Sanitation workers and ‘structural racialisation’ in a globalising Centro Havana

Abstract

Discussing racism as more than just a past legacy has been taboo during most of the Cuban Republic, including under socialism. But since the 1990s, theorists, often drawing on concepts from contemporary race theory in the US, have started to analyse racism as a continuing, active force in Cuba. The author takes issue with formulations of racism that treat it as a discursive force and disconnect the debate on race from class. Based on long stints of fieldwork in Cuba since 2015 with a workforce almost automatically associated with blackness – the workers in the sanitation department of Centro Havana – the author argues for attention to the forms of racialisation that most impact poor and working-class Cubans and that are part and parcel of capitalist penetration and the impact of globalisation. Using Arun Kundnani’s ‘darker red’ theorisation of ‘structural racism’ as a systemic, albeit shapeshifting, companion of global capitalism, this piece explores how the specific capitalist dynamics unfolding in Havana today introduce the spectre of structural racism. This means for the lives of these workers a shift from an everyday working experience of socialist integration to one of economic precarity; a shift from being socialised into the neighbourhood to becoming alienated from it; a shift from sanitation workers being targeted for ‘socialist civilising’ to them becoming subject to punishment. A key difference that Cuban socialism can make lies in how the authorities respond to workers resisting such structural racialisation.

Introduction

The Caribbean has been a key node in what Arun Kundnani calls the ‘darker red’ theorising of the intertwined histories of capitalism and racism: ¹ the tradition of thinkers such as C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Stuart Hall, Claudia Jones and Walterio Carbonell ² whose struggles were ‘for socialism but one centered upon the experiences of racism, colonialism, and imperialism’. ³ There is currently a global revival of such theorising of ‘racial capitalism’, a term often referring to Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) but initially introduced by South African Marxists in the 1970s in the fight against apartheid. ⁴ ‘Racial capitalism’ in the darker red tradition does not suggest that race is the driving force behind global capitalism but rather argues that capitalism is racial capitalism: rather than being a separate ideological system, racism is a material basis of global capitalism and is, therefore, constantly regenerated within it. From this perspective, Kundnani has made a powerful argument, on which this article will build, that the ‘structure’ of structural racism is capitalism.

Socialist Cuba, however, occupies a particular position in this debate on racial capitalism. On the scale of world history, it figures prominently as a symbol of resistance against US imperialism’s instigation of racial capitalism around the globe. During an earlier Cold War-era high-point of darker red theorising, during the days of Black Power and the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s, prominent intellectuals such as Walter Rodney linked themselves to the Cuban Revolution precisely for this reason. However, at the time, this paradoxically contributed to the further silencing of the race/colour debate within Cuba, where talk of racism has long been seen as ‘an enemy-promoted narrative used to create divisions . . . where notions of preserving national unity and sovereignty are paramount’. ⁵

This article suggests that the present darker red theorising of racial capitalism can connect to the reemerging debate on racism in Cuba today and that it is urgently needed to bring into focus how global capital instigates forms of structural racism affecting the most marginalised Cuban workers. It was thereby necessary to develop a methodology of analysing processes of ‘structural racialisation’ as they unfold at the scale of everyday working lives while explicitly connecting these to global dynamics that are unfolding in a once again ‘globalising’ Caribbean – a region historically shaped by global racial capitalism but recently caught up in an intensified ‘whirlpool of global capitalist accumulation’. ⁶ For Cuba, this recent period is usually referred to as the ‘Special Period’: with the severe economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union as Cuba’s main trading partner, Cuban socialism was officially declared ‘under siege’ from 1991 onwards and thus in need of ‘relentless changes’, many of which were consistent with capitalist logics and ‘appeared in contradiction to . . . revolutionary principles’. ⁷ By explicitly situating Cuba in a ‘globalizing Caribbean’ ⁸ and the Special Period in a global era of financialisation, this article consciously transgresses the methodological boundaries that hinder the analysis of racial capitalism in Cuba today.

The concrete site, from which I make my contribution to debates on racism in Cuba and the capturing of processes of ‘structural racialisation’ more generally, is the changing relational context affecting a Cuban workforce that is almost automatically associated with blackness: the workers of the Municipal Sanitation Services (Los Comunales for short), which, on paper at least, employ no less than 5 per cent of Havana’s total workforce. ⁹ I have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork with a group of these workers since 2015, during a period in which the crisis of the Special Period had stabilised somewhat, and into the following years when, particularly with the tightening of the US embargo against Cuba under the first Trump administration and the consequent further restrictions on Cuba’s energy import, the country was seen to be drifting into a ‘second Special Period’. I begin with an event that occurred during my most recent return visit.

A clue to structural racism: ‘they didn’t even make a bulla’

It was on the penultimate day of my 2023 visit that I stepped onto the streets of Centro Havana – one of the most densely populated, ‘racially integrated’ but at the same time racially stigmatised neighbourhoods of Havana ¹⁰ and encountered Rodrigo, ¹¹ one of the pickers (street sweepers) I know well. Rodrigo is a retired professional judoka and former party member, a black man of Jamaican ancestry from Santiago de Cuba who had built himself a home in Centro Havana as part of the micro-brigadas (collective self-help efforts) of the 1970s. He is one of the most hard-working and physically fit of the street-sweepers and, even at 74, he barely looks 60. He likes to tell me, ‘When I sweep the streets, I don’t caress the ground like my compañeros do; I dale (I go for it) – I have to buy a new broom every few weeks!’

But Rodrigo was delayed that day, and it soon became clear why: he had been sweeping the pavement before dawn, a few metres away from the new Tribe Caribe ‘boutique’ hotel, when he suddenly heard someone shout ‘ese no sirve’ (that one’s no good). The next thing he knew, his broom was jerked out of his hands and used to hit him on the back and shoulders as an enraged stranger attacked him. All Rodrigo could think was, ‘I’ve got to stay on my feet’, while his judo reflexes served him well to parry the blows. For a moment, he considered reaching for the machete in his cart, which he uses to cut weeds, but then decided against escalation. Instead, he grabbed his dustpan and threw it at his attacker with all his strength, surprising him and making him run away while Rodrigo cursed him (maricon!).

