Inside El Barrio: A Bottom-Up View of Neighborhood Life in Castro's Cuba (review)

Havana is one of the few places in Latin America where the imprint of socialist development policies can still readily be seen on the urban landscape. Inside El Barrio uses the neighborhood as a starting point to explore neighborhood life and culture in Havana during the Special Period (1989-2006). The book's goal is to show how Cuban society operates "on the ground" in vulnerable neighborhoods. Taylor attributes the stayng power of Cuba's socialist regime through a difficult economic crisis to the stable, hyper-organized neighborhoods that anchor Cuban society.

Inside El Barrio is a mixed-methods study that draws on historic document analysis, participant observation, informal interviews with community leaders, a 'social land-use survey' of the historic San Isidro neighborhood and a household survey. Unfortunately, many of the innovative methods laid out in the prologue are either not incorporated into the analysis or are not used at all, such as 'systematic digital photoanalysis' and 'GIS used to study patterns of land use and institutional development of neighborhoods, including community interrelationships'.

One of the book's central premises is that a fundamental ideological duality underlies Cuban's view of how their society should be organized. This duality between the 'popular' and 'economic' classes, Taylor asserts, emerged during the struggle for independence and continues to the present. While the economic classes dominated from independence through the republican period, the popular classes at last saw their vision of "a people-centered society" based on "the principles of solidarity, reciprocity, the equitable distribution of wealth and socioeconomic justice" (p. 178) with the Triumph of the Revolution in 1959. The book thus begins with a detailed history of the establishment of this ideological duality that resulted in the struggle for Cuban independence from 1868 to 1902.

The Triumph of the Revolution in 1959 also marked the triumph of the 'popular' classes over the long-standing rule of the 'economic' classes. Havana was remade through 'people-first' policies that dismantled the housing market, led to an unprecedented 85 percent of Havana residents owning their homes, relocated slum dwellers, established micro-brigades to address chronic housing shortages, established neighborhood-based organizations such as the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), transformed elite spaces into public spaces and 'resymbolized' the urban setting. One influential effect of eliminating the real estate market (only permutas, or swaps, were permitted) was that habaneros were 'frozen' in neighborhood space. Many of the pre-revolutionary residential patterns thus persisted, including unequal physical condition and quality of life across neighborhoods but also a high degree of racial integration (racial residential segregation previously had been predominant only in elite neighborhoods). With the economic crisis of the 1990s came economic compromises that transformed Havana once again into a tourist city, plagued by symbols of elitism. Neighborhood strengths such as high levels of social capital and trust helped habaneros make ends meet during the Special Period, but consumer desires rather than survival needs have now become "the driving force behind everyday life and culture" (p. 146). Taylor interprets this development as problematic, with unmet consumer aspirations constituting a form of structural dissatisfaction that collides with Cuba's people-centered society.

The revolutionary government's underlying political philosophy fundamentally shaped economic and urban development decisions. The Revolution's goals were materialized through housing, health and education policies and the heavy subsidization of basic needs such as food, transportation and utilities. Participatory democracy was realized through neighborhood-based organizations such as the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) and the Federation of Cuban Women (FMCs). An urban historian and planner in the United States, Taylor is clearly employing a comparative perspective in his analysis of the success of Cuban neighborhoods, focusing on homeownership and housing security, occupational and racial diversity, household structure (i.e. several adults living in the home translates...