CUC) and the Cuban peso (CUP) were Cuba's official currencies at the time of my research. The value of one CUC was roughly equivalent to 1 US dollar and worth 25 times as much as the CUP. As of January 1st 2021, Cuba transitioned to the unification of its double currency system, eliminating the CUC.

ficity of the Cuban context and state regulations make developing the enterprise possible only through self-employment (Peters, 2015). Its peculiarities lie in the fact that it has been shaped by state socialism and the "second economy" (Pérez-López, 1995) that emerged to provide the goods and services the state was unable to and which went on to become a structural feature of Cuban economy.

As discussed by Ritter and Henken (2015) in their analysis of Cuban entrepreneurship, restrictions on the private sector have either resulted in a classic "brain drain", pushing some of Cuba's most educated and skilled citizens abroad, or in a particular form of "insile", forcing them out of their field of expertise and into much better remunerated work, although perhaps less socially beneficial. Such downward mobility, which saw doctors, lawyers and teachers working as taxi drivers, waiters or managing private accommodation, happens because professional activities are still prohibited, as well as private business in sectors like education and healthcare. However, some exceptions, while still heavily regulated, have opened the doors to innovation and created the premises for capitalising on cultural heritage both in Cuba and outside it.

The above-mentioned downward mobility has a counterpart in the cases I am addressing in this article: with no other capital required except for bodily capital, Cubans who become involved in the dance business experience an upward mobility – financial and symbolic – due to the imaginaries and narratives about dance and dancers created mostly outside the island. By adopting and adapting these narratives, Cubans subject themselves to a "self-folklorization" process (Klekot, 2014) which underlines the inequalities of international tourism, which are made and remade in social practices. For tourists, dance practices become "embodied souvenirs" (Ana, 2017) that make Cubanness available and, in a way, portable through the body that experienced it. In this way, dance comes to function as a key symbol of cultural tourism, employing the "rhetoric of the Caribbean body" (Scher, 2011) – understood as lightheartedness and sensuality – and leads to the commodification of Cubanness in its entirety, a phenomenon that can only be regarded in relation to class, gender and racial hierarchies that are deeply rooted in colonialism (Stoler, 1995).

With music and dance at the core of Cuban popular culture, their transnational circulation and popularity abroad brought about processes of commodification that are simultaneously cultural and political and have played a key role in the development of the tourism sector. Anthropological studies have discussed artistic forms beyond their local anchors, and in the field of dance in particular it is possible to observe the creation of transnational "social spaces" around specific genres (Waxer, 2002; Pietrobruno, 2006; Davis, 2015). While in the Cuban context the dance business itself is by no means comparable to well-established

private initiatives like *casas particulares* or *paladares*, 2 it does occupy a central position in processes related to the commoditisation of heritage and it illustrates the standardising regimes that situate dance between cultural heritage and leisure commodity (Pietrobruno, 2009). Performances and the transmission of dance traditions become part of the touristic and political uses of culture, strongly determined by economic factors and operating with essentialist concepts and definitions of identity. Intangible heritage creates socio-economic revenue and the moving body becomes the main tool for accessing tourism economies. Economic realities and social inequalities that stem from contact with foreigners result in creative approaches for financial gain, perpetuating expectations about Cuban fantasies, as dancing bodies become transactional through the maximisation of bodily capital (Wacquant, 1995).

Images of "authentic" music and dance have to a great extent come to shape the touristic modes of visualisation and experience, at the same time revealing the processes of commodification and standardisation behind these images. Ultimately, they have also contributed to the creation of a rapidly growing market for dance and dance teaching.

Over time, dance practices on the island also started functioning as an interface for more complex networks of alternative economies, revealing the rising inequalities and social stratification that arise as direct effects of market socialism (Morris, 2008), creating new spaces, forms and means of revenue. In the next section I discuss how, against this background, the processes of institutionalisation of Cuban dance reveal the fluid relations that stem from encounters on the dance floor between Cuban dancers and foreign visitors and reshape the notion of professionalism.

#### The business of dance: what makes a professional?

In 2010 the Cuban government announced that it would reduce work in the state sector while at the same time introducing new policies to facilitate self-employment. The private sector was ultimately supposed to absorb the "redundant" workers in the state sector, which proved to be rather unrealistic, especially given the stigma that still surrounded the private sector. The list of permitted activities was published in *Gaceta Oficial* no. 12 in October 2010 and included 178 categories (some of them extremely detailed, such as piñata seller or umbrella repair), to be augmented to 181 in 2011 and 201 in 2013, and again reduced to 123 in 2018 through the reorganisation of 96 activities within 28 categories. With the new laws, the hiring of labour was liberalised and it was permitted to rent facil-

2 Restaurants run by self-employed people.

ities from either the state or other citizens in order to set up small enterprises. While all professional activities were still prohibited, there were some exceptions – and number 101 on the list read "*Profesor de música y otras artes*" (Teacher of music and other arts). The first half of 2011 saw a change of tone in official media, and self-employment stopped being deemed a temporary solution. Instead, it was encouraged and by 2014 the number of self-employed workers had tripled compared to 2010 (Ritter & Henken, 2015: 162). The Cuban state intended to introduce a radical overhaul of the Cuban economic system that would favour *cuentapropistas* (Pérez Villanueva, 2015), which was however brought to a halt in August 2017 when the government suspended the issuing of new licenses to certain businesses until "the self-employment system has been brought to perfection" (*Gaceta Oficial* no.31, 2017).

It was in this climate of uncertainty that in March 2018 I found my friend Mireya worrying about the future of her business amid the uncertainty surrounding the forthcoming new regulations from the government. For the past four years she had been quite successful in running a dance school owned by her brother, who after a few years spent abroad had returned to Cuba and reclaimed his business. She had lost any source of income and even though she had found a place for a new school, she could not hire people who wanted to work for her because they could not apply for a dance teacher's license. Two of the teachers who had worked with her in her brother's school chose to follow her and started training the future teachers, so that they would be able to start working once they got their license. In order to be able to register her new business, Mireya had to change her documents so that the address of the new school would appear on her ID as her residence. Despite the hardships she had to navigate, Mireya managed to set up her new school and even receive her first groups of dancing tourists (in other contexts, this would have been labelled a form of neoliberal governance which compels – or "empowers" – people to consider themselves entrepreneurial subjects). "There is no need to wait for the state to give you anything. I am an *empresaria* (entrepreneur), I make all the decisions, and the government has no say in this as long as I pay my taxes", she told me one day in front of the school, while handing out leaflets to passers-by. She did however express her support for another measure rumoured to be included in the new laws, namely allowing only one license per person. "It's not normal to have five or seven licenses, you can't cook here and dance there, you either cook or you dance".