Rodrigo wondered who the stranger was who had attacked him – something that the second-in-command at Rodrigo’s worksite was already trying to investigate together with two police officials. According to Rodrigo, it was a mulato man in orange overalls, and he suspected the man had been under the influence of drugs. As we talked, I raised a question that Rodrigo might have seen coming from me: ‘Do you think there was racism involved?’ ‘Could well be’, was Rodrigo’s reply, ‘or because he saw me as a puro?’ ¹² ‘A puro?’ ‘Yes, you know, an old guy with no family, sweeping the streets before daybreak.’ But then Rodrigo added, more passionately: ‘Before, if something like this would have happened, I’m sure neighbours would have intervened, they would have scared him off. This time, they didn’t even make a bulla [a ruckus]; they just turned their backs and closed their doors!’

After talking some more, I said goodbye to Rodrigo but kept thinking about the attack and what Rodrigo had told me. And it struck me: by responding to my question about racism by veering off into remarks about his new and disturbing experience of neighbours abandoning him in a time of need, Rodrigo had actually answered my question. I needed to see racism not just as overt or covert expressions of racial prejudice but as something inextricably woven into the way social relations were changing in Centro Havana.

Taking my ethnographic clue from Rodrigo’s surprise that ‘they didn’t even make a bulla’, combined with a ‘darker red’ perspective on structural racism, I argue that there is more going on here than just (covert) racial prejudice. Indeed, Cuban socialists may think that these kinds of incidents can be prevented by encouraging the authorities to redouble their efforts ‘to stigmatise exclusion rather than black people’, ¹³ to condemn racism, to hail sanitation workers – especially elderly ones – as ‘working heroes of the Cuban Republic’, and to take even more seriously the celebration of 15 February as the Day of the Worker of the Sanitation Services. However, I will show that processes are unfolding in the neighbourhood that latently transform the many more or less explicit forms of racialisation that affect sanitation workers into a process of ‘structural racialisation’, whereby race moves beyond the form of overt discourse or covert institutional bias and turns into a relational structure of everyday life.

But before analysing the relational processes of structural racialisation in Centro Havana, I need to elaborate on what motivates my intervention in debates about racism in socialist Cuba and racial capitalism more broadly and on how I have methodologically translated the notion of ‘structural racism’ into an examination of emergent processes of structural racialisation.

A ‘darker red’ contribution to the racism debate in Cuba

From the early days of the Cuban Republic, race/colour has been a taboo subject. José Martí – Cuba’s national hero of independence – saw the existence of racial groups, or talk thereof, as competing with the desired formation of an ‘inclusive, raceless Cubanness’ ¹⁴ and this ‘racial silence’ ¹⁵ only deepened with the 1912 massacre of members of the Western hemisphere’s first black political party, Cuba’s Partido Independiente de Color. While the first years of the 1959 revolution form an exception – and while the revolution itself, of course, radically reduced racial inequalities in areas such as housing and education ¹⁶ – the ‘rule of racial silence’ ¹⁷ was restored in 1962, when Fidel Castro proclaimed that the fight against racism had been ‘won’. Prominent Cuban intellectuals continued to analyse the remaining problems as mere ‘residual racism’, lingering racial prejudices that people had ‘absorbed by osmosis’. ¹⁸ From this perspective, then, the main trouble with the Special Period was one of scarcity, of limits being imposed on the revolution: ‘plans that were hoped to reduce inherited inequalities that had yet to be eliminated – notably that in housing where blacks tended to live disproportionately in housing of bad condition – had to be halted’. ¹⁹

But the visibly rising racial inequalities of the Special Period – in combination with ‘more intensive and extensive cross-cultural contacts’ ²⁰ − made it difficult to continue denying that racism in Cuba was more than a mere historical vestige. Partly under the influence of US-based intellectuals, the idea of ‘institutional racism’ persisting in Cuba began to enter the debate. Alejandro de la Fuente, in particular, drew attention to two major mechanisms contributing to increasing racial inequality: the remittance circuits from which white Cubans benefitted much more than black Cubans ²¹ and the fact that in the more lucrative sectors of the economy – especially tourism and the pharmaceutical sector – black employees were being displaced by white employees, with no recourse to legal mechanisms for redress. ²² Indeed, while the ‘veil of the homogenous and egalitarian Cuban nation’ ²³ started to lift and American intellectual influences (for example, Henry Louis Gates Jr.) and Caribbean cultural influences (notably Rasta-reggae) were contributing to an increased awareness of ‘black consciousness’ in Cuba, the revolution’s historical abolition of autonomous black organisations (especially the cabildos that were a distinct legacy of Cuba’s colonial past) and the continuing official refusal to recognise the few existing black organisations in Cuba (such as the Cofradía de la Negritude) came in for criticism. ²⁴

What is striking in the current revival of the debate on racism in Cuba is, however, that it not only draws on race theory developed in the US but also reproduces some of the limitations that have developed in it since the 1980s turn to liberal and poststructuralist paradigms. This is particularly evident in the concern with ‘institutional racism’. When the term was initially introduced by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 book Black Power, it meant to draw attention to ‘policies, programs and practices of public and private institutions that resulted in greater rates of poverty, dispossessions, criminalization, and illness, irrespective of the intentions of the individuals involved’. ²⁵ On the strength of the Black movements of the 1960s, ‘institutional racism’ thus helped push aside ‘Black culture’ as the central explanation for Black inequality in the US. With the repression of Black radicalism from the 1980s, however, notions of ‘institutional racism’ became more disconnected from political economy. Racism became understood again as ultimately driven by racial ideas and ideology, with the merit of ‘institutional’ racism being merely to reveal racism’s ‘covert’ workings in a ‘colourblind’ era in which racism is no longer overt and legally sanctioned.

