This paper argues that the household has become a renewed space of significance for Cuban women in the post-Soviet period. It draws from existing scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the city of Santiago de Cuba to discuss the effect of post-Soviet crisis and reform upon women's domestic practices, the management of domestic economies, and longstanding gender ideals that link women to the domestic sphere. Physical, economic and social factors leading to post-Soviet Cuban women's increased concentration upon the household are argued to be both the result of pre-existing social orientations towards households as a womanly space and a response to specific politico-economic shifts since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This article describes practices of informal digital media circulation emerging in urban Cuba between 2005 and 2010, drawing from interviews and ethnographic research in

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This paper reflects upon the difficult entanglement of personal and professional identities that I experienced when getting married during doctoral fieldwork. In addition to producing insights for my ethnographic data, the process of marrying, and the planning of a wedding, transformed my understanding of my relationship to informants, requiring me to re-examine my previously unconscious distance between my 'fieldwork life' and my 'real life'. Falling in love in the field, under the watchful gaze of informants and beyond the gaze of home, obliged me to challenge distinctions I had unintentionally made between an intellectual, anthropological involvement with Cuban culture, and an emotional, aesthetic and personal distance from Cuban culture. At the same time, I concluded that such artificial distinctions between 'field' and 'life' were in themselves necessary and productive strategies to manage the emotional challenges of extended fieldwork.

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