Later that year, on July 10th, *Gaceta Oficial* no. 35 would shed some light – and cast a lot of doubt – on the new laws and regulations regarding self-employment. The Vice Minister of Work and Social Security, Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera, clarified during a press briefing that the new measures did not mean self-employment was taking a backwards step, but it would be carried out in a more orderly manner (Figueredo Reinaldo & Extremera San Martín, 2018): "There are workers who own a cafeteria and at the same time have a manicure license or one for producing and selling shoes. In practice, this person is the owner of several businesses and this is neither the essence nor the spirit of self-employment, which consists of workers carrying out their activities on a daily basis". In her support of the government's decision to limit the number of licenses one could hold, Mireya expressed a certain degree of trust in the state's regulatory framework; however, with labour security shifted towards the individual and an unstable income she found herself in a position to somewhat circumvent the regulations.

As far as the activity of dance schools and dance teachers was concerned, the new regulations described it as follows: it is forbidden for teachers of music and other arts to constitute schools or academies, they cannot issue graduation certificates, work is individual and therefore they cannot contract the services of other teachers or instructors, nor organise events of a competitive nature or otherwise.

The new dispositions came into life as of December 7th, but as early as November they were already all everyone ever talked about in the schools where I conducted research. In a display of distrust that characterised much of everyday life under socialism (cf. Verdery, 1996) the actual legislative text was deemed less important and relevant than the various interpretations of it which circulated widely among dancers, who would voice their concerns over what they had heard from their peers about the new laws. Mireya expressed these worries one afternoon after a group lesson which involved ten of her dancers: "Only three of my teachers have licenses. And now they say that they will check who is a trained dancer and who is not. I think it's because the government didn't get enough money from the dance schools, we pay taxes in Cuban pesos so it's not profitable for them". The only bright side she saw – if they were allowed to continue without the requirement for trained dancers – was that she had managed to change her documents and thus appeared to be renting out the space to the dancers teaching in her school. Thus, if the authorities come to inspect, it would be easy to justify that they are in fact doing "individual work", and thereby complying with the rules. Sofia, the owner of another dance school, found a different way to circumvent regulations: "Most schools will have to shut down because of these new requirements for teachers to have graduated from the ISA or the ENA in order to work in dance schools.3 But this is not a problem for us, 70% of my dancers graduated from one of these institutions. I always said I wanted professional dancers, long before the new laws were announced. Now, if an inspector comes to check, even if he spends the entire day at the school, instructors who are not graduates

3 The Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) and Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA) are two of the most prestigious schools for the arts established by the Cuban government.

can be presented as assistants, so it is not a problem". These reactions illustrate the type of accommodating relationship that arises when the total avoidance of the state is seldom possible (de Soto, 1989). But they also indicate the role of the state not just in legalising a particular activity, but in legitimising it and making it more profitable through the sense of security and responsibility implied by the notion of being "professional".

This became particularly relevant in recent years, with the increased demand for "experiential tourism" (Salazar, 2011). Cultural practices and symbols that ensured recognition and revenue gained meaning both locally and internationally,

A few years ago I noticed that whenever I was offered lessons in a dance school the license was the main argument used to convince me. "I am a dance teacher, I have my license and everything" was the usual conversation opener. But as more dance schools started functioning, especially in Havana, the license argument stopped being enough. Unlike *casas particulares* and *paladares*, legality was no longer the main concern nor the main argument used to attract potential new clients – professionalism was. The most common explanation given for this was the state's failure to control and regulate certain key aspects of self-employment. In an 2018 interview, Rogelio, choreographer and owner of a dance school, explained as much: "Nobody asks for any proof or documents [of formal education in the field of dance], you just go and say you want a license to be a teacher of music and other arts. And they did this in all sectors, cell phone repair, hairdressers – nobody checks your skills. Nobody but the market.  But with dance it's more difficult because sometimes tourists don't know if they were taught well or not. Beginners in particular can't tell the difference between a professional and a fraud, they can be tricked easily".

Rogelio's comment draws the attention towards the regulatory mechanisms of the market, which can establish and confirm one as a professional where the state fails to acknowledge the differences between practitioners. In fact, one's ability to understand the market and the demands that come from tourists is understood as the key to achieving success and is very often presented in opposition to the state's lack of flexibility and capacity to innovate. Two of the dancers who followed Mireya to her new school pointed out the differences between the two business models – the "socialist" one and the "capitalist" one –making it clear that from their point of view a private business should adopt what they considered a successful capitalist model. Eduardo explained it in the following way: "when you have a business which does not belong to the state you need to have a capitalist way of thinking, you need to think more about the business than about the personal problems of the people who work for you. Let's say we both work for the same school and you are a much better dancer than I am, you teach better, but I constantly have problems and complain to the owner – she will give me all the clients and leave you with no work for days because I have problems. This is very unprofessional".4

Functioning outside the state-regulated system, many of the self-employed dancers and dance school owners enjoy a new-found independence and sense of freedom that the state sector lacks. But at the same time, they contribute to the creation of new social norms characterised by increased individualism and autonomy (Ewick & Silbey, 2003). The "self-steering" capacities of the individual designate new rules for everyday life: initiative, ambition and personal responsibility, in an attempt to maximise one's human capital (Rose, 1996).

Another recurring aspect in discussions around the professionalisation of dance teaching is the increased flexibility and readiness to adapt to an ever-changing schedule based on clients' demands. Whenever I apologised for being late for a dance lesson (having somewhat internalised a more relaxed approach to time and schedules), my teachers would explain that while the client can be late, the teacher cannot, as this would be considered unprofessional and be reflected in the reviews left by the clients. As opposed to being employed in the state sector and therefore having a somewhat fixed schedule, work in the private sector means adapting to a different kind of lifestyle, one that puts the clients and their needs ahead of one's private life, personal plans and priorities.