This discursive understanding of institutional racism is also present in the work of most contemporary US-based scholars of racism in Cuba. Devyn Benson’s ²⁶ insightful deconstruction of the racial assumptions behind Cuban revolutionary policies, for instance, focuses entirely on discourse, as does Danielle Clealand’s analysis of racial ideology and black consciousness in revolutionary Cuba. ²⁷ And even among scholars who focus on the rising inequality in Cuba, racism is understood as an ideological force, with merely material ‘effects’. De la Fuente, for example, argues that many of the ‘racially differentiated effects’ were ‘a function of the pervasiveness of a racial ideology that portrays blacks as lazy, inefficient, dirty, ugly, and prone to criminal activities’. ²⁸ And even the critical Marxist analysis of Samuel Farber, while acknowledging that prejudices feed ‘on the continuing reality of black powerlessness, disadvantage, and subordination in many areas of life’, ²⁹ still sees racial ‘discrimination’, in ‘systemically entrenched’ form as defining ‘the heart of racism’ and ‘a vigorous campaign of affirmative action’ as the solution. What we see, then, is what Zine Magubane ³⁰ astutely observes about contemporary race theory in general: a tendency to reduce political economy to ‘a backdrop, the setting within which the epic battle for and against White supremacy occurs’, thus often ‘mirroring’ rather than truly challenging the ‘prejudice paradigm’. As a result, racism was understood in a way that did not acknowledge it as a material force. Moreover, the forms of racism that were part of the debate in Cuba were not amongst the issues that workers of Los Comunales were most upset and worried about daily.

Fieldwork encounters with racism

During my fieldwork, I came across a lot of overt racist discourse. Many references to blackness were ambiguous as ‘negro/negra’ could be used merely to indicate a person’s appearance – even if there are always echoes of a racial hierarchy in which colour categories ‘are value-laden with lightness/whiteness more desirable than darkness/blackness’. ³¹ Often enough, however, overt racism appeared stripped of all ambiguity. On the very morning of Rodrigo’s attack, just as I stepped out into the street, I ran into a lighter-skinned owner-resident who knew my reputation for hanging out with sanitation workers and who asked me with a wry smile whether I was on my way to ‘tus negritos’ (your little blacks), immediately offering an unsolicited ‘joke’ about how he hated ‘two things in Cuba: racism and blacks’, adding in an even less funny and explicit vein: ‘they should just throw them all in the sea’.

I also encountered more latent ‘institutional racism’. Aletha, one of the tecnicas (supervisors), joined Los Comunales after being bullied out of her job at a prestigious hotel because she did not have the right ‘presence’ (buena presencia – coded language for whiteness) to work with tourists. And many workers had stories of surveillance and false accusations in their previous jobs. Elena – la Negra, the somewhat reluctant cleaner of the cleaners’ compound, better known for her terrific cooking – quit her job in a state cafeteria because of the countless times she was blamed for stock going missing. Rodrigo used to be a Communist Party member and, as such, would surely have found a better post-retirement job, except that he quit the party because he couldn’t stand the way comrades lectured him about ‘punctuality’ and ‘discipline’. Anthony, the workplace boss, used to be a marinero (sailor) but was sacked when the captain of his ship was found guilty of drug trafficking. Anthony was presumed complicit – as activist Norberto Carbonell told me: Todos los pájaros comen arroz, pero el toti siempre paga las culpas (all the birds eat the rice, but the blackbird always gets the blame).

Overt racism thus already formed a historically evolved ‘formal’ layer of racialisation of sanitation workers that was reinforced by the effects of institutional racism. Still, both forms of racism were removed from the pressing daily injustices and problems that workers struggled with. When I asked workers about racist comments made in their direction, they would shrug them off as ‘just jokes’. When I inquired about how people ended up in Los Comunales, angry memories would surface, often involving racial, and other forms of, discrimination. Yet, the problems that workers shared with me without probing – the problems that occupied them daily as they were trying to survive with dignity – had no apparent connection to the racism talked about by activists. While socialist scholars Rodrigo Espina and Fernando Martínez Heredia insisted that the disconnect was because blackness does not exist as a political identity amongst workers in Cuba, ³² a ‘darker red’ perspective made me realise that it was rather because of the lack of a more material understanding of racism that Cuban anti-racist activism did not have an agenda that spoke directly to the concerns of the workers employed at Los Comunales.

Taking on structural racism: a ‘darker red’ perspective

A ‘darker red’ perspective implies, above all, a commitment to understanding racism and capitalism as fully intertwined – which only makes sense if we adopt a more expansive definition of capitalism as the whole social order that takes shape around the dominant force of capital, including capital’s ‘background conditions of possibility’. ³³ Labour’s exploitation by capital, then, is not only about the exploitation of ‘concrete living labor in a defined workplace’ but works through ‘the pressures emanating from the whole of the capitalist system, the world economy, on “abstract labor’”. ³⁴ Historically, this capitalism has only ever been racial capitalism, as racism has been ‘co-constitutive of labor exploitation and value regimes under capitalism’. ³⁵ Indeed, in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, it became very clear that racism tends to become entrenched – rather than diminished − through the ‘normal’ functioning of capitalism. ³⁶

The history of racial capitalism includes the ‘ideological’ uses of race – for instance, to reconcile the existence of slavery and liberal democracy ³⁷ but draws particular attention to race as a material force, ³⁸ as when ‘the differentiating tendencies of capitalism become racializing processes’, ³⁹ when ‘racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires’, ⁴⁰ and when ‘racialising processes of class’ start unfolding. ⁴¹ Kundnani’s ‘structural racism’ thus helps to shift the debate on racism from the primary focus on discrimination – unequal treatment resulting from racist ideologies about human beings’ worth – to an understanding of racism as a form of oppression that develops systemically from the role of capital in organising value regimes. Where most contemporary race theory focuses on ‘institutional’ racism to expose covert (as opposed to overt) racism, we could say that Kundnani addresses ‘real’ (as opposed to formal) racism.

