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Exploring the Cultural and Infrastructural Impacts of Consumerism on the New Cuba Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs Volume 3 Issue 1 Cuba Today Article 4 December 2018 Exploring the Cultural and Infrastructural Impacts of Consumerism on the New Cuba Grace Stainback Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/hgjpa Part of the Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Latin American Studies Commons, Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons, and the Urban Studies Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Stainback, Grace (2018) "Exploring the Cultural and Infrastructural Impacts of Consumerism on the New Cuba," Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 4. https://doi.org/10.15760/hgjpa.2018.3.1.4 This open access Article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). All documents in PDXScholar should meet accessibility standards. If we can make this document more accessible to you, contact our team. Exploring the Cultural and Infrastructural Impacts of Consumerism on the New Cuba Cover Page Footnote A special thanks to the following for bringing this experience to fruition: Kevin Kecskes, PhD Isbel Diaz Torres This article is available in Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/hgjpa/vol3/ iss1/4 2018 THE HATFIELD GRADUATE JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS 1 Exploring the Cultural and Infrastructural Impacts of Consumerism on the New Cuba Grace Stainback Portland State University This paper seeks to explore how a shifting economic model and an increasing influx of U.S. tourism, customs, and products will impact consumerism and waste in Cuba. The paper begins by charting the rise of an unwitting conservationist culture among Cubans, built out of necessity as a response to Castro-era economic hardships. This is followed by a discussion of recent Cuban economic reforms and the rise of tourism, private enterprise and material luxury in Cuba. For the emerging autonomous economic class who have shouldered decades of scarcity, the social and economic values of consumerism far outweigh any perceived environmental cost. Finally, an analysis is undertaken concerning the ideological and infrastructural challenges facing Cuba as it moves towards a future of elevated consumption. Public infrastructure in Cuba is outdated and ill-equipped to manage the swift rise in material waste that will result from increased tourism and economic activity. While co-production models and community organizing efforts to promote environmentalism have proven successful on other island nations that have experienced a swift rise in consumption, civil society actors in Cuba experience socio-political barriers to public participation. Looking forward, the Cuban state must empower the burgeoning private sector and Cuban citizens to participate in the effort to maintain Cuba’s low ecological footprint. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 10.15760/hgjpa.2018.3.1.4 Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2018], Art. 4 2 CONSUMERISM IN THE NEW CUBA Vol. 3:1 Part One: The Rise of the Cuban Creative Class Cuban-born artist and designer Ernesto Oroza is a collector of artifacts. These artifacts are rare, but they aren’t products of ancient history, and they aren’t expert-made. Rather, they are the stuff of everyday Cuban life, doubly remarkable in their genius and simplicity: old aluminum lunch trays fashioned into radio antennas; a motor, harvested from a broken washing machine and welded to power a makeshift key-cutter; an irrigation system consisting of old soda bottles nourishing an urban farm of organic produce. Oroza travelled all over Cuba collecting these objects between 1994 and 2007, during the height of what Fidel Castro dubbed “The Special Period in a Time of Peace.” Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba lost close to 75% of its international trade and the economy plummeted. Faced with severe austerity measures and dwindling resources, Cubans had to get creative to make do. And they did: the perfect storm of material scarcity brought on by the Special Period, and a ubiquitous, free education system distributed through socialist policy merged to spawn remarkable ingenuity in the everyday. Oroza calls the DIY phenomena “technological disobedience,”1or the tendency for Cubans to think outside the normal capabilities of an object. Interestingly, in a place where disobedience towards government authority is not tolerated, liberation from the limitations of single-use material objects was attained. It was, in a way, its own form of individualism: a creative force that surpassed the boundaries of everyday material rules. “As the crisis became more severe, people’s creativity grew more powerful, and everywhere you looked you saw solutions to the needs that people faced all the time, in every aspect of life,” Oroza said in a 2013 interview.2 Examples