Value Struggles: The Politics of Production in Rural Cuba

Abstract

This dissertation examines the politics of value in contemporary rural Cuba, focusing on the agricultural region south of Havana. The Soviet bloc’s collapse in the 1990s and Cuba’s need to reconnect to the neoliberal global economy under US sanctions led to significant challenges for the socialist regime, prompting higher marketization, the semi-dollarization of the economy, and new challenges to the state’s legitimacy amidst increased social heterogeneity and inequalities. As Cuba “used capitalism to save socialism,” private farmer-led food production emerged as a crucial arena for evaluating the state project’s viability. This dissertation unpacks the intersection between the Cuban state’s value project and the livelihood and situated moralities of the rural people who were asked to increase food production during times of crisis. The main actors in this account are small private farmers, migrant agricultural workers, female staff employed in agricultural cooperatives, and the Cuban state in its multiple and often disjointed facets. The thesis reconstructs and theorizes Cuba’s post-Soviet value architecture as crucially underpinned by a semi-dollarized monetary medium. It examines the agricultural hinterland south of Havana and its population as outcomes of historical processes, and develops a thick ethnographic description of the economic lives of small private farmers, migrant workers, and women doing social-reproductive work as situated moral beings striving to secure a livelihood and lead meaningful lives. The outcome is a survey of intersections, contradictions, and complicities surrounding value, making evident the antagonisms and collaborations across class and gender divides and racialized distinctions of belonging. By examining how different senses of value—as prices, the utility of things, and moral principles—align or contradict each other at different scales, the dissertation sheds light on the negotiation between pragmatic circumstances and moral principles that everybody, including the state actors, must face. Attention to value dynamics elucidates how ideals transform and influence economic practices, shaping attachments and rejection of socialist principles amidst the challenges of the politico-economic landscape.