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State and life in Cuba: calibrating ideals and realities in a state‐socialist system for food provision

2020; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1469-8676.12961

1469-8676

Osmara Mesa Cumbrera, Lázara Yolanda Carrazana Fuentes, Dialvys Rodríguez Hernández, Martin Holbraad, Isabel Reyes Mora, María Regina Cano Orúe,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Based on our collective ethnography of Cuba's socialist system for the provision of state-subsidised food, this article explores manners in which the state weaves itself into the fabric of people's everyday lives in state-socialist society. Instituted by Cuba's revolutionary government in the early 1960s, Cuba's 'state system for provisioning' is still today the backbone of household subsistence, propelling individuals into direct daily relations with the state via its neighbourhood-level network of stores that distribute food catering to citizens' 'basic needs'. Our ethnography brings together a series of studies conducted by the members of our team in different parts of Havana, charting the most salient aspects of people's interaction with the state in this alimentary context. We argue that the state becomes pervasive in people's daily lives not just because it is present in so much of it, but also as the basic normative premise on which people interpret and evaluate everyday comportments in the interactions food provisioning involves. Life in state socialism involves the constant and intricate comparison of its own realities against the normative ideals the state purports to institute. These 'vernacular comparisons' between life and state, as we call them, are the 'local knowledge' of state socialism in Cuba. A partir de nuestra etnografía colectiva del sistema del abastecimiento de alimentos subsidiados por el Estado cubano este artículo explora las formas en las que el estado se imbrica en el tejido de la vida cotidiana de las personas en el socialismo de estado. Instituido por el gobierno revolucionario cubano a principios de la década de 1960, el 'sistema estatal de abastecimiento' de Cuba es todavía hoy la espina dorsal de la subsistencia de los hogares, el cual impele a los individuos a establecer una relación cotidiana y directa con el estado a través de la red de establecimientos comerciales a nivel de barrio que distribuyen alimentos de acuerdo con las "necesidades básicas" de los ciudadanos. Nuestra etnografía reúne una serie de estudios llevados a cabo por los miembros de nuestro equipo en diferentes partes de La Habana, describiendo los aspectos más significativos de la interacción entre las personas y el estado en este contexto alimentario. Argumentamos que el estado se vuelve ubicuo en la vida cotidiana de las personas no sólo por estar presente en numerosos aspectos de la misma, sino también por ser el supuesto básico y normativo con el que la gente interpreta y evalúa sus comportamientos en las interacciones cotidianas relacionadas con el abastecimiento alimentario. La vida en el socialismo de estado involucra una constante e intrincada comparación entre los ideales normativos que el estado pretende institucionalizar y sus realidades. Estas 'comparaciones vernáculas' entre vida y estado, como las llamamos, son el 'conocimiento local' del socialismo de estado en Cuba. S'appuyant sur une ethnographie collective du système socialiste cubain en matière d'approvisionnement de nourriture subventionné par l'État, cet article étudie la manière dont l'État s'immisce dans la vie quotidienne des gens, dans une société socialiste. Instauré à Cuba au début des années 1960 par le gouvernement révolutionnaire, le « système étatique d'approvisionnement » constitue encore aujourd'hui l'épine dorsale de la subsistance des foyers, et pousse les individus à entretenir des relations quotidiennes directes avec l'État à travers son réseau de magasins de quartier, qui distribuent des aliments correspondant aux « besoins vitaux » des citoyens. Nos travaux ethnographiques réunissent une série d'études, menées par les membres de notre équipe dans différents secteurs de La Havane, mettant en évidence les aspects les plus saillants de l'interaction entre les individus et l'État dans le domaine de l'alimentation. Nous soutenons que l'État pénètre dans la vie quotidienne des gens, non seulement parce qu'il y est presque omniprésent, mais aussi comme une prémisse normative fondamentale à partir de laquelle on interprète et évalue les comportements quotidiens dans les interactions faisant partie de l'approvisionnement alimentaire. La vie sous le socialisme étatique implique une comparaison complexe et constante entre ses propres réalités et les idéaux normatifs que l'État prétend instaurer. Ce que nous appelons les « comparaisons vernaculaires » entre la vie et l'État composent la « connaissance locale » du socialisme étatique à Cuba. Much of the by now well-established anthropological literature on the State has focused on questions of what one might call critical ontology. What