Imagined individuality

Abstract

If no man is an island, if we are inherently social creatures, how should we understand people’s claims to be valuable individuals, separate from their environment? Based on ethnographic research among self-employed Cuban market traders, this article analyses performances of imagined individuality to understand how people cultivate a notion of themselves as separate from social ties. In Cuba, work in the growing private sector provides a foundation upon which people assert personal independence. In order to cultivate and realize these notions of individuality, one needs to fulfill gendered expectations of material distribution. Hence, to assert personal independence requires the mobilization of unequally distributed resources.

Infrabanking: Mobilizing capital in communist Cuba

“…Alejandro's desire was not only to refurbish his home and build a tourist rental business but, more profoundly, he said, to progress sufficiently in his finances so that he no longer had to rely on personalized relational dependencies. As Alejandro put it, “ no me gusta pedir ” (“I do not like to ask [for favors]”)—echoing a common refrain in Cuba (Wig, 2021). Alejandro embedded his economic affairs with kinship relations, aiming one day to cut himself off from these very dependencies.…”