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“Maybe Tomorrow I'll Turn Capitalist”: Cuentapropismo in a Workers' State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Emma F. Phillips
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Abstract

In 1993, the Cuban government significantly expanded the scope of legal self-employment on the island. The change has not been uncontroversial, and cuentapropistas have frequently been held up, both in Cuba and in the United States, as the symbol of Cuba's transition to a free-market economy. In framing cuentapropistas as the vanguards of capitalism, observers have adopted a concept of “transition” which is both rigidly ideological and teleological. This article argues that by employing a sociolegal approach toward cuentapropismo—examining close-up not only the Cuban government's regulation of self-employment, but also how the operation of law is mediated through cuentapropistas' own self-perceptions—we can develop a richer and more complex understanding of transitional periods. Rather than conceptualizing “transition” as a straight line from communism to capitalism, a sociolegal analysis draws attention to the complex relationship between law, identity, and work in the renegotiation of citizenship, and the constitutive role that evolving conceptions of citizenship may have for the shape and character of a transitional period.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 305 - 342
Copyright
© 2007 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I am grateful for the support of the David Rockefeller Centre for Latin American Studies, the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, and the Centre for Criminology at the University of Toronto, which enabled me to conduct fieldwork in Cuba. I would like to thank William Fisher, Brian Palmer, and Ron Levi for their encouragement and guidance in the development of this project, and Mariana Valverde, Mark Salber Phillips, Herbert M. Kritzer, and the anonymous reviewers of the LSR for their very helpful comments.

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