Kundnani also makes it clear that structural racism is unstable, changing shape according to the requirements of capital and, in particular, the resistance of the exploited and dispossessed. Thus, there have been major shifts in the global history of racial capitalism. In the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, it encouraged European workers ‘to perceive their advantages over the colonized as the entitlements of race and nation’. ⁴² In contrast, when decolonisation destabilised this racial boundary, neoliberalism actively reworked this legacy into a new ‘infrastructure of oppression’ centred on enforcing market discipline and branding the resistance to this as the irrational rage of populations who, unlike the western bourgeoisie, lack the ‘rational spirit of enterprise’. Theorising from history, we can say that just as capitalism always needs an ‘outside’ through which to ‘fix’ its inevitable contradictions, so bourgeois ideology needs the naturalising and de-historicising powers of race to legitimise the violence necessary to police the resistance of this ‘outside’, while disavowing it as its own creation. Indeed, ‘racecraft’ ⁴³ has been a consistent companion to capitalism, though the particular form taken by such efforts at mobilising and entrenching differentiation for the sake of capital is a ‘particular axis of coincidence’. ⁴⁴

A methodology to research emergent forms of ‘structural racialisation’

Analysing ‘structural racialisation’ requires a methodology of grasping it as an unfolding material process that is not as directly observable as racialised discourses, nor as quantitatively measurable as the ‘material effects’ of racism. It requires studying diachronically, focusing on changes in the social relations that constitute the ‘real’ (or material) conditions for racialisation, i.e. changes connected to the relationships that form the context people depend on to make a living. The ‘extended case method’, as formulated by Michael Burawoy, is therefore most suited ⁴⁵ and moreover helped me overcome the problematic tendency in Cuban studies to take the nation-state as the prime unit of analysis and to always see Cuba as an exception.

To engage with the extended case method to capture structural racialisation in Cuba it is necessary to recognise that the ‘Special Period’ is not a uniquely Cuban ‘economic’ dilemma but coincides with a global phase of accelerated financialisation that has pressured all Caribbean states. Indeed, the recent restructuring of the Caribbean political economy – most visible in tourism, export processing, mining, and migration and remittance flows – has not bypassed Cuba. Rather, the Special Period is a uniquely Cuban justification for following the general Caribbean trend of exploring new, more radical strategies for attracting capital and acting as a more reliable debtor in global financial markets. Similarly, the impact of an emerging transnational capitalist class operating in the region does not bypass Cuba, as is evident for instance in the set-up of the Mariel Special Economic Zone (SEZ) ⁴⁶ and the spectacular take-over by Airbnb of much of the casa particular (holiday rentals) market after its Cuban launch in 2015.

Following the extended case method to see the neighbourhood of Centro Havana as constituted by a global context also means recognising that the key national legal reforms, that many see as the starting point for political-economic change in Cuba, are often merely attempts to regulate processes that are already underway. Consider the housing market in the context of tourism: Decree-Law 288 of 2011 officially authorised the sale of houses for the first time since the revolution but did not create the real estate market. Indeed, casas particulares had already been authorised in 1997, and even before that, a latent process of ‘marketisation from below’ had been taking place since the 1970s in the form of house swaps (permutas). ⁴⁷ With the 2011 law, the Cuban state sought to regulate the nascent real estate market by setting state-assessed property values to guarantee that houses would remain affordable for the average Cuban worker. However, in practice, as Hope Bastian ⁴⁸ analyses, a very different value regime prevailed, with houses selling for tens, or even hundreds, of times more, prompting the state to introduce a new tax code in 2017 to prevent sales taxes from being completely divorced from reality. Indeed, Havana, like other cities in the Global South with relatively underdeveloped real estate markets, has become a frontier in ‘the global urbanization of capital’, ⁴⁹ with internationally circulating capital becoming a key driver of developments in its housing market.

In line with the extended case method, the ‘intersubjectivity of scientist and subject of study’, ⁵⁰ finally, was also key to how I approached structural racialisation. I began my fieldwork in 2015 with nine months living in Centro Havana while affiliated with the Juan Marinello Research Centre. I had come to Cuba with a comparative project in mind: to explore whether the resonances I had found in post-reform, late socialist Kerala (India) between an emergent anti-caste and indigeneity-centred activism and the changing everyday lives of ordinary Dalit and Adivasi workers, also existed between the rising anti-racist activism and ordinary Afro-Cuban workers in Cuba during the Special Period. ⁵¹ So, I spent time in Cuba with anti-racist activists, learning from their perspectives. But I was eager to see how activist perspectives resonated with ordinary Afro-Cuban workers. One day, I thus decided to walk into the workers’ compound of Los Comunales, brave the stares of the workers − who must have thought I was some weirdly lost tourist − and begin the process of explaining to them that I was a researcher hoping to interview them and hang out with them, with the aim of eventually ‘writing a book’. For a while, the status difference between a (foreign, ‘white’ – yuma) assistant professor and a (‘black’) sanitation worker remained palpable. Interestingly, however, as the status difference began to fade, as I became an all-too-familiar presence in the workers’ compound and with the workers on the street, I noticed hostility from more middle-class, often lighter-skinned, neighbourhood residents. A small farewell party I held with some of the workers in the apartment I had rented in 2016 ended rather badly when my former landlady (who considered herself white and was infatuated with Spain) stormed into the living room and began tearing my Cuban film posters off the wall to hasten my departure, yelling that her property had been taken over by comemierdas (shit-eaters).

I turn now to my findings regarding the processes whereby such racism in Cuba found a grounding in the relational structures that constitute the ‘real’ context of workers’ daily struggle to make a living.

From socialist integration to precarity

I was usually annoyed when Cuban academic colleagues claimed that sanitation workers – who in socialist Cuba have relatively high salaries − earned more than academics did, because this ignored the fact that salaries are only a small part of people’s income in Cuba. But indeed, before the Special Period and even in the recovery period before the re-intensification of the economic crisis in the late 2010s, Los Comunales did provide workers with a fairly decent income against a limited number of working hours a day. It was no one’s dream job, but it provided a trajectory of reintegration for those who might otherwise have been left behind. The work was flexible enough to accommodate a range of personal problems – often caused or reinforced by social stigmatisation, as in the case of various gender non-conforming workers − without the risk of dismissal.

