Through an engagement with historical, epistemological, and ethnographic modes of analyses, I trace how individual bodily practices—that is, practices relating to the body and its health—in contemporary Cuba provide a fertile terrain for examining the multiple pathways through which political subjectivities are created and transformed. Specifically, I highlight the ways in which these practices serve as de facto access to basic health services and supplies and actively contribute to the daily functioning of Cuba's socialist health care system. I argue that scholars must move beyond contrasting rote descriptions of socialism vis‐à‐vis capitalism and, rather, look to new fields of inquiry that address the coproduction and coexistence of different forms of capital and new configurations of statecraft and subjectivity in 21st‐century Cuba. [Cuba, state, capital, bodily practices, subjectivity, socialism]

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El éxito de Cuba en el campo de la salud pública a menudo se asocia a altos índices estadísticos alcanzados por la población en muchas áreas. Ésto ha llevado a muchos estudiosos a hacer de la isla un "anti‐modelo" de desarrollo. Sin embargo, los investigadores en esta línea de pensamiento caen en lo que yo llamo fetichismo estadístico. Esta forma de fetichismo tiene un objetivo específico. Los indicadores básicos de salud en Cuba proporcionan un modelo de la realidad, pero no permiten el examen crítico de lo que las cifras reflejan o cómo se obtienen. Este artículo propone el amplio examen de los procesos sociales, que moldean e influyen en el sistema primario de salud pública en Cuba. Concretamente, el trabajo examina cómo el colapso del bloque soviético y el fortalecimiento del embargo por parte de los Estados Unidos están cambiando la experiencia yla aceptación que la población tiene del sistema de salud.Además, el trabajo analiza cómo los cambios en la dinámica de las relaciones entre la población y la burocracia médica han transformado también los modos en que el Estado ejerce y representa su poder de un modo más sutil a través de la imposición de una disciplina física a nivel individual. Palabras Claves: Cuba, antropología médica, subjetividad, prácticas cotidianas, Poder Estatal. keywords: Cuba, medical anthropology, subjectivity, everyday practices, state power

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Psychoanalysis has produced an ensemble of institutions, expertise, procedures, and practices for rendering the psychoanalytic subject legible and, through this, psychic life as an actionable site of intervention, dislocation, and struggle. This article examines how diverse psychoanalytic communities in Buenos Aires have produced unique grammars that influence how individuals articulate ideas about health and well-being. Descriptive, culturally specific, historically informed, and always provisional, this grammar is empirically grounded in lived experience. Through presenting several case studies, I flesh out how this grammar, as a deictic expression of/for the unconscious is deployed, reworked, and embodied in everyday interactions. I demonstrate how psychic life is enmeshed within social and political experience. In doing so, I consider how interpersonal, existential, environmental, social, and political contingencies shape divergent notions of well-being and structure desires of what it means to live "a good life." [psychoanalysis, psychic life, well-being, Lacan, Buenos Aires] Your psychic life is a discourse that acts. Whether it harms you or saves you, you are its subject. Our purpose here is to analyze psychic life, that is, to break it down and to start over. -Julia Kristeva (1995, 6) Well-worn, black, leather-bound books of Sigmund Freud's writings were neatly arranged in bookcases flanking the hallway leading to Micaela Cabrera's office. Inspired by minimalist, modern décor aesthetics, the office had a neutral color palette, offset by an ornate, wooden shuttered door to a French balcony. A black lacquer table and sleek office chair were paired with a conspicuously large, grey, upholstered accent chair for analytic patients. Every detail was precise. "It took a while to create the right mood for this space," Cabrera commented. 1 This carefully curated space, allowed for her patients' unconscious thoughts and motivations to be made legible. Through this, Cabrera gained insight into, or the signification of, their psychological and somatic symptoms. For Cabrera and other analysts like her,