Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in post-reform Cuba, this paper introduces monetary disorder to show how digital platforms, fiscal governance, and informal trust networks co-produce new financial subjectivities, inequalities, and solidarities amid inflation, digitalisation, and state-led monetary reform

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how digital financialisation, fiscal governance, and informal communities intersect to produce new subjectivities and inequalities in contemporary Cuba. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it develops monetary disorder as an analytic for understanding how state-led efforts to stabilise and formalise monetary systems can unintentionally generate fragmentation, informality, and moral uncertainty.

Focusing on Cuba’s recent reforms—monetary reunification, enforced digitisation of payments, and the legalisation of private microenterprises—the paper shows how citizens are increasingly constituted as digitally mapped fiscal subjects embedded in state banking infrastructures, while simultaneously relying on transnational and informal financial networks to survive inflation and currency collapse. Platforms such as Telegram, Zelle, TropiPay, and cryptocurrency exchanges function as bottom-up infrastructures of trust that enable exchange, savings, and investment when formal channels fail.

The paper traces how these digital financial communities link intimate household economies to global circuits of remittances, speculation, and state revenue, while producing differentiated financial subjectivities: entrepreneurial investors adept at arbitraging currencies, cryptocurrency investors, precarious pensioners, and digitally excluded actors. These processes are deeply gendered, racialised, and generational, reinforcing new class formations tied to access to remittances and digital infrastructures.

By situating Cuban digital finance within broader debates on financialisation and governance, the paper argues that polarisation is not simply imposed from above but is negotiated, contested, and occasionally mitigated within everyday digital financial practices. Ethnography reveals how informal solidarities, trust-based verification systems, and improvised governance emerge within fragmented monetary systems, highlighting alternative forms of economic coordination under conditions of fiscal crisis.