En Casa: Women and Households in Post-Soviet Cuba

This paper argues that the household has become a renewed space of significance for Cuban women in the post-Soviet period. It draws from existing scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the city of Santiago de Cuba to discuss the effect of post-Soviet crisis and reform upon women's domestic practices, the management of domestic economies, and long-standing gender ideals that link women to the domestic sphere. Physical, economic and social factors leading to post-Soviet Cuban women's increased concentration upon the household are argued to be both the result of pre-existing social orientations towards households as a womanly space mid a response to specific politico-economic shifts since the collapse of the Soviet Union.