Paper Short Abstract:

This paper presents ethnography of one family’s planned migration trajectory from Cuba to the US in order to locate the nexus of lived geopolitical factors across time and space that weigh on ordinary Cubans’ ability to live with dignity.

Paper Abstract:

The personal and political as bounded and discrete categories have long been undone both in broader social imaginaries as well as Social Anthropology. The anthropology of reproduction has been a crucial subfield that has helped this problematisation (the separation between the private and domestic on one hand and the public on the other) at the scale of individual, family, community and nation (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995). As these varying scales come together, so do the nuances of geopolitics. The embargo the US imposed on Cuba in 1958 has reached a global magnitude and done extreme harm over the last 66 years (Andaya 2021; Holbraad 2021). The socioeconomic impact on Cuba has been exacerbated by the economic crises that the world over is experiencing as well as being further affected by cycles of rebuilding post-hurricane–which are increasing in frequency due to climate change— (Sheller 2020), and finally a downturn in tourism that the island has seen since Covid-19. This paper presents ethnography of one family’s migration trajectory from Cuba to the US in order to locate the nexus of ‘lived’ geopolitical factors across time and space that weigh on ordinary Cubans’ ability to live with dignity (cf. Marsden 2021:9). It attends to the complicated lived experiences of reproduction, kinship and relatedness and how migration becomes a means by which aspirations surrounding the former dynamics can be realised as their interconnections throw the category of the geopolitical into harsh relief.