Introduction
This article is part of a collective research project that addresses, in its broadest scope, how ideals of the good life are articulated, (re)assessed, and related to specific places and contexts as a result of the experience of crisis and migration1. The idea for the project germinated as I was carrying out field research in Cuba and among Cuban migrants in Spain. Fieldwork in Cuba started in 2005, and while originally focused on informal encounters in the realm of tourism (Simoni, 2016a), gradually included Cuban migrants who were on return visits to the island (Simoni, 2015; Simoni, 2019a; Simoni, 2019b). Since 2012, I started undertaking fieldwork in Barcelona to carry out research among Cuban migrants (Simoni, 2015; Simoni, 2016b; Simoni, 2019a; Simoni, 2019b). Between 1990 and 2015, the Cuban population in Spain saw a steep increase, rising from 2,637 to more than 125,000 (García Moreno, 2011; Krull & Stubbs, 2021; Sánchez Fuarros, 2012). By the mid-2000s, Spain become the most important destination for Cubans wanting to improve their lives and their economic conditions without losing the possibility of entering and exiting Cuba, as was the case for Cuban migrants to the United States (Martín, 2008).
My research among Cubans in Barcelona took place at a time when migrants were feeling the effects of the 2008 financial crisis particularly hard. Between 2008 and 2013, unemployment in Spain went from 11 percent to 26 percent, but among migrants, rates reached 36.5 percent, to go by Valero-Matas, Coca, and Valero-Oteo’s (2014) work. Several of my Cuban interlocutors were jobless or only working part-time, often in precarious and badly paid positions. As I have argued elsewhere (Simoni, 2016b), the specific political economic conjuncture in which my research took place, and the kind of questions it raised – about the way the economy functioned and one’s place in it, and the winners and losers in the process – was a detonator of moral economic critiques and arguments. Conversations fell quite easily to comparing Cuba and Spain and current changes in both countries, whose economies were often contrasted as capitalismo (Spain) and comunismo (Cuba). The hardship of living in Spain, was leading some of my Cubans interlocutors to reassess and reevaluate the life they had left back in Cuba, and to seriously contemplate the possibility of going back.
For Wilson2, a Cuban man in his early forties working part-time in the security sector in Barcelona, Spain had become downright ‘useless’ (no sirve). Reflecting on the economic crisis, he explained that conditions had deteriorated significantly. Seeing no prospects for improvement, Wilson was considering a return to Cuba. ‘You see, because in Cuba, obviously, you have many limits and shortages, but well… the people, the friends, the family. I mean, you have security (seguridad). Here, if you have a job, it’s okay, but otherwise, what do you do? Here there is no safety. In what concerns Europe (lo que es Europa), it’s a big insecurity.’ Wilson's concerns were echoed by Yusniel, another Cuban man in his late twenties who had recently arrived from Cuba. With a touch of irony, he remarked, ‘Cuba is the best country in the world to be poor!’. For Saúl, who had lived for about ten years in Spain, Cubans had come to Spain to improve their material conditions (mejorar su economía), ‘but then with the crisis, as the economy “got screwed” (se jodió)’, many were ‘rediscovering and seeking sentiments’. ‘They look for other Cubans’, he told me, ‘for things they are familiar with, for their stuff (lo suyo)’. In Barcelona's climate of crisis, where job loss had become common among the Cubans I knew, Saúl expressed frustration with the growing number of friends and acquaintances soliciting him for excessive favors and services. ‘There are people who no longer know how to separate business from friendship,’ he lamented. ‘They are confusing everything,’ mixing sentiment with economic interests and calculations inappropriately. His critique resonated with the ideals I had encountered in Cuba, cultivated among Cubans involved in relationships with tourists seeking to leave the island. These individuals embraced the hope of a more ‘normal’ life abroad (Simoni, 2016c)3. However, as Saúl’s observations suggested, any expectations of such ‘normality’ were now unraveling in the wake of Spain's economic crisis.
Among the Cuban migrants I met in Barcelona, return visits played a key role in terms of assessing how things were evolving in Cuba, and determining whether going back was really something worth considering. Hopes on this matter, in general, were not too high. Sceptical and cynical postures prevailed, the widespread assumption being that the Cuban ‘system’ remained largely dysfunctional, and that in spite of highly mediatized narratives of change, the situation on the ground remained marred by the ‘usual’ bureaucratic complications, arbitrariness, unaccountability, and corruption. For some, however, economic prospect in Cuba started to look at least better that those they could have in Spain. I could sense, in other words, a measure of optimism among Cuban migrants in terms of circulating back and forth from Cuba, eventually returning more permanently, and setting up viable businesses in the country (see also Aja Díaz et al., 2017). As Cuban migrants in Barcelona debated such possibilities, they gauged the current transformations that Cuba was undergoing, most notably the new economic reforms encouraging private enterprise, and the new migratory law facilitating exits and returns (Castro Ruz, 2012). Some of my interlocutors were eager to test the potential of such transformations, exploring for instance business opportunities that could help them have a better life in Cuba than the one they had in Spain4.
