19/11/2020 COVID-19 and Inequalities in Havana https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/export/html/1359879 1/4 COVID-19 and Inequalities in Havana Segmented Consumption Opportunities in Cuba’s Changing Food System By Hope Bastian I’ve been living in Cuba for the past ten years, and in the past few months have had the opportunity to watch how the Covid-19 pandemic has played out here quite differently than in much of the world. And I am particularly fascinated about how my own research on inequalities and food availability is playing out in this new period of crisis. In Cuba timely coordinated actions by a centralized government, oriented by public health officials, researchers and academics, have largely controlled the threat of Covid- 19. This summer the Cuban state unveiled a three-phase recovery plan and on June 18 the whole country, with the exception of Havana and Matanzas, entered in the first phase of post-COVID measures. The capital city Havana has lagged slightly behind the rest of the country, but on July 3 we also entered phase one. By mid-July most of the rest of Cuba had entered phase three. In order to achieve these results, the Cuban state has mobilized public health workers and students. The rest of us pitched in by responding to the request to #quédateencasa and joining in the applause at 9 p.m. to recognize health workers. In the United States, where I’m originally from, I read about critical conversations taking place about who is defined as an essential worker and whether “essential” is just a euphemism for expendable or replaceable. There is a recognition that being able to stay home requires a level of economic and social privilege. In socialist Cuba, many workers have been allowed to work from home. Parents who are unable to work because of closed schools receive sixty percent of their salary to take care of their children at home. However, even when one is not forced to leave the house to continue bringing in an income, in Cuba buying basic products cannot be done easily or remotely. The Everyday Struggle to Put Food on the Table Under the “normal conditions” of post-Soviet Cuba putting food on the table is a complicated endeavor that depends on strategically deploying not only economic capital, but also social capital. In my book, Everyday Adjustments in Havana: Economic reforms, mobility and emerging inequalities, I describe the systems of stratification that became the new “normal” in Cuba at the end of the Special Period. I also show how the fast-paced changes in Cuban economic and social policy outlined in the 2010-11 Guidelines of Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution have restructured opportunities for mobility, access to consumption and power in Havana. Between 2012-2013, I interviewed professionals working in the economically disadvantaged state sector who described Cuba’s complex social structure using the deceptively simple labels upper class (clase alta, élite), middle class (clase media) and lower class (clase baja). Regardless of which social group the speaker belonged to there was remarkable consensus. Respondents named food security as one of the