Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.11.1.0115
• Pages: 115-116
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Author: Rosa García-Chediak

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

BOOK REVIEWS

Hope Bastian, Everyday Adjustments in Havana: Economic Reforms,

Mobility, and Emerging Inequalities (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018),

hb 248 pp. ISBN: 9781498571098

Reviewed by Rosa García-Chediak1

It is not common to find books about inequalities – of economic base – in con-

temporary Cuba. Among Cuban researchers, the lack of statistical information

is well known, a problem that matches with a particular academic mainstream

that overlaps ethnic and gender approaches to inequalities. With regard to the

foregoing, the book of Hope Bastian is pretty remarkable, because far from

being trapped in the borders of academic fashions, her ethnographic work

bridges the gap between the changes in the economic structure of the country

and the State itself, to meet the values, practices and – at the end – actors that

necessarily change too. Before listing some specific strengths of this book, it

seems important to quote the main objective, that focused in the last pragmatic

reforms in Cuba (2012–), to explore ‘inequalities and stratification in late social-

ist Cuba and how macro forces affect everyday lives in Havana households’.

Also indispensable is to summarise the content of this work. In this sense,

Everyday Adjustments in Havana starts with a retrospective view of the main

social transformations of Cuba in the last 25 years; proceeding with an analysis

of the structure of stratification set in the 1990s and its evolution till the present

day. From there, the author offers an insight into the recent changes in the labour

market and some of its implications for household economies; then ending with

a highly suggestive analysis of the real-estate market revival and how it contrib-

utes to the reproduction of class inequalities in Havana.

The first obvious merit of this work is the very fruitful use of qualitative meth-

odology and ethnographic tools. As the author expresses it, this research strategy

was compelled by the circumstances of a lack of access to quantitative informa-

tion, and by the stigma towards inequalities and poverty on the Island. But pre-

cisely the perspective assumed allows for the identification of core issues such as

1 Rosa García-Chediak is an Associate Professor at the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos,

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México.