Many of the dancers I worked with pointed out that their free time had become practically non-existent, since the time they didn't spend teaching was dedicated to finding new clients. Such was the case of Merced, owner of a dance school and *casa particular*, whom I'd meet quite often at salsa parties in one of the most popular venues in Havana: "I am a professional, I graduated from ISA, and at times I can go a week without anyone. If you don't have a [travel] agency or a foreigner to send you students, your only option is to be out in the street all the time". For Merced and for many other dancers, having graduated from a state institution is an extra legitimisation which should at least theoretically ensure a steadier flux of clients, this differentiating them from the teachers who lack this kind of formal training. However, in most cases dancers cannot rely on their expertise or experience alone to build their client base, and it is widely acknowledged that international cooperation with a travel agency or a dance school abroad can increase client numbers (especially given the rising pop-

4 My findings match those of Amelia Rosenberg Weinreb (2009), who in her study of Cuban "consumer-citizens" points out that while abandoning an analysis built around binary categories might be an appealing intellectual endeavour, some of these binaries remain present and relevant in the daily lives of Cubans.

ularity of "dance trips" or organised tours that place a strong focus on dancing and include lessons and parties in the programme). The desired/targeted client is a tour operator, who would ensure a steady and significantly higher income. In reality, many schools rely on individual clients who find information on the internet or simply happen to be passing by the school, ask for dance lessons on the spot or make appointments from one day to the next. Social media has come to play a very important part in running the business: before opening the new school, Mireya had already made sure she had hired a team of professionals to build the school website and manage social media accounts; reviews on Tripadvisor and Facebook comments were carefully monitored by school managers, who would sometimes employ strategies the dancers disapproved of just to make sure the clients were content. Sofia recalled one such situation during one of our interviews: "When one client couldn't have his lesson as planned, I offered him two free lessons, as a courtesy. I had to explain to the teachers that even if the client doesn't pay, they will still get their money, but this is a way to make sure the client leaves happy and writes a good review. Most of the times they don't understand how this works, because they just want their money, they don't care about anything else".

The professionalisation strategies discussed above were ultimately aimed at ensuring international visibility (most often measured in reviews, popularity on social media and reservations from tourists who had either seen videos of the teachers dancing, or had come across the school's website) and a relatively constant workflow, at least during high season. But at the same time the growing demand for dance re-emphasised a differentiation between two groups of practitioners: those who learned to dance from family and friends, and those who acquired it through formal instruction (McMains, 2013). This, in turn, generated a series of ambiguities around the very notion of professionalism and rendered the apparently clear-cut distinction between state and private somewhat less clearcut, as I discuss in the following section.

#### Bailarín, bailador, callejero, inflador

In 2012, while doing research among rumba practitioners in Matanzas, one of my closest acquaintances at the time shared the good news that her grandson Omar had been admitted to the ENA. "We are all *bailarines empíricos*5 in this family", she told me, "and he has been dancing ever since he was very little. But he is the first of us to get into the ENA, even though others have tried before

5 A term used to describe those who learn to dance in informal community settings (e.g. from family and friends) rather than in organised classes.

him". As I returned to Matanzas in the following years, she was often critical of the knowledge being passed on to her grandson and his classmates, since in her opinion the teachers were superficial in explaining Afro-Cuban folklore, which she referred to as "our heritage, our roots". However, she did point out that as a *bailarín profesional* (professional dancer) he would have more opportunities to find work in a dance company after graduation.

Six years later, I met Omar on the set of *Bailando en Cuba*, a TV programme/ competition aimed at finding Cuba's most talented young dancers while at the same time promoting the island's dance heritage. He was going to perform with some fellow dancers and then he was off to work in one of the hotels in Vedado, one of the more affluent neighbourhoods in the capital, a major tourist attraction with a bustling nightlife. "I work as a choreographer for a dance company and we have shows four times a week, it's going really well. Before this I was in another company, we would train a lot but there was no work". Omar was not the only one to draw a clear line between training and actual work. Many of the dancers I worked with pointed out that being in a dance company meant – in the best-case scenario – a salary of a few hundred CUP and additional money when the company is contracted for a show. This kind of insecurity led many of them to seek employment with the somewhat more profitable dance schools aimed at foreign audiences, where, as explained by Danaysi, "you don't have to wait for the end of the month to get your money. And besides, clients take you to places you can't afford, because they are too expensive. As a teacher you work a lot, but it's not the hard work of a *bailarín professional*".

A few months later I met Omar again at Casa de la Cultura in the neighbourhood of Centro Habana. I was there with a group of tourists from Poland who had come to Cuba to take part in dance, music and personal development workshops, organised by Anna, a dance teacher I had taken classes with a few years before in Warsaw. Omar was there to help his friend Yordanis, who led the class along with Anna. Just like Omar, Yordanis works as a choreographer for a dance company and for this occasion he had to find five other male dancers, so every woman in the group would have a partner. Before the lesson started, I asked Anna why she didn't choose any of the salsa schools for her project. "I know Yordanis and his work, but I also know how they work in those dance schools and I am not interested. I wanted professional dancers for my women, not some random guys from the street who say they are dance teachers".

The lesson had a different structure to the one I was used to from the dance schools: there was no warm-up, no exercises to prepare the body, no breaking down of the basic steps into smaller sequences. After the lesson Yordanis explained that none of these things made sense and they were just inventions for tourists, because Cubans learn how to dance without stretching their muscles before and after class. Halfway throughout the lesson he asked his fellow dancers to lead better and more forcefully, because as the women didn't know how to dance, they didn't understand their partners' signals. He went on to tell them that this was not really learning to dance because the time was too short: the point of the lesson was to give the women an idea of Cuban culture. On our way back to Old Havana, Anna told me: "I didn't want to say anything to Yordanis because I didn't want to spoil the mood, but I specifically asked for professional dancers. And you saw, some of them didn't even know how to lead". A few days later I met Yordanis at the end of his training session with his dance company. We talked about tourists, dance and teaching, and he explained: "Teaching tourists is monotonous and repetitive and not challenging enough for a *bailarín*. Sometimes *bailadores* are better for teaching tourists because *bailarines* don't know*. 6* They will teach you what they learned, they have very good technique, but their dancing does not have the street style (pero no bailan callejero)".

