WHEN DISORDER IS THE ORDER: CUBA DURING THE SPECIAL PERIOD

The fact that as of 2008 Castro had already succeeded in installing his brother as President and Prime Minister of Cuba -- and that in late 2010 he seemed poised to also hand over the final title of Head of the Communist Party of Cuba to Raul (Franks 2010) -- impresses the Revolution's supporters and appalls its opponents. How is it that socialist Cuba has endured beyond the existence of the Soviet system that shaped it? In this dissertation, I "bring people back in" (Eckstein 2004, 212) to answer this question. I focus on three specific parts of Cuban daily life--productive activity, consumption practices, and humor. Taken together, these areas of human activity provide a window into Cuban daily life and the complex relationship between citizens and the state that offer a more accurate portrayal of the relationship between Cubans and the socialist state than is often encountered, especially in popular media. This work demonstrates that many of the practices of ordinary Cubans during the Special Period and later can be seen as responses to new state policies, which were, themselves, responses to the country's sudden expulsion from Soviet economic support and insertion into the capitalist global economy. Focused mainly on mitigating the economic crisis, Cuban leaders were unable to anticipate or control most of the social transformations that the new laws and policies of the mid-1990s caused