Seminars

Cuba equals crisis. This framing has been the hallmark of most scholarship on the island over the last four decades - and it is incomplete. State planning, informal markets, dollarization, global capitalism, the US embargo and everyday survival coexist in a fragmented and dysfunctional economic order. Yet these contradictions--and "crisis" itself--are not temporary failures but the organizing principle of a politico-economic system that has morphed over the decades. Binary readings (formal/informal; socialist planning/market failure) obfuscate the fact that economic governance in Cuba operates through schizoid patterns—simultaneously prohibiting, enabling, and depending upon formal, informal, a-legal and illegal economic practices in a system where market driven inequality, egalitarian rhetoric, and US imperialism coexist uneasily. Thus schizonomics is a dysfunctional yet lasting and stabilizing mechanism of survival rather than a symptom of imminent collapse. This means rethinking the assumed keywords of economic policy in Cuba: Money becomes a pharmakon: cure, poison, and scapegoat. Economic distortions in the context of an endemic crisis produce a new culture: rebusque (making do). Any assumed 'transition' to capitalism belies the "recombinant" nature of the Cuban economy: schizonomics is not a temporary phenomenon but a framework that will operate in years to come.The question therefore is not whether specific reforms will succeed or fail, but what kind of economic system is reproduced through these recurring contradictions. The main focus is not on policy outcomes as much as on the political economy that generates them.

This session will analyze current socioeconomic and political conditions on the island, as well as the state of US-Cuba negotiations. Emphasis will also be on the impact of out-migration from the island and attitudes among the Cuban diaspora, especially in the United States.