Marina Gold

Background In the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has promoted initiatives that aim at the elimination of mother-to-child transmitted diseases for over two decades. Although Guatemala has assumed the commitment to improve access and coverage of reproductive and perinatal services, the goals have not yet been reached. Often, th...

Congenital transmission is a key route of Trypanosoma cruzi infection in Latin America and globally, contributing significantly to the burden of Chagas disease. The interruption of transmission from mother to child has recently become a focus issue. However, the research landscape on congenital Chagas disease remains largely unexplored. The purpose...

Chagas is a zoonotic disease conditioned by the need to eliminate or control the vector in human settlements before targeting infected individuals. Simultaneously it is necessary to raise awareness of health problems generated by chronic Chagas disease (ChD), for people to participate actively in vector control programs that will then enable the im...

This paper will consider two levels within the study of the Cuban revolution: the meta-narratives of change and continuity that determine the academic literature on Cuba and inform political positioning in relation to the revolution, and the methodological challenges in understanding how people in Cuba experience change and continuity in their dail...

The process of turning asylum seekers into refugees involves a complex management and bureaucratic machinery that often creates prolonged periods of uncertainty (social, legal and economic) as people are reclassified and reconfigured. Turner’s category of liminality helps to explore the process of determining economic migrants from refugees as a ri...

The Swiss system of direct democracy is in many ways paradoxical. The federal structure counteracts the formation of centralizing state hierarchies and protects the egalitarian representation of local political interests. Simultaneously, local political structures can have hierarchical and exclusionary effects, especially when democratic processes...

Revolution, a term so frequently heard in Cuba, has remained surprisingly unexplored; and yet, it is the referent against which not only Cuban politics, but morality, sociality, and history are measured. This book explores the Cuban Revolution not as an ideology, but as a form of practice and a fluid set of relations. Through an analysis of urban s...

At 6 A.M. I was woken up by the call of the rooster in my neighbor’s yard. There are two reasons why Cubans have roosters in the city: they have hens for meat and eggs and keep a rooster to reproduce them and for cockfights, illegal, but popular. Half-consciously I prepared the stovetop coffee percolator and turned on Radio Reloj. The rhythmic tic-...

On a warm Saturday night in December 2009, a year into my fieldwork period in Havana, we organized a dinner party at a friend’s house. Gustavo, in his thirties, lived with his 28-year-old brother Ernesto, in a large house that once belonged to their grandmother. Sandra, a young woman from Oriente, also lived with them. They were all scientists. San...

Asocialist country like Cuba comprises an extensive state apparatus. From state-controlled agriculture to education and health care, as well as a large military, Cuba follows the pattern of socialist states elsewhere. One would be right then to imagine that the idea of the state looms large in everyday Cuban discourse. Notwithstanding the omniprese...

The Cuban government has its own official understanding of what La Revolución implies: it is a “process that has began, an action of el pueblo, together with the Revolutionary Government and mass organizations, everything, as until now, under the direction of the leader of the Revolution [meaning Fidel Castro]”1 (Geyer 2001: 31). Therefore, the par...

In January 2011, while I was writing my thesis, I visited Havana. On the day I arrived my friends took me to the movies to see “Casa Vieja” (Old House), Lester Hamlet’s first film, produced by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cienematográficos (ICAIC—Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry). The script was adapted from an old t...

Post-Soviet Cuba has often been characterized as a place “in transition.” That Cuba has been forced to radically adapt to a changed global scenario is unquestionable. The nature of the transformations that ensued in Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, is still open to debate. Emerging during the Special Period as spontaneous respo...

Private urban agricultural ventures, initially a spontaneous response to food shortages during the Special Period, soon became a state-sponsored project, related to global notions of sustainability. This article explores the relationship between sustainability discourse and its local dimensions to reveal the role of sustainability in the reformulat...

More than a state ideology, the concept of 'Revolution' holds multiple meanings for Cubans. A historic moment, the government, the country, the people—Revolution is any one of these and all of them at once. How, then, do people experience a permanent Revolution in their daily lives? The interactions between biomedicine, alternative health practices...