While a few of them had never lost their citizenship rights in Cuba, most of my interlocutors underwent the formal ‘repatriation’ process granting them legal residence in the country. Aja Díaz and Rodriguez Soriano (2022) and Barcenas Alfonso (2023) analyse the exponential growth of formal resettlements to Cuba between 2013 and 2020, which saw the reasentamiento of over 60,000 Cuban emigrants, mainly coming from the United States and Spain. While no doubt significant, these numbers are not a good indicator of the number of Cubans returning to reside permanently in Cuba, whose experiences are the primary focus of my research. In their analysis of post-1989 Cuban mobility and migration in Canada and Western Europe, Krull and Stubbs (2021) point to the growing relevance of ‘circular migration,’ noting that while ‘[t]here has been some return migration, ... the trend is increasingly for it to be circulatory and for home to be split between places’ (2011, 174). Such emerging forms of transnationalism are also highlighted by Bastian (2018, 141), who singles out ‘circular migrants’ as one of ‘three new social groups that have gained importance in Havana as a result of recent policy changes’ (alongside ‘employers and employees’ and ‘(satisfied) consumer-citizens’). Roberto, one of my interlocutors in Havana who had come back from Italy five years earlier, after fifteen years living there, insisted on how he, unlike most repatriados, was a ‘real’ returned migrant, one that lived full-time in Cuba. For him, most repatriados simply used their newly acquired status instrumentally, to benefit for the economic advantages that this could provide - buying property, setting up a business, facilitating the import-export of goods. Roberto didn’t hide a certain disdain when talking about repatriados, who were said to live mainly abroad, and didn’t face the everyday challenges of people like him, who had taken the decision of coming back to Cuba for good. In Roberto’s reasoning, living Cuba’s everyday ‘struggles’ seemed to acquire an aura of authenticity, one that signaled a valued stance in terms of allegiance, belonging, and commitment.
It is useful to consider here, at the risk of generalizing and (over)simplifying, what seemed to me the prevailing interpretations of returns, like that of Roberto, among the non-migrant Cubans I frequented in Havana and Viñales, people coming prevalently from disadvantaged sectors of the population, who had never left the country and, in many cases, cherished migration opportunities. The recurrent view was that two main, economically related reasons, could explain the migrants’ decisions to come back to live in Cuba. The first, valued one, was that you had been successful and that you were now duly coming back to ‘your country’, to dwell among your family and ‘your own’, to set up a profitable ‘business’ (negocio), live the life of a dueño – a business owner - and thus enjoy the profits of the money you had earned abroad. The second, much less valued reason, was that you had somewhat failed: that you were back because something went wrong, because you couldn’t make it any longer ‘out there’, because you had been unable to make money, and/or adapt to life in Europe, and/or gotten yourself into trouble (e.g. a legal issue). The details could vary, but the widespread additional assumption, was that if you hadn’t made it, it was somewhat your fault, something that in turn explains the stigma attached to a ‘return of failure’, to borrow on Cerase (1974).
Many Cubans I spoke to, were aware that in countries like Spain, but also France and Italy and, sometimes, Europe more generally, the 2008 financial crisis had taken a toll on the livelihood opportunities of the migrants who had been living there. A young Cuban man living in Italy, back on a brief visit in Havana in August 2019, talked at length to a captivated audience of peers and friends about the life of Cuban migrants in Europe. He assured us that, with the crisis and xenophobic climate that affected the old continent, there remained only three ways for men like them to make good money: 1) delinquencia (delinquency) 2) una mujer rica (a rich woman) and 3) narcotráfico (drug trafficking). His somewhat hyperbolic explanation served to display his own prowess as a successful migrant, but made it clear that most Cubans in Europe - and he spoke in particularly to the Italian case - were really struggling to get by, and had barely enough money to come back visit the country, let alone invest in it. Such kind of narratives nourished a climate of relative suspicion as to the faring of returnees back in Cuba, their reasons for being back, and, more broadly, the relative success or failure of their migratory trajectories. This explains also why their economic activities garnered much attention, as these could serve as good indicators to make up one’s mind, in terms of adjudicating such ‘success’ or ‘failure’.
Methods
This study is based on long-term ethnographic research conducted between 2005 and 2023. Initial fieldwork in Cuba began in 2005 and focused on informal encounters in tourism, later expanding to include returnees. In 2012, complementary fieldwork commenced in Barcelona among Cuban migrants affected by the 2008 financial crisis. Since February 2018, I undertook six one-month field visits to Cuba, focusing on Cuban returnees—mainly men—who had previously lived in various European countries, including Spain, France, Italy, and Austria. Most had returned and undergone the formal repatriation process between 2013 and 2020.
Data were gathered through participant observation in everyday life contexts, repeated informal conversations, and engagement in the domestic, social, and economic activities of returnees. No interviews were formally recorded; instead, detailed field notes were kept throughout. Sampling was purposive and snowball-based, relying on pre-existing contacts and new connections formed during fieldwork. Approximately 15–20 returnees formed the core of the study, alongside interactions with their relatives, neighbors, and local interlocutors in Havana and Viñales. Emphasis was placed on understanding the lived experiences of return migration, economic reintegration, and moral self-positioning. Field notes were thematically coded and interpreted through an iterative, inductive approach, following anthropological practices of meaning-making grounded in context and everyday interaction.
Ethical approval was obtained from the European Research Council and the Geneva Graduate Institute Ethics Review Committee. Oral informed consent was secured from all participants, as approved by ERC monitoring procedures. Pseudonyms are used throughout to protect confidentiality.
Doing negocios, becoming dueño
Now in his forties, Roberto had never travelled back to Europe since his return to Havana. In my stays in Cuba, I spent a considerable amount of time with him, and had the chance to hear him recount his life in Italy and his return on many different occasions, to a variety of audiences. Roberto did not really have anything particularly striking to show in terms of being a ‘successful’ entrepreneur back in Cuba. He lived in his parents’ house in Centro Habana, where he had refurbished the attic, and ran a small ferreteria (hardware store) in the house’s entrance hall. His negocio (business) was selling plumbing material under a license for household items (articulos para el hogar). He told me his license did not really cover what he was actually offering, namely hard to find plumbing items and toilet facilities to a clientele of casas particulars (bed and breakfast) and paladar (restaurant) owners. While Roberto always made a point of explaining to people that he had lived for a long time in Italy, the specter of having returned as a result of a somewhat failed migration tended to loom over him when he dealt with other Cubans. The need to justify his trajectory was, in this sense, always imminent. Roberto, who liked to speak Italian with me, criticized Cuban common sense, saying that most people on the island mistakenly thought that ‘over there’ (allá, abroad) everything was easy: ‘é il sogno americano…’, the American dream. The frequent questioning and interpellation Roberto endured generated a certain unease. He always had to explain, tell a story, and elaborate on the reasons of his return. When I asked him about his reaction to such questions, he told me he generally told people he had a couple of good business here in Cuba, and that would generally suffice to quench their curiosity. Similar, rather vague evocations to profitable negocios, emerged or were more subtly hinted at by other returnees I engaged with, when I saw them interacting with other Cubans.
