A Research Summary of Dissertation Fieldwork (Summer 2024) in Santiago de Cuba
Sharon Qiu, Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies
My proposed dissertation title is “To the End of the Line: The Culture of Informality in Late-socialist Cuba.” The dissertation will focus on Cuban people’s livelihood under resource shortages, the concomitant temporal governance, and the pervasive informality that reconstructs people’s subjectivity and sense of normalcy. More specifically, I try to understand how people access daily necessities (i.e., bread) and what they think about the prolonged “waiting” in everyday life which involves the official sector, the black market, and the private business.
With CHR’s Summer Doctoral Fellowship, I conducted fieldwork in Santiago de Cuba in the Summer of 2024. I resided in a casa particular (guesthouse) in the neighborhood which I pseudonymized “Ropa Vieja,” borrowing the name of a classic Cuban dish. In mid-July, I moved to another guesthouse in the center of Santiago. Among these two neighborhoods, I conducted participant observation and collected life histories. On hearing that I lived in “Ropa Vieja,” many of my interlocutors frowned their faces, as it is “oscuro” (dark) at night and unsafe for foreigners. Within two weeks of my stay, I heard about several nearby robberies. My friends and the host discouraged me from walking alone in the streets at night. A woman like me, with a phenotypical East Asian appearance that was uncommon in this area, is targeted as a victim-to-be. The criminal rates soared in post-pandemic Cuba due to a lack of food, and medicine, and general impoverishment.
Nonetheless, “Ropa Vieja” was important for my observations of the “pasos” – street vendors pass houses and call the name of their goods, such as bread, fish, fruit, vegetables, and pastries to notify potential buyers. Goods circulated in streets are from the black market. For instance, bread sellers whistled in the street to signal people that “hay pan (there’s bread).” The bakery employee “saved” ingredients at work and used the bakery facilities to make the bread. They then arranged for someone to sell them in the street at a price higher than what the official bakery regulated. In this way, each participant of this negocio (business) has a share of profits. Such an appropriation of state resources is widespread in almost all official sectors. Consequently, people have to wait in line for hours to get the goods, for example, bread, as the bakery is “short” of flour, cooking oil, or electricity. I refined my research question in the second week of my fieldwork – Why do people wait? How is shortage manipulated to impact waiting?
Interlocutors reported that such waiting, standing with an empty stomach and tropical heat for hours is stressful, torturing, making no sense, and even useless. I further categorized “waiting” by location and situation and examined the differences. For example, waiting at a bank to withdraw money is different from waiting for electricity to come back at home. The former is institutional, while the latter is embedded in a more private setting. In another case, a local Cuban lady waited in a cafeteria to be served, while her waiting was prolonged because the male waiter disobeyed the woman co-worker’s persuasion to serve the customers by the order they were seated. On hearing the whole conversation, the Cuban lady quit her waiting and left. This suggests a “gendered” waiting that should be examined by the social norms of Cuban society.
In addition, CHR’s Summer Doctoral fellowship enabled me to “gift” my research participants. Since Cuba’s economy deteriorated, the peso has been further devalued. Goods prices are exorbitant and unaffordable to many Cubans. For example, a cafeteria janitor only earns 2000 pesos per month, while a bath soap costs 170 pesos, one pound of rice costs 200 pesos, and one pound of ham costs 500 pesos. Many participants skipped lunch to save money. I offered them pizza, fruit, and bread, and sometimes treated them to meals in restaurants.
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September 26, 2024