Postsocialist puzzle
Cuba’s cultural condition is put under the microscope. Review: Portable Postsocialisms, Paloma Duong, by Gavin O'Toole
Portable Postsocialisms: New Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History, Paloma Duong, 2024, University of Texas Press
If Cuba survived the painful collapse of the socialist bloc at the end of the Cold War, it has yet to consolidate a crystal clear “postsocialist” vision of its future other than persisting in a form of authoritarian statism.
So while its regime continues to be singled out as a regional exception in almost every way by both its supporters and critics, it has followed a path similar to those found elsewhere Latin America that prioritises the role of the state in recovery and survival.
According to Paloma Duong, the rhetoric and policies that have shaped Cuban postsocialism and its legacy in Latin America place it in an explicit dialogue with “the return of the state”—an alliance between state developmentalist interventionism and the restructured interests of transnational capital in the region.
This has meant that Cuba’s postsocialist “mediascape” accommodates competing visions of a present in which nation-state and transnational markets, the PCC and global finance, persist alongside each other while intersecting with informal and hybrid economies mediated by local digital cultures.
At the same time Cuba navigates new relations with other postsocialist societies and a resurgent global anticapitalist movement less attracted to the materialist arguments and class reductionism of the past.
What we are left with is a complex, messy discursive and cultural condition that can defy understanding.
Duong writes: “At the turn of the twenty-first century, Cuban socialism—its signifiers, its legacies—was reactivated as an international object of political desire in the postsocialist moment; at the same time, the global market became a national object of desire in postsocialist Cuba, but that desire meant different things to different social actors. However, these imaginaries of change challenge both the traditional Marxist and neoliberal orthodoxies that conflate (desires for) independent economic activity with (the exploitative designs of) market capitalism.”
To understand Cuba better, therefore, requires the researcher to seek more nuanced representations of political change and revolutionary continuity, which may allow for alternative visions of the future that call into question the symbolic legacies of the established political landscape.
Duong does so, examining a broad range of cultural messages—in music, fashion, screen, and fiction—to explore Cuba’s postsocialist condition and how the heirs of its revolutionary legacy accept, reject, or transform narratives of political continuity and social change.
A critique of Cuban postsocialist culture, she suggests, needs to “capture the tension between two seemingly contradictory phenomena: the continued relevance of Cuban socialism as an object of international political desire, and the unfolding of national desires to participate in the capitalist global market”.
The result identifies perspectives that challenge the official, single-party state’s monopoly on the history and definition of Cuban socialism alongside foreign, exoticizing, perspectives which see its socialism as “portable”—consumable but contained.
Both these perspective are detrimental to debates about progressive values in Cuba outside of narrow revolutionary statist or anticommunist frameworks.
Romanticism and commodification, the author suggests, have been counterproductive to discussions about what viable alternatives to capitalism and conservatism look like in Latin America.
Duong serves up an informed cultural critique spiced with considerable theoretical flavour that has much to commend it, if at times confounding the reader with the expansive nature of her scholarly imagination and the sweeping extent of topics addressed.