According to Roberto, Cubans did not know what ‘real’ work meant. When seen in the light of his experience in Italy, he claimed that there was no ‘culture of work’ (cultura del trabajo) in Cuba, and that work was simply not in Cubans’ DNA. Instead, what prevailed was ‘business’ (negocio), in which he included el invento, and therefore all sorts of informal and illegal business endeavors5. While he had worked hard in Italy, Roberto was now fond of his business, and I could see he very much enjoyed being the ‘owner’ of his ferretería. As he repeatedly told me, his job was to invertir, to invest - notably in plumbing pieces and items for toilets and showers as soon as they appeared in the informal market, por la izquierda (‘by the left’, meaning ‘under the table’ in Cuban common parlance), to then resell them and carve out a profit. No doubt, Roberto’s business gave him enough to get by. But after his first very optimistic references to his businesses, spending more time with him also made me realize that his day to day was rather modest. Any extraordinary expense, such as going out for food or a concert with his partner, had to be carefully monitored to stay within his tight budget. Getting a better picture of Roberto’s everyday life, led me to temper my initial expectations as to the kind of life that returnees like him were living upon return.
Humbe, a Cuban man in his mid-forties who had returned to live in Viñales – a rural, town and touristic hotspot located 200 kilometers west of the capital - after almost twenty years in Austria, also emphasized the significance of the move from ‘worker’ to ‘owner’. Humbe had first migrated alone to Austria, and then managed to bring his Cuban wife too. They had had a daughter there, who was only eight years old when they had decided to come back to Cuba. Humbe told me he had an extremely busy but economically successful life in Austria up to the time when he left, working in the restauration sector and managing two and at times three jobs at once – from food catering to aide in a restaurant. After all this time in Austria, he told me his wife had started missing Viñales more and more. Seeing that things were starting to change and opening up in Cuba, they had taken the risk to invest back in their hometown, buying a house on the main street, and, after some years and the required refurbishment work, opening up a private restaurant, a paladar. His wife had returned first, and after a couple of years back and forth, once he was sure they could make a good living in Viñales, Humbe decided to sell all their belongings, leave Austria, and make a more definitive move to Cuba. As I enquired about his return, Humbe recognized that things had been tough at the beginning, and that it had taken a while to get accustomed to the usual scarcities that characterized life in Cuba, most notably the difficulties of provisioning and finding products both for his family and for the restaurant. But now, after a few years, he said he couldn’t complain: coming back had been a good decision, and all things compared, his quality of life had much improved.
Jokingly, he pointed at his big belly, a visible sign that he was eating more than enough, and doing rather well on that side of things. He contrasted his busy life in Austria, where he had never stopped, working several jobs and busy from dawn to nightfall, with his current life in Viñales. ‘Son siete años que no trabajo…’ – ‘It’s seven years now that I don’t work’ he once claimed, a big grin on his face, minimizing his efforts in running the paladar, not considering it work, and putting the emphasis instead on what the life as a dueño, a business owner, afforded. Humbe loved going fishing, for instance, and that’s what much of his conversations often revolved around - planning the next outing to a nearby lake, or discussing fishing gears and techniques. I could attest of such passion as I accompanied him, with some other friends, in a couple of such fishing excursions, which proved to be good occasions to continue our conversations on his move from Austria back to Cuba, the frequent comparisons of life ‘here’ and ‘there’, and his relative ‘good life’ in Viñales. But like for the economic life of the other returnees I met, Humbe also acknowledged a certain unpredictability, in that it was highly depended on the flow of tourists. A few years earlier, Humbe had separated from his wife, and left her the more profitable paladar on the main street to open a second one, in a less profitable location. He was now struggling to cover the costs of keeping the business open, and thought of selling his ‘almendron’, the 1950s American car he had bought and repaired, in order to get some much-needed cash and start rethinking his business plans.
As I spent more time with returnees like Roberto and Humbe, who were in many ways still leading a life of privilege when compared to most other Cubans I know, I start realizing that they were doing less well, economically, than they themselves claimed in our initial conversations, or when talking to other Cubans. What emerged repeatedly, was thus a certain discrepancy between bold generalizations on the economic possibilities Cuba offered, and the everyday struggles to sustain and cultivate the image of the successful returnee, of well-off dueños and entrepreneurs. It is on such discrepancy, its reasons, and peoples’ efforts to obviate it, that I now turn.
Economic critique and prefigurations of ‘success’
Joel was a Cuban man in his late forties, whom I first met in Barcelona back in 2012, when he used to run a small Cuban joint in a popular nightlife area of the city, while also leading a Cuban band. The economic crisis in Spain had hit Cuban musician like Joel hard, with gigs paid less and less, and little chance of making a living with music alone, which was his passion. Widely circulating, for instance, was the story of a famous member of a Cuban band, who had migrated to Spain only to struggle to make ends meet after the crisis, and who had ended up living precariously on the street, or squatting friends’ homes, before deciding to move back to Cuba. Joel’s idea was to bring his musical ‘project’ - as he liked to call it - back to Cuba, make it grow from there, and then lead a more or less transnational life between Cuba, Spain, and wherever else playing with his band would lead. In the last twelve years, I got a chance to speak to him repeatedly, both in Cuba and in Spain, and couldn’t help noticing that his tales of life in Cuba were often couched in a tragicomic register, one punctuated by examples of misadventure and mishaps.
