Renegotiating the Reproductive Bargain: Gender Analysis of Economic Transition in Cuba in the 1990s

Abstract

This article argues that Cuba's economic demise following the collapse of the former Soviet Union should be seen as a crisis in reproduction as well as a crisis in consumption and production. Using qualitative ®eld research carried out in 1994 and 1995 in Havana and in the province of Matanzas, the author shows that the commodities and services required for reproduction could no longer be guaranteed through the distribution system of the Cuban state. Consequently, people began to devise a range of survival strategies in order to ensure the reproduction of their households, including trading in unocial markets, leaving formal employment and engaging in a portfolio of incomegenerating activities in the informal sector. Such strategies were patterned by the existing sexual division of labour and show a reinforcement of traditional gender roles. The article argues that these changes will have important political as well as economic consequences for Cuba's future.

Transcending the Impact of the Financial Crisis in the United Kingdom: Towards Plan F—a Feminist Economic Strategy

“…This meant first that women's substantial contribution to welfare, both paid and 14 This was a term originally coined to analyse the rapid transition in post-1989 Cuba, when the state was starved of Soviet subsidies and had to reorganise the allocation of national resources. The Cuban state was forced to adjust the ways in which the different elements of labour, time and resources required to achieve reproduction of people, that is, biological, daily, generational and social reproduction, were provided (see Pearson, 1997).…”

4 Burmese Female Migrant Workers in Thailand: Managing Productive and Reproductive Responsibilities

“…This involves going beyond the analysis of the vulnerability to exploitation of migrant women workers, due to the lack of effective protection from either the sending or the receiving state, to analyzing the gendered implications of their responsibilities for reproduction (Thapan 2006: 13; Pearson/Kusakabe 2012a). There is a continuous struggle between wage earners and the state to meet the resource and other costs of childcare and other reproductive responsibilities, which Pearson (1997) termed the 'reproductive bargain'. But when the state rolls back its responsibility for taking care of childcare, disabled and sick people, and increasingly, elderly people, it is most frequently women who have to extend their paid and unpaid work to ensure that any care deficit is covered.…”

Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction

“…Led by one of the important protagonists writing about labour power in the earlier domestic labour debate, Ruth Pearson (1997) returns to the notion of reproduction in interesting ways. She elaborates on the notion of the bargain which had been developed during the 1990s by a variety of feminist economists including Agarwal (1997) and retains many of the elements of this: a recognition of the importance of both productive and reproductive spheres acting together, the significance of structures (norms and institutions) but also of agency, and the interplay between the household, the state, market and community.…”