"Relationships and Money, Money and Relationships": Anxieties around Partner Choice and Changing Economies in Post–Soviet Cuba

Abstract

"Relationshipsand Money, Money and Relationships": Anxieties aroundPartnerChoice and Changing Economies in Post-SovietCuba Elise Andaya Now, everyone has family ... overseas that help them because here the salaries don't suffice. And if they don't have family overseas, people go looking ... for a partner with money, and that's the way it goes. Relationships and money, money and relationships. I'm telling you, girl, you have to survive and with the problems we have, it's not easy. —Lisette Fuentes, 28, homemaker Feminist scholars have long contended that putatively private concerns around gender, kinship, and reproduction serve as key entry points for exploring broader social struggles and transformations. Building on their insights, I use the discourses around partner choice in contemporary Cuba as a lens onto experiences of social change fol lowing the devastating economic crisis precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's principal trading partner. As with other modernist projects, the early Cuban revolutionaries viewed time and history as linear processes, in which the gradual perfeccionamiento (per fecting) of society with the passage of time would bring about a fully realized socialist society. Ideologies and practices of marriage and kin ship were considered one marker of this progress toward el hombre nuevo FeministStudies39, no. 3. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 728 Elise Andaya 729 (the new man) and the new nation; orthodoxy held that in socialism's egalitarian society, romantic partnerships would be based on per sonal compatibility and mutual respect rather than concerns around economic or social mobility. The dramatic re-shaping of Cuba's economy and society in the post-Soviet era, however, has given rise to new economic inequali ties as well as new strategies for survival and well-being. As the epi graph above suggests, kinship relations can often take center stage in these negotiations. In this article, I examine the perceived impact of the economic crisis on practices of partner choice in contemporary Cuba. I argue that anxieties around changing ideologies and practices of gender and kinship reflect a broader disquiet about changing social and economic hierarchies in Cuba and the future of the socialist proj ect in a new global and local political-economic order. When socialism emerged in Cuba, it did so in a highly stratified society shaped by nearly four hundred years of a sugar-plantation and slave-based economy under Spanish colonialism (1515-1898) fol lowed by fiftyyears of US influence during which Havana was inter nationally known as "the playground of the Caribbean." The 1959 revolution held out the promise of a radically egalitarian society in which the state would satisfy the needs of all of its citizens, eradicat ing the racial, economic, and gender inequalities that the revolution aries viewed as the legacy of capitalism and colonialism. Bolstered by economic subsidies from the Soviet Union, the new state guaranteed support for citizens through full employment; established the ration system to ensure an egalitarian distribution of household necessi ties; inaugurated national systems of social services, education, and healthcare; desegregated public spaces; abolished laws governing "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children that disproportionately dis criminated against children born of race- and class-mixed unions; and wrote the 1975 Family Code that explicitly articulated the shared role of women and men in the ideal socialist family. This social transformation, the revolutionaries argued, was also dependent on the production of a new socialist subject who would be motivated by values of solidarity, morality, and collectivity rather than by individualist and materialist interests. Yet although Cuban socialism declared the birth of the "new man," it was perhaps more crucially on the practices of women that claims to social progress 730 Elise Andaya were staked. While the revolutionaries' Marxist-Leninist framework meant that changes in class relations and relations of production were generally prioritized over explicit gender or familial policy, reforms aimed at incorporating women into the public labor force inevitably reshaped broader gender relations. The reconfiguration of colonial gender and kinship ideologies, which emphasized women's domestic roles as the source of their moral authority, was a particular goal of socialist reform efforts. Female participation in public labor, the rev olutionaries predicted, would not only contribute to building social ist society but...