Graydon Smith

Topic

Reframing Crisis: Hope and Future-Making in Contemporary Cuban Photographs

Department of Anthropology

Date & location

• Tuesday, August 27, 2024

• 10:00 A.M.

• Clearihue Building

• Room B007

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria (Supervisor)

• Dr. Melissa Gauthier, Department of Anthropology, UVic (Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. Susan Lord, Department of Film and Media, Queen’s University 

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Dan Russek, Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies, UVic

   

Abstract

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, already challenging circumstances in Cuba have significantly worsened, heavily impacting how Cubans envision their lives and futures. Using a combination of visual and ethnographic methods, I conducted two months of fieldwork in the summer of 2023 in Cuba’s second largest city, Santiago de Cuba. Using photovoice, photo-walks, and semi-structured interviews with eight Cuban young adults, I visually explore life following the worst economic crisis in the island’s history. Following COVID-19, an already fraught political climate has further devolved, migration has reached historic rates, inflation renders many goods unobtainable, and infrastructure and services are challenged. For many, future paths are unclear; they may seek better lives abroad, or fight to improve their conditions on the island, in a tumultuous and polarized political climate. For youth, migration often appears more viable to catalyze change. I employ the theory of radical hope to consider how people produce meaning and futural momentum despite tremendous pressure and uncertainty. Curating images into five key themes, I consider discourses of migration, loss, change, escape, and survival during difficult times. As I argue, these photographs inform a non-generalizable, nuanced image of life during crises, highlighting sustaining moments alongside threats to hope. This centers a more dignified view of life, emphasizing momentum rather than fatalism, individual agency, and the possibility for change without prescribing future paths. By emphasizing possibility alongside critique, I raise questions about these indeterminate trajectories and the role of hope in a seemingly hopeless time, finding that a portrait of contemporary Cuban lives and futures are difficult to characterize with pre-existing ideas.