When I met Joel in Cuba in August 2019, he immediately began lamenting the lucha titánica—the titanic struggle—he was enduring to make his musical project succeed on the island. Beyond his musical endeavors, Joel had shared with me on previous occasions how he had ventured into various business initiatives since he had returned to Cuba about five years earlier. Unfortunately, all these ventures had failed to yield the anticipated results. More often than not, Joel found himself the victim of scams perpetrated by Cuban residents—individuals who perceived and treated him as a Cuban coming from abroad, akin to a tourist: a potential source of hard currency and an easy mark for subterfuge. Over time, Joel concluded that it was nearly impossible to find trustworthy business partners in Cuba. He saw the ‘system’ as fundamentally flawed and dysfunctional, with everything dependent on personal contacts and, consequently, riddled with corruption. In his view, people lacked the ability to work properly and with seriousness. Initially, Joel had harbored high hopes for a smoother reintegration into the island’s economic landscape, attempting to establish several promising business ventures. He had identified two main sectors in Cuba as ripe with potential, still ‘virgin’ in terms of economic development: food and transport. Seizing these opportunities, Joel embarked on a small pig-breeding venture and purchased a vintage American car, intending to use it as a taxi by renting it out to a driver. However, neither of these ventures bore fruit. According to Joel’s account, the failures were largely due to the economic misbehavior, carelessness, and unreliability of his Cuban partners. These challenges reinforced his sense of disillusionment with the country’s business environment and deepened his frustration with the systemic issues that continued to hinder his efforts.
Joel’s criticisms, and the stories of his economic vicissitudes in Cuba, tell us of the disappointing aspects of return. In his narratives featured issues of mistrust in family, friends, fellow-nationals, and a broader ‘economic’ and ‘political’ context marred by corruption and mismanagement. To this we can add condemnations of economic incompetence and misconduct by Cuban people. The dissatisfactions of return, it must be said, are not a novelty for scholars of migration. In the first anthropological review of ‘return migration’, Gmelch (1980) affirms that most of returnees are unsatisfied and disappointed back in their homeland. Cerase’s (1974) earlier account of the return of Italians from the United States, also highlights the returnees’ frustration, with many coming back to Italy with innovative ideas to implement business only to find ‘local power structures’ put a spoke in their wheels. Returnees may come to see their non-migrant compatriots as ‘narrow and old-fashioned’ (Oxfeld & Long, 2004: 10) and develop an identity of ‘returnee’ out of heightened reflexivity as to who they were and have become (Oxfeld & Long, 2004: 14). Scholars of return migration encourage us to examine how imaginaries and expectations of return relate to the concrete experiences of re-settlement, so as to ascertain ‘[w]hether the homecoming is liberating and empowering, leading to satisfaction and self-discovery, or, on the other hand, an experience of disenchantment, culture shock and new displacement’ (King & Christou, 2011: 461).
Urging us to move beyond the tendency to privilege ‘the “questions of unhappiness and dissatisfaction” (King, 2000: 19)’ (Stefansson, 2004: 8) in the analysis of homecomings, Stefansson calls for an approach that views return as ‘a creative effort oriented towards constructing better and more satisfying futures’ (2004: 12, see also Hammond, 2004). If ‘breakdowns of expectations’ (Narotzky & Besnier, 2014) in destination countries, such as those resulting from the profound economic crisis in Europe, could inform my Cuban interlocutors’ return projects, my initial findings suggest that upon going ‘back home’, many returnees, like Joel, confronted yet another set of breakdowns and challenges6. The concrete experience of return, tended to raise specific sets of difficulties and dilemmas resulting mainly from a disjuncture between migrants’ hopes and expectations, and the concrete vicissitudes of life once back. Migrants’ expectations were, in this sense, put to the test of living, of finding their way – yet again – in a range of everyday situations that raised their own material challenges and moral demands. But rather than simply surrendering to ‘disappointment’ (Zigon, 2017) in return, interlocutors like Joel strived to keep alive and prefigure scenarios of economic success. In this endeavor, much effort was dedicated to generating value from their experiences abroad, and in showing how such value could eventually pay off ‘back home’.
While spending time with Joel, I observed how he frequently invoked the ‘Spanish card’ of a transnational lifestyle in his interactions with his bandmates. This strategy appeared to serve as a motivational tool, encouraging his band members to remain invested in the prospect of a successful international music career, one that held the promise of tours in Spain and beyond. ‘When we’ll travel…’ Joel repeatedly prophesied one evening as we sat chatting over a bottle of rum. This conversation took place after he and his bandmates had performed as an opening act in a modest, run-down venue in Havana. Joel’s remarks were peppered with directives: ‘We have to be ready,’ ‘We have to practice more,’ and ‘You have to follow my advice—for when it gets big…’. His words seemed aimed at sustaining a sense of potentiality and preparing the group for an imagined future of musical success on a global stage. These allusions served to generate an atmosphere of excitement and euphoria, maintaining high spirits by invoking imaginaries of a successful international career. They foreshadowed the possibility of imminent recognition in the national charts, which would, in turn, pave the way for international fame, lucrative opportunities, and performances across various venues. The imagery of financial success and widespread acclaim was particularly compelling for many of the band’s members, most of whom had never left Cuba. Their enthusiasm was palpable, as they eagerly envisioned the prospect of venturing abroad and achieving the success Joel so vividly described.
Joel relied on his transnational connections, the allure of imaginaries of a better life abroad, and the narrative of his past successes as a musician in a renowned Cuban band (he had indeed toured internationally with a well-known group before moving to Spain) to inspire his bandmates. These elements were instrumental in persuading them to embrace the vision of a promising future he laid out—a future where their efforts would eventually pay off. By drawing on these aspirations, Joel encouraged his bandmates to stay committed, follow his guidance, and continue honing their skills. For now, they worked for minimal compensation, sustained by sporadic concerts, but always with the promise of a brighter horizon. ‘But we have to make more rehearsals,’ he emphasized, ‘We have to make more sacrifices’; ‘That’s how successful bands make it: You’ve got to trust me on this, I have been (out) there, I know how things work.’ These declarations conjured a sense of potentiality, binding the group to his leadership and to the shared dream of eventual success. Joel lived the life of a band leader, keeping the dream of success on the ‘imaginative horizon’ (Crapanzano, 2004), believing in his ‘project’, and striving to enroll those around him in his vision.