is the state (Abrams 1988; Mitchell 1991)? Does it exist or is it illusory, and how is its putative existence sustained (e.g. Geertz 1980; Alexander 2002; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gupta 2012)? It is noteworthy, however, that studies conducted in state-socialist contexts have been more concerned with what in a different context Krupa and Nugent call the 'phenomenology of rule', 'attend[ing] closely to the social space of lived governmental and nongovernmental encounters and [asking] about the conditions that (may) make the state appear present in everyday social relations' (2015: 6). For example, in East Germany, how did the state implicate itself into people's personal lifecourse so as to define their sense of self and belonging (Borneman 1992)? How, in Romania, did the state make its presence felt in people's most intimate spaces through the regulation of family planning (Kligman 1998)? And how did it come to have such a powerful hold on people's imagination even where its reach may have seemed weak, such as Soviet Siberia (Humphrey 1983; Grant 1995; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003)? In conditions of state socialism, then, in which the state's presence purports to be pervasive, making itself felt in nigh on every aspect of life, the most pressing anthropological question is not what the state actually 'is' – or whether, indeed, the state is actually as powerful as it claims, or why people come to imagine that it is – but rather, first of all, what it is like to live in the midst of such a thing. Taking such phenomenological (as opposed to ontological) questions as our starting point, in this article we take the state as a vernacular concern rather than an analytical one (cf. Krupa and Nugent 2015: 9–10), to ask how the state exists for people in the late state-socialist context of Cuba. To render ethnographically visible the sometimes visceral relationship between 'the state' (el estado) and 'the person' (la persona) in Cuba, we focus on an arena of daily life in which this relationship is vital in a literal sense, namely, the everyday operation of the 'state system of provision' (sistema estatal de abastecimiento), in which rationed quotas of state-subsidised food are distributed to the population on a monthly basis. In what follows, we describe ethnographically the character and dynamics of this interaction in order to articulate analytically the particular manner in which 'the state'11 To avoid tiring the reader with proliferating scare-quotes of this kind, for the rest of this article we will take as read the inverted commas indicating the vernacular character of the terms 'state', 'person' and their cognates ('functionary', 'citizen', 'household', etc.). becomes not just a pervasive element of people's lives, but a point of reference that provides the basic coordinates within which life in Cuba is lived. In particular, we argue, through its manifestation in the structural arrangements for the daily provision of food for households, the state provides the horizon of expectations, values and, in the most literal sense, 'norms', against which its daily interactions with people, as well as the interactions between people themselves, are constantly calibrated. As we shall show in an array of different aspects of the state system for food provisioning, this capacity of the state to become the norm against which life is measured is realised most pervasively through the way people continually compare the reality of their experience with the normative expectations that the state itself embodies. This capacity of the state to implicate itself as a premise of such continual everyday acts of 'vernacular comparison', as we call it, is a prime way in which the state becomes the very ground on which life is lived in a state-socialist society such as Cuba. Our argument will develop in two steps. The first two sections provide a phenomenology of the state's presence in people's daily lives by examining two social spaces that the Cuban system of food provisioning connects, namely, the intimacy of the home in which the arrangements for household consumption are made, and the state stores from which the subsidised goods are distributed at neighbourhood level. As we shall see, the state system of food distribution puts these two spaces in a relationship of mutual (albeit asymmetrical) interpenetration. Then, in the following two sections, we examine the ways in which vernacular comparisons between state norms and lived realities are woven into the fabric of people's everyday interactions with the state system of food provisioning, becoming the very stuff out of which these finely balanced interactions are made. A note on the nature and methods of our research will be useful at the outset. The research is the result of a four-year-long ethnographic collaboration between us, which grew out of an 'ethnographic exercise' that Holbraad ran as part of his teaching on the Diploma in Anthropology at the Cuban Institute of Anthropology (ICAN) in Havana in 2015. Our team