Building on the latest advancements in the anthropological study of intimacy, economic practice and morality, a research funded by the Ambizione scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation examines the case of tourism in Cuba and the migratory trajectories to Spain that result from it. In its initial focus, the research set out to uncover how Cuban people who have been engaging with tourists in their home country, and have followed their foreign partners abroad, are affected by and respond to intense public scrutiny and problematisation of their intimate-cum-economic lives. The research process raised other significant axes of investigation, notably in regard to the transformations in economic practices and sensitivities among Cuban migrants in Spain, and among Cuban residents aspiring to migrate abroad. More details with Research Fellow Valerio Simoni.
Can you give a picture of the main migratory trajectories resulting from tourism in Cuba?
Tourism in Cuba generates a range of different encounters and relationships between foreign visitors and members of the Cuban population, and this phenomenon retained the attention of my doctoral and postdoctoral investigations. Some of these relationships become very intimate and lead to long-term bonds that can ultimately result in marriage and the migration of the Cuban partner to the tourist’s country of origin. To understand this phenomenon, it is important to take into account that the residents of this Caribbean island have very limited possibilities to travel abroad, be it for the financial resources that this requires, and which most Cubans lack, but also because there are only a handful of countries in the world that Cubans can freely travel to. In this context, long-term relations with tourists, most notably marriage, can constitute a privileged vehicle for migration. Contrary to mediatised accounts that portray marriage with tourists as eminently or even solely instrumental and motivated by a desire to migrate, my research gives serious consideration to the more ample range of motivations that Cubans give to their transnational trajectories, including the very nature of their intimate relations with tourists. Spain is among the main destinations of such tourism-related migration, but my research also shows that such migratory trajectories extend to other European countries, the Americas, and other places in the world that tourists come from.
Why did you decide to focus on the relation between Cuba and Spain?
The relation between these two countries goes back more than five hundred years, to Spain’s conquest of the island and the ensuing four centuries of colonial rule. From the 1990s onwards, the tourist-migration nexus illustrates the most recent phase in a transatlantic flow marked by unequal power relations. With the increased difficulty of migrating legally to the United States and the intensification of the touristic and commercial links between Cuba and Spain, by the mid-2000s this European country became the most important destination for Cuban people who wanted to ameliorate their lives and economic conditions. In spite of the growing significance of the circular movement of Cuban people between their home country and Spain, the phenomenon remains understudied. Besides the emphasis on economic motives, authors who have explored recent Cuban migration to Spain have stressed the importance of the sentimental and emotional dimension, notably when love and marriage are at stake. The recent surge of Cuban migrants in Spain has been highly mediatised and criticised as a typical case of improper use of marriage for migration purposes, and is paralleled by the authorities’ efforts to tighten policies against so-called “marriages of convenience”. Accusations of “fake marriages” raise important questions about the moral assumptions that govern the realms of intimacy and economic practice and prompt to delineate and patrol their boundaries. The study of the tourism-migration nexus linking Spain and Cuba becomes a privileged entry point to understand how moral articulations of the intimacy-economy dialectic circulate in today’s world and contribute to redraw normative lines of belonging and exclusion across the North-South divide.
As an anthropologist, how did you go about studying the “intimate-cum-economic lives” of this specific population?
As an anthropologist, my main research tool was what is known as “participant observation”. In Spain, this consisted in observing and participating in the life of Cuban migrants in moments of leisure and peer sociability, while in Cuba I tried to engage with Cuban migrants on return visits to the island. In both cases, the aim was to gain insight into how research participants experienced and talked about their intimate relations and about the economic dimensions of their life. The gendered dimension of informal interactions made it easier for me to gather data on Cuban men’s intimate lives as compared to Cuban women, given that I was more willingly included in moments of male sociability in which gossip occurred. Insights into the economic dimension of the research participants’ lives were easier to gather since these matters were more openly discussed among men and women alike. Occasionally, I sensed that my status as a non-Cuban made my interlocutors more comfortable with discussing issues that they found more difficult to talk about openly with other Cubans, due to peer pressure and a concern for maintaining a certain image of themselves in front of fellow nationals. This was in itself revealing of the tacit cultural norms and values at play when talking of one’s intimate and economic life.
