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114 6 Having Faith and Making Family Overseas Near the end of my fieldwork, I sat in the modest living room of a small, lowceilinged building with Lisette Fuentes, a young homemaker in her late twenties . Periodically interrupted by the antics of Lisette’s rambunctious young son during the interview, I posed once again my routine question about changes in familial life since the fall of the Soviet Union. As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, this simple question elicited complex narratives in which women reflected upon the problems of reproducing children and households, as well as the shifting relationship between the socialist state and its citizens. Lisette’s response came without hesitation: “Now, everyone has family . . . overseas that help them because here the salaries don’t suffice. And if they don’t have family overseas, people go looking . . . for a partner with money, and that’s the way it goes. Relationships and money, money and relationships. I’m telling you, girl, you have to survive and with the problems we have, it’s not easy. It’s the truth, unfortunately, but the person who doesn’t have family overseas, can’t live in Cuba.” Her comment, echoed in various ways by other women and men I came to know, opened up an unforeseen line of analysis. I had initially viewed migration as beyond the purview of my research, and I was months into fieldwork before I fully considered the implications of migration for sustaining Cuban families and society. But in post-Soviet Cuba, signs of el exterior (“the outside,” often meaning “overseas”) are everywhere, belying ubiquitous tourist and foreign media portrayals of the island as closed or stuck in time. In the pillared shade of Infanta, one of Central Havana’s main arteries that passed directly in front of my home, men and women wearing clothing emblazoned with incongruous American slogans and institutional affiliations strolled by doorways where women sold miscellaneous sponges, lighters, and nail polish received from abroad through HAVING FAITH AND MAKING FAMILY OVERSEAS 115 transnational networks. On one particularly memorable occasion, my field notes record a truck spewing black diesel fumes thundering by with a neatlylettered plea in English on its windshield: “I need a foreign girlfriend,” while just two doors down the road, a pregnant woman strolled toward the clinic in which I conducted fieldwork, towing a small child whose colorful shirt proudly declared in Spanish, “Someone who loves me very much went to Miami and brought me this T-shirt.” These ubiquitous connections between overseas kin and families living on the island challenged the geographic and conceptual limits that I had imposed on my fieldwork, broadening my analysis beyond the site of the clinic, gendered family relations, or even various labor economies to locate Cuban reproductive relations within a profoundly stratified transnational field. In the post-Soviet economy, many families engage in the work of biological and social reproduction supported by goods and capital obtained through links with family “outside ” rather than through avenues provided by the socialist state (Fernandez 2010; Safa 2009). Yet the import of these transnational kinship ties are not only in the material benefits that they may provide. For many Cubans, as for the families of emigrants in many other contexts, overseas kin have come to symbolize the elusive promise of a life that will be emotionally and materially fulfilling in ways that they see as no longer attainable in post-Soviet Cuba.1 This symbolic and material importance of overseas kin is captured in an often-told pun, which asserts that the only real faith (fe) in Cuba is in family overseas (F.E.; Familia en el Exterior). Echoing the joke about sending fetuses to a better life in “the exterior,” this wry quip slyly references Cubans’ storied ambivalence about both Catholicism and socialism, to underscore the hope invested in transnational kinship networks as people imagine different kinds of possible lives. These complex economies of kinship and yearning are shared with migrants and their families in many sending countries. In Latin America and the Caribbean, an established body of research has demonstrated the intertwining of family and economies as people and capital move along transnational kinship networks.2 Strategies of transnational kinship and economics are entangled in other ways as well. In the Dominican Republic, Denise Brennan (2004) has examined how, in the absence of other overseas kinship networks that may yield highly desired remittances or visas, female sex workers—usually single mothers...

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