Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the non-existence of anthropology as an academic discipline in Cuba, for historical reasons, as opposed to a wealth of anthropological problems and the need for a knowledge which only anthropology can provide in Cuba’s present situation.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology does not exist in Cuba, in the sense that an academic career of anthropology does not exist on any level. This is a consequence of the fall of the Soviet Union around 1990, which left Cuba in a state of orphanage, with a number of Cubans forced to interrupt their Ph. D. studies in the Soviet Union. At the same time anthropology exists in Cuba, not as an academic career, but as a conglomerate of anthropological problems, projects and solutions. Some anthropological disciplines continued after the fall of the Soviet Union and Soviet traditions, most clearly archaeology. An anthropological viewpoint appears most clearly in Cuba in a solid tradition of criminology and social medicine, and in an ecological approach to the study of social problems. One of the consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union was a process of decentralization in its political organization and its assets of traditional knowledge, on a municipal and community level, but lacking the technical and methodological instruments for studying the problems on these levels, which have been developed in Western anthropology. The problem really boils down to the question of what knowledge only anthropology can provide, in a situation of extreme nervousness on all levels, when it is evident that changes have to be made (and are made), but nobody knows exactly what changes are possible without sacrificing the conquests made through a prolonged revolutionary process, under the pressure of a rampant neoliberalism and under the weight of a yearlong blockade.