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Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork among «emprendedoras», this paper explores how young Cuban women engaged in remote self-employment reconfigure work, gender relations, and sociality through digitally mediated entrepreneurial practices in late-socialist Cuba.

Paper long abstract

Since 2020, Cuba has experienced a deep economic crisis alongside significant policy reforms that expanded legal self-employment and small-scale entrepreneurship. At the same time, the rapid diffusion of mobile internet and more affordable data plans have extended digital connectivity to broader segments of the population. These shifts have made digitally coordinated, home-based entrepreneurial work increasingly widespread, reshaping both livelihoods and everyday social relations.

Women’s entrepreneurial labour often blurs conventional divisions between «casa» and «calle», production and reproduction, and social relations function as a crucial form of capital in a context marked by scarcity and informality. For instance, dense female networks («estar enREDada», as an emic pun) enable access to clients, materials, and mutual support among artisans. At times, practical help even turns into more intimate connections, such as friendships, the sharing of family events, and support beyond the «emprendimiento». Sociality thus emerges not only as something that takes place at work, but as work – integral to the reproduction of economic activity.

The paper highlights how these arrangements contribute to overcoming a simplistic understanding of dynamics related to gender, labour and social ties, beyond a polarized or deterministic standpoint. On the one hand, digital micro-entrepreneurship can reinforce gender inequalities, intensifying reproductive labour, low-profile strategies, and self-exploitation under conditions of informality and crisis. On the other hand, it can generate new forms of economic agency, access to income, expanded social connections, and partial renegotiation of household roles, including the involvement of other family members in both business activities and domestic tasks.