Renegotiating the Reproductive Bargain: Gender Analysis of Economic Transition in Cuba in the 1990s

This article argues that Cuba's economic demise following the collapse of the former Soviet Union should be seen as a crisis in reproduction as well as a crisis in consumption and production. Using qualitative field research carried out in 1994 and 1995 in Havana and in the province of Matanzas, the author shows that the commodities and services required for reproduction could no longer be guaranteed through the distribution system of the Cuban state. Consequently, people began to devise a range of survival strategies in order to ensure the reproduction of their households, including trading in unofficial markets, leaving formal employment and engaging in a portfolio of income-generating activities in the informal sector. Such strategies were patterned by the existing sexual division of labour and show a reinforcement of traditional gender roles. The article argues that these changes will have important political as well as economic consequences for Cuba's future.     

Book reviews

ILO‐GEET, Economic Restructuring and Social Dialogue in the Ivanovo Oblast, Russia, International Labour Organization — Central and Eastern European Team, Report No. 14. Available from: ILO‐CEET, Moszaru. 14, Budapest H‐1066, Hungary. 62 pp, hb, ISBN 92 2 110302 1 (no price included).

Europe at the Margins: New Mosaics of Inequality. Costis Hadjimichalis and David Sadler (Eds). Chichester, John Wiley, 1995, xii+ 246pp, £45.00 hb, ISBN 0 471 95635 X.

Post‐Fordism: a Reader. A. Amin (Ed). Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, ix + 435 pp, £45.00 hb, ISBN 0 631 18856 8, £14.99, pb, ISBN 0 631 18857 6.

An Enlarged Europe: Regions in Competition?. Sally Hardy, Mark Hart, Louis Albrechts and Anastasios Katos (Eds). London: Jessica Kingsley & Regional Studies Association, 1995, 342 pp., £22.50 pb, ISBN 1 85302 188 1.     

“Our Tarkine,Our Future”: The Australian Workers Union Use of Narratives Around Place and Community in West and North West Tasmania,Australia

The Australian Workers Union (AWU) represents the miners on the West Coast of Tasmania. When the future of mining on much of the West Coast was threatened by the environmentalists' proposed National Heritage listing of the Tarkine region, the union campaigned to prevent the listing. Through its embeddedness in place, the AWU was able to use a sense of place, memory and identity to construct a community campaign that moved beyond the West Coast into the North West Coast where many of the miners lived. The union was able to renew its narrative resources by moving work out of the workplace and into the Tarkine. In this way the AWU was able to mobilise community support and shift political power to the local where workers could regain control over their lives and the place where they lived and worked.