I am mindful here of the questions Zigon’s recently urged us to address when analyzing fieldwork material, moving ‘beyond the actual’ and towards ‘the incipient no-yet’ (2018: 14), and asking: ‘What potential for becoming is trying to be enacted? Or, what other possibilities of being are pointed toward?’ (2018: 15). In the light of Zigon’s observations, we may argue that Joel was attempting to open possibilities, but if his ‘worldbuilding’ efforts acted as ‘temporary prefigurations’, their potentiality for ‘actually happening and sticking’ (2018: 4) remained very much uncertain. Joel deliberately crafted a state of make-believe, one that performatively functioned as a rallying device to garner support, assistance, and favours. This positioning elevated him to a perceived superior level—economically, socially, and culturally. It appeared to grant him a certain ascendancy and a form of persuasive power across a wide range of social and economic relationships. The imaginaries Joel invoked not only sustained his vision but also facilitated various aspects of his life in Cuba, reinforcing his influence and enabling him to navigate challenges more effectively. Within this framework, Joel positioned himself as the potentially rising star, leveraging the allure of future success to consolidate his role as a charismatic and aspirational figure. However, the reality he was striving to bring about remained a fragile one, punctured by occasional insinuations of failure and humbling doses of irony and derision, also from his band members, which at times made him notice that, ‘actually’, and for the moment at least, they were really struggling, barely getting by, and going nowhere.
Jorge was another returnee in his forties, back for five years in Viñales after having spent twenty in France. Thanks to a French friend who helped him with ideas and capital, Jorge had just built a rather big house, were he lived with his Cuban wife and daughter. When I met him in August 2019, Jorge had finally got the license to start renting for tourists in his bed and breakfast (casa particular), but business was very low, with much competition in the village, and not enough tourists around. ‘No tengo nada, ni cinco fulas [US dollar equivalent] tengo’ (‘I have nothing, not even five dollars’)7, told me Jorge, referring to the fact that he was broke. ‘But people still believe that I am a millionaire’, he continued, ‘and this suits me’. When I asked him what was so good in people thinking him a millionaire, while he was in fact broke, his answer was rather straightforward: ‘Mejor que te tengan invidia de que te tengan pena’ – better that people envy you, than pitying you, was his reasoning. ‘¡Que no se note la miseria!’, keep the misery out of sight - was another of his favorite mottos, which he repeated for instance when inviting us to have some food or coffee. Jorge acted the generous guest, while alluding with complicity to the fact that this was all about cultivating appearances, and that his real economic situation was rather dire – ‘la miseria’, the misery he ascribed to most people in Cuba. Not unlike the case of Joel, my impression was that Jorge too reflexively activated a state of make believe that could serve to his own advantage. Gorge often referred to himself as having another status, as being French, but also Cuban, and a member of las grandes ligas, the ‘big leagues’, thus drawing a parallel with the realm of sports and top-ranking champions. He could allegedly play, and play well, in both realms, what he imagined as the ‘Cuban’ and the ‘French/European’ way of doing things, notably business.
Concretely, for now, Jorge had to make do with what the Cuban context allowed him, with severe limitations on his business expansion, having to keep a low profile, and with very little, if no income. But in his imaginative horizons and the virtual scenarios he activated lay a potentially brighter future, an even better life, in which the efforts of his migratory trajectory would bear their fruits. In his day to day, I saw Jorge constantly playing up his difference8, striving to transform the prestige of having being abroad and the promises of a potential transnational live between France and Cuba into social and economic advantage. Jorge didn’t shy away from asking people for favors. Banking on the prestige of being a returnee and the positive connotations of such transnational trajectory, Jorge cultivated relations with people ‘of use’, people that ‘mattered’, and who could look upon him as a possible provider of help and of useful connections, notably connections to the outside world. Jorge lived between playing the ‘true’ Cuban who knew how to dwell in ‘Cuban things’, and the cosmopolitan transnational, the ‘French-like’ guy who was equally at ease with foreigners, who knew what foreigners wanted and how to care for and entertain them, notably in his casa particular. Several times, he told me and his Cuban friends that he had learned about commerce and how negocios worked ‘out there’, and that this gave him an indisputable advantage in doing good business. As he put it, Europe had ‘educated’ him’, and taught him much, notably in terms of economic behavior and planning. ‘Europa me explotó, con el trabajo’ (‘Europe exploited me, with work’), admitted Jorge when referring to the hardship of his life as a construction worker in Marseille, ‘but taught me to use my head, to be intelligent’. Jorge thus marked a difference and imbued with value his experience abroad. What he implied, was that he had become a better person, notably in economic terms, a more competent economic actor, someone who knew how to provide proper service, European-style, or how to separate friendship from business, the latter being something that he repeatedly criticized other Cubans of being unable to do.
In spite of such claims, according to my friend Jacob, who was Jorge’s cousin and always accompanied me on my visits, the latter was not actually practicing what he preached. On the contrary, most of his getting by, on a day to day basis, was predicated on a mixing of friendship and favors that had little to do with alleged ‘European ways’ of separating sentiment and friendship from negocio. Jacob was getting tired of Jorge’s requests for a helping hand in construction work in his casa particular. He kept receiving guarantees of further retribution and favors in exchange for such help, but Jorge had never given him what he promised, and Jacob had no reason to think this would ever change in the future. Given this, Jacob preferred working for other people, with Viñaleros who, in spite of never having lived abroad, knew how to pay and how to separate ‘business’ from ‘sentiments’ (el negocio de los sentimientos). Mindful of these contradictions, and the way they were spotted by Jacob, I address in the next section the disjuncture between narratives of ‘business the European way’ (negocios a la Europea), such as those prefigured by Jorge, and the practice of doing business ‘the Cuban way’ (a lo Cubano), which other returnees I met referred to and praised. Without a priori reifying nor analytically postulating any such distinction, it is the way such distinctions emerged in the discourses and enactments of my interlocutors that interests me here, and the way some returnees ended up qualifying and embracing a ‘Cuban way’ of doing negocios. This was the way, or so they claimed, that enabled them to move their businesses forward in Cuba, adapting to the specificities of the economic context. Doing negocios ‘a lo Cubano’, however, did not imply relinquishing the ascendancy and advantages that being a returnee could grant, including showcasing the distinctive economic competences and skills one had learned allá, 'over there'.
