Important reasons why Yadira had entered into a relationship with Livian included her female kin who urged her to settle down with a peaceful man and economic considerations that were connected to her expectations of pleasurable outings with him.
Nevertheless, after the early courting phase such amusements became more and more rare and Yadira quickly started to get bored of sitting her nights at home as opposed to her previously busy dating life. She soon began to accept invitations for a date from other men during the afternoons when Livian was out of town working, trying to hide her misdemeanours from him when he returned home. He started to become increasingly jealous and tried to supervise her comings and goings as much as his work permitted.
Soon afterwards he had problems at work and his income diminished. Livian started to give Yadira less money every month and had less access to such luxuries as an occasional can of foreign beer or some extra food via his work, which led to quarrels with Yadira.
One night Livian drank heavily in anger, went driving drunk and ended up having his licence suspended for some months. He asked for their next-door neighbour to replace him at his work as a chauffeur while his licence was suspended, but ended up losing his job completely because his boss preferred the neighbour as her chauffeur. Yadira’s frustration in the relationship grew and she came to the conclusion that the relationship is not giving her anything anymore: “Why would I give him something if he doesn’t help me?” After several attempts, she managed to force Livian to leave her flat and ended the relationship. Livian, on the other hand, saw the situation differently. He drew upon the idea of reciprocity to highlight her lack of affection for him: “I’m annoyed since I know that she doesn’t think of me and I think of her.”
Men’s failure to meet women’s material expectations intertwines importantly
grateful to Kevin Birth for pointing this out to me.
with conflicts in gender relations and the break-up of reciprocal care easily leads to a separation. In this case, Livian losing his job and not being able to fulfil the expectations of male care (money and material contributions) that Yadira placed on him was the event that led Yadira to break up a relationship where she had been unhappy for a long time.
Such gendered notions relate to the relation between heightened
monetisation, growing inequalities, and intimate attachments. Similar large-scale changes that characterise post-Soviet Cuba have been noted to complicate intimate relations and more long-term forms of reciprocity in various parts of the world. Cole (2009) argues that in Madagascar, recent political and economic changes have introduced a new Western style opposition between love and money, which has brought along problems of the commodification of intimacy. Urban Malagasy respond to these changes with gendered strategies:
men try to find wage work and women seek out wealthy, preferably Western foreign partners with whom they engage in exchanges of sex for money (Cole 2009). Wardlow (2006a) discusses a similar theme in Papua New Guinea where monetisation transforms and breaks the more traditional cycles of reciprocal gendered exchanges between men and women. Men’s greater access to cash resources brings changes to the traditional bride wealth exchange, undermining women’s position and driving them to engage in negative agency via prostitution (Wardlow 2006a).
Both Cole and Wardlow describe situations where local notions of gendered exchanges in intimate relations become undermined due to increased monetisation and inequality, leading to an increasing emergence of
commodification of sexuality. Although Cuban gender relations have displayed instabilities also in the past (e.g. Martinez-Alier 1974: 124-30; Villaverde 2005), contemporary habaneros are no strangers to such problems. However, I had no informants who would have engaged in exchanges of sex for money. Despite the great importance that women place on a man’s wealth in considering his desirability as a partner, all such relationships that I witnessed were working on some types of expectations of reciprocal contributions. Yet, the increasing inequalities and the heightened monetisation since the 1990s have to a degree changed expectations related to love and sexuality.
My data suggests that even though Cubans differentiate between “material interest” (interés) and relationships driven by other types of motivations, in practice notions of love, intimacy, and affect are deeply intertwined with materiality in most day-to-day situations and it often becomes impossible to differentiate between the two. Material contributions are the way to express and prove the existence of emotional attachment and bonds of love.
Love is defined by actions. As a matter of fact, my informants never spoke of
“true love.” While men could sometimes declare their love for their partner (e.g. “she is the love of my life” – ella es el amor de mi vida), it was not typical for women to use the term “love” to describe their attachment to men. At best, they could say that they “liked” someone (“me gusta”) but this attraction was always intertwined with being very pleased with the material help or forms of entertainment that a man was able to offer them. While I kept on pressing my female informants with questions about whether they liked a man or were mainly interested in what he has to offer at the beginning of my fieldwork, most of the time it was impossible to try to distinguish between the two.