Do you have a particular memory related to your research?
A very important moment of breakthrough during my fieldwork in Barcelona, which went on to facilitate my integration into the group of Cuban people I ended up frequenting most of the time, happened when a Cuban man and I realised that we had a friend in common, namely another anthropologist that he had once helped when still living in Cuba. This coincidence became part of a story that my friend in Barcelona liked to recount to other Cubans for the rest of my fieldwork. It became a way to explain and normalise my presence in the group, a sort of “myth of origin” of how I had become part of his intimate circle of friends. This fortuitous and fortunate coincidence illustrates in a tangible way how my research was building on almost a decade of work in Cuba, and how this prior experience could facilitate meeting other Cuban people with whom I shared not only some cultural competence, but also a social network of friends and acquaintances. Albeit never as significant as in this case, there were more occasions in which Cubans I met in Barcelona knew friends I had made back in Cuba, and part of my research method was also to explicitly nourish and capitalise on such linkages. One way of doing this was to act as a mediator between Cuban migrants in Barcelona and their friends and families back in Cuba, carrying letters and gifts to Cuba and back to Spain. Given that means of communication between Cuba and the rest of the world are still fairly limited compared to the situation in other countries, being able to help my interlocutors was extremely gratifying and also very appreciated by them, and became a way for me to reciprocate their collaboration.
Can you share with us some major findings?
Among various findings, a particularly significant one has to do with what I would describe as a process of increased “purification” of the domains of the intimate and of the economic , as a result of long-term relations with tourists and of migration via marriage. The accusations of instrumentalising intimate relationships to marry a foreigner and thus migrate out of Cuba rely on the assumption that mixing love and economic interest is wrong, an assumption that also informs legal dispositions taken in Europe and elsewhere to prevent and penalise what is seen as a misuse of intimacy and an improper way of migrating. Among my research participants in Cuba and Spain, a common narrative saw them criticise “other” Cubans who mixed friendship or love with economic interest. The argument was that if intimacy was extremely important in their lives, it was not to be tarnished by economic agendas. Economic behaviour, in turn, would better be detached from relational considerations. Reasoning this way, several migrants in Spain criticised the alleged “typically Cuban” tendency to mix the realms of the intimate and of the economic and argued that their experience in Europe had taught them how to embody more properly such distinction. As Cubans, they considered themselves more skilled and proficient than Spanish people in establishing intimate relationships, whereas for economic behaviour one had better learn from Spanish ways of doing, with the Cuban economy easily portrayed as an domain where failure and malpractice prevailed. This composite mode of identification was once expressed in the following way: “One hundred percent Cuban, but of European thought” (“Ciento por ciento cubano, pero de pensamiento Europeo”).
Are you still in touch with some of your research participants?
Yes, I am still in touch with many of them. The research project has now ended, but not my plans to return to Cuba and Spain and continue meeting and spending time with people who have by now also become my friends. Online forms of communication, which are finally making their way also in Cuba, are helping us stay in touch, and it is also via such means that I can occasionally give a helping hand, especially to those interlocutors in Cuba who find it hard to make a living, and to whom a little contribution from someone living in Europe can make a big difference. In some cases, I have myself facilitated their communication with family and friends out of Cuba, by helping some acquire a mobile phone and occasionally recharging their credit via promotions that are available online from abroad. The new project I am currently devising, which has Cuba and Spain among its research sites, would help me continue cultivating and building on these relationships, and thus prolong an engagement that I find both professionally and personally enriching, and which I hope can be equally beneficial and gratifying for the people I work with.
Publications by Valerio Simoni:
- “Economization, Moralization, and the Changing Moral Economies of ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Communism’ among Cuban Migrants in Spain.” Anthropological Theory 16, no. 4 (2016): 454–75. doi:10.1177/1463499616684053.
- ”Ethnography, Mutuality, and the Utopia of Love and Friendship in Touristic Cuba.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 8, no. 2 (2016): 143–67. http://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/02_-_Simoni.pdf.
- “Intimacy and Belonging in Cuban Tourism and Migration.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33, no. 2 (2015): 26–41. doi:10.3167/ca.2015.330204.
Illustration: Malecón, Havana, Cuba. Photograph by Valerio Simoni.