Negocios and trapicheo ‘a lo Cubano’
I turn back to the case of Joel first. In one of our last conversations in August, the band leader told me of his latest fiasco in making it in the ‘mulas’ business - the term mula (lit. ‘mule’) denoting a person profiting from travelling abroad and buying goods to resell informally in Cuba (see Cearns, 2019). Reflecting on this umpteenth business failure, Joel reached the conclusion that he was not good at negocios. ‘Lo mio’, ‘my thing’, he told me, is doing ‘algo concreto’ (something concrete): ‘mi música, mi trabajo!’ (My music, my job!). In other contexts of conversation, I had often heard Joel pride himself of being an entrepreneur, of having come back from Europe with a clear idea of how business ought to be done, ready to make a difference in Cuba. His latest acknowledgment of failure made me think that Joel’s ways of doing business were perhaps out of synch with the way negocios tended to be done in Cuba. My impression upon leaving Cuba in August 2019, was that the returnees I had seen fearing better tended to be those that had (re)attuned themselves to the unwritten rules of la lucha and the trapicheo – the ‘dealing’, often referring to shady and informal transactions, the scraping of a living by buying and selling, ‘a lo Cubano’. Padrón Hernández (2012: 91–94) and Köhn & Siré (2022) have pertinently highlighted the ambivalence in Cuban society, where cheating and a lack of solidarity are lamented as indicators of a societal crisis, yet street smartness and cunningness are simultaneously valued as essential skills for navigating the current economic conditions.
Street smartness, guile, and shady deals a lo Cubano were explicitly praised by Pedro, whom I had first met on the plane to Cuba in February 2019, right at time in which he had decided to come back to Cuba for good. After twenty years living in Barcelona, this Cuban man in his early fifties had finally taken the decision to live on the island, and apply for formal repatriation. His plan was to set up a business with the money from his severance payment, after he had been laid off by his employer in Barcelona, a restaurant liquidated a few months earlier. To this, Pedro could add the cash he got from selling his small apartment in the Catalan capital. On the plane, Pedro told me how he eagerly awaited such return, including getting back to the Cuban trapicheo, fiddling and doing business in the informal sector. At the time, I had been captivated by his delight at such prospect, the prospect of engaging in various negocios and inventos, from reselling imported goods, to the more consequential plan he had of buying a house and refurbish it for a tourist rental. When I met Pedro again, after barely three weeks from his arrival in Havana, he had already bought a house and was busy refurbishing it. Answering my surprise at his fast progress, Pedro said that ‘con dinero se hace todo’ (‘with money, you can do anything’). ‘Aquí [in Cuba] hay de todo, y si tienes bala [money] lo consigues rápido’ (‘Here [in Cuba] there is everything, and if you have bullets [money] you can get it fast’. When we met again in August 2019, the house was ready to receive tourists, and had already started renting informally (por la izquierda), carefully and discretely, so as not to compromise his future business, for which he was expecting the official license. Pedro seemed well versed in such informal scheming, and while he also banked on the prestige and ascendancy of being a Cubano-Español, his economic undertakings showed an embracing of alleged ‘Cuban ways’ of doing negocios.
A similar attunement to, and praising of the trapicheo was evident also the case of Ramon, whom with his Spanish wife had decided to come back to Cuba three years earlier, after over a decade living in Madrid. The crisis in Spain had struck both of them hard, and they had been left without job and little prospects of making a decent living in Madrid. ‘Si tenemos que inventar, ¡mejor inventar en Cuba que en España!’ (‘If we have to come up with something [re. informal ways to get by], better to do it in Cuba than in Spain’), told me Ramon’s wife Manuela. In their early sixties, they were highly aware of the difficulty of finding employment in Spain, and were thus planning their future in Cuba, were they had arrived with some savings and several ideas of the type of negocios they could set up. Ramon and Manuela had bought a house in a reparto (low class neighborhood) a bit removed from the center of Havana, which they were slowly refurbishing ‘Spanish style’, as he liked to put it - complete with AC, glass-windows, and kitchen and bathroom appliance directly imported from Spain. Their latest plan was to build a pool in the ample patio at the back of the house, to rent out by the day, for parties and other celebrations which, Ramon assured me, were much on demand among Cubans who had money to spend these days. From a pool, you could get as much as 60–80 CUC a day, so that seemed to him a great plan to cash in good rent money. In the meanwhile, the two got by reselling imported goods and with other inventos Ramon took care of, in the black market.
As we can clearly see, we are moving away here from the image of migrants returning with ‘European’ business ideas and economic ways of doing, as highlighted for instance by Joel and Jorge. Instead, we are faced with savvy adaptations to what the Cuban economic context was deemed to afford, including what several of my interlocutors saw as typical Cuban ways of doing business. As in the case of Pedro, Ramon seemed to benefit from the ascendancy that his double Spanish-Cuban citizenship afforded, and didn’t hesitate to mobilize alleged European competences and skills in his dealings with his Cuban family, neighbors, friends, and business partners.
