Paper short abstract

This paper traces top-down state projects and bottom-up practices through which binary distinctions are reproduced and unsettled in Cuba. It argues for an analysis of emotional polarisation that attends to the interplay between state-led differentiation and bottom-up affective practices.

Paper long abstract

In recent decades in Cuba, questions of who constitutes the Other, the “them” or “they”, and who belongs to the “us,” the “we,” have increasingly come up for debate. For decades, state discourse positioned the United States as the primary external Other (El Imperio), while internally the shopkeeping, property-owning bourgeoisie functioned as a domestic counterpart. Particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, small private businesses were defined out of the social fabric and denounced as “parasitical” and “counter-revolutionary.”

Market reforms in the 2010s, which legalised certain business activities and reflected a more pragmatic stance toward private enterprise, marked an important shift. State authorities began to frame private sector workers as “one more alternative” for legitimate labour and as a component of the revolutionary project. At the same time, Cuba’s official relationship with the United States shifted from open hostility toward a period of partial normalisation.

Drawing on years of ethnographic research among Cuba’s new market actors (2015-present), including small-scale retail vendors and taxi drivers, this paper examines how analytical tools from psychological anthropology help illuminate these historical developments. It builds an analytical bridge between geopolitical shifts and the individual “building blocks” of polarisation by examining the interplay between top-down state projects of differentiation and bottom-up affective practices through which polarisation is reproduced, negotiated, and sometimes unsettled in everyday life. Inspired by psychologically informed anthropological approaches to binary differentiation, the paper treats polarisation as a relational and affective process rather than a purely ideological one.