comprises students and staff of ICAN who, inspired by an initial exercise on the study of the role of queuing in everyday life in socialist Cuba, decided to develop a more systematic study of the state system of provisioning (henceforth SSP). To do so, we decided to look at the SSP from the point of view of the different actors involved in it – clients, vendors, administrators, state functionaries – as well as the different social contexts it connects – family, neighbourhood, state stores and state agencies. Each member of our team took responsibility for charting one aspect of the process: Carrazana looked at the SSP's role in the context of the family, Reyes studied a local SSP store, Cano focused on the sociality of the interactions between clients and vendors, Rodríguez studied so-called 'messengers' as intermediaries between them, and finally Mesa was able to study the inner workings of a state agency charged with overseeing aspects of the SSP at municipal level. As Cuban citizens conducting 'ethnography at home', each researcher conducted participant observation and interviews in their own local area of Havana, combining their findings with their own life-long experience of the SSP. Holbraad acted as overall coordinator of the study, providing also some of the analytical framing in the final stages of drafting. Over the four years of our collaboration, each member of the group produced multiple versions of their ethnographic materials and analyses, and we met in Havana approximately every six months to discuss them, draw connections between them, and eventually give shape to the analysis presented below. The serial structure of our argument, therefore, largely reflects the shape of our group and the structure of our experiment in collaborative ethnography. Following the Revolution of 1959, Cuba entered an era of profound economic, political and social transformation, with adverse effects on dominant interests of US capital on the island. In response to the revolutionary government's rapid measures of nationalisation, in June 1960 the USA imposed an economic embargo, commonly referred to in Cuba as 'the blockade' (el bloqueo). In addition to ending bilateral trade, withdrawing investment and banning American tourism, by February 1962 the embargo included the ban on food and medicines exports to Cuba. In view of the ensuing shortages, on 12 March 1962 the revolutionary government's Law 1015 created the National Board for the Distribution of Supplies. Its task was to establish the list of items that would become subject to local or national rationing, decide on the quantities of each product to be allocated to the population, and organise their regime of distribution to individual households across the island. To facilitate this new system of state-subsidised food and other daily necessities, the state authorities instituted the so-called 'Notebook for the Control of Provisioning' (Libreta de Control de Abastecimento, commonly referred to as la libreta – 'the notebook'). Similar to rations books used in situations of national scarcity elsewhere, this state-issued notebook has since the early 1960s been used to record on a monthly basis each family's allocation and consumption of state-subsidised provisions, as we shall explain in more detail below (for a detailed history and symbolic analysis of la libreta in Cuba, see Fundora García 2016). In the 1960s, '70s and '80s, the SSP formed the backbone of household consumption in Cuba (Díaz Acosta 2010). To be sure, following the crisis provoked by the demise of the Soviet Union (the so-called 'Special Period' of the 1990s) and subsequent measures to attract foreign investment and develop controlled forms of private enterprise on the island, at present the SSP operates alongside other forms of consumption. These include non-rationed state goods (productos liberados), the higher-ticket goods obtained in state-controlled supermarket chains operating in so-called 'convertible currency' (CUC), which is pegged to the US dollar and runs parallel to the 'national currency' of Cuban Pesos (CUP) (see Holbraad 2017), as well as products available at non-regulated prices in the private sector, including an ever buoyant informal economy in goods and services exchanged beyond the parameters of the law. As described in a number of ethnographies of everyday consumption in contemporary Cuba (e.g. Pertierra 2011; Rodríguez Ruíz 2014), these varied fields of production, exchange and consumption constitute a complex field of transactions that Cubans navigate as part of what Anna Pertierra (2011) calls the 'struggle for consumption'. While the role of the SSP within the landscape of everyday consumption has diminished markedly in recent years, with the acute crisis of the 1990s having profoundly affected both the quality and the quantity of goods supplied,22 Since the 1990s the quantity and variety of the goods provided on the SSP has diminished. While in the 1980s the 'basket of basic goods', as state discourse marks it explicitly (la canasta básica), included a wider variety