Juan was someone who needed this flexibility. He was once a national boxing champion, donning golden teeth and being so famous that Fidel himself would come to congratulate him on his victories and tease him: ‘Throw me a punch!’. During the Special Period, however, Juan fell into serious alcoholism after his wife’s infidelity (she had ‘put horns’ on him, as they say in Cuba), compounded by his inability to escape the damage to his reputation, as the economic crisis limited the prospects of a transfer. Making things worse, the grand house in the middle of Santiago, which was the trophy of Juan’s boxing career, was sold by his mother after a jealous son-in-law stabbed her daughter to death in one of its rooms. With Juan’s beloved mother now living in a dilapidated house on the outskirts of the city, his pride hit rock bottom, and his alcoholism escalated. Eventually, in Los Comunales, Juan found a way to earn a living despite his alcoholism. He was dedicated to his work and loyal to the jefe de zona (workplace boss), but he regularly had to recover from his drinking before being able to start his route. Juan was allowed to live in a tiny shack adjacent to the workplace office, and if he were late waking, his jefe – Anthony – would simply bang on the office wall and tell him to get up.

In addition to stable employment, another pillar of security for the workers at Los Comunales was the workplace-related welfare provision. Anthony was regarded as a good boss precisely because he paid attention to the personal situation of each of the workers and expended a good deal of effort to ensure their welfare when necessary. Serious back problems were a common health problem amongst those who had worked on the garbage trucks for many years and Anthony organised the sick leave papers and lobbied the relevant authorities to enable hospital treatment. Basura (his real name, meaning ‘garbage’), a strong, relaxed worker who always radiated positivity and whose father had also worked on the trucks, was once badly pierced in the chest by something sharp falling out of a garbage container. He was rushed to hospital and healed well. As for Juan, he was regularly helped by Anthony when on the verge of acute alcohol poisoning, and Anthony even got him admitted to a rehabilitation clinic. In addition to this free medical care, the workers were taken chopping (shopping) for clothes and toiletries with the points they earned at work. Workers were also given the chance to buy ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch at extremely discounted prices − a vital support for workers like Juan, who usually didn’t make it to the end of the month on his salary.

Already in 2016, when I joined a chopping expedition to a distant warehouse, there were heavy complaints about how rare such shopping had become. By 2018, it had been completely abolished. Similarly, complaints about the unavailability of subsidised lunches peaked around 2020, after which they, too, were scrapped. The workers did not know – and could not know – whether this was due to the Lineamientos de la Política Económica y Social that had begun to be drafted in 2010 and whose implementation hung like the Sword of Damocles over their heads or whether, as the workers often suspected, it was simply because resources sent (mandados) did not arrive because of corruption at a higher level. Meanwhile, Anthony continued to get serious medical cases admitted to the hospital. But less life-threatening medical care was often unavailable, and medicines had become almost unaffordable as they were only available on the black market. By 2023, almost everything had to be bought out of one’s salary, which, although it had been significantly increased in 2021 with the implementation of monetary unification, was now in constant decline vis-à-vis the inflation of food prices, mainly driven by the increasing difficulty of attaining Venezuelan oil and locally exacerbated by private restaurants and hotels buying up food stocks from the public distribution system. ⁵²

The situation created almost unbearable stress for Anthony as he had to devise ever more creative ways of compensating workers while, due to increased levels of consumption at the other end of the class spectrum, ‘these days garbage never stops’. Since the beginning of the Special Period, petrol and spare parts had been in short supply, making it completely uncertain if and when garbage trucks would appear. As workers were increasingly forced to engage in informal work to make a living, they were not going to wait around for a truck to appear without getting paid. So, in addition to managing the garbage work under increasingly erratic conditions, Anthony had to run around organising quick night-time expeditions to collect defunct garbage containers and sell them to an illicit recycling plant, plan short detours for residents who had paid for the trucks to act as removal vans, and organise the staffing of the cleaning routes in such a way that ghost workers would not be detected by outside inspectors – all to generate extra income for himself and for workers who would otherwise be unwilling to work.

Things were even more stressful for the workers, who were never sure of their next meal. Instead of being a stable source of livelihood, working at Los Comunales became one of several precarious sources of income. Juan managed to be assigned a route that took him past the offices of the CTC (the Union of Cuban Workers) – a workplace that still ran a canteen – where, at times, he could receive a left-over meal. The same route also ended near a tourist shop, where he sat down next to his cleaning cart, hoping that tourists would ‘throw a dollar’. Or he would collect plastic bottles and cardboard to sell to one of the state-run recycling points. Other workers sat around on their route selling individual cigarettes to passers-by, apologetically commenting that they were luchando (struggling) if anyone they knew came by. Once a mechanism of economic inclusion, work at Los Comunales was increasingly marked by desperate precarity.

From socialisation to alienation

Los Comunales was also supposed to be a workplace that helped to re-socialise people who had become estranged from socialist society. Most workers on the trucks started at Los Comunales while serving the last part of their prison sentence, ⁵³ which is another reason why Los Comunales workers were assumed to be black: as is the case in the US, also in Cuba, crime is stigmatised as ‘black’. ⁵⁴ Partly because of such ‘racial criminalisation’, dark-skinned men are indeed overrepresented in prison in Cuba. ⁵⁵ Most ex-convict workers at Los Comunales had moreover been in jail for one of the various ‘economic’ crimes that became more common during the Special Period, for instance, breaking into a bodega (a state-owned grocery shop). Los Comunales was to offer workers a way to make themselves useful to society again by participating in meaningful revolutionary work that would ensure a clean neighbourhood, free of the diseases transmitted by rats and mosquitoes – a neighbourhood without the ‘hygiene hazards’ denounced in neighbourhood graffiti.

Manolo, Juan’s best friend, cherished the possibility of contributing to the revolution. He had ended up with Los Comunales not in the aftermath of a prison sentence, nor because of social deviance, but rather after a crippling accident during military training. A veteran of the Angolan war against apartheid South Africa ⁵⁶ and a staunch Fidelista, he was deeply pained by the fact that after his apartment in Centro Havana collapsed (a common tragedy in the neighbourhood), his wife and teenage daughter had secretly left for the United States. Manolo was not one to complain, but sometimes a pent-up frustration exploded in a tirade about the falta de respeto (lack of respect) he experienced, for example, when basic equipment – gloves, brooms, trolleys – never reached the workers. He also lamented that the respect that sanitation workers used to receive during the May Day parades, where they were celebrated as ‘vanguards’, had disappeared. Manolo was exasperated that people’s everyday socialist commitments had been corrupted by the rise of ‘easy money’, as he would tell his co-workers, swaying his hips to mimic effeminate manners; he would surely have found ways to make better money if only he were a ‘different kind of person’.

