A groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and belonging among black Cubans in the early twenty-first-century

Promoting the revolutionary socialist project of equality and dignity for all, the slogan ¡Venceremos! (We shall overcome!) appears throughout Cuba, everywhere from newspapers to school murals to nightclubs. Yet the accomplishments of the Cuban state are belied by the marginalization of blacks, the prejudice against sexual minorities, and gender inequities. ¡Venceremos? is a groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and belonging among blacks in early-twenty-first-century Cuba, as the nation opens its economy to global capital. Expanding on Audre Lorde’s vision of embodied, even “useful,” desire, Jafari S. Allen shows how black Cubans engage in acts of “erotic self-making,” reinterpreting, transgressing, and potentially transforming racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities. He illuminates intimate spaces of autonomy created by people whose multiply subaltern identities have rendered them illegible to state functionaries, and to most scholars. In everyday practices in Havana and Santiago de Cuba—including Santeria rituals, gay men’s parties, hip hop concerts, the tourist-oriented sex trade, lesbian organizing, HIV education, and just hanging out—Allen highlights small but significant acts of struggle for autonomy and dignity.

"“[A]meticulously researched and exquisitely theorized ethnography that begins with a queer speculation of the revolutionary inevitable…. But what’s truly magnificent about this study is the auto-ethnographic impulse Allen endows… as well the many reverberations that his fieldwork in Cuba holds for thinking about and working through the politics and the political struggles of African Americans in the U.S.”" - New Books in African-American Studies

"“[T]he brilliance of ¡Venceremos? is that it so powerfully presents the lived — and rapidly changing — realities of individual Afro-Cuban subjects. . . . ¡Venceremos? is an engrossing, important piece of scholarship that constructively bridges multiple disciplines and should be of interest to readers both inside and outside the academy.”" - GLQ

"“In this ambitious ethnography Allen tackles some of the most complicated but compelling issues in contemporary Cuba…. The book makes an important theoretical contribution to advancing debates on these issues…. ¡Venceremos? leaves us with the question, “Will we overcome?” but Allen has certainly moved us closer to an answer with this artful ethnography.”" - Journal of Anthropological Research

"“Jafari Allen’s new ethnography… provides a timely consideration of desires for freedom and possibilities for social equality under the Cuban Revolution…. His is an important intervention for Cubanists, Caribbeanists, and all those interested in understanding the nexus of desire and liberation in processes of racialization, gendering, and sexuality.”" - American Ethnologist

"¿Venceremos? is ... a beautifully written in-depth ethnography on contemporary Cuba." - Suomen Antropologi