of foodstuffs as well as personal hygiene and cleanliness products, at present the subsidised provisions include for each person a monthly quota of rice, sugar, beans, eggs, oil, matches, coffee, pasta, salt, chicken, mince and spam. On average, however, this quota lasts for around 10–12 days per adult (Ferriol 2001; Mesa-Lago 2009). One might say that the SSP has passed from being a 'total social fact' in Ssorin-Chaikov's Maussian sense (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017: 97, citing Mauss 1992) to a situation in which its claims to totality are severely eroded by Cuba's increasingly varied economic landscape, which has since 1990 included more and more elements of marketisation (see also Holbraad 2017). the system still constitutes an important source of basic provisions for most Cuban families. Playing a significant role in people's daily activities and the dynamics of family life, the SSP constitutes a prime arena of interaction with what they refer to and think of as 'the state', and is therefore a privileged site for examining ethnographically how the state implicates itself into people's daily existence, formatting in particular ways lives lived in its midst. To be sure, in this the SSP is similar to a number of other domains of life in state-socialist Cuba – e.g. the education system (Blum 2011), labour arrangements (Rodríguez Ruíz 2015) or healthcare (Brotherton 2012). Nevertheless, the SSP can be seen as perhaps the most thoroughgoing example of how the state penetrates deep into people's lives, inasmuch as most Cubans interact with it on an everyday basis for the duration of their life, in the intimate sphere of the home, and indeed the very sinews of their body. Every morning I do my little tour. I pass by the bodega [the state outlet – see below] to see what's come in, then I pass by the agro [the fruit and vegetable market, which is not subsidised], the pharmacy, and then the bakery. Then I pass by the kiosk to get the paper and I stay for a while at the yard of the bodega chatting to the people there. […] I don't hurry much in getting the goods [coger los mandados], I never go on the first day. I usually take them out [los saco] little by little. As we are very organised, we always try not to run out of rice or oil in order to avoid having to go running to get them. Sometimes we get the goods only at the end of the month, depending on how they are given. My son-in-law or my daughter helps me when we have to get the rice or the sugar, because they are heavy. But the rest of the stuff, like chicken, mince or whatever other meat products arrive, you do have to get as soon as it comes, because you only have three days to get it out, otherwise you lose it. We pick up eggs as soon as they arrive, not because you can lose them quickly, since you do have ten days to pick them up, but rather because they do not keep them cool and since it's so hot here I'm always worrying that they could go bad. With bread it's different, you have to go and get it every day. Entirely standard for Cuba, the grandmother's account can be read as an example of what Katherine Verdery has called the 'etatization of time' under socialism. Writing of the ways in which state processes 'mark time' for ordinary people in socialist Romania in the 1980s, Verdery uses the term to describe 'the ways in which the Romanian state seized time by compelling people's bodies into particular activities' (1996: 40), including queuing for scarce goods, spending hours commuting, etc. To be sure, the SSP is but one of the ways in which similar temporal dynamics have been experienced in Cuba throughout the revolutionary period, demanding of people that they effectively coordinate the rhythm of their daily chores with that of the state's regime for the dispensation of food and other basic necessities. It is indicative, for example, that so many of the stock phrases one associates with neighbourhood chat in Cuba are concerned with these daily exercises in 'etatizized' timing: Has the chicken arrived? When is its sell-by date? Is there anything new in la bodega? When is the salt due? Coordinating the temporality of the intimate sphere of home and neighbourhood life (including the personal – indeed biological – sphere of eating and its arrangements) with that of the state as expressed through the organisational exigencies of the SSP is a continuous daily activity that implicates itself into the fabric of ordinary living. We may note, however, how these acts of daily coordination between personal intimacy and state process tend in important ways to blur the distinction between the two. On the one hand, the sheer logistics of people's daily use of the SSP render the state-issued rations of food a prime mechanism through which the state implicates itself into the most intimate spheres of family life. This is most tangibly the case with the state-issued goods themselves, which, having been procured at the state outlets in the neighbourhood, are taken into the home, kept in the kitchen (often in designated receptacles and positions) and then cooked and eaten by family members. While the state's projection into the home in this material manner has all the unconscious qualities of a Bourdieusian habitus (Bourdieu 1980), it is significant here that Cubans are just as habitually conscious of the distinction between goods procured on the SSP and other goods purchased elsewhere (e.g. on the black market or at a supermarket), referring to the former as goods 'of the state' (del estado) or 'of the state outlet' (de la bodega), typically connoting in this way also their inferior quality (e.g. 