But whereas in 2015, it was a falta de respeto that workers like Manolo passionately complained about – a disconnect between the revolutionary celebration of sanitation work and its status in reality – these passionate complaints were overtaken in the years that followed by a quieter, more desperate sense of alienation. Manolo’s situation in 2023 was a striking illustration: the workers’ compound had been renovated the previous year, transformed from a grubby and foul-smelling place into a relatively tidy-looking patio with a freshly painted office building and a new bathroom area that even had a working shower for a short time (before it was stolen). That bathroom area, however, was where Manolo had been living for years, ever since his apartment had collapsed. Where once he had proudly shown me his tiny dwelling, cleverly organised for maximum functionality and storage, he now drifted between sharing a room with another homeless worker and sleeping at his in-laws who lived opposite the compound − a household headed by a fierce matriarch who, it was rumoured, had consequently demanded to collect Manolo’s relatively generous (military veteran’s) pension. The only way out of this humiliating situation for Manolo would have been to accept the home officially assigned to him as a veteran in an entirely different neighbourhood – something Manolo quietly but stubbornly refused.

However, it was not only those, like Manolo, who had clandestine housing who were being pressured out of the neighbourhood as it underwent renovation and beautification. Workers who lived in desirable housing – in colonial-style apartments that their families had acquired during the revolution when (often black) workers were assigned the homes of (usually white) bourgeois families who had fled Havana – also felt the pressure to leave because they could not afford the renovations necessary to prevent their apartments from becoming derumbes (ruins). Elena was desperate to continue living in the neighbourhood, but she agonised constantly about selling her apartment as she had fallen through her upstairs kitchen floor and kept being told by neighbours of the high amounts of money that private investors were offering for her type of apartment. Similarly, during an episode of domestic violence, Anthony’s wife had fallen through the floor of her apartment and with the gaping hole as a grim reminder, she demanded that Anthony sell the apartment and buy a functional (albeit smaller) apartment in the adjacent neighbourhood. This turned out to be a disaster for both of them, as Anthony’s work required him to be in the old neighbourhood all the time, while his wife had to constantly go there as her ration card (including the rations of deceased family members) was registered at the old address.

Meanwhile, those who could – not the workers of Los Comunales but people of other means (often also of lighter skin colour or in any case considered ‘whiter’) – had renovated their apartments and, following the trend that started at the beginning of the Special Period, had reserved parts to rent out as a casa particular to foreigners (while often paying others to do the cooking and cleaning involved). This practice of renting out, legalised in 1997, also increased the commodification of housing, which was followed in 2011 by a law officially authorising the sale of houses. And since these wealthier residents, who were able to enter the tourism rental market, could easily earn in a day what a worker at Los Comunales would receive as a monthly salary, ⁵⁷ the eagerness of buyers – increasingly also Cuban-Americans and foreigners – only increased, as did the desperation of those falling behind. On my last visit, I also came across an even more remarkable phenomenon in socialist Cuba: the Hotel Tribe Caribe – in front of which Rodrigo was attacked – consisted of an entire residential apartment block that had been bought up and renovated in a truly exquisite Art Deco style, to now – according to its website – rent out to tourists for up to 1,000 dollars a night. ⁵⁸

Some workers criticised the emergence of this real estate market as ‘capitalist’, but most were remarkably uncritical of the new phenomenon, as they believed people ‘chose’ to sell, disregarding the market mechanisms compelling them to do so. Alienation looked even more like a voluntary process because, after years of prohibiting private renovation for fear that this would increase the pilfering of state resources, the state was now even offering loans for private home renovation. A few sanitation workers had taken out such loans but eventually spent them instead on the constant financial emergencies that characterised their lives. Ironically, at a time when ‘Afro-Cuban culture’ was being celebrated in the neighbourhood as a tourist attraction – with the Callejon de Hamel’s anti-racist murals and Santeria rituals attracting busloads of tourists – black workers living in the neighbourhood were under increasing pressure to sell their homes to newcomers (who wouldn’t be mistaken for black) and moving to an entirely different neighbourhood. Moving out of the neighbourhood made it difficult for the workers to maintain place-based social relations – the sociolismo (a play on socio, ‘mate’) they relied on to make ends meet. It also meant that these workers were now sweeping the streets and collecting the garbage of a neighbourhood to which they no longer belonged.

From civilising surveillance to punishment and eviction

Working at Los Comunales always had a (re)integrative aspect and included measures aimed at inculcating the revolutionary value of disciplina in workers. Workers were suspected of indisciplina by default, partly because many struggled with alcoholism or had served time in prison, but also because indisciplina was much sooner recognised as such if the person in question was negro. I, for example, saw Juan’s boss, Anthony – of very dark complexion but also of such high ‘nivel’ (so highly educated/cultured) that workers would tell me he was ‘actually a white man’ ⁵⁹ – reprimanded by the director of the empresa (the management office) for the indisciplina of having taken off his shirt when he had joined in with workers to load rubble into a truck. I also interviewed a woman who ran a local ‘revolutionary’ NGO in the neighbourhood, whose mission was to educate sanitation workers on how to ‘politely and peacefully start a conversation’ when workers saw residents nonchalantly throwing garbage on the street. Meanwhile, every workplace of Los Comunales had at least three tecnicos/as – usually of a higher nivel – who would check the workers’ tracks daily to see if they had done their work properly.

