Everyday Moral Economies

Offering a rare glimpse of rural life in modern-day Cuba, this book examines how ordinary Cubans carve out their own spaces for ‘appropriate’ acts of consumption, exchange, and production within the contradictory normative and material spaces of everyday economic life.

• Discusses the conflict between the socialist-welfare ideal of food as an entitlement and the market value of food as a commodity
• Bridges the fields of human geography and anthropology
• Approaches food networks and the scale of food systems in a novel way
• Provides a comprehensive look at Cuba today, with coverage of history, politics, economics, and social and environmental justice
• Enhanced by vivid photos from the field

Preface xi

Acknowledgements xxiii

List of Acronyms xxv

1 Introduction 1

2 The Historical Emergence of a National Leviathan 33

3 Scarcities, Uneven Access and Local Narratives of Consumption 73

4 Changing Landscapes of Care: Re-distributions and Reciprocities in the World of Tutaño Consumption 99

5 Localizing the Leviathan: Hierarchies and Exchanges that Connect State, Market and Civil Society 121

6 The Scalar Politics of Sustainability: Transforming the Small Farming Sector 153

7 Conclusion 181

Appendices 199

Index 211

“The book will be of interest to geographers engaged in debates on diverse economies, as well as those pursuing work on food security, food sovereignty, and/or the politics of food.” (The Canadian Geographer/Le Geographe Canadien, 25 October 2015)

"This book provides pragmatic insights into Cuban culture, which may be extremely useful as trade, travel, and diplomatic efforts increase between Cuba and the United States in the future." (Springer Nature, September 2015)

Marisa Wilson is a social anthropologist and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. Her present research involves political and moral economies of food and (un)sustainable consumption, especially in relation to uneven processes of globalization and neoliberalization in the Caribbean. She has published in both geography and anthropology journals, including Food, Culture and Society, the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and the Journal of Rural and Community Development.

If one way of defining our global community is a shared consumer culture, then most Cubans are on the outside looking in. Inclusions and exclusions in the world of Cuban consumption are rationalized from without in terms of market inefficiencies, and from within in terms of nationalist and socialist discourses. This book examines how ordinary people in Cuba carve out their own spaces for ‘appropriate’ acts of consumption, exchange, and production within the contradictory normative and material spaces of everyday economic life.

Using food as a lens, Marisa Wilson uncovers the moral, ecological, political, and economic issues that Cubans in a rural town face on a daily basis - particularly disjunctures between the socialist-welfare ideal of food as an entitlement and the market value of food as a commodity. The book provides an important perspective on how ‘alternative’ projects to resist or counteract mainstream economies depend on their ability to ‘jump scale’ from local perspectives to wider normative and political economic relations, and back. Bridging the fields of geography and anthropology, this is a rare glimpse of everyday life in rural Cuba and of the complex political and economic negotiations ordinary people make in their daily 'struggle' to sustain themselves.

‘Wilson provides a hugely important corrective to our tendency to take for granted the dominant systems of food production, exchange and consumption. Her ethnographic account of how ordinary Cubans live and link two coeval economic systems helps us to appreciate the underlying scales and values that all economic systems express. An excellent combination of the best of anthropology and human geography.’
—Daniel Miller, Professor of Material Culture, University College London

Everyday Moral Economies is a fascinating study of food provisioning and the creation of value in contemporary Cuba. Skilfully combining a geographical understanding of the politics of scale with an anthropological sensitivity to the vicissitudes of daily life, Marisa Wilson reveals how the contradictions between food-as-commodity (within globalised neoliberal markets) and food-as-entitlement (with a socialist planned economy) are resolved in everyday social practice.
—Peter Jackson, Professor of Human Geography, University of Sheffield