In the previous section I discussed issues related to legality and the roles played by the state and by the emerging dance market in defining a professional. But for many Cubans involved in the dance business, notions of professionalism are strongly related to formal training and to an education completed in a state institution (this also holds true, to a certain extent, for more generalised perceptions, not only those of the people involved in dance teaching). While in some cases professionalism is understood as a marker of an entrepreneurial self, in many others it has less to do with business and more to do with the chosen career path of someone who decided to pursue a degree in dance. From this perspective, there is a clear cut distinction between the two categories mentioned by Yordanis: *bailarín* is the professional dancer with a formal education, whereas *bailador* is a dancer who has not benefited from formal training, but the notion itself does not imply any qualitative judgment on the skills and abilities of the *bailador*. What Anna expected when she asked Yordanis for professional dancers was, in fact, highly skilled *bailadores*. Yordanis made sure he offered what she had requested (as in the end this was a business opportunity he did not want to miss). Professionalism was what sealed the deal – but their ideas and understandings of the notion did not coincide.

Just as Yordanis and Omar taught tourists from time to time while still focusing on their careers as choreographers/dancers, Lianet, who at the time of my research was teaching at the ISA, told me she would work with travel agencies every now and then, earning in one hour the same amount she received from the government for a month of teaching. She also pointed out that for a *bailarín pro-*

6 While both *bailarín* and *bailador* can be translated as "dancer", the meanings attached to them differ, as I explain further on.

*fesional* there is no professional development in just teaching tourists – although it's easy money, a professional will have a career to think about, new choreographies to create, and will seek out performances that give more visibility. At the same time, the dance market is not necessarily compatible with the background and formation of professional dancer: "Salsa7 is not something you are taught at the ISA or the ENA. It's a popular dance and even if you have classes on it they are usually superficial – just to give an idea. Because these are dances that Cubans learn at home, or with our friends, everything you see happening in dance schools now is a methodological invention. It exists because there is a market for it". While teaching foreigners is a remunerated activity and usually more lucrative than dancing professionally, other financial aspects separate the worlds of *bailarines* and *bailadores*. They were clarified by Rogelio after one lesson, when he also explained what he believed to be the essential difference between the two categories and added a third one: *el bailarín* comes from the school, from academia, has theoretical and practical knowledge; *el bailador* knows how to dance, hears the music, knows when to start,8 he comes from the street (*viene de la calle*); but he is not the same as the *callejero*, who usually doesn't know how to dance, hears the beat but starts whenever he wants without paying attention to the musical phrase. "Havana is definitely a city for *bailadores*", he told me. "The dance schools are constantly looking for teachers, all the festivals are looking for teachers, a *bailador* goes to a festival and is content with free admission and with showing his dance skills. Even if they don't come from academia, they are usually good dancers and have many students. They are out every night, they need to be in this world all the time. For a *bailarín*, dancing is his job – he wants money for his work, and usually there's no money for this".

Night-time entertainment, centred on music and dance events, provides the venue for further delimitations and constant negotiations of identity. Night-time interactions in Havana, juxtaposed with an imagined, fantasised Cuba, and images of romantic love created and communicated through dance, make tourists susceptible to being seduced by the scripted performances (cf. Grazian, 2008) articulated in spaces of cultural interactions between tourists and locals.

Since tourism reinforces the idea that in Cuba everyone dances, dance schools usually take responsibility for creating "safe spaces" for their clients including

7 The term is used by Cubans to refer to a dance style otherwise known on the island as *casino*, which came to be known internationally as "Cuban salsa", and was adopted as such especially by dance schools aimed at foreign tourists.

8 In salsa, the basic step is done to a quick-quick-slow, quick-quick-slow rhythm on beats 1-2-3, 5-6-7 of an 8 count, and "knowing when to start" means finding the beat for the first step, informally known as "finding the 1".

outside the class. In such contexts, professionalism gains yet another meaning: taking responsibility for the client, making sure they do not become the target of *infladores* – self-professed dancers/dance teachers with no knowledge or skills but with a strong presence which can quite often be deceiving.9 One night, at a party to which he had accompanied one of his clients, Noel explained to me just how deceptive they could be: "Sometimes I go out with my clients and I tell them it is fine if they want to dance with someone else, but if you want to leave with the guy, you need to let me know. Of course I know many of them [the men who usually attend salsa parties], you can find respectful people, but often girls don't understand that guys have other intentions, that they want money, or sometimes just to be with a foreigner. There is a difference between *I love you* and *I like you*. *I like you* pretty much always means I like your money, I like your phone".

Such protective behaviour is seen as a professional obligation, but it becomes the carrier of multilayered messages that are open to identities in the making, because more often than not the strong discourse around professionalisation is built not so much around what a professional is, but around what a professional is not: "A professional dancer is not one of those guys from the street who always look for girls. This kills the image of the professional", was a comment made by Ricardo, one of my dance teachers from Sofia's school. As such, responsibility for one's clients is not only a strategy for defending the image of the business and ensuring an overall positive experience, sheltered from the nuisance that may occur in random street interactions, it becomes a means of self-affirmation and ultimately self-esteem for the dancers and for how their subjectivities are understood and articulated.

These themes, which are central to the way dancers and dance teachers perceive themselves and their work, relate to the phenomenon of *jineterismo*, widely discussed in Cuba and often considered a consequence of tourism (Rundle, 2001; Simoni, 2016). The term literally means horseback riding, but it is used to define hustling and/or prostitution. The persons engaging in *jineterismo* (called *jineteros* or *jineteras*) offer sex, company, guidance and sometimes goods (usually cigars but not exclusively) in exchange for money, meals or a night out. Often such engagements with tourists are expected to lead to marriage and, subsequently, the chance of leaving the country. The phenomenon is also perceived as a very delicate issue for the country's socialist government, as it constitutes an affront to revolutionary morality. Relationships are seen as either purely sexual – usually between Afro-Cuban women and male tourists (cf. Fusco, 1998) – or romantic,

9 The term literally translates to inflator or pump, but it is commonly used in Cuban slang to refer to a person who uses trickery and deceit, usually by pretending to be someone or something they are not, in order to obtain certain gains or benefits.

lacking economic connotations (Fernandez, 1999). The relationships between Cuban men and foreign women are often framed as "romantic involvements" (without disregarding the economic component) that reinforce the sexualised racist fantasies that attract female (sex) tourists to the Caribbean (Kempadoo, 2004; Simoni, 2015).