'thanks for the coffee, it tastes good', one might say politely to one's host on a visit, only to be told 'oh no, it's bad, from the bodega'). Things have their fixed place, and I also have a few bags [jabas] I use for getting them [que son para los mandados]. There are the ones for the rice and the sugar that are the heaviest, those I made of fabric. The rest I put in plastic bags. For the tubers [viandas, including potatoes, yams, taro, etc.], my son-in-law bought me one of those bags with wheels so I don't have to lift so much. […] I always put that in the courtyard so it's not in the way, but the others I have on the shelf where I store the goods. The notebook [la libreta] I keep in a handy spot so that everyone knows where it is, just in case they have to go and get something. The 'notebook' mentioned by the grandmother is a crucial point of interface between the intimate sphere of the family and the state processes of the SSP, being at once an object of daily use by families and an official document issued by the state agency charged with administering the SSP, called OFICODA.33 This is the acronym of Oficina de Control para la Distribución de los Abastecimientos (Controlling Office for the Distribution of Provisions), which has local branches throughout the country. This dual aspect of the notebook – both personal and official – is captured by the grandmother's comment on its importance: 'you have to have it at hand because you never know what you might need, and sometimes they can come and do a verification for something and they ask for it'. This duality is captured paradoxically on the cover of the document itself, which states 'This notebook is not an identification document' - the Magrittian statement indicating the ease with which its users can come to see it as such (cf Foucault 1983). The official nature of the information contained in its pages, after all, includes the full names of the members of the 'family nucleus', who must be registered at the local OFICODA, with gender, date of birth, address and even relevant medical conditions that are identified on the document by designated codes that correspond to special dietary provisions.44 Conditions that receive special dietary dispensations include high cholesterol, diabetes, HIV, ulcers, cancer and malnutrition. In interactions with the SSP, then, the notebook comes to serve as a prime means of identification, representing the family's entitlements within the system, as well as recording their use on a monthly basis, acting in this way as a kind of bureaucratic metonymy for the family itself. In fact, one may think of the notebook's metonymic status as operating in two directions at once. In one direction, it allows the family to which it belongs (and which it represents in Alfred's Gell's indexical sense of 'acting as a representative of'; 1998: 98) to project itself into the administrative processes of the SSP. In the other direction, understood as an official document in its own right – a document 'of the state' – its presence inside the home renders the notebook a prime vehicle for the state's metonymic projection into the intimate sphere of family life. Recalling similar techniques of the state's metonymic projection into family life in the Soviet Union as described by Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (2003: 81–2), and illustrating further the processes Verdery has called 'etatization', mentioned above, this double movement of metonymic projection holds also for the traffic of goods and entitlements that the notebook serves to regulate, acting as the prime mediator of the relationship between the SSP and the families it is charged with serving. As we saw, the movement of goods distributed by the state outlets of the SSP effectively carry the state into the home, inasmuch as the goods are understood as being 'of the state'. A similar metonymic projection, however, occurs in the opposite direction, from families towards the state process of the SSP. This has to do with the marked sense of entitlement on which the system is premised and which its operation habituates. Enshrining the monthly quota of goods corresponding to each family as a matter of personal entitlement (rather than merely something that is offered for purchase or provided as a service), the SSP effectively establishes an internal (Ollman 1975), mutually constitutive (Sahlins 2013) relationship between people and the goods the SSP distributes not just to, but also for, them. Established