Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

The Cuban Revolution is not an event as much as an unfolding process whose key conceptual lynchpins have persisted since (before) 1959: self-determination, anti-imperialism and the pursuit of a ‘proper’ political grammar articulated from the postcolony through the pursuit of nationalism and socialism. This essay charts a counter-genealogy: it traces a brief history of pork in order to unravel the material and ideological crisis and the strengthening of an incipient consumer culture in post-Soviet Cuba. Challenging the ideological unity of Revolutionary discourse, pork enters the lexicon of crisis that permeates the quotidian through theater (Pedro Torriente), novel (Ronaldo Menéndez; Leonardo Padura Fuentes), and lived experience in Havana’s streets (and bath tubs). It becomes an experiential and conceptual tool that allows moving beyond etymological ascriptions that reduce crisis to its medical or juridical roots (discrimination, decision) and open it up to different signifieds: time or crisis as suspension; and food or crisis as lack. By placing food at the center of the public, social, and political discourse of the nation, the Special Period (the economic crisis of the 1990s following the demise of the Soviet Union) disrupted the teleological conception of revolutionary history in favor of the immediacy of hunger, power outages, interminable lines, and the re-signification of lucha (struggle) as individual survival vis-à-vis the revolutionary process. This process of disruption gives shape to a new popular ethos that places consumption at the center of the national narrative of present-day Cuba