But *jineterismo* raises issues related not just to economic inequalities, it reveals divisions related to class, race and gender, and is frequently framed as challenging to Cuban notions of morality. In explaining the distinction between *bailarín* and *bailador*, Lianet referenced the low cultural level as a differentiating aspect between the two: "They [*bailadores*] have a very low cultural level and many times they are in the business for what comes along with the dance: the money, finding a foreigner and leaving the country, so teaching salsa is rarely about teaching salsa". The moralising argument against *jineterismo* seems to have become dominant in the late 1990s (Kempadoo, 1999), particularly among white, middle-class Cubans who tend to consider it a manifestation of a "low cultural level" (*bajo nivel cultural*) generally ascribed to Afro-Cubans, revealing racialised ideas of morality and behaviour.

For many dance instructors, it became important to emphasise their opposition to *bailadores*, *jineteros* and *infladores*, while at the same time pointing out that simply being immersed in music and dance is not enough for tourists to learn how to dance themselves. More and more schools started offering the service of "taxi dancer", giving clients the possibility of being accompanied to dance parties or concerts by a teacher for a fee that covers entry to the venue chosen by the client, drinks and a few hours of dancing (usually from two to four). This would help tourists practice what they learned in class in a safe, secure environment, which would not only protect them from possible trickery, but would guarantee the quality of the dancing (most of the dancers I worked with explained this as an attempt to avoid tourists going to parties and only dancing with people with poor dancing skills). I discussed this with Isabel one day and she promptly commented: "The only difference between taxi dancers and *jineteros* is that *jineteros* don't have t-shirts with a logo. Besides, *jineteros* can always choose how far they want to go, how much time they spend with tourists. Dancers don't have this possibility, they are like *jineteros* hired by the dance school, and they probably get less money anyway". While, financially, such activities do pay off, giving dance instructors the possibility of earning in one night the equivalent of half a month's state salary (prices for taxi dancing usually start at 15 CUC), this night work in fact joins the circle of objectification, (mis)representation and emotional entanglements, shedding light on the ways the individual is locked into a mode of constant promotion, while the self becomes commodified in social spaces of self-affirmation.

#### Conclusions

With heritage and tourism functioning as collaborative industries (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998), they offer the venue for the negotiation of memory, identity and social mobility, articulated in spaces of cultural interaction between tourists and locals where "authenticity" functions as a tool for legitimising and validating the tourist experience. Music and dance become part of a set of key symbols that define the tourist experience before it actually happens and during the experience itself. While for the tourism industry and for tourists themselves the representational emphasis is more on the imagined attributes of the island, Cubans use aspects of this discourse in order to promote and develop initiatives deeply rooted in pragmatic motivations. In a country where legal employment in the tourism industry is the fastest way to accumulate capital, the main aim is access to foreign currency.

Against this background, the institutionalisation of dance-related practices (and particularly teaching aimed at foreign tourists) is related to the (re)conceptualisation of work and productivity within emerging small businesses. The reforms introduced by the Cuban government to allow self-employment brought with them a strong discourse of professionalisation and new work practices in the field of dance. Becoming a dance teacher in a private school aimed at international tourists has a dual outcome: on the one hand, it gives access to foreign currency, making it possible to earn more than in state jobs (some simply do not possess the capital required to set up a different kind of business).

On the other hand, this type of mobilisation of cultural resources through tourist encounters creates the premises for capitalising on cultural heritage both in Cuba and outside it. At the same time, it illustrates a dynamic that to a certain extent mirrors the downward mobility experienced by highly skilled professionals in the state sector who choose to work in the more profitable private sector. While this is mostly the case for trained dancers coming from academia, it is also true for dance aficionados without formal training who experience an upward mobility that is simultaneously financial and symbolic. This prestige and symbolic capital are reinforced by ideas that circulate around Cuban dance and by the ability of dancers themselves to quickly adapt, adopt and capitalise on these narratives. Through these processes, a certain ambivalence towards the state emerges: with dancers displaying similarities to other self-employed workers in their ability to circumvent regulations and navigate an intricate legal and taxation system, they also rely on the state as a legitimising tool. While for other self-employed workers the relation with the state is usually only a matter of legality or formalisation of their activity, dancers turn to the state in order to emphasise their professionalism, as a result of proper training in one of the higher education institutions. In this way, the lines between notions of state and private become more blurred and the processes related to the commodification of heritage reveal the inner tensions that arise in the wake of political and social change.

#### Acknowledgments

The research for this article was conducted as part of two research projects funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, number 2017/25/N/HS3/00315 and number 2019/32/T/HS3/00379, and during a research stay at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin from November 2019 to April 2020.

#### References

**Ruxandra Ana.** PhD from the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include dance anthropology, anthropology of tourism and cultural heritage, especially in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her current work focuses on cultural heritage in relation to labour practices, entrepreneurship and social change in Cuba. ORCID: 0000-0002-6069-584X

## **Cuban Institutional Reform and the Crossroads of Inequality in the 21st Century1**

#### Introduction

Any analysis of the institutional reform implemented in Cuba this century faces the complexity of addressing a process that remains ongoing and includes multi-temporal dynamics and intersecting interests.2 Economic considerations are prioritised in this process, in a wider Latin American context of coexisting regressive and progressive political changes. In the Cuban case, legal instruments and policy documents guide the search for a path of autonomous development.

The ongoing reform has (re)aligned basic pillars of social distribution in place in the country since 1959. It is too early to evaluate the magnitude and scope of the changes, given the slow process of their implementation. However, the starting point of the adjustments and their handling is vital to thinking about the present and future of Cuban society in the socialist transition; not least because the transformations are designed to improve the sustainability of Cuba's overall strategy (PCC, 2011a; 2011b; PCC & ANPP, 2017a; 2017b; 2017c; PCC & ANPP, 2019). The general aim of this chapter is to analyse the structural and symbolic correlations of deepening inequality within the framework of the current reform.

The discussion of ideas in this paper is based on the cooperative production of sociological research appropriate for these issues, as well as a contemporary review of official documents (PCC & ANPP, 2019; *Gacetas Oficiales* No. 13 and

1 This text has benefitted from the valuable reading and recommendations of Dr Blandine Destremau, who improved it with her informed suggestions about Cuban society and helped to bring more coherence and precision to the theoretical and practical dilemmas addressed in it.

