Description: welcome to archcus A COLLECTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE MATERIAL CULTURE IN CUBA, 1959–1989 Explore our collection Start Exploring the Vibrant Material Culture
All dimensions of material culture were politicized in one way or another in the period of communist rule . . . Communism, after all, was a material ideology. It was about material conditions, material factors, and material transformations. Above all, communist regimes sought to transform society by remaking material culture.
Political subjectivities, or the understandings citizens had about their relationship to the state, became imbedded in and generated by the material.
The highly bureaucratic, institutionalized state acted not only as a distributor of resources…, but it was also the ‘corporation’ or source of most mass-produced goods, owned the retail establishments, employed the staff, and, finally, dictated the qualities, aesthetics, and prices of goods…. The state dictated what counted as legitimate material necessity… what the population consumed (type of good, design, and quality), …where (state stores with appropriate advertising and displays) and how (dictating ‘so