iVenceremos?

Promoting the revolutionary socialist project of equality and dignity for all, the slogan !Venceremos! (We shall overcome!) appears throughout Cuba, everywhere from newspapers to schools murals to nightclubs. Yet the accomplishments of the Cuban state are belied by the stark inequalities apparent in the marginalization of blacks, the prejudice against sexual minorities, and the devaluation of women. !Venceremos? is a groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and belonging among black Cubans in the early twenty-first-century, 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, events, and sites in Havana and Santiago de Cubaoincluding Santeria rituals, gay men's parties, hip hop concerts, the tourist-oriented sex trade, lesbian organizing, HIV education, and just hanging outoAllen highlights small but significant acts in struggles for autonomy and dignity.