Economic spheres, tactics and market access strategies in transitioning Cuban society

Abstract

The constitutional reform of 1992 in Cuba was the event that provided the legal framework for the reformulation of the socialist property regime, opening up space to other forms of economic exchange which were prohibited until that time. From that moment on, with the creation of the CUC in 2004, significant transformations began in what concerns the relationship between state and market as distributing agencies of goods and services. In this paper, an ethnographic analysis is presented focusing on monetary exchanges and the new economic formations in the Cuban society in 2014, to examine their incidence in the administration of the domestic unit in everyday life. It is intended to make a contribution to the anthropological studies on multicentre economics, integrating the concept of economic spheres originated in studies on peoples of Subsaharan Africa, with those of tactic and strategy of Michel de Certeau, to make the relationship between different and complementary logics that coexist in Cuban society visible.