2 When referring in the chapter to "institutional reform", the perspective used is that of interrelating the transformations of the legislative framework with the desirable (or otherwise) effects they produce at the social level. To be sure, the process of (re)commodification in Cuba and of significant transformations to the welfare system began long before the changes implemented this century, but narrowing down the ideas presented here has led to a focus on the impacts of the commodifying shifts in Cuban government policy strategy from 2010.

85,3 2019), newspaper articles and research outputs. The chapter proposes a theoretical understanding of the processes, the actors involved and the temporalities affected by the changes underway. The overarching ambition is to debate the political economy premises of the reform and its effects on social justice in emancipatory terms.

The existence of an expansive, well-established structural and ideological context of capitalist accumulation at global level and in Latin America means Cuba's institutional reform faces challenges beyond the merely economic. Critical evaluations of this Caribbean experience therefore urgently need to be produced and disseminated within the framework of Latin American political alternatives.

This chapter aims to contribute to the dialogue on these challenges, and its analysis develops over four sections. The first sets out Latin American contributions deriving from inherited and contemporary critical thinking to consider the limitations of development on the continent, with particular attention to Cuba. The second addresses the political dilemmas facing the reform, not only to act with the stated economic urgency but to give greater consideration to processes and context when evaluating the changes. The third section presents the importance of broadening the analysis of inequality and poverty towards a multidimensional approach that examines habitat, local differences and generational factors to achieve the political consensus needed to advance the current adjustment strategy. In the fourth part, a diagnosis of inequality is sketched out based on the impacts of old and new actors in the reform,4 as well as the articulation of diverse and emerging sociabilities within the restructuring of Cuba's social classes. Finally, the fifth section outlines a more comprehensive and inclusive course for both political and academic agendas.

One last clarification and statement of principles. The author's work of thinking about and questioning Cuba has been continuous, but she is not directly exposed to the country's everyday life experience or to the heat of the discussions in situ about the direction of the changes and the conflicts they entail. At the same time, looking at events in Cuba with a more global perspective is proving to be an enriching experience. Hence, the call to recognise the need for an open approach to the dialogue of knowledge between academics, civil society and policymakers thinking about the island that also includes emigration.

3 *Gaceta Oficial* No. 13 refers to raising pensions and pay scales in the state sector, while No. 85 adds and modifies elements of the practice of self-employment.

4 The focus of the article is general and looks at the transformations of actors produced by the reform. The processes of the production of poverty in detail can be found in other works by the author (Voghon, 2016; 2018; 2019).

1 Critical thinking in Latin America: a useful perspective for understanding the dynamics of inequality beneath Cuba's universal policies?

In the first decade of the 21st century, one of the most important considerations when reflecting on Latin America's social protection architecture is the viability of the development models underway. The arrival in power of several progressive governments contributed significantly to regaining autonomy in the leadership of national projects,5 as well as to expanding assistance and the social policy system in general. Geared towards addressing social vulnerability and extreme levels of poverty, these instruments, however, have proved incomplete when it comes to transforming the social and symbolic structures of the (re)production of poverty and inequality, the regressive nature of the tax system and the foundations of exploitation in wealth production and distribution.

The shift from the Washington Consensus to the Commodities Consensus established new problems and paradoxes that even reconfigured the outlook of Latin American critical thought and the left as a whole (Svampa, 2019: 30). As Gudynas argues (2015), more than a mode of production, extractivism refers to a mode of appropriation in which the extraction of natural resources – and their negative social and ecological impacts – is legitimised by a larger role for the state in capturing that surplus and redistributing it.

Progressive governments have emphasised the comparative advantages of the demand for commodities in the international market, introducing new paradoxes that have reshaped the Latin American left and critical thinking. Neo-extractivism has shown the limitations of projects that also legitimised the mindset of infinite development by minimising or denying the unequal and negative ecological impacts of the extraction and export of natural resources on a large scale (Svampa, 2019; Gudynas, 2015).

Hence, the complexity of analysing inequality requires a historical perspective: one that questions the centrality of income as a structuring element of socioeconomic class (Antía et al., 2015) in contemporary societies and particularly those in Latin America. The dominant vision in both the social sciences and policy measures ignores the limitations of income and results analysis. It is necessary to reflect more on the processes that produce inequalities, which, for the most

5 The regional background to these projects was the advance of integration mechanisms such as the creation of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples' Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP). However, these alliances hinder the development of a robust and systematic system of cooperation on the continent.

part, are not are located in this secondary sphere of distribution. It should be recalled that the monetary form of this inequality tends to mystify these processes through its abstraction (Pérez, 2017: 73).

The technocratisation of social policy during the boom in conditional cash transfer programmes reinforced this historical legacy and deepened gender inequalities within families due to a moralising (Cunha & Ivo, 2019), minimal and clientelistic view of poverty (Álvarez, 2005; 2013). The difficulties progressive governments face in the 21st century and their setbacks and advances in development matters are useful for discussing the importance of political instruments that link democracy and equality.6 In the absence of political will and with the state captured by Creole and transnational elites, this equation seems to offer little hope of success. Particularly when, under neoliberal rule, the power structures uphold the logic of capitalist accumulation. In the current domestic and international setting, specifically worsened by the effects of the pandemic, Cuba also finds itself unable to escape this neoliberal mandate.

It is therefore worth highlighting some of the Latin American contributions that will help us reflect on Cuban inequalities (Cattani, 2008; Arzate et al., 2011): 1) a relational and dynamic perspective on the mechanisms that explain the existence and (re)production of inequality and poverty; 2) recovering the historical– cultural as a structural and shaping element of development; 3) the relationship between the global, national and local levels and the mechanisms of power and domination that make them possible; 4) the need to question the persistent nature of transnational capital's hegemony in peripheral economies, as imposed by the international division of labour; 5) the existence of agents/mechanisms that generate inequality and poverty in a context of asymmetric relationships; and 6) the increasing sophistication of the symbolic mechanisms that legitimise these social forces and contribute to maintaining the status quo. These premises are critical in order to tease apart the complex web of (re)production of inequality in Cuba and the contradictory nature of the ongoing reform.

6 This chapter employs a basic definition of "development" that centres on the relationship between material and human components. In Cuba, in conditions of economic dependence, significant human development progress is observed, along with stagnation in the political and participation structures meant to respond to the challenges of creating a political alternative to the neoliberal.

