Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the constant necessity to adapt and find new survival strategies in late socialist Cuba. It focuses on community projects as grassroots-led alternatives for community development that strive to survive in the face of economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues.

Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic was only another layer of an ongoing crisis the country was facing. Lower numbers of tourists in the years preceding the pandemic and the inability to manage foreign debt that led to the provisioning crisis were daily reality that only got more complex due to the sanitary crisis.

Nonetheless, these problems were accompanied by opportunities related to limited political changes and the emergence of grassroots initiatives in the form of community projects. These initiatives struggled to establish themselves as autonomous actors who provided alternatives to community development fueling broader political debates on preserving and cultivating the professed values of Cuban socialism in the contemporary context.

This paper explores the constant necessity to adapt and find new strategies and solutions to ongoing crises as finding a way out of the existential stuckedness (Hage 2009), a feeling caused by living in a permanent crisis. Through navigating the complex institutional systems of the Cuban state, and dealing with incoherent attitudes and sometimes outwards animosity of state officials, leaders of the community projects constantly negotiate and reassess the means of pursuing community development.

The paper focuses primarily on the strategies for achieving food sovereignty, a long-term goal of the Cuban government and a way of finding common ground between community projects and state institutions. The promotion of urban agriculture and permaculture schemes become spaces for developing community resilience, as well as tools to establish common grounds between state institutions and grassroots initiatives.