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Paper Short Abstract:

Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork among people living of waste in Havana, Cuba, this intervention will show how creativity – individual and societal – emerges from waste, letting ways of inventar – what I call wastecrafts – flourish.

Paper Abstract:

In Havana, nothing seems to be recycled at a first glance. Conspicuous amasses of waste accumulate outside the dustbins, waiting days, sometimes weeks, to be collected and brought to the landfill. There is no separation of discards in the households: waste is simply collected by waste-trucks and brought to the city landfill, a hill of waste that have grown higher and higher through the years. It is not rare to see a person throwing out something directly on the ground, without caring to find a dustbin.

Nevertheless, the state of things is pretty the opposite of what it might seem at a first, superficial look. Waste is recycled, mainly informally, and it gives shape to an organized and complex system - an economy of waste – with an unbelievable number of social actors participating to it. It is a sort of chain, that starts with the people collecting and separating recyclables and ends with those selling products that have been in some way processed from waste. The variety of things obtained from waste is astonishing, and it reveals a great inventiveness that characterizes many Cubans. This creativity, this capacity of inventing or repairing things with alternative materials, is not only to be seen in association to determinate, creative individuals, but it is to be considered also at the macrolevel of the society in its whole. Indeed, this well-functioning economic system based on waste is a response to an ongoing, decades-long situation of material scarcity, given by Cuba’s peculiar socio-political situation.