Women’s Work in Special Period Cuba

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Contextualizing Women’s Work in Special Period Cuba

   • Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

   Pages 1-24

3. Women and Work in Cuba During the First Three Decades of the Revolution, 1959–1989

   • Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

   Pages 25-43

4. ‘El Salario no Alcanzaba’: The Salary Did Not Stretch

   • Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

   Pages 45-62

5. ‘The Invisible Day’

   • Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

   Pages 63-89

6. Formal Work: State Occupations and Work in the Tourist Industry

   • Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

   Pages 91-129

7. Informal Work: Cuentapropismo, La Lucha, and Jineterismo

   • Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

   Pages 131-170

8. The Combination of Different Types of Work

   • Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

   Pages 171-199

9. Attitudes Toward Work

   • Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

   Pages 201-227

10. Conclusion: ‘Yo creo que nosotros estamos en el PE todavía’—I Still Think We’re in the Special Period

    • Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

    Pages 229-234

11. Back Matter

    Pages 235-255

    PDF

The abrupt loss of Soviet financial support in 1989 resulted in the near-collapse of the Cuban economy, ushering in the almost two decades of austerity measures and severe shortages of food and basic consumer goods referred to as the Special Period. Through the innovative framework of individual and collective memory, Daliany Jerónimo Kersh brings together analysis of press sources and oral histories to offer a compelling portrait of how Cuban women cleverly combined various forms of paid work to make ends meet. Disproportionately impacted by the economic crisis given their role as primary caregivers and household managers and unable to survive on devalued state salaries alone, women often employed informal and illegal earning strategies. As she argues, this regression into gendered work such as cooking, sewing, cleaning, reselling, and providing sexual services precipitated by the post-Soviet crisis to a large extent marked a return to pre-revolutionary gendered divisions of labor.

• Women in Cuba
• Caribbean and Cuban studies
• The Special Period
• Women's Employment
• Cuban economy
• The Cuban revolution
• feminisation thesis
• state employment in Cuba
• individual and collective memory
• memory studies
• informal economy
• gendered work
• Cuban black market

• Richmond, The American International University, London, UK

  Daliany Jerónimo Kersh

Daliany Jerónimo Kersh is Assistant Professor of International History at Richmond, The American International University in London.

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