Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the politics and the poetics of waiting in Cuba. Waiting is central to the making and unmaking of socialist subjectivity in time. Waiting may both forge innovation and creativity and destroy the people waiting, evoking affects as diverse as doubt, despair or hope

Paper long abstract:

My paper explores the politics and the poetics of waiting in Cuba. The politics of waiting refers to the structural and institutional conditions that compel people to wait. Waiting is a ‘technique of governance’ (Auyero 2012), an instrument to elicit particular forms of subjection and subjectivity. The poetics of waiting refers to the existential affordances of being placed in uncertain temporal intervals. People waiting deal with it differently. Waiting may both forge innovation and creativity and destroy the people waiting, evoking affects as diverse as doubt, despair or hope (Janeja and Bandak 2018). In post-soviet Cuba the act of waiting in line for bread, the bus, other scarce goods and services is one of the common characteristics of lived experience under state socialism (Frederick 2006, 171). As Cuban socialism was constitutionally updated in 2018-19, Cubans, particularly in the province, experienced an intensification of the ‘arrhythmic endless waiting’ characteristic of everyday life (Verdery 1999). Waiting with and for others is part of la luchita (the struggle) to keeping up with being socialist in a negative historical conjuncture. The intensification of social waiting was often experienced as a “psychological war.” Through a person-centered ethnography of Esperanza and Maga as they engage in multiple forms of waiting, I explore the psychological work of being placed in uncertain times.