Conclusion
Anthropological research linking notions of value, expectation, hope, with (frustrated) scenarios of social and physical mobility has highlighted how migrants may simultaneously occupy ‘two or even three different regimes of value’ (Pine, 2014: S101). I hope this article has been able to show how such multiplicity plays out among returnees in Cuba, notably in relation to the way they imagine economic life ‘back home’, envisage their economic possibilities, enact economic activities, and cope with the disjuncture between their expectations and the concrete test of life upon return. Facing a context of economic crisis in Spain, and encouraged by changes in Cuba’s economic and migratory policies, several of my interlocutors came back to the island with hopes of starting a profitable business (negocio) and live the life of a business owner (dueño). After the hardship of working menial jobs in Europe, notably in the restauration sector, most of the returnees I met hoped to achieve a better quality of life in Cuba. It is significant that many of the Cuban non-migrants they interacted with, harbored the opposite hope of travelling and finding a better life abroad. In this context, returns were heavily scrutinized; they rose questions as to what lead migrants to come back to a place that so many still wished to leave. The widespread assumption was that if they did so, it was because they had good money to spend, and plans for a profitable business. The grim alternative, was that they had simply failed allà, and were coming back tail between their legs because they had no other alternative. There could be other ‘reasonable’ reasons, most notably family ties, but my impression was that the economic dimension could hardly be avoided in the assessment of a return. The ‘failure’ scenario was to be avoided, even when people had little to show in terms of economic progress and upward mobility. Having to respond to the widespread expectations of a ‘successful return’, my interlocutors, most of whom returned from difficult economic situations in Europe, could be judged as not having been up to the task, as having missed a golden opportunity, and this was generally attributed to their own inability to make the most of migration. What could thus be seen as a primarily political economic issue – the crisis in Europe and the difficulty of capitalizing on the time spent there - was thus turned into an issue of individual responsibility and a moral criticism of failed economic behaviour (see also Simoni, 2016b)9.
This was the specter of ‘failure’ with which people had to come to terms when facing the critical gazes, commentaries, and judgments of those who had not migrated. Such climate of suspicion could lead returnees to redouble efforts to mark a difference, to show that something had been achieved in their stay abroad, that some ‘progress’ had been made after all, that they had not ‘wasted’ the opportunity. Materializations of economic progress – a business, a new house, expensive commodities – were the widely expected ‘proofs’ of such success, and Humbe for example, with two paladares and an almendron in his ‘curriculum’ for everyone to see, had no problem in showing that his trajectory had been an overall success. But those who didn’t have anything obvious to exemplify this, could resort to other means to give value to their time abroad. This is when skills, competences, and the foreign connection could be activated and put to use. ‘I have good connections and [potentially] an open door for international musical careers’, could claim Joel to his bandmates, capitalizing on his past successes and his transnational lifestyle to draw them into his ‘project’. I have not much to show, but my ‘mentality’ has changed and I know how to set up a business and deal with tourists a la Europea, the way they like it, could claim others. Specific modes and models of economic behavior, deemed more ‘sophisticated’ and ‘advanced’, such as Jorge’s alleged competence in separating business from sentiment, could be foregrounded as distinctive qualities that would make a difference in the Cuba of the near future, a country several returnees saw on the verge of ‘capitalism’ (Simoni, 2018). Such competences could be cast, like in Jorge’s case, as invaluable qualities that only years of experience abroad would help you achieve, and which if not in the present, bore the promise of success in the future. Some claimed such success to be imminent, and strived hard to get their claims heard, taken seriously, and work like self-fulfilling prophecies.
Here, we enter what Fischer (2014: 207–208) describes as the space between ‘aspiration and opportunity,’ meaning, as this author explains, ‘that aspiration—the will—is alone insufficient to effect change’ (2014: 208). Instead, aspiration ‘must also have a way, the space to operate among a range of substantive opportunities’ (ibid.). To address this, Zigon (2018: 13) has called for ‘a theoretical-analytic that is attuned to this link between potentiality and possibility’. It was precisely at this intersection of potentiality and possibility that my interlocutors, navigating the challenges of life upon their return, engaged in what might be termed ‘performative work’. But their verbal claims, if pushed too far and unsubstantiated, could in the long run or upon closer inspection become counterproductive, and come to be seen as simply ‘showing off’. ‘Està inflando’ (‘he is showing off’) would Jacob argue, for instance, when assessing his cousin Jorge’s claims of having become an infallible economic agent, thanks to his experience in Europe. ‘Quien hace negocios conmigo nunca pierde’ (‘who does business with me never loses’) maintained Jorge, but Jacob had stopped believing such thing, and the more the cousin insisted in his unique economic skills, the more Jacob came to see them as examples of his arrogance, further discrediting him and his chances of making it big in the tourism business.
To become more persuasive and move beyond ‘temporary prefiguration’ to ‘actually happening and sticking’ (Zigon, 2018: 4), claims and evocations like those of Jorge, or Joel with his bandmates, needed to anchor themselves in concrete elements capable of generating reality effects. This required some form of corroboration within the worlds returnees inhabited—tangible aspects that could be publicly recognized as ‘proofs’ that their assertions were either true or at least on the verge of becoming so. In the performativity framework proposed by Callon, this process falls within the domain of ‘performation struggles,’ involving concrete ‘tests’ and ‘trials’ (2007: 330) that determine the ‘success or failure’ of an individual’s ‘act of language’ (ibid,). These struggles depended on the ‘enrolment’ of others in the reality returnees sought to foreshadow and realize, enabling it to transcend mere wishful thinking or the unfulfilled aspirations of a wannabe self-fulfilling prophecy. In the case of Jorge, for instance, he banked on others’ believing him ‘a millionaire’ to gain respect and recognition, and by the same token make his life easier. The life of a dueño, made of satisfying and profitable social relationships with people who worked for him, and with others like him, the latter begin generally Cubans who had also been allà, associates in las grandes ligas.
