“ Compañero , Respect Your Vocation!”: Improvisations for a Workaday Crisis

Artistic renditions of the discourse of work in post-Soviet Cuba unleash all the anomalies and contradictions of this scenario. But although Cubans and Cuba watchers often underscore the exceptionalism of Cuba's revolution and of its precarious post-Cold War situation, these critical recastings of revolutionary work ideology evoke the kinds of questions about other geocultural locations, historical periods, and literary-cultural traditions. The historical trajectory of Western capitalism, particularly of late capitalism, constitutes the backdrop for many pieces in this issue, whereas Cuba, although embracing selective capitalist elements to fend off economic disaster, could be characterized as the embodiment of late-20th-century socialism under siege. But its singularities notwithstanding, the Cuban case foregrounds the power of a sudden financial crisis to catapult the secure into pre-cariousness and shake up a society's dearly held guiding myths about the value of work and the equality of access for citizens. Here, Unruh offers a glimpse of the burgeoning informal economy keeping countless Cubans afloat in the post-Soviet era.