and held up as an attempt by the state to provide for the 'basic needs' (necesidades básicas) of its citizens, there is an important sense in which the goods that the SSP provides are as much 'of the people' as they are 'of the state'. This is also reflected in the language people use to refer to the goods in question, which is suffused with assumptions of ownership. The grandmother's observation about not being in a hurry to get the family's quota from the bodega is in line with such common expressions as 'they have to arrive', 'they must be there', 'they are mine and no one can touch them', 'there's no hurry, they belong to me' and, perhaps most pithily, the Spanish expression lo que me toca, which could be translated as 'my fair share' or 'what I'm entitled to'. In this sense, the state-subsidised goods of the SSP can also be understood as metonymic projections of the person into the official realm of the state, with the state outlets acting as custodians of goods that in a deep sense are already constitutive parts of the people to whom they belong. This metonymic traffic, then, allows the realms of the state and the family to penetrate each other in material, fully corporal, ways. This dynamic is further extended, however, when one shifts ethnographic attention from the family and its interactions with the SSP to the space of the bodegas, the local state outlets charged with distributing the goods, which family members visit on an everyday basis. As we shall show, the neighbourhood bodega is a highly socialised space, in which verbal and corporal behaviours that are associated with domesticity effectively flow into a space presented and imagined as an appurtenance of the state-sponsored administrative structure of the SSP. In the following section we illustrate this with reference to a single bodega that was studied ethnographically in a working-class area of Old Havana by Reyes. Alongside state bakeries, butchers and milk dispensaries, bodegas are part of a nation-wide network of state outlets charged with distributing foods and other items that the state deems to be part of the 'basket of basic goods' (canasta básica) that are supposed to meet families' basic needs. The 'basic' quality of this revolutionary undertaking is reflected in the no-frills character of the state outlets, which stands in perceptible contrast to the stores selling non-subsidised goods, and even more so when compared to the private sector shops that have mushroomed around Havana since the 2000s. The outlet studied by Reyes is typical. Goods are stored unceremoniously in basic receptacles of different sizes – sacks of rice, beans, sugar, a few cans, vases or packets of whatever other products are available, a plastic tank for cooking oil – and displayed around the counter at which the bodeguero (the administrator-cum-shop-keeper) keeps the pound scales on which the quotas are weighed out for the consumers, as well as his torpedo – the notebook in which transactions are recorded. The property itself is in a bad state of repair, darkly lit and with rickety doors. The official, state-sponsored character of what in pre-revolutionary times would have been a local convenience store (this being the standard meaning of the word 'bodega' in Cuban Spanish), is made evident in lists of goods included in the current week's quota, displayed on the wall, alongside a worn poster that reads ¡Viva La Revolución Cubana! As the bodeguero explained himself: 'The Ministry of Commence (MINCIN) guidelines require us to put up the weekly distribution quotas so that the consumers are informed, so with my own money every Sunday I buy the newspaper [referring to the Tribuna de La Habana, the weekly paper in which the quotas are announced by the state authorities].' Still, while the bodega is therefore perceived as being 'of the state' much as the goods it distributes are, it is also a space in which the more intimate sociability of domestic relations flows, mirroring the contrary-wise flow of the state into the home presented above. This is immediately evident in the relaxed attire of many of the consumers who visit the bodega. While official regulations prohibit consumers from entering the bodega bare-chested, on hot days male consumers habitually enter without wearing a top – an act that in Cuba connotes relaxed domesticity. Similarly, it is not unusual to see at the bodega women in their dressing gowns, with uncombed hair, wearing flip-flops – all markers of the domestic as well. In the bodega studied by Reyes, local clientele expressed their appreciation of the bodeguero in this regard, noting approvingly his relaxed attitude to questions of attire, notwithstanding the rules. In this sense, the space of the bodega acquires some of the qualities of a domestic space – a street-ward extension of the home, even. Recalling also the grandmother's comment about how she spends time at the bodega chatting with acquaintances as part of her daily routine, it is fair to say that the bodega is seen as a space of everyday sociability – a place to see neighbour