Sanitation workers and ‘structural racialisation’ in a globalising Centro Havana

Discussing racism as more than just a past legacy has been taboo during most of the Cuban Republic, including under socialism. But since the 1990s, theorists, often drawing on concepts from contemporary race theory in the US, have started to analyse racism as a continuing, active force in Cuba. The author takes issue with formulations of racism that treat it as a discursive force and disconnect the debate on race from class. Based on long stints of fieldwork in Cuba since 2015 with a workforce almost automatically associated with blackness – the workers in the sanitation department of Centro Havana – the author argues for attention to the forms of racialisation that most impact poor and working-class Cubans and that are part and parcel of capitalist penetration and the impact of globalisation. Using Arun Kundnani’s ‘darker red’ theorisation of ‘structural racism’ as a systemic, albeit shapeshifting, companion of global capitalism, this piece explores how the specific capitalist dynamics unfolding in Havana today introduce the spectre of structural racism. This means for the lives of these workers a shift from an everyday working experience of socialist integration to one of economic precarity; a shift from being socialised into the neighbourhood to becoming alienated from it; a shift from sanitation workers being targeted for ‘socialist civilising’ to them becoming subject to punishment. A key difference that Cuban socialism can make lies in how the authorities respond to workers resisting such structural racialisation.