Entrepreneurship and city life: new urban dynamics in transitioning Cuba

This research explores the topic of urban transformation in transitioning societies, by looking at the case of Cuba, a country that is undergoing institutional and economic reforms since 2008. The set of reforms, known as “the realignment”, aim at “perfecting” the socialist system, and include the expansion of the private sector to unprecedented levels in the revolutionary period (1959-present). In urban environments, the presence of private businesses is conspicuous. The entrepreneurs create new opportunities for work and consumption and other ways of using and appropriating the urban space. This study looks into the role of emerging private entrepreneurship in transitioning Cuba, and the urban futures imagined and delineated from those spaces. This qualitative inquiry transdiciplinarises knowledge from different fields, including communication and cultural studies, urban geography, transition and post-socialist studies, and entrepreneurship research. In articulating conceptual devices from those research areas, this thesis also follows the epistemological and methodological orientations of assemblage thinking. In this research, assemblages are a subject and a practice of inquiry that enables us to observe how connections and relations are forged, interrupted and modified in the unfolding process of urban transformation. In alignment with assemblage thinking and mode of inquiry, this study uses different methods that speak for the lived experiences of the participants as well as the experiences of the researcher in the field. Interviews with 56 entrepreneurs across different industries, as well as mapping, observation, and photodocumentation of private businesses and events in seven municipalities were conducted between 2019 and 2020. Urban change is analysed here as a process increasingly shaped by entrepreneurial assemblages, namely, emerging and constantly evolving configurations of multiple human and non-human entities. Instead of seeing entrepreneurship and the city as organic unities, the study focuses on connections and contingent arrangements with transforming or stabilising socioeconomic, spatial, and political potential. Material, travel, and digital assemblages challenge linear and metric accounts of the process of transition by underscoring the multiple temporalities and devices of capitalism and socialism at play in sites of urban entrepreneurship. The foremost findings are that entrepreneurial assemblages are important indicators of the possible course of urban change in Havana. In these assemblages, different entities, spaces, practices, forms of association and communication evidence the unsolved urban dilemmas of the revolution. These dilemmas are related to the provision of infrastructure and services as much as opportunities for individual expression and citizen participation. The digital, the travel, and the material assemblage also reveal an increasing stratification of the Cuban society and widening differences between central and peripheral neighbourhoods in Havana. The contradictions emerging from these assemblages cannot be solely explained using dichotomic approaches that highlight the oppositions between socialism and capitalism. Both systems of reference and economic practices are synthetised here using the notion of in-betweenness, which designates a “state of being” and the doings of entrepreneurs in Havana.