Reframing crisis: Hope and future-making in contemporary Cuban photographs
Date
2024
Authors
Smith, Graydon
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Abstract
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, already challenging circumstances in Cuba have significantly worsened, heavily impacting how Cubans envision their lives and futures. Using a combination of visual and ethnographic methods, I conducted two months of fieldwork in the summer of 2023 in Cuba’s second largest city, Santiago de Cuba. Using photovoice, photowalks, and semi-structured interviews with eight Cuban young adults, I visually explore life following the worst economic crisis in the island’s history. Following COVID-19, an already fraught political climate has further devolved, migration has reached historic rates, inflation renders many goods unobtainable, and infrastructure and services are challenged. For many, future paths are unclear; they may seek better lives abroad, or fight to improve their conditions on the island, in a tumultuous and polarized political climate. For youth, migration often appears more viable to catalyze change. I employ the theory of radical hope to consider how people produce meaning and futural momentum despite tremendous pressure and uncertainty. Curating images into five key themes, I consider discourses of migration, loss, change, escape, and survival during difficult times. As I argue, these photographs inform a non-generalizable, nuanced image of life during crises, highlighting sustaining moments alongside threats to hope. This centers a more dignified view of life, emphasizing momentum rather than fatalism, individual agency, and the possibility for change without prescribing future paths. By emphasizing possibility alongside critique, I raise questions about these indeterminate trajectories and the role of hope in a seemingly hopeless time, finding that a portrait of contemporary Cuban lives and futures are difficult to characterize with pre-existing ideas.
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Keywords
Anthropology, Cuba, Visual, Photography, Cultural Anthropology, Arts, Hope, Future, Crisis, Photovoice, Santiago de Cuba, Migration