Kinship as an Idiom for Social Relations

Reciprocity is central to Cubans’ negotiation of their kin and gender relations. Cubans enact and expect reciprocity in the course of everyday practices of care that create and reproduce family and love relations. Care also plays a central role in the state ideology through the socialist idea of lifetime nurture. However, both individuals’ caring practices and the state care vary considerably from one moment to another. This chapter introduces the notion of dialectics of care as a way to understand the shifting interaction between individuals’ caring practices and state nurture over the life cycle. Over time, when engaged in mutual care, various social actors become conceptualized through kinship idioms by both individuals and the state discourse. Kinship thereby provides Cubans a general idiom for social relations.