The City is Sick: Adaptive Transnational Care Between Cuba and the United States

Abstract

Between 2022 and 2023, over a million people left Cuba, representing 10% of Cuba’s total population and the largest exodus in Cuban history. These numbers are staggering and highlight the dire conditions on the island that Cubans have been forced to navigate. In addition, they are troubling indicators of what is to come as Cuba contends with its infrastructural decline and increasingly aging population. While the majority of those who left Cuba have done so with the intention of relocating to the United States, others have moved to receiving countries throughout the world. This exodus is motivated by a series of acute crises endured within the context of years of chronic precarity that have made life barely livable for the Cuban people. It is further impacted by the need to fill in the gaps and manage the uncertainty with adaptive transnational care. This dissertation operationalizes the language of “sickness” to examine how interlocking systems of domination, namely legacies of imperialism and colonialism, have bound Cuba and the United States for centuries. These systems are entangled with the lives of the Cuban people, shaping the provision of transnational care. Therefore, this dissertation examines how the historical and contemporary political relationship of these two countries has shaped how people care for one another in profoundly life-altering ways.