‘I Put Food on Everyone’s Table’: Food Provisioning and Domestic Work across Three Generations of Black Women in Santiago de Cuba

Based on long-term ethnographic research, this talk draws on three generations of Black women from a low-income family in Santiago de Cuba. Hanna Garth details their household labor to feed the family, paid domestic labor cooking and cleaning in the homes of wealthier white Cubans, and entrepreneurial endeavors, such as raising pigs, and selling prepared food, as ways to generate income. She analyzes this within a broader phenomenon of “luchando la vida” (struggling for life) as Cuban families continue struggle to access food and maintain a decent quality of life as the socialist welfare state continues to falter in post-Soviet Cuba.