Compared to Jorge and Joel, people like Pedro, Ramon, and Roberto, held discourses on the economy and economic practice that suggested they had both feet on the ground, so to speak. Their narratives and moral dispositions were said to embrace the specificities of economic life in Cuba, including what were seen as more vernacular ‘Cuban’ ways of doing negocios and inventar. Rather than insisting on prefiguring the advantages of business ‘European style’, these interlocutors spoke of their willingness to reattune themselves to the ways in which economic life and livelihood opportunities worked on the island. These ways, according to Roberto, gave more prominence to negocio than work: the former was what Cubans were good at, in his view, and he was determined to do his best at it, including putting to fruition what he had learned in Italy on the matter. Such embracing of the Cuban world of negocio, indeed, did not mean relinquishing the ascendancy that coming back from Europe could provide. For all of my interlocutors, the question still remained of the difference that having been in Europe made. Some had concrete economic assets to show – a house and/or a business, like in the cases of Humbe, Pedro, Ramon, Jorge – while others, like Joel, banked on their highly transnational life to accrue their economic profile. All these returnees’ economic lives remained under scrutiny, with the pressure to ‘succeed’ heightened by the simple fact that they had left ‘developed’ Europe to come back to Cuba. Their years of hard labour and the experience gained in Europe had to be worth something, and the expectation was that they would make a difference in the changing economic landscape of Cuba, and be on the frontline of what would come next. The future seemed to call for ‘más desarrollo’ (‘more development’), for ‘más negocio’ (more business) in an island that was, in the narratives returnees helped spread and socialize, still ‘virgin’, where ‘everything’ still needed to be done. We can perhaps argue that in their efforts to give value to their migration and return, to make their trajectories a success story, and to cast themselves as the harbingers of Cuba’s economic future, returnees where adding fuel to the flames, feeding the very same unreasonable expectations that ended up weighting heavily on them.
Ethics and consent statement
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Informal consent procedures were reviewed and approved periodically by ERC Ethics Reviews and Monitoring Notes (cf. footnote 1), the first of which dates 27th of October 2017. As explained in the text above, and accepted in ERC Reviews and Monitoring Notes, data for the research were obtained via the ethnographic method of participant observation. In terms of informed consent, both these methods required the understanding and collaboration of the participants involved, and the full disclosure of the research process and the nature of participants’ involvement. Written consent was initially considered; however, the ethics committee due to the following three main reasons formally approved oral consent procedures. 1) Context-specific concerns: In Cuba, some prospective participants expressed mistrust or discomfort about signing official documents, particularly given the country's politically sensitive environment. 2) Participants’ protection: Ensuring anonymity and confidentiality was paramount. Introducing written forms risked deterring participation and increasing suspicion of institutional surveillance. 3) Longstanding ethnographic practice: Consistent with established anthropological ethical guidelines and the principle of ‘do no harm’, I found that an oral approach, carefully explained and documented in a confidential log, was the most ethically appropriate. These procedures were reviewed and approved by ERC Ethics Reviews and Monitoring, and complied with guidelines for qualitative social science research with human subjects. The research underwent five Periodic Ethics Reviews by European Research Council, always receiving ethical clearance. The last ethics approval by the European Research Council was received upon completion of the research, on July 18 2023 - Ethics Monitoring Note-759649-006, Ref. Ares(2023)4985918 - 18/07/2023. See also Footnote 1 for more details on Ethics review procedures and Ethics Monitoring Notes.
Concretely, the oral consent procedure adopted for the research involved giving participants all the information contained in an Information Sheet prepared for the project, and approved in periodic ERC Ethics Reviews and Monitoring Notes. The Information Sheet detailed the purpose of the study; Participants received information on the nature of the research and their expected involvement, its potential risks and benefits, the person in charge of the research and his funding, as well as participants’ right to confidentiality, anonymity, and withdrawal at any time from the research process. The collaborative nature of participant observation also required constant monitoring, bearing in mind that the consent gained initially could require renegotiation throughout the course of a research project. Concrete measure were taken to ensure that participants were always aware that their participation remained voluntary, and that they could withdraw their participation – including destruction of the data already gathered from them - at any time without any consequences. To this end, Research participants knew how to contact the researcher and its institution (electronic and telephone contact information was provided) to have questions answered, receive additional information, make complaints, announce withdrawal, or resolve a grievance. The author created a register of the persons who had given oral consent that is anonymized, with individual entries taking the following form. ‘Respondent n [n designating a number] was presented the consent form and has agreed to participate orally, [date and place]’.
Data availability statement
The qualitative data (field notes) supporting the findings of this study are not publicly available due to ethical and security considerations. All participants were promised strict confidentiality and anonymity, given the sensitive nature of their personal narratives and the potential political and economic ramifications of disclosure. The empirical data contain identifying details related to migrants’ family situations, economic activities, and community dynamics in a context where disclosure could pose social or legal risks. Sharing field notes could inadvertently compromise participants’ identities.
This data restriction was reviewed and approved by the European Research Council Executive Agency’s (ERCEA) Ethics Review Unit, which confirmed that disclosing raw ethnographic data would violate confidentiality agreements with participants (ethics clearance on 27 October 2017, Ref. Ares(2017)5270670 – 28/10/2017).
Requests for access to anonymized excerpts of the data may be directed to Valerio Simoni, at valerio.simoni@ics.ulisboa.pt. Access will be considered for qualified researchers who submit a methodologically sound proposal and obtain ethics approval (or an equivalent institutional review). Any shared data will be thoroughly anonymized, and recipients will be required to sign a Data Use Agreement stipulating that no attempts will be made to re-identify participants or share data publicly.
Acknowledgments
The research on which this article is based relied on the generous collaboration of research participants in Spain and Cuba, to whom I extend my deepest gratitude. I thank the Instituto Cubano de Antropología (ICAN) for providing assistance and institutional affiliation during research in Cuba. The research received ethics approval by the European Research Council and the Geneva Graduate Institute Ethics Review Committee. The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT Post-Doctoral Grant SFRH/BPD/66483/2009), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF Ambizione Fellowship, PZ00P1 147946), and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 759649), supported my investigations during the periods 2010–2014 (FCT), 2014–2017 (SNSF), and 2018–2023 (ERC). Any shortcomings are my own, and sponsoring agencies are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information presented here.
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