The Struggle for the Market

A firsthand look at how business owners in Havana navigate the changing Cuban market and state

The Struggle for the Market tells the story of Cuba's economic reforms in the 2010s, focusing on the experiences a group of small business owners known as cuentapropistas. These business owners were the most directly affected by the transition from the state-centered planned economy of earlier decades to an economy in which the state had legalized dozens of job categories for small-scale enterprise—including work in private transport, restaurants, and street vending—and which offered citizens wider opportunities to register a private business. Here, anthropologist Ståle Wig narrates a story of the market reforms and the challenges and triumphs that small-scale entrepreneurs have experienced.

By asking what it means for a state to shape a market, and for people to become part of such a project, Wig reveals how small business owners created economic and ethical order for themselves, within a system that both empowered and constrained them. The author, who spent twenty months living and working in Havana’s bustling marketplaces, offers a firsthand account of the lives, hopes, and frustrations of people caught up in this moment of historic development. The result is an intimate, firsthand look at how Cubans struggled to make money and meaning as new hierarchies emerged in their society. Ultimately, The Struggle for the Market discounts common assumptions of linear change in favor of an examination of Cuba’s economic transition that reveals the intricate dynamics of market and state in a socialist context.