### 2 Postponed economic urgency: the political dilemmas of the reform

A more abstract conception of the reform reveals two problem areas: the break with an integrated, complex vision of development;7 and the existence of stagnant political practices that cause obstacles and incongruencies for the proposed transformation. A relatively recent example of these contradictions was the (re) centralisation drive towards the end of the 1990s (Triana, 2015). The slowdown of the current reform is the result of systemic gaps in the development agenda begun in the 1990s upon the fall of the socialist bloc and the resurgence of the US blockade. To trace a path of many twists and turns, of which the recent "monetary ordering" is but one (*Juventud Rebelde*, 2021), it is necessary to critically review the agenda of priorities and the set of measures approved so far. A fact that should not be overlooked is the way civic mobilisation shapes this agenda. Despite centralised state power, pressure groups assert their demands to the detriment of others who are growing increasingly silent.

The first areas on the reform agenda that opened up sketched out the economic and social policy priorities roadmap. Some of the most important were the economic measures such as increasing the flexibility and promotion of the private sector,8 loosening the immigration reform, releasing certain banned products and goods for consumption, access to hotels and cell phones, the purchase and sale of cars and homes, and the promotion of foreign investment.9 Other initiatives such as the (arbitrary in most cases) creation of non-agricultural production cooperatives,10 guaranteeing broader levels of autonomy to Cuban enterprises, the transfer of idle lands and the decentralised management of local governments face(d) greater vicissitudes in their implementation despite being fundamental actors/areas in the change process.

7 Official documents propose the idea of sustainable development (PCC & ANPP, 2017a; 2017b; 2017c), and put forward a conceptual model of a comprehensive implementation pathway for achieving it.

8 Inaccurately called the self-employed sector from the start. This euphemism, used to characterise both employees and employers, has also encouraged a failure to distinguish between different business sizes and types of activity.

9 The Foreign Investment Law, No. 118 of 2014, was approved just three years after the extensive consultation exercise on the *Lineamientos de la Política Económica y Social* (LPES) by the National Assembly of People's Power; there was no grassroots consultation about its legitimacy as a key instrument within the reform strategy.

10 Although recognised as the second most important form of property after state ownership, contradictory incentives have prevented it from playing a fundamental role.

Nevertheless, when referring to Cuban society recent documents do not use the word "inequality" (PCC & ANPP, 2017a; 2017b). By contrast, the documents legitimise the differentiated access to and enjoyment of the supply of goods and services, declaring the intention to eliminate subsidies and ineffective expenses (PCC, 2011a; 2011b).11 In this sense, these documents lack a strategic perspective of the links between economic advances, sustainability and the expansion of social policy by which to promote equality.

The urgent economic need and the promotion of mercantile dynamics have clearly given rise to a degree of conflict between the economy and development in the current Cuban context. This imbalance has had serious implications for social assistance policies, wages and the pension system (Mesa-Lago, 2015). The delayed economic transformations in key areas such as agricultural development and food security policies have contributed to the mechanisms of inequality and social stratification worsening at a faster rate in the absence of strategic measures designed to contain them.

Among the characteristics shaping the emerging policy modulations of the reform underway, the following may be noted (Voghon, 2019; Hernández, 2015):

11 These advantages were not removed for certain groups, such as the armed forces, the political high command, the police and certain segments of the diplomatic staff who have retained privileged access to income and consumer goods that other population groups have been denied both in the period prior to the crisis of the 1990s and in successive reforms.

12 "Withdrawal" in this text refers to the relative absence of state responsibility in key areas of social protection. The term suggests the greater burden imposed on the family or individual to meet basic needs. One example is the current constitution's legalisation of family responsibility for risks and care, criteria that went on to be used to evaluate whether or not to offer social assistance benefits (*Constitución de la República de Cuba*, 2019: Chapter 3).

13 A deeper appreciation of this issue in the implementation of the reform agenda is urgently needed in order to understand the class restructuring process in Cuban society today.

a result of norms and cultural behaviours in which moral discipline is key (Cunha & Ivo, 2019);14

While the priority is given to economic development, the crucial task is to overcome the practices that have shaped the institutional development of the Cuban political system and their effects throughout the entire social fabric. A key example of this continuity, also present in the current Díaz-Canel government, is the fact that in parallel to the initial economic changes since Raúl Castro came to power, a process has been underway of consolidation and expansion of the military sector.16 Another contradictory aspect is the legislative component of the legitimation and stability of the measures. Even today, many of the institutional order's legal mechanisms are produced by decree. It is important to note this procedure in light of the fragmentation it introduces, which results in a random field of action that offers ample leeway to arbitrary decisions when defining the relationship between rights and duties.

The new constitution approved in 2019 is a concentrated expression of the conceptual dilemmas associated with the process of change, and of the experience gained in the preparation of previous fundamental documents (PCC &

14 Here, "co-responsibility" means an approach that emphasises the central place of care in development and establishes which collective, community and family mechanisms will guarantee it.

15 A key area in which this shift may be appreciated is attention to homeless people, whose numbers have been rising, particularly since the purchase and sale of houses began. For more, see the list of journal articles in the References section. Another example is the start of university training in social work: by going further than the current training, it will open up new possibilities.

16 Through the Grupo de Administración Empresarial, S.A. (GAESA), the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) control high added-value natural and tourism resources, import and export companies, customs control, and ports and transportation, as well for example the Mariel Special Development Zone. During the reform, many of the currency collection stores (TRD) and the CIMEX corporation were transferred to the FAR's management system. The dissolution of Habaguanex S.A. was a paradigmatic case. Created by the Office of the Historian, it had formed part of the local-management model of Old Havana's historic centre.

ANPP, 2017a; 2017b; 2017c). However, compared to the ambitious development objectives of these previous texts, its scope is limited. Close reading of the final document reveals the importance given to the political and ideological content as key components of building a society in the socialist transition. Another significant advance is the incorporation of a rights focus, although the practical implementation of these guidelines throughout the legislative calendar will need further assessment and evaluation.

Cuba's processes of institutionalisation have left a major deficit in the formalisation of citizen participation, which has been stripped of its transformative and innovative character when seeking community/local solutions. Popular Councils, the most important grassroots organisations, have been granted very limited space within the constitution. Their absence is notable from the section on the processes of promoting foreign investment. It should be borne in mind that from the 1990s onwards the country opened up to neo-extractivist formulas in both the tourism and mining industries, of which the nickel exploitation in the Moa area of Holguín province is one example (De la Cantera & Toppin, 2019). The minimal tradition of socio-environmental conflicts meant that investment projects based on foreign capital, such as the Castellanos mining megaproject in the province of Pinar del Río, got underway without the necessary consultation and participation of the populations involved in managing the ecological risk they pose.

