Creating order through struggle in revolutionary Cuba

In carrying out fieldwork in urban Cuba, it is quite evident that this is a society in which the sorts of individuals Daniel Miller has described in his introduction simply do not exist: contemporary Cuban life precludes both the heterogeneity and the individualism of London. Indeed, the temptation in writing about individuals in socialist Cuba is to focus exclusively upon the restrictions that seem to exist upon individualistic activities and aesthetics. Yet, as with the other chapters in this volume, the issue of the degree of individualism should not preclude another discussion that is just as important in Cuba as anywhere else. Although Cuba may not be individualistic, I was still studying individuals, and I am equally concerned to document how individuals can create their own narratives and make sense of their own experiences within a context of homogenous social structures and an ethos of communitarianism. There are ways of ordering the world within a highly normative society such as Cuba which still allow individuals to account for their varied life trajectories. One example of this is the ordering concept encapsulated by the term luchar; the Spanish word for struggle. Within the context of Cuban socialism individuals tend not to understand their own life trajectories through valorizing individualism or choice as is common within the liberal tradition. Rather, the capacity for individuals to affect and direct their own lives is largely represented by Cubans through focussing on the philosophy and the practices subsumed by this work luchar: To briefly illustrate this argument, this chapter describes my encounters with two women in the city of Santiago de Cuba whose lives, while very different, show the capacity of individuals to appropriate discourses of struggle usually associated with Cuban socialism to order their own experiences and practices to amount to what Miller has referred to in the introduction as an 'aesthetic'.