INTRODUCTORY NOTE  <>  NOTA INTRODUCTORIA

This article was originally published on February 14, 2015 in PANORAMAS, of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Latin American Studies (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA), published here with the author’s authorization. 

Este artículo apareció originalmente el 14 de febrero, 2015 en PANORAMAS, del Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad de Pittsburgh, publicado aquí con la autorización del autor.

Contact him/contactarlo en:  ralum@pitt.edu.

Poor Cuban family - from You Tube video

THE CUBAN CULTURE OF POVERTY CONUNDRUM

“Dictators…always look good…from the outside”
Tomáš Masaryk,  Czech sociologist/philosopher

By:  Roland Armando Alum, Research Associate
         University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Latin American Studies (USA)

Introduction

Here I propose here to re-examine certain aspects of life in “Socialist Cuba,” principally the so-called culture of poverty, as gauged relatively early in the Castro brothers regime by two U.S. socio-cultural anthropologists, the legendary Oscar Lewis and his protégée/associate Douglas Butterworth, whose research project 4.5 decades ago was surrounded by controversy and enigmas.(1)

Unquestionably, the Fidel and Raúl Castro “Revolutionary Government” enjoyed an extraordinary initial popularity in 1959. Yet, the enthusiasm vanished as the duo hijacked the liberal-inspired anti-Batista rebellion that had been largely advanced by the then expanding middle-classes. Instead of delivering the promised “pan con libertad” (bread with liberty), the Castro siblings converted Cuba into a socio-spiritually and fiscally bankrupt, Marxist-Stalinist dystopia in which both, bread and liberty are scarce (Botín, 2010; Horowitz, 2008; Moore, 2008).

Cuba was the last Ibero-American colony to attain independence (1902); yet, by the 1950s, the island-nation was a leader in the Americas in numerous quality-of-life indicators. This record was reached notwithstanding instability and governmental corruption during the republican era (1902-58), including the 1952-58 bloody authoritarian dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.(2)   However, under the (now anachronistic octogenarian) Castros, Cuba became an impoverished, Orwellian closed society beleaguered by unproductivity, rampant corruption, humiliating rationing, human rights abuses, and –understandably– unprecedented mass emigration (Díaz-Briquets & Pérez-López, 2006; Horowitz, 2008).

Cuba's Culture of Poverty Conundrum

The Lewis and Butterworth project in 1969-70 is still, oddly, among the little known accounts of the early effects of the Castro family’s regimentation. Supported by a Ford Foundation’s nearly $300,000 grant, the professors intended to test Lewis’s theory of the "culture of poverty" (or rather, sub-culture of poverty). They had innocently hypothesized that a culture of poverty (hereafter CoP) would not exist in a Marxist-oriented society, as they presupposed that the socially alienating conditions that engender it could develop among the poor solely in capitalist economies. Influenced by Marxism, Lewis in particular had cleverly problematized the commonalities of the poor’s elusive quandary in well-known prior studies across different societies, notably among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.(3)

While poverty is defined in relative terms, the CoP was conceptualized as an amorphous corpus of socially transmitted self-defeating beliefs and interrelated values, such as: abandonment, alcoholism, authoritarianism, deficient work ethic, domestic abuse, fatalism, homophobia/machismo, hopelessness, illegitimacy, instant, gratification/present-time orientation, low social-civic consciousness, mother-centered families, sexism/misogyny, suspicion of authorities while holding expectations on government dependency, and so forth.

This “psychology of the…oppressed… poor” is considered a key obstacle to achieving vertical socio-economic mobility even in fluid social-class, more open societies, such as the U.S. Not all poor individuals develop a CoP, but being poor is a sine qua non condition.

Ever since its early stages as a separate discipline in the mid-1800s, anthropology’s cornerstone has been the concept of “culture.” A century later, the notion drifted to everyday language; to wit, statements such as “a culture of corruption” became common in the media in reference to mindsets in government and corporations. I prefer the interpretation of culture by my own Pitt co-mentor, “Jack” Roberts (1964): “a system for storing and retrieving information,” which fits with the Lewis-Butterworth approach.

With initial high-level governmental welcome, one of the Lewis-Butterworth investigations entailed comprehensive interviews of former Havana slum-dwellers resettled in new buildings. In the research project’s fourth book, The People of Buena Ventura, Butterworth (1980) admitted with disenchantment that his research project found sufficient social symptoms that met the CoP criteria, thus disproving the initial hypothesis expecting an absence of the CoP under socialism.(4)

The Project's Significance

The Lewis-Butterworth ethnographic (descriptive, qualitative) work has various additional implications. It shed light for an evaluation of the Guevarist “New Socialist Man” archetype. Similarly, it informed an understanding of the dynamics that led to the spectacular 1980 Mariel boat exodus, when over 120,000 Cubans (some 1.2% of Cuba’s population) “voted with their feet.” Ironically, the regime and its insensitive fans abroad still refer to the raggedy refugees with disdainful discourse as “escoria”  (scum) and with the Marxist slur “lumpen proletariat.” Significantly, most Marielistas were born and/or enculturated under socialism, i.e., they personified the presumed “New Man.” Many of them, moreover, had been military conscripts, and/or had served time in the infamous gulag-type “U.M.A.P.” forced-labor camps created for political dissidents (particularly intellectuals and artists), Beatles’ fans, gays, the unemployed, long-haired bohemians/hippies, Trotskyites, would-be emigrants (considered “traitors”), and religious people (including Jehovah’s Witnesses and Afro-Cuban folk-cults’ practitioners), etc. (Núñez-Cedeño, et al., 1985). In fact, the Marielistas encompassed also an over-representation of Afro-Cubans, the demographic sector traditionally viewed as most vulnerable, and thus, among the expected prime beneficiaries of socialist redistribution.(5)

To continue click here 

________________________________________