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Paper short abstract

In Cuba’s migration/return encounters, failure-talk allocates entitlement and polices belonging: migrants’ non-sharing is read as inability or refusal (“bad” belonging). Returnees invoke choice and discretion. Tracing disputes across scales, the paper situates this in a North/South moral economy.

Paper long abstract

Return migration and diasporic visits to Cuba activate a failure/success axis that does more than evaluate trajectories: it functions as a distributive judgement through which entitlement and belonging are negotiated. Based on ethnography in Havana and Viñales and research with Cuban migrants in Europe, this paper examines disputes that erupt when returnees and visiting Cubans face claims on migration’s gains (money, goods, investments).

In these encounters, non-migrants who remain on the island (“stayers”) leverage a key asymmetry: the capacity to police who counts as “from here”. They link belonging to solidarity, reciprocity, and "repartir", and treat redistribution as a test of loyalty and worth. When returnees do not share, the same fact is made to mean two things that can coexist and intensify polarization: incapacity (the migration “failed” to yield fruits, a failure often individualized), or refusal (choice and discretion are recoded as disloyalty and moral failure).

Tracing these classifications across scales, from household quarrels to neighborhood reputations and broader narratives about “real” nationals and quasi-foreigners, the paper complicates any neat separation between personal “moral failure” and collective politics of belonging. It situates failure-talk within a wider North/South moral economy that structures expectations of sharing and raises epistemological and political questions about which moral languages ethnographic analysis ends up reproducing.