Paper Short Abstract:

The crisis unfolding in Cuba is a silent and underrepresented one. Women’s embodied and emplaced memories and experiences of crisis speak of the decline and transformations of the revolutionary project, in stark contrast with official narratives of continuity put forward by the Cuban government.

Paper Abstract:

In post-Covid Cuba, memories of the Special Period, the name given by Fidel Castro to the period of economic hardships that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main trade partner, became a barometer for measuring the scale of ongoing predicaments. Currently, the multiple crises that affect the country, the agonizing decline of the Cuban Revolution, and an acutely perceived sense of rupture permeate the life stories of ordinary Cubans on the island and abroad. For Cubans who stayed on the island, memories of the Special Period trigger both a sense of nostalgia and a reluctant acceptance of worsening living conditions. For those who decided to leave, they became a catalyst, even when they were too young to remember the early 90s.

For Cuban women, the ongoing crisis governing economic and social life results in overwork, lack of security, and a life lived in constant tension and exhaustion, facing physical and mental health problems aggravated by the chronicized scarcity that the island had been confronted with over the past decades.

In this paper I address women’s private, intimate, embodied memories and experiences of crisis as a counterpoint to the collectivist symbolism and the government’s reaffirmation of the country’s strong attachment to revolutionary project, which relied upon an ultra-virile sense of national identity and centered male, heterosexual bodies in the construction of the Cuban nation-state.