Presentation short abstract

This paper argues that the terminal crises facing Cuba’s core infrastructural systems occasion a generative opportunity to think through the complexities of the idea that “building new worlds requires building new infrastructures.”

Presentation long abstract

As Cuba’s ageing energy grid teeters on the brink of collapse, routine blackouts have returned as a feature of everyday life, stirring memories of the darkest chapters of the “special period” that followed the collapse of the socialist bloc in the early 1990s. This paper proposes that Cuba's multifaceted contemporary infrastructural crisis occasions a new opportunity to think through the complexities of the idea that “building new worlds requires building new infrastructures.” While the Cuban Revolution’s efforts to construct a highly functional social infrastructure are well documented, far less attention has been paid to its inability to construct a correspondingly functional set of physical infrastructures. Today, this failure is perhaps more transparent than ever, as basic “hard” infrastructures are menaced by unprecedented levels of dysfunction. As Cuba’s socialist system enters its seventh decade, it has become increasingly clear that its efforts to build a new kind of “world” have had to rely on a set of physical infrastructures that were inherited from precisely the “world” that it sought to replace. This paper considers what this example can teach us about the limits and possibilities of relying on the old in insurrectionary efforts to usher in the new. In doing so, it argues that the terminal crises facing Cuba’s core infrastructural systems offer generative illustrations of the immense complexity of sustaining resistance in the absence of reliable infrastructure.