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Paper short abstract

This paper builds on the idea of “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2004) to show how the interconnectedness between State officials and common people is at the core of the contemporary functioning of the Cuban State, at a time where its material public infrastructure is collapsing.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I build on my fieldwork in Havana (Cuba) on the State’s involvement in urban agriculture projects and on the notion of “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2004) to show how people’s interconnectedness underpins a crucial mode of functioning of the contemporary Cuban State. Indeed, I make a distinction between a ‘material infrastructure’, historically at the core of the Cuban State and now collapsing, and a ‘human infrastructure’ composed of State officials and common citizens whose constant face-to-face contact is at the core of the specific form the Cuban State takes at the grassroots. ‘Material infrastructure’, the infrastructure of provisioning of the Cuban revolutionary State, has been intimately penetrating Cubans' personal lives for decades : public housing, hospitals and state-run food provisioning facilities have been a feature of everyday life for generations of Cubans, deeply shaping their subjectivities (Holbraad, 2018). However, the current crisis in Cuba has brought to a near complete standstill several of these infrastructures and multiple state’s redistributive initiatives more generally. The prolonged nation-wide blackouts that have been recently caused by the deterioration of the state-run electrical grid are an epitome of a wider situation of infrastructural collapse. Despite all of this, low-level State officials continue to do their work even if its nature has radically changed : it does not consist anymore in redistributing resources but rather in the ambivalent task of at once helping and controlling citizens’ initiatives. They do so by constantly acting on their personal relationships, the ‘grid’ of the ‘human infrastructure’.