‘La Lenin is my passport’: schooling, mobility and belonging in socialist Cuba and its diaspora

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of transnational networks of alumni of an academically selective boarding school in Havana, this article explores the nexus between mobility, schooling and belonging in the context of socialist Cuba and its diaspora. Drawing on Goffman’s work, I argue that the boarding school experience was transformative; it facilitated or consolidated social mobility for its pupils, which later, for many, led to geographic mobility in the form of study and work outside Cuba. After graduating, alumni continue to identify with the school and to reproduce their alumni identities. The affective webs of belonging forged through family links and friendships fostered at the school constitute emotionally sustaining networks that also provide material support after migrating. I propose that the school represents a site of identification for a globally dispersed non-national diaspora and argue that migration scholars need to embed international migration within people’s lives more broadly.

Keywords:

• diaspora
• schooling
• belonging
• mobilities
• Cuba
• transnational network

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to interviewees for their time, to Margalida Mulet Pascual for research assistance, to Vanessa Ramos Castillo for transcriptions and to the John Fell Fund for funding. Thank you also to the guest editors and two anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments.

Notes

^1. Interviewees were recruited using a snowball approach, drawing on existing contacts from prior research. Margalida Mulet Pascual conducted some interviews for me, recruited via her own contacts. All interviews were conducted in Spanish. Names and some details of interviewees have been changed to protect their anonymity.

^2. For a review of scholarship on education in revolutionary Cuba, see Lutjens (1998).

^3. On the gender implications of the idea of the New Man, see Behar (2000).

^4. Not all these facilities are in use today.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mette Louise Berg

METTE LOUISE BERG is Departmental Lecturer in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford.