Paper short abstract:

In contemporary Cuba, people have been compelled to seek new health solutions in the context of a continuously deteriorating state health care system. This paper explores how such remedies often contest biomedical views and create complex body politics amidst increasing scarcity and inequality.

Paper long abstract:

In the contemporary world, biomedical understandings are increasingly challenged by new ideas and practices of health. These developments are fuelled by such global processes as the increasing privatisation of institutional health care and the intensifying role of digital technologies in people’s health practices. Cuba creates a particularly interesting site for exploring such transforming health practices because for decades, its socialist government has maintained a state monopoly that politically prioritized a regime of biomedicine. However, recently, in the context of an ailing socialist state, the increasing liberalisation of Cuba’s economy, a continuously deteriorating institutional health care system and constantly growing inequalities, Cubans have been compelled to find new ways to care for their health. Privately run yoga studios and gyms have sprung up in Havana, various remedies are keenly sought after in digital discussion groups, and many people grow herbal remedies in their small, urban patios. This talk draws on long-term ethnographic and more recent digital research amongst racially mixed Havana residents to examine the new and not-so-new remedies that Cubans employ in their efforts to maintain health and cure illnesses in the context of scarcity. Often, such health solutions contest the biomedical monopoly that has been central to the claims for legitimacy of the Cuban revolution, carrying the potential to express profound political dissatisfaction in a country that has for long prided itself on its medical achievements. At the same time, the political implications of such health practices are ambiguous, intertwining complexly with local social and cultural understandings of bodies.