Moreover, although women may not speak of love as such, they may stay cooking, cleaning, and caring for a man for years, which is something that should also count as an indication of an affective attachment of some sort.
Thus, love becomes tightly intertwined with the gendered reciprocal care and actual material practices, suggesting that my informants’ conceptualisations of heterosexual attachments differ from the Western dichotomisation between love and money to a certain extent and that there are gendered differences in the ways in which men and women relate to notions of passionate love.
At the same time the large-scale transformations that Cuban society has experienced since the 1990s are closely connected to certain complexities in intimate relations. Due to gendered notions of male and female contributions in a relationship, the contemporary importance of wealth and consumption in gender relations places pressure especially on men to have money. As wealthier men often maintain an advantage in attracting women, some of my male informants saw it as a constant threat that another man would appear offering more to their partner. Due to the significance that women place on a man’s material contributions in a relationship, this is a rather viable concern on the men’s part. The current importance of consumption and the transformations related to the possibilities of social mobility have an impact on sexuality and love, but they are experienced as gendered.
In salsa and reggaeton song lyrics in particular, women are frequently portrayed as deceitful and running after the man with the most material advantages to offer. However, while men may sometimes complain about women’s ‘greed,’ in the end it is not in their interest to portray their relationship with women this way, for this would imply that a man’s relationship with his partner is not based on any type of proper reciprocity.
For a man to imply that his partner is taking advantage of him easily evokes an image that he lets himself being used by cunning women, leading to a perception of him as weak and lacking masculinity. Moreover, emphasising a man’s single-sided contributions in a relationship may also suggest that a man
is so unattractive that he can only charm women with his money. This would deny any emotional attraction on the woman’s part, which again carries the potential to question his masculinity. Notions of reciprocity are important also to men’s conceptualisations of their material contributions to women.
My male informants sometimes expressed annoyance about the amount of claims that their partners made on them or complained about how much money they had spent for the benefit of a woman in a relationship. However, this usually took place when a relationship was also flawed by other problems or after a woman had ended the relationship. At the same time, even when expressing such views, my informants never explicitly denied women’s rights to make material claims on them. Rather, they complained that women expect too much. What is at stake is the negotiation of a properly balanced reciprocity in a relationship. Even though reciprocity does not need to be symmetrical, relationships that completely lack reciprocity are seen as abusive.
As the lack of male material care is an important reason for a woman’s desire to separate from her partner, a man may notice this and try to fix the situation by starting to contribute more to the relationship. When Yadira was trying to end her relationship with Livian, he made one last effort to try to make her change her mind. He suggested that he starts to dig a well and installs a system of running water to her house. In her view, this was a way for him to make himself useful and to stop her from trying to make him move out.
However, as she truly wanted to end the relationship, she did not want him to start doing the work because this would have placed moral pressure on her to reciprocate his labour by continuing the relationship; evicting him after such a huge job would have been extremely rude.
Rosendahl describes how men revenge women’s decision to end a relationship by taking away the items they have bought or helped to buy (1997: 72-73).
While this sometimes took place amongst my informants, men were always shameful of such acts and stated that the items that they required back had been “loans” from someone else in the first place and that they were supposed to give them back; that they had never been actual “gifts.” Women reacted to such acts with anger, frowning, and annoyance. This suggests that men’s contributions to women are considered an integral part of the reciprocity in the relationship and it is morally questionable and shameful for a man to require his contributions back at separation. However, the example from Yadira and Livian shows that a woman as well may reject a man’s contributions as a way to refuse the reciprocity and the continuation of the relationship that this would entail when she wants to end her relationship with her partner.
This highlights the fact that it would be too simplistic to see women’s claims on men’s material contributions as an indication of women being ‘greedy.’ As women continue to maintain far greater responsibility for dependent kin than men, they often share the little resources they have with wider networks of kin whilst simultaneously trying to secure their children’s material wellbeing.
At the same time, these types of large-scale transformations may highlight more dichotomised understandings of intimate relations if they increase the pressure that women feel to partner with men who – apart from their wealth – have little appeal in terms of other factors of attractiveness (such as good looks, dancing skills, and courteous behaviour).