Between Cosmopolitanism and the National Slot: Cuba's Diasporic Children of the Revolution

Abstract

Although cosmopolitanism used to be associated with Western, elite practices, it has in recent years been used to describe a wider array of practices by non-elite and non-Western groups. This article explores the cosmopolitanism of Cuba's "children of the revolution" living in Spain. They are those now young adults who were born in Cuba after the revolution and who were brought up to become the socialist New Man. Theirs was a world of socialist cosmopolitanism, which simultaneously was infused with commitment to a national, territorially-based political project: an independent, socialist Cuba. However, some of these New Men and New Women now embrace ideals of cosmopolitan individualism rather than the patriotic socialism with which they were inculcated as children. Yet the cultural tools that the children of the revolution make use of in their practices and narratives of cosmopolitanism paradoxically point back to revolutionary Cuba. The article argues that cosmopolitanism as a lived practice owes to experiences within the Cuban socialist-national project and is in effect a response to the ineffectiveness of this project, not necessarily a substantive opposition to it. Social capital and habitus deriving from Cuban socialism gave the children of the revolution the desire to attain cosmopolitanism as part of their life-projects. This finding suggests that the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism needs further rethinking.

Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture

“…As a descriptor for contact and interaction across national, ethnic and other categorical boundaries, conviviality shares semantic terrain with cosmopolitanism, but it is also different from it. Cosmopolitanism in its Enlightenment incarnation claimed universalism, but it has in practice been associated with a male, Western and elite subject position (Berg 2009;Youngs 2009). In the past few decades, scholars have explored vernacular, critical and various other forms of grounded 'counter-cosmopolitanisms' Harvey 2000;Robbins 1998;Werbner 1999;Wise 2009).…”

How Generations Remember

“…Existing research spans studies on kinship and family (see, e.g., Bertaux and Thompson 1993;Lisón Tolosana 1966;Parkin and Stone 2004), to ageing and the intergenerational contract (see, e.g., Lüscher and Liegle 2003) and life-course research related to political attitudes and educational and career paths (see, e.g., Mayer 2009). In the last few decades, generation has become a central concept in research on migration, connected to studies on exiles (see, e.g., Ballinger 2003;Berg 2009) as well as second-generation migrants (see, e.g., Vertovec and Rogers 1998;Wessendorf 2007). Moreover, generation has also been a topic in life-course and biography research connected with political ruptures (see, e.g., Diewald et al 2006;Rosenthal and Bogner 2009) as well as in studies concerned with intergenerational aspects of memory (see, e.g., Hirsch 2008;Welzer 2007).…”

On the social ground beneath our feet: for a cosmopolitan anthropology

“…Like others, I followed Hannerz’ suggestion that it has become time ‘to let more ethnographers in’ (2004: 73) on the study of cosmopolitanism. My engagement has accordingly taken the form of an ethnography of young diasporic Cubans living in Spain and the ways in which they use cosmopolitanism to construct subjectivities outside of constraining and reductive nationalist–territorial concepts of identity and Cubanness (Berg 2009). ‘The children of the revolution’, as I call this group, grew up in a world of actually existing socialist cosmopolitanism, which simultaneously was infused with commitment to a national, territorially‐based political project: an independent, socialist Cuba.…”