of technological disobedience arise everywhere in the contemporary news and pop culture documenting Cuban life. In The Other Side of Paradise, Julia Cooke writes about throw pillows stuffed with old VHS tape, and faulty toilet bowl chains patched up with a melted Bic pen cap.3 Another journalist recounts street vendors serving up flan in the bottom half of a used beer can to eager customers.4 During my time in Cuba in December 2016, I visited Muraleando, an urban dump-turned-community art center that was an impressive homage to creative re-use. The architectural layout of the space evoked the colorful flair of Antoni Gaudi but, upon closer inspection, was composed of recycled construction materials and accented with broken glass, old coffee cups and chunks of household appliances. Sculptures fashioned from car parts line the site: a hubcap-framed shrine to an unspecified deity, a rooster sculpted from the axle of a Ford ‘59. Stainback: Consumerism in the New Cuba 2018 THE HATFIELD GRADUATE JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS 3 Perhaps the most striking recognition of Cuban resourcefulness came from a non-Cuban. During a visit to the newly opened American Embassy in Cuba, an uninviting fortress of steel barricades set against the breezy, palm- lined backdrop of the Malecon, I asked U.S. Foreign Service Officer Steve Martelli what Americans could learn from Cubans. In lieu of mentioning Cuba’s exemplary health care and education systems, he gushed, “You should see the things they make, out of the things they make them with,” mentioning a boat he once saw fashioned with the old motor from a blender.5 Conservation shows in Cuba’s environmental metrics. It is the only country that meets the conditions of sustainability according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), which refers to a balance between human development indicators and ecological footprint.6 As Cabello et al. explain, “the government of Cuba was forced by its extreme situation to confront the reality of limited resources. It chose the less traveled path of sustainable development for its people. The culture of savings and rational use of resources is also of core importance for the Cuban model.”7 Remarkably, while Cuban people have access to free education and quality health care, and have a life expectancy rate that slightly outstretches Americans, their environmental impact has remained impressively low. According to Lewis: the average Cuban has a 4.7-acre ecological footprint, the total amount of land area needed to grow the food they eat, produce the goods they use, and absorb the carbon they emit. For humans to avoid depleting the earth’s ecological resources, we would all have to live on about 4 acres each, according to the environmental nonprofit Global Footprint Network. As of 2011, Costa Ricans each used 5.4 acres, Norwegians almost 12, Americans nearly 17.8 But where do the Cuban people stand on these metrics? Considering that most citizens living within the lexicon of capitalist-oriented Western societies have been taught to equate consumption and excess with progress, championing the conservationist road less traveled is a remarkable mentality for the Cuban populace to maintain. But are Cubans actually satisfied with their level of consumption, or is their eco-friendly lifestyle just an ironic byproduct of the grim economic realities on the island? There is a common term used to describe how Cubans face the struggle that colors everyday life: resolver, to resolve. Resolver, above all, encapsulates the relentless work ethic and creative tactics employed by Cubans to solve their problems. The Communist Party has since latched onto Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2018], Art. 4 4 CONSUMERISM IN THE NEW CUBA Vol. 3:1 the concept of resolver as a point of national pride. Hours of blistering public oration delivered by Fidel Castro, and countless newspaper articles and billboards embracing socialist ideals and the patria, or homeland, have reminded generations of Cubans of the value inherent in their struggle. Wrote Perez: Sacrifice and struggle persisted as idealized attributes of Cuban, to be invoked as the model of conduct as circumstances warranted... Cubans were overtaken by the inexorable logic of their past, enjoined to discharge a legacy of duty imposed by all the history that preceded them. The past provided a time-honored paradigm, loaded with meaning from which to infer duty appropriate to being Cuban.9 However, many Cubans speak of a present that is far removed from the past. Weary from decades of austerity and nationalistic propaganda promising that next year, things will be better, many in Cuba are not satisfied with their current lifestyle or consumption patterns. Novelist Ena Lucía Portela bluntly said in 2007 that “in truth I do not have the slightest idea of what it means to be Cuban today, assuming that it means anything at all.
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