Since US anthropologist Oscar Lewis's expulsion from Cuba in 1970, ethnographies of revolutionary Cuba have been few and far between. This alone renders Ryer's work significant, but his findings about everyday life in post-Soviet Cuba are also fresh and original.
We know more about the Africa of Afro-Cuban “origins” during the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation economies of sugar and tobacco than we do about the lingering impact of solidarity with Angola during the Cold War, when Cubans went overseas to fight and Africans came to Cuba to study. This study both speaks to the meanings of race within the specificities of Cuban revolutionary culture and locates those meanings within broader patterns of Hispanic Caribbean models of mestizaje, raza and nationalism in a way that insular approaches to revolutionary Cuba neglect. To quote Fernando Ortiz, Ryer considers a new Cuban counterpoint—how Cubans came to see themselves as mestizo and thus different from the imagined topographies of both “la Yuma” (the idealized notion of the United States and the capitalist world) and África in the immediate post-Soviet moment as the dollar economy began to open up in the 1990s.
Ryer reveals how Cuba's international solidarity policies in Algeria, Sudan, Mozambique, and Angola ended up having a subtle but enduring impact on domestic understandings of race and nation, as well as forging a new “1.5 generation” of African students who have come to see themselves as Cuban in important ways. This is the first study to take stock of how Cuban internationalism has reshaped Cuban race and nationality, as well as seriously consider the life course of Africans who lived in Cuba during their extended training.
Ryer demonstrates, for example, how Sudanese youths who spent extended periods of time in Cuba were deeply touched by their experience—shedding important cultural knowledge intrinsic to Nuer and Dinka ethnic identity, from linguistic competence to age grade and tea ceremony competency. He shows how Sudanese women who came of age in Cuba wished to retain their independence and postpone marriage, how boys aspired to use their new Cuba-acquired skill set rather than become soldiers, and how both felt deeply nostalgic for Castro's Cuba and revolutionary conciencia. In the 1990s, Africans also acquired status in ways that contradicted their location in the racial status hierarchy, due to their access to goods in the diplotiendas.
This study is richly documented and crisply argued, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary Cuban international humanitarianism and its cultural and social impact at home and abroad. Multisite ethnography is always challenging, but Ryer makes excellent use of blogs and documentaries to trace these returnees back home and document their transnational life stories and the changing modes of the affect, longing, and desire that they reveal.
Ryer also explores the localization of US meta-symbols such as Nike and the US flag during the early 1990s, as Cubans celebrated leisure over utility. Through adopting the US flag as a style icon, and appropriating Tommy Hilfiger's country-club wear, Cuban youths developed a unique street style that indexed a desire for status signaling, yet in ways that were not necessarily at odds with their political identity. Ryer refuses to reduce Cuba's understanding of things US inevitably to resistance: he reads these cultural appropriations in terms of a complex blend of pride, longing, emergent inequalities, and disillusionment, as well as utopian desire, thus offering an important corrective to the presumption that every act in Cuba is political. The study reveals how consumption theory can be fruitfully applied in a context of scarcity: status distinctions are parsed in minute terms because consumer goods are in short supply, and Cubans find creative ways of fashioning their identity through commodities.
Ryer also offers a groundbreaking exploration of the grey economy and the multiple strategies deployed to poach products from the state to sell on the side. This material reveals much about the systems of barter involved in everyday life in contemporary Cuba; those systems weave people together in complex debts of reciprocity and expanded dramatically during the Special Period. In sum, Ryer's book is a fresh and original contribution to our understanding of Cuban everyday life, including everyday negotiations of the meanings of Africa and the United States, the swapping economy, youth culture, and consumption.
