“I Have Been Formed in This Revolution”: Revolution as Infrastructure, and The People It Creates in Cuba

Abstract

How do revolutions form persons? Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Havana (2015–17), this article takes as its point of departure the trajectory of a middle-aged woman's involvement with state structures and institutions during the course of constructing the house in which she lives. Describing ethnographically the ways in which these state involvements intertwine with other areas of her life, I suggest that this woman's sense of having been “formed in the revolution” is owed partly to the way in which the revolutionary process penetrates (or “flows”) deep into the minutiae of her life. Contrasting this manner of subjectivation with Che Guevara's conception of conciencia and the formation of a “New Man,” I suggest that the immanence of this process of infrastructural penetration may enable us to articulate an alternative way of understanding how revolutionary subjects are formed. [Cuba, housing, infrastructure, revolution, state, subjectivity].