Abstract

CASTRO, Carlos Gomes de. No hay vida: dismantling and permanence in Cuban bateyes. Etnográfica [online]. 2020, vol.24, n.2, pp.371-400. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10/4000/etnográfica/8916.

In 2002 Cuban government published a document that made explicit the need to “restructure” the sugar field. Dozens of mills were then disarmed and dismantled, leaving the bateyes without what brought “life” and gave “movement” to them. In this article, I intend to show how this process of both “restructuring” and “deterioration” was perceived, evaluated and surpassed by the people who were directly affected by it. I conjugate, in a kind of description built on contrasts, the perspectives of the State - represented by the programs of action and the construction of an idea of “efficiency” - and those of the inhabitants from different areas that made their living from sugar production, for whom the formulation of temporalities and the manipulation of materials appear as ways of readjusting a broken world. From beginning to end, I indicate how sugar, embodied in ruinations, is a long-lived substance that produces landscapes and modifies subjectivities.

Keywords : ruinations; affective spaces; batey; Cuba.

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