| Amidst the deprivations and disappointments of the so-called Special Period in Peacetime, baseball in Cuba has remained a vital site for demonstrating concern for the values and meanings of Cuban socialism. It might seem in this context that baseball would indeed be a distraction from the more serious business of day-to-day survival among the ruins of a once formidable "cradle to grave" social welfare system. Yet, in the routinization of crisis that has marked the now 19 years since the "special period" was initially declared, this dissertation argues that the playing, spectating, and commodifying of baseball in Cuba offers keys to understanding not only how oblivion has been averted but how new meanings have emerged to sustain Cuban social and political structures and to provide coherence, however contingent, however fleeting, to Cuban experiences of these crises.;Through an ethnographic as well as theoretical focus on games, on the categories of risk and contingency upon which they hinge, I consider the "enigmas of continuity and change" (Kelly 2005: 1015) in contemporary Cuban socialism as not exclusively matters of coercive force or economic prosperity (Kornai 1980, cf. Verdery 1996, Burawoy and Verdery 1999) by highlighting the ways in which structures are never total but always historical, and power emerges in the specific ways in which risks are taken and the results managed in collective efforts, both official and popular, to make sense of as well as inhabit a post-Soviet world. |
