Schizonomics

The Cuban Revolution is on the brink. Hyperinflation, mass migration, and deepening tensions with the United States are recasting the nature and future of a political experiment that has radically transformed Cuba and the Americas since 1959, forcing a rethink of money, labor, socialism, and the Monroe Doctrine itself. The crisis resulting from the collapse of the USSR has since become endemic, and in this conjuncture the Revolution is being rewritten from within. In the streets of Havana, money is fragmenting, and with it, the political grammar of Cuban socialism. This book offers an ethnographic and theoretical account of how the pluralization of monetary regimes is reshaping that grammar in real time. Positioning Cuba s expanding black market not merely as an economic phenomenon but as a lived social space, an experimental site of governance, and a catalyst of emergent subjectivities, the study pursues three interlocking lines of inquiry: the quasi-dialectical tension between state-sanctioned labor and informal income as competing moral and political economies; the symbiotic relationship between growing self-entrepreneurship and illicit exchange networks; and the formation of a new economic rationality producing novel fiscal subjects and resignifying socialism along pragmatic rather than paternalistic lines. Together, these threads illuminate a transformative moment in which the foundational meanings of money, nation, and revolution are being renegotiated under conditions of radical uncertainty. Rather than a story of decline or rupture, this is an account of the Revolution s ongoing, contested reinvention one that speaks to broader questions about the fate of socialist projects in a world shaped by crisis, informality, and the schizoid creativity of everyday life.