Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in Cuba

If one way of defining our global community is a shared consumer culture, then most Cubans are on the outside looking in. Inclusions and exclusions in the world of Cuban consumption are rationalized from without in terms of market inefficiencies, and from within in terms of nationalist and socialist discourses. This book examines how ordinary people in Cuba carve out their own spaces for ‘appropriate’ acts of consumption, exchange, and production within the contradictory normative and material spaces of everyday economic life.   Using food as a lens, Marisa Wilson uncovers the moral, ecological, political, and economic issues that Cubans in a rural town face on a daily basis – particularly disjunctures between the socialist–welfare ideal of food as an entitlement and the market value of food as a commodity. The book provides an important perspective on how ‘alternative’ projects to resist or counteract mainstream economies depend on their ability to ‘jump scale’ from local perspectives to wider normative and political economic relations, and back. Bridging the fields of geography and anthropology, this is a rare glimpse of everyday life in rural Cuba and of the complex political and economic negotiations ordinary people make in their daily ′struggle′ to sustain themselves.  

Series Editors’ Preface ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xxiii List of Acronyms xxv 1 Introduction 1 2 The Historical Emergence of a National Leviathan 33 3 Scarcities, Uneven Access and Local Narratives of Consumption 73 4 Changing Landscapes of Care: Re–distributions and Reciprocities in the World of Tutaño Consumption 99 5 Localizing the Leviathan: Hierarchies and Exchanges that Connect State, Market and Civil Society 121 6 The Scalar Politics of Sustainability: Transforming the Small Farming Sector 153 7 Conclusion 181 Appendices 199 Index 211

Marisa Wilson is a social anthropologist and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. Her present research involves political and moral economies of food and (un)sustainable consumption, especially in relation to uneven processes of globalization and neoliberalization in the Caribbean. She has published in both geography and anthropology journals, including Food, Culture and Society , the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford , the International Journal of Cuban Studies , and the Journal of Rural and Community Development .