During my early fieldwork, I was told of increasing surveillance and disciplining. In 2016, workers were eager to show me the new 360-degree cameras that had been installed above some garbage containers as if guarding some precious treasure – the treasure in question no longer being the health and hygiene of the population so much as the tourist gaze that was not supposed to witness people rummaging through garbage bins. ‘From China’, workers commented, complaining that the cameras, for those not expert in judging the camera’s rotation behind its glass sphere, had increased the number of fines they had received for fishing out materia prima, i.e. recyclables, from the containers. Los Comunales were also increasingly singled out in public discourse as a den of ‘corruption’. While the Special Period led almost every Cuban – including white-collar workers – to ‘invent’ economic side-activities, the management of Los Comunales increasingly felt the need to demonstrate efforts to ‘root out corruption’. Anthony, in particular, was often targeted and suspended from work, sometimes for weeks at a time, for accounting irregularities. According to the managers, these irregularities were a cause of Centro Havana’s failing garbage collection services, but, according to Anthony, the actual cause was the much larger-scale corruption happening at higher levels of the administration.

Over time I saw the disciplining of workers of Los Comunales hardening into something qualitatively different: a process of them being almost constantly under threat of punishment, making workers avoid the police at all costs. Juan, for example, told me the story of how he felt morally indebted to another worker, Yuri, because of the day Juan was attacked with a machete by one of the garbage truck workers who suspected Juan of going after his woman. Things got so ugly that a neighbour called the police. Suspecting that both Juan and his attacker were likely to go to jail if they were caught, Yuri ‘sacrificed’ himself, shouting out to Juan to ‘run for it’ while obstructing the police. Juan’s moral debt was enormous, as Yuri subsequently got into terrible trouble because of all the unpaid fines the police found in his file. In fact, by 2023, many workers had accumulated so many fines that they risked being sent to jail. What’s more, the fines seemed to be getting higher and higher every year. The latest iteration of this trend − the implementation of a new legal resolution in 2023 to step up efforts to prevent ‘improper disposal of garbage’ – listed no fewer than twenty-six finable offences (a to z) for littering. ⁶⁰ While most of the listed offences were intended to punish littering residents, in practice, the new, hefty fines often landed on sanitation workers, with offence ‘z’ prescribing a fine of 5,000 pesos (almost an entire month’s salary) for ‘persons . . . who by failing to fulfil their function prevent . . . the existence of a clean, hygienic and healthy environment’.

By the 2020s, fines thus went from being a disciplinary nuisance to becoming an anxiety-provoking and punitive measure whereby workers were blamed for structural problems in garbage collection to avoid ‘the system’ being blamed. Delegates of the Poder Popular (National Assembly of People’s Power) which had gained greater decentralised budgetary autonomy, became increasingly nervous about garbage piling up as certain residents – especially those invested in tourism − would complain about it, and others would take pictures that ended up circulating on Miami-centred social media platforms as symbolic of all that was supposedly wrong with socialist Cuba. In 2022, in addition to the sermons that Anthony was used to receiving from the director, who would drive up to his workplace and order him into his car to rub Anthony’s nose, at least figuratively, in whatever pile of garbage he had received complaints about from the head of the Poder Popular, this time Anthony was sanctioned for an equivalent of 200 euros. Fearing he would otherwise be sent to prison, Anthony paid up, but to do so, he had to borrow money left, right and centre on risky promises, leaving him with too many informal creditors to manage and forcing him to flee to Niquero, a municipality that, seen from Havana, is almost synonymous with remoteness. It was a surreal experience for Anthony, who had grown up in Havana, and a dangerous one, as he suffered from chronic pancreatitis, which meant he often had to be taken to the nearby hospital for acute emergencies: the nearest hospital from where he lived now in Niquero was about six hours away.

A development in Juan’s life also reflected the punitive turn towards sanitation workers – a turn driven by wealthier residents whose influence was ever more visible in their ‘flood[ing of] the city with iron window grills [that] create a sense of enclosure and fear, the anticipation of a certain criminality, more overwhelming in the mind of the new rich than in reality’. ⁶¹ In 2023, I met Juan in a different workplace from where he had worked and lived for over two decades. What had happened was that the middle-class woman who lived overlooking the sanitation compound – a woman so notorious for complaining about workers’ behaviour that she was nicknamed ‘the witch’ – had once again called the police one evening, this time to complain that she had seen Juan ‘exposing himself’. ‘That’s what she was hoping for!’, Manolo’s wife exclaimed when telling the story, while Juan apologetically explained that he had simply been taking a piss in a corner of the compound. No one but ‘the witch’ believed that Juan had behaved indecently, but, shockingly, the police took the opportunity to permanently evict Juan from the compound where he had been living. In his new Comunales workplace, in a different neighbourhood, Juan soon built up a rudimentary new social-cum-survival network, but the sense of loss was palpable during the days I spent with him. When not commenting on his 24-hour-a-day efforts to stay sober, his words always returned to how much he missed his friends Manolo and Anthony and the brutal injustice of the eviction. On the last day I spent with him during my most recent visit, as we walked back to Juan’s new workplace − a closed, lonely and foul-smelling space where he now slept − he turned to me and said, ‘Luisa, you know, this life . . . I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy’.

Conclusion

By paying close attention to the changing relational context of the daily lives of sanitation workers in Centro Havana as a global capitalist law of value began to reshape the neighbourhood, it was possible to discern the contours of a particular process of structural racialisation. The process of replacing socialist workplace-centred welfare provisioning with what were intended as decent salaries took place in the context of reforms designed to ensure the survival of a socialist system in a larger capitalist global economy that would otherwise too easily drain it. The capital that flowed into Centro Havana to produce the tourist rentals that were supposed to keep Cuba’s economy afloat was supposed to help maintain the ‘sphere of contained reproduction’ ⁶² of which Los Comunales was a part. In reality, however, workers were experiencing ever-increasing precarity. The process of workers’ alienation in and from their neighbourhood thus takes place in a context where labour is devalued and property relations, used to channel global capital flows, once again become decisive in determining local belonging. Indeed, this is one of the ‘serious systemic implications’ of the Cuban state’s contradictory – socialist and rentier − approach to value in the post-Soviet conjuncture. ⁶³ The process whereby socialist surveillance and disciplining take a punitive turn, then, occurs in the context of sanitation shifting from being about public health and hygiene to being about the status and attractiveness of a neighbourhood for tourism.