As Svampa warns, neo-extractivism is characterised by the gigantism or large scale of its undertakings, which is also a warning sign of the magnitude of the investment (capital- rather than labour-intensive) and of the actors involved. In general, these are transnational corporations, although the so-called trans-Latin corporations play their part. Such megaprojects generate little direct employment after their initial construction phases,17 produce few significant endogenous supply chains, disrupt traditional local economies and displace people or cause health problems for those who remain (Svampa, 2019: 22–23). Given their major eco-social impact, these issues merited greater consideration in the consultation over the final drafting of the current constitution. The inclusion of regulation and public consultations in those projects is critical given the lack of previous debate about the drawing up of the foreign investment law.

The constitution was an opportunity to promote a socialist transition that is more closely attached to the democratic value of citizen participation and its

17 In these small communities, generally located in rural areas of the country, the levels of job creation resulting from this type of investment and male-dominant activities amplify social inequality, as certain groups are included in these projects at the expense of others, a process that also includes notable gender inequality.

contribution to development. It could also have promoted a model of access to information and knowledge centred on a collective perspective that extends beyond the individual.18 At this point, the persistent political dilemmas found an ideal niche for their reproduction, and neither the reform as a whole nor the laws that underpin it are able to provide an answer. They remain at the mercy of their contradictory essence.

#### 3 A multidimensional reconfiguration of inequality and poverty in Cuba

The Cuban system's main strength has been the existence of the political will to guarantee positive social indicators even in times of economic downturn. Traditionally, this model has been characterised by the existence of a structure of universal guarantees, which have worked with relative effectiveness for over half a century, establishing an institutional legacy of social protection (Álvarez & Mattar, 2004). It has also been distinguished by the state's central role in providing social protection and the people's identification of it as the main agent for securing those guarantees.

Despite the social spending in the key human development areas (health, education, employment, habitat, access to information and culture), inequality persists in the access to the institutional social policy architecture meant to ensure inclusive social mobility for families with different starting positions in terms of accessing material and symbolic resources (Voghon, 2018). Local differences and habitat appropriation are two essential factors when analysing processes of inequality at urban and rural levels.

Housing is key to explaining the contemporary dynamics of spatial and cultural segregation in the access to welfare. In Cuba, the development of homebuilding and renovation policies (Núñez, 2008) has been too slow and falls of the short of levels needed to respond to the dynamics of generational replacement and the (re)composition of the family unit. Access to housing has proven difficult, increased by the limited capacity for self-management and cooperative solutions for this problem (Carrasco & Jimenez, 2021).

The diverse temporalities that coexist within the revolutionary context and its policies are key to understanding Cuba's present and future challenges. The vectors of tension between the present and past in generational terms unfold throughout the historical development of the socialist project in the country. The

18 The use of urban land is another key omission from the document, with the focus more on the regulation of idle land in rural areas.

experience of inequality is therefore not temporally or generationally homogeneous,19 but is riddled with processes of retraction, improvement and bifurcation that have marked and characterised the Revolution's history and its policies of promise (Davies, 2017). Hence, the reform is the product not only of a moment of urgency on the part of the government, but also of the way alternative actors organise a response to the raft of generational problems and social demands interwoven in civic mobilisation and or individual/collective struggles.

The reinforcement of equality in Cuba requires more complex and systemic approaches that go beyond the conception of income as a variable for measuring well-being. Extensive study has been made of government structures and their weaknesses from a participatory perspective (Dilla, 1996; 2000). More research is needed to advance theoretical and methodological research on wealth accumulation and state capture practices (Cañete, 2018; Durand, 2019) within Cuban society. This is because these mechanisms are at the heart of Cuban enterprises' lack of autonomy, the advance or regression of the private sector, the access to and management of information and the increasingly stratified supply in the leisure industry. Hence, the importance of recognising the channels and actors involved in the dynamics of inequality.

#### 4 The drivers of inequality: actors and mechanisms.

This chapter has repeatedly raised the need to go beyond a vision that focuses on income and consumer goods. More complex analyses are needed when addressing the social dynamics of the (re)production of inequality. One observable reality within the long transformation that began in the 1990s is the weakening of work as a source of social integration.20 Among other processes of vulnerability, the reform legitimised the figure of the on-call worker,21 as well as job insecurity

19 Throughout this chapter, generations are not just considered in their chronological dimensions. Instead, temporality means a generation's modes of production, and therefore concerns deep variations in economic and social conditions. These differences shape group identities at a given moment and not necessarily the whole society (Mannheim, 1928/1952; Bourdieu, 1980; 1999).

20 Fundamentally, this disconnection is caused by the relative decline of state-sector salaries and the pensions derived from workers' social security contributions – the most significant group in the Cuban labour network. The fall in their earning capacity makes it difficult for workers and their families to meet their expenses, despite recent measures to increase wages and pensions (*Gaceta Oficial*, 2019a).

21 In labour terms, the rules of the game demand higher levels of skill in the face of reduced job supply in the state space. Faced with these mechanisms, the unskilled workers in this sector who have spent much of their working life in a particular position are forced to relocate or lose their job. The biggest shock of this process at the subjective level was that state work ceased to

and precariousness (Peña & Voghon, 2014). The current Labour Code (*Gaceta Oficial* No. 29, 2013) turns out to be a weak legal instrument for tackling the existence of ad hoc mechanisms that undermine rights in the world of work.

Remittances have contributed significantly to weakening the labour factor, its social value and contribution to social inclusion (Hansing & Hoffmann, 2020). Their relevance as a parallel factor of social distribution due to their irrigational capacity explains a great deal of private sector investment and the strategies developed by individuals and families to satisfy their needs (Munster, 2014; Delgado, 2016). Despite the permanent updating of the regulations on the exercise and development of the private sector, three obstacles remain: the low inclusion of skilled jobs; the fragile implementation of the tax system; and the mechanism of supply and assurance of these initiatives. One positive element of inclusion in the 2019 regulations was the disaggregation of tax burdens by territory and type of activity (*Gaceta Oficial*, 2019b).