Paper short abstract:

A series of contradictions underscore ethnographic research in Cuba today. They range from those in everyday life to state mechanisms inspired by Leninist dialectics. This paper seeks to show that to ‘get it right’ lies precisely in understanding the contradictions as grounded in history.

Paper long abstract:

A series of contradictions underscore ethnographic research in Cuba today. Both popular and academic presentations of Cuba either portray it as a victim of dictatorship caught in the past or see it as a socialist utopia that suffers from imperialist sanctions. While the state vows to maintain universal medical care and free education, medicines are constantly out of stock, and teachers and doctors leave their jobs for better incomes. While ordinary people and mass rallies continue to assert solidarity and commitment to the moral principles of socialism, the spectacular always threatens to subsume the political. While official ideology draws heavily on the working class, manufacturing industry and industrial employment were never fully developed as generations of Cuban economists aspired to. This paper gives a review of the contradictions in Cuba as they are manifested in everyday ethnographic encounters, in Cuba’s articulations of nationalist and socialist ideologies, as well as in Cuba’s peculiar history of modernisation that unfolded under the shadows of the Spanish, American, and Soviet imperialisms. It seeks to show the difficulty in understanding these contradictions takes root in both our structural-functionalist ancestry and the liberal origins of the social sciences of the twentieth century. ’Getting it right’ and making the correct ‘anthropological jump’ require us to consider the Leninism-inspired state mechanisms as historically-effected social theories.