Although these processes involve relatively small-scale and fragmented forms of capital constrained by a variety of socialist regulations, they constitute more than just some ‘visible inequalities in consumption patterns . . . not related to ownership of the means of production or to economic power’. ⁶⁴ The stories described here are not of the radical capitalist plunder and dispossession most readily associated with the global history of racial capitalism but of workers being dispossessed of the general socialist welfare they used to enjoy; there is no violent segregation of population groups, but rather more subtle market-mediated processes of exclusion; there is no hard legal border separating the valuable from the cheapened and oppressed, but an apparently socialist set of laws that in practice, however, punish the more vulnerable. Many ‘private homes’ in Centro Havana have become both a means of production and a means of financial speculation. This transformation likewise redefines the work of Los Comunales: it transforms what was earlier considered a significant contribution to the revolution into labour at the service of capital. It pressurises democratically elected neighbourhood councils into coercively enforcing this service. Although nascent and subtle – and the outcome still contingent – these processes form a ‘real’ political-economic structure of everyday life that feeds into the pre-existing formal racialisation experienced by workers of Los Comunales.

The analysis thus shows that structural racism, which usually carries ‘the imprimatur of the state’, ⁶⁵ can also arise in a context where the state is ‘morally’ committed to socialism. Indeed, where capital enters a socialist political economy, it proves extremely difficult to contain its influence in reshaping social relations. It moreover influences policy decisions, visible, for instance, in how Cuba’s ‘sphere of contained reproduction’, of which Los Comunales is a part, is constantly deprioritised in terms of state investment. ⁶⁶ The various legal measures taken by the Cuban state to then counter the effects of this underinvestment have often unintentionally deepened the process of structural racialisation, as in the case of the fines that were supposed to prevent littering by neighbourhood residents but ended up penalising sanitation workers instead. The analysis even suggests that a socialist state, struggling to legislate its way through the contradictions raised by the intensely commodifying tendencies of an emergent urban tourist market, may be particularly prone to unintentionally deepening processes of structural racialisation.

To come full circle, let’s return briefly to the attack on Rodrigo. During the attack, there was no mention of Rodrigo being ‘black’ (or elderly), and Rodrigo’s supervisor and the police sprang into action almost immediately, showing themselves to be supportive. On the face of it, then, the relevance of anti-racist politics is questionable. But having analysed a process of structural racialisation unfolding, we see that Rodrigo was identifiably part of a labour force experiencing precarity, alienation and penalisation as the consequence of transnational private investment and accumulation in Centro Havana. Such processes of structural racialisation reinforce the pre-existing repertoire of formal racist sentiments, which a deranged individual can easily translate into a random, albeit targeted, attack on a worker who was already seen as black and who is now moreover seen – while fulfilling essential work – as ‘good for nothing’. The unfolding processes meanwhile elevate the more mobile residents of the neighbourhood, those who own apartments they can rent out to tourists, who tend to think of themselves as ‘white’, and who no longer felt enough in common with Rodrigo to even make a bulla when he was attacked. As the position of these wealthier residents in the neighbourhood strengthens, they also indirectly – through the police and local elected officials − gain more influence over the workers at Los Comunales, whom they start to despise for not sufficiently fulfilling their wishes for a garbage-free, tourism-friendly neighbourhood.

If all this looks very much like structural racism in its outcome, there is, however, one aspect that Kundnani, inspired by A. Sivanandan, strongly emphasises and that deserves final consideration: under capitalist governance, structural racism is not only a mechanism of exploitation and dispossession that is produced in – and essential to − the very process of capital accumulation, but also a mechanism of dehumanising its victims precisely at the moment when they try to resist. Indeed, at that moment, what might have been a non-explicit (but real) process of racialisation becomes much more explicit as race begins to function as a way of culturalising and dismissing political resistance as the irrational and enraged outbursts of ‘lesser peoples’. ⁶⁷ A key question to consider, then, is whether resistance to structural racism is taking shape and whether this is giving rise to racist repression. I observed a hopeful trend in this regard: in 2015−2016, when processes of structural racialisation were not yet so noticeable, the stories of protest I heard tended to be rather grim, of workers being beaten up when they dared to demand better working conditions. The way this seemed to work was that instead of police coming in to intervene, groups of Communist loyalists were sent to the scene to beat up strikers, making it look like ‘neighbours’ were ‘spontaneously’ responding to counter-revolutionary responses to the crisis of the Special Period. After this happened a few times, the workers seemed to have lost the desire to protest.

Paradoxically, however, in recent years – while processes of structural racialisation have emerged – more optimistic stories of protest have also. Someone, for example, enthusiastically told me how she’d heard that workers of Los Comunales in an adjacent neighbourhood had held a sit-in strike, sitting down collectively and demanding that they be provided with the necessary equipment and paid their due salaries before they would go back to work: ‘You’ll need very big balls to pass this picket-line, they told the manager . . . and it worked!’, she exclaimed happily, describing how after the second day the managers had rushed to provide the workers with the necessary equipment and pay them their due salaries. When I expressed my surprise that the authorities had allowed such a strike to take place, she added that it had all taken place indoors, inside the workers’ compound, not on the streets, and that because it had not put the authorities to shame, the strike had been tolerated and workers’ demands recognised as legitimate.

Similarly, someone else told me how the empresa had tried to promote a woman to the position of workplace boss who, according to him, nobody could stand because she was both absent and overzealous – she even kept lists of workers to be disciplined and workers who were considered destacado (outstanding) – without any consideration for workers’ personal situations. However, the empresa reconsidered when workers refused to work if this woman became their boss. ‘In your country, they call that a strike, don’t they?’ the person who told me asked with a somewhat mischievous smile, satisfied with the outcome of the negotiations. It seems, then, that when kept out of the danger zone of geopolitics and national security – a danger zone into which the ‘11 July protests’ in 2021 in Centro Havana clearly did venture − the authorities in Havana are reluctant to add insult to injury and, on the whole, refrain from depoliticising sanitation workers’ protests as anything other than legitimate demands. As long as Cuba remains a socialist country, this will be a key difference to the structural racism that exists in countries that fully embrace capitalism and are only too eager to use race to depoliticise and culturalise resistance. ⁶⁸