On her book The Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life
Cover Interview of January 13, 2021
Lastly
I hope that the book encourages people to see beyond Western
media representations of Cuba. The media has been preoccupied with the idea of
Cubans as trapped within a one-state autocracy, yearning for political and
consumer freedoms unavailable to them. Cubans are generally depicted as
repressed entrepreneurs: a world of small businesspeople, dissidents, bloggers,
and others who want freedom of speech and freedom of commerce. The progression
of Cuban society is its journey toward capitalism, the evolution of Cubans to
become more like us. Such representations betray a deep failure to understand
Cuba on its own terms.
There are many trajectories and models that loom large in
the worldviews of Cubans, from the Black Radical tradition in the United States
to the model of Chinese market socialism and the Pink Tide revolutions that
swept Latin America. Some want more space to speak out critically or engage in
commercial activities. And the growing presence of corporations such as Airbnb
and Netflix is fostering new capitalist rationalities. But we must also
understand the ways that consciousness and modes of being are deeply shaped by
values of collectivism, egalitarianism, and voluntarism, derived from the
socialist and post-independence past.
We hear much about Cuba’s transition. These essays depict a
society in transition, but not necessarily one that is moving in a unilinear
direction toward an embrace of capitalism. Rather, they reveal a range of
utopic and liberatory visions that often take a socialist worldview as the
horizon of the taken-for-granted, while also reflecting the multiple influences
that have come to play a role in Cuban society from antiracist, anticapitalist,
feminist, and LGBTQ movements to open-source information sharing, gamer
culture, rock, hip hop, and reggae.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
I hope that the book encourages people to see beyond Western media representations of Cuba. The media has been preoccupied with the idea of Cubans as trapped within a one-state autocracy, yearning for political and consumer freedoms unavailable to them. Cubans are generally depicted as repressed entrepreneurs: a world of small businesspeople, dissidents, bloggers, and others who want freedom of speech and freedom of commerce. The progression of Cuban society is its journey toward capitalism, the evolution of Cubans to become more like us. Such representations betray a deep failure to understand Cuba on its own terms.
There are many trajectories and models that loom large in the worldviews of Cubans, from the Black Radical tradition in the United States to the model of Chinese market socialism and the Pink Tide revolutions that swept Latin America. Some want more space to speak out critically or engage in commercial activities. And the growing presence of corporations such as Airbnb and Netflix is fostering new capitalist rationalities. But we must also understand the ways that consciousness and modes of being are deeply shaped by values of collectivism, egalitarianism, and voluntarism, derived from the socialist and post-independence past.
We hear much about Cuba’s transition. These essays depict a society in transition, but not necessarily one that is moving in a unilinear direction toward an embrace of capitalism. Rather, they reveal a range of utopic and liberatory visions that often take a socialist worldview as the horizon of the taken-for-granted, while also reflecting the multiple influences that have come to play a role in Cuban society from antiracist, anticapitalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements to open-source information sharing, gamer culture, rock, hip hop, and reggae.