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Stephan Palmié
Department of History
University of Maryland, College Park

Abstract:

The author confronts the impossibility of extricating his subject matter - Afro-Cuban religious knowledge and practice - from its observational context in the massive crisis Cuba is currently experiencing in its “Special Period in Times of Peace” in the wake of the demise of Soviet Communism in 1993. He examines and questions portrayals of Eastern Europe, Cuba, and the “non-western” world as comparable in their experience the “penetration of capital into non-capitalist ways of organizing the world.” The paper concerns itself with interpretations of the morality of increasingly divergent patterns and relations of exchange and consumption on the background of a fundamental restructuring of the Cuban economy observable today. Cut off from its economic moorings in the former socialist bloc, and afflicted with the continuing U.S. embargo, Cuba is undergoing changes more dramatic than anything that occurred since the revolution in 1959, and has embarked on a course of frantically developing a socially highly problematic tourism industry. For Cuba, however, tourism is obviously a mixed blessing. The existence of a tourist sector in the midst of a state-administered economy of scarcity itself is deeply problematic. Deep social rifts are opening up between emerging segments of the population with access to foreign currency, and those, who remain restricted to the non-dollarized sectors of the economy to meet their daily needs. In a burgeoning popular discourse, the term "jineterismo" [hustling for dollars] speaks to morally highly ambiguous notions about commoditized exchange, luxury consumption, and the creation of social identities through processes of objectification. New, and blatantly post-socialist identities, such as that of the "bisnero" (from "business"), have begun to emerge. At the same time, distortions of expected forms of social conduct cumulatively work to erode people´s public standing as "buena gente", and increasingly disengage them from the structures within which moral obligations are appropriately contracted and discharged. What Lemon (1998) in the Russian context calls a "crisis of representation" occasioned by a dual currency system undermining previously taken for granted conceptions of value, thus spills over from the economic sphere into the domains of social valor and personal worth. Additionally, the incipient emergence of class-like relations between groups with differential access to the dollarized sector of the economy strongly appears to correlate with forms of othering based on racial ascriptions. Among practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions another set of interpretations obtains in uneasy coexistence with the popular perceptions. For within their symbolic universe, the process of moralizing emergent patterns of dollarized exchange and consumption, as well as the forms of identity they are seen to enable and objectify, are informed by notions of mystical causality in addition (and sometimes conflict) to mundane ones. The paper also examines methodology and modes of analysis. The fact that all mercantile exchanges are empirically overdetermined by a multitude of extra-economic considerations has never deterred economists from the belief in the market as a phenomenon or force which could be analyzed as if it represented a sphere of agency (and even an agent) fundamentally separated from all those non-economic aspects of social life which it allegedly structures and shapes. Likewise, even though "actually existing socialism" is perennially flawed…none of this vitiates, indeed, it even confirms, the truths of Marxist-Leninist dialectics. And, more importantly, it can be experienced as such -- if and when one´s world is conceived as "transitional". The paper examines aspects of popular discourse which crystallize a theory of human violation and abuse which articulates with (rather being produced in response to) a dollarizing economy, where different currencies begin to speak not just to unequal life-chances, but to stark contrasts between notions of agency and powerlessness, identity, selfhood and otherness mediated by ultimately fluid and shifting moral economies tied to different monetary media of exchange. It examines the plight of people caught up in a disintegrating version of soviet-style state capitalism riddled with a dual currency system that brings out the worst of two worlds.