The Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life by Sujatha Fernandes (review)

Sujatha Fernandes regales us with an eclectic collection of essays aptly titled The Cuban Hustle. As she explains at the outset, the idea of 'the hustle' comes from a combination of luchar, resolver, inventar and jinetear. The first three are very much ingrained in the Cuban vernacular of the revolutionary period, while the fourth symbolizes the period ushered in by the crisis 1990s. The turn to international tourism brought with it an unintended sexual dimension, and jinetear took on a whole new meaning as Cuba once again defied the odds to survive, albeit in a changed form.

The context for 'hustle' is that of Cuba as an island 'crucible that fostered all kinds of dynamic cultures' in which 'ordinary Cubans' sought to create alternative cultures in the post-Soviet period—part of a long history dating back to the colonial era, of aspirations for social justice and the fashioning of modes of survival and expressive cultures' (1). The essays cover almost a 20-year span, from 1998 when Fernandes first visited the island to 2017, documenting the 'sheer inventiveness' of Cubans 'not only jostling to survive but also to create meaning in a time of turmoil' (2).

The underlying thread is how deeply interwoven are values of collectivism, egalitarianism, and voluntarism, derived from the past. Fernandes sees these as evidencing a panoply of 'utopic and liberatory visions' in a 'groundswell' of self-organized cultural and activist movements challenging government and orthodoxies. Examples of this are antiracist movements and forms of black cultural expression in response to the racialized impoverishment of black Cubans in the new economy.

The book is divided into three sections: the culture of the Special Period (from rumba to hip-hop, feminism to film, art), normalization (Netflix meets the weekly 'packet', rap meets highbrow art, documentary, digitalization, black diasporic dialogues), and Cuban futures in the Trump era ('hairdressers of the world unite', socially engaged activism, a ship adrift). First-hand interviews with Cubans, some of them leading figures in their field recounting their experiences and perceptions, are juxtaposed with her own commentary and analysis. They traverse the 1990s collapse, when artists and galleries were left without basic supplies. The film industry went into recession and the government into a siege mentality, and the mid-90s, when the arts resuscitated through integration into new global networks of production and distribution, with multiple and contradictory effects. Fernandes argues that alongside a 'fetishization' of 'marketable commodities for global consumers' and individual commercialization of artists rather collective experimentation, transnational networks also helped reshape the Cuban cultural sphere around issues of gender and race; and a vibrant cultural production and activism nurtured future generations and projects in the new millennium in Cuba and abroad.

While impossible to do justice here to the richness of the topics and wealth of detail, they well substantiate her conclusion that forms of cultural expression in the post-Soviet period have been marked by two features: engagement and dialogue with global networks and negotiation with state institutions, critiquing new hierarchies of power in a globalizing Cuba. She ends: "It is not possible to predict how the future will unfold in Cuba, though the revolution faces better odds of survival at the end of the 2010s than in the early 1990s… What we can say is that Cubans will continue to find ways to hustle, invent, create, and make poetry out of the material of their everyday life" (169).

Fernandes was writing, of course, before Covid-19, and post-pandemic Cuba arguably faces even greater challenges today than it did in the 1990s. Surely, however, come what may, Cubans will continue to hustle!