Emprendedores and Luchadores: Cuban Entrepreneurship, Socialist State Retrenchment, and the Normalization of Racialized Exclusion

ABSTRACT During the economic crisis of the 1990s in Cuba, self‐employment was gradually and begrudgingly decriminalized, referred to by state leaders as “a necessary evil” in a “Socialist island adrift in the sea of Capitalism.” However, it continued to be stigmatized as antisocial and morally suspect, diverting labor and innovation away from the Revolution, a state‐led social project for the benefit of all, toward individual wealth accumulation. By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, official state discourses changed. New discourses celebrated independent economic actors as the key to sustainable development and future Socialist prosperity; self‐employment was reenvisioned as vital to the nation's economic health. I argue that the apparent transformation in the state and Revolution's acceptance of Cuban entrepreneurs is actually incomplete. While some forms of independent economic activity and new economic actors are now celebrated and defended by the state, the mobility and dignified life promised by entrepreneurship are not open to all who undertake creative solutions to unmet social needs.