Since 2008, the increased opening of Cuba’s economy to private entrepreneurship has seen the emergence of new professions. In a recent story, Al Jazeera follows a Havana-based wedding planner as she prepares a luxurious celebration for customers who, like most of her clientele, are white Cubans living abroad. The case of the wedding planner allows us a glimpse into the new forms of privilege and success that have emerged in contemporary Cuba.
As seen on the video, the wedding planner and nearly all of her employees are white, young and pretty. The wedding planner shows the camera crew around her spacious home, new car and hip office. She explains she gains most of her business online through her 10,000 Facebook followers. Since the acquisition of the materials needed for weddings is often difficult in Cuba, her United States-based brother helps her by delivering items such as hundreds of candles. The machinery required for making decorations is brought from Panama, and flowers come from Ecuador. I was unable to verify the prices of her services since her website lacks all references to money, but it is likely that customers pay several thousand CUCs for their parties. The wedding planner works around the clock and laughingly notes she barely has time to see her spouse. She also praises her employees for their devotion to her company: “If you don’t have trained staff with a sense of belonging, without that in our work we couldn’t have reached this point.”
It seems that lavish weddings have gained more precedence since Cuba’s increased opening to global capitalism during the last few years. The emergence of flashy celebrations and new cosmopolitan entrepreneurs reflects larger, cultural, social and economic changes taking place in contemporary Cuba. It is related to emerging class differences and to possible shifts in Cubans’ understandings of family relations.
In 2007-2008, I conducted ethnographic research on kinship, gender and the life course amongst low-income, racially mixed Habaneros. My interlocutors were “ordinary Cubans” in the sense that many of them were employed at the state sector and most of them enjoyed, at best, a highly sporadic access to foreign remittances. In my research I focused on rituals such as weddings because they are representative of broader social relations. The weddings I attended differed greatly from those organized by the wedding planner: they took place in state halls and were often relatively relaxed. While many people organized a fiesta, some were married in jeans and T-shirts with only two persons present. Most importantly, my Cuban friends, for the most part, did not care much for weddings. There were no weddings amongst the circle of my close interlocutors during my nine-month-long fieldwork period. The weddings I managed to attend were due to friendly Cubans’ willingness to welcome a stranger to their parties.
Rather than entering into legal marriage, my interlocutors preferred to engage in consensual unions. They used the terms “husband” and “wife” interchangeably for both short and long-term love interests. In fact, many of my Cuban friends had a rather pragmatic relationship to marriage. Some rejected it on the basis of their fear that marriage would give their partner legal rights to their home and make them fall prey to predatory lovers looking to find a solution to Havana’s ever-lasting housing crisis. Others just did not care for formalities in their love affairs. One elderly couple had gotten legally married to “take the honeymoon” the state offers to married couples at a subsidized price as incentives for entering into marriage.
It is not that my Cuban friends did not care for love. Rather, they placed the greatest value in their relationships to their ‘blood’ relatives, which they saw as the source of reliable love, care and everyday help. Relationships with heterosexual partners were often laden with suspicion. Recently, researchers like Noelle Stout and Valerio Simoni have shown how love relations in contemporary Cuba are often fraught with fears about betrayal and material interests.In such a climate of insecurity, it is not surprising that most of my interlocutors were not interested in marriage. While many blame the changes of the post-Soviet era for the emergence of untrustworthy relationships, such suspicions may also reflect more long-term cultural and social tendencies. In the Caribbean, since the colonial era, kin relations amongst low-income, non-white people have emphasized the reliability of their ‘blood’ relatives over marital connections. Such understandings of kinship place great value in the position of women as mothers and cherish strong bonds between parents and children, sometimes at the expense of marriage.
The people who embrace grandiose weddings in contemporary Havana are usually white, wealthy and for the most part, residing outside of Cuba. The exclusive price of these parties places them out of reach to many people like my Cuban friends. The locals who manage to cash in from such new sources of income are disproportionally white and connected to international networks of cash, goods and information. Often to even become employed in such a field, a person has to be young, good-looking and light-skinned: the criterion of a buena presencia (good appearance) marginalizes people whose skin color is considered ‘too dark’ – and possibly also persons who are seen as being ‘too old’ or ‘too fat’? – from accessing lucrative jobs. Such business practices encourage individuals to create a new relationship to the state: as opposed to previous socialist loyalties, workers are now required to commit to private enterprises and a new work ethic that requires relentless labor, flexibility, odd hours and the prioritizing of work over socializing with family and friends – neoliberalism par excellence.
This cultural emphasis given to weddings carries the potential to promote normative notions of respectability in family relations. Traditionally, in the Caribbean, anthropologists have seen weddings as a class-defined status symbol closely related to Christian ideas of respectability (Smith 1996). In her study on colonial Cuba controlled by significant divisions of class and race, Verena Martínez-Alier noted that legal marriage had value as a significant status symbol amongst all groups in the society. Marriage was more common among the white upper classes, while both consensual unions and mother-centered kin relations (matrifocality) were widely practiced amongst the non-white population.
Soon after its entry into power, the revolutionary government sought to equalize Cubans’ access to legal marriage. During the 1960s’ campaigns of collective weddings and the latter institutionalization of state wedding halls, the revolutionary government aimed to grant all Cubans the possibility of celebrating weddings with a bourgeois luxury. The aim was to level class differences and promote greater stability in the family relations of the poorer, non-white section of the population. However, we know that, in practice, the value of legal marriage rather eroded during the years of the revolution at the expense of consensual unions and matrifocal kin relations .Nevertheless, simultaneously as the social power of state institutions is diminishing, entrepreneurs such as the wedding planner have become the symbol of success in the new Cuba.
What does the emergence of such grand scale weddings mean to ordinary Cubans who are unable to organize such parties themselves, tap into the revenues they create to the privileged few, or even to get invited to the fiestas? On the one hand, the appearance of such celebrations is another example of the emergence of intensified racialized class inequalities in contemporary Cuba. Havana’s new upper class distinguishes itself from poorer Cubans by engaging in forms of consumption inaccessible to others, such as sumptuous weddings. On the other hand, the new cultural centrality of weddings suggests a shift in understandings of kinship and gender towards pre-revolutionary values. If poorer people like my interlocutors begin to aspire to celebrate similar grandiose weddings and legal marriage gains a status value, such a shift in Havana’s ritual landscape carries the potential to promote bourgeois ideas of respectability. Such a shift may encourage more patriarchal understandings of family relations if marriage becomes a way to devalue single mothers and others who do not fit into the parameter of heterosexual nuclear families. Ostentatious weddings seem to be in the process of becoming the status symbol of wealth, success and white respectability that they were in pre-revolutionary Cuba, with the power to stigmatize those who are unable or unwilling to engage in legal marriage.