Migrant, tourist, Cuban: Identification and belonging in return visits to Cuba

In the course of field research among Cuban migrants in Barcelona, I encountered various personal stories and anecdotes about return visits to Cuba. A striking feature in many of these narratives was the value placed on being and behaving like an “ordinary” Cuban when visiting the island. Exemplifying their attunement to the “Cuban lifestyle,” Cuban migrants I talked with – who had all left the country in the last thirty years and mostly in the last decade – highlighted their return to simpler routines and behavioral and consumption patterns, in terms of accommodation, food, transportation, dress code, and the rhythm and pace of life more generally. Forget one’s mobile phone, forget about checking emails and Facebook daily – via these conversational observations, they presented selves that knew and appreciated what it was to live in Cuba as Cubans. Regularly, such portrayals were contrasted with the attitudes of “other” returning Cuban visitors said to be less sensitive to the Cuban reality and to flaunt their newly acquired foreign tastes and superior socio-economic statuses, a recurrent target being “ostentatious” Cuban Americans coming from the United States. In tension with these narratives, however, were anecdotes by the very same research participants on the differential treatment they regularly received back in Cuba, as “Cubans living abroad” (los cubanos que viven en el extranjero). These could be stories of “interested” (interesados) kin, friends, and acquaintances that only sought to draw money from the “rich Cuban from abroad,” scheming, deceiving, and treating them as they would any other foreign tourist. Such narratives of concrete interactions and events during the migrants’ visits spoke of challenges of recognition and belonging.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Approaching difference, inequality, and intimacy in tourism a view from Cuba

Based on ethnography of touristic encounters in Cuba, the article reflects on competing approaches to difference, inequality, and intimacy in tourism and in anthropology. Comparing the understandings of tourists and Cubans involved. in these informal engagements, of the Cuban authorities, and of scholars and commentators, three idealized scenarios and modes of interpretation are teased out. Rather than assessing their degree of accuracy or suggesting the primacy of one over the other, the article reflects on their co-presence and competing rationales, focusing on the conditions of their emergence and assessing their epistemological, moral, and political implications. In so doing, it foregrounds how the expectations, desires, and moral underpinnings that inform our findings and interpretative horizons resonate with those of the people we study, opening up different possibilities for estrangement and familiarization, and highlighting what is at stake in these processes both for anthropology and for those with whom we work.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Sex, seduction, and care for the other in touristic Cuba

In continuity with stereotypes that can be traced back to colonial times, present-day tourism images of Cuba tend to emphasize the sensual nature of this Caribbean destination, highlighting the cheerfulness and amiability of its inhabitants as well as their alleged “hotness” and exuberant sexuality. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Cuba between 2005 and 2016, the article discusses Cuban men’s narratives and practices of seduction of foreign tourist women. The focus is on gendered processes of self-definition that reproduce a global image of Cuba as a place charged with sensuality and eroticism while highlighting these men’s sexual, loving, and caring abilities. By moving beyond reductive readings of sex tourism and sex work, the article highlights the broader range of competences, sensitivities, and moral attunements that these intimate relationships bring into play, and the way they inform Cuban men’s subjectivities, their seduction practices, and their hopes and possibilities to establish long-term relationships with their tourist partners.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Informal guiding. Enacting immediacy, informality and authenticity in Cuba

To better conceptualize the tourism encounter, scholars have highlighted the importance of mediators, notably tourist guides, in framing visitors’ experiences of a destination, encouraging to move beyond “hosts and guests”, “tourists and locals” binaries. The study of informal touristic encounters in Cuba helps problematize the identification of the tourist guide, highlighting the stakes of such categorization in a context of tightly regulated, state-led tourism development. Favouring a framing of tourist-Cuban interactions as genuine expressions of intimacy that escape the worker–customer binary, these encounters enact valued forms of informality, immediacy and authenticity. Their promise is to provide a “unique” glimpse into the “real” Cuba and the lives of “ordinary” Cubans, and to generate alternative possibilities for knowing and relating with the destination and its people.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

A pedagogical presentation of a C⋆C^\star-algebraic approach to quantum tomography

It is now well established that quantum tomography provides an alternative picture of quantum mechanics. It is common to introduce tomographic concepts starting with the Schrodinger-Dirac picture of quantum mechanics on Hilbert spaces. In this picture states are a primary concept and observables are derived from them. On the other hand, the Heisenberg picture,which has evolved in the $C^\star-$algebraic approach to quantum mechanics, starts with the algebra of observables and introduce states as a derived concept. The equivalence between these two pictures amounts essentially, to the Gelfand-Naimark-Segal construction. In this construction, the abstract $C^\star-$algebra is realized as an algebra of operators acting on a constructed Hilbert space. The representation one defines may be reducible or irreducible, but in either case it allows to identify an unitary group associated with the $C^\star-$algebra by means of its invertible elements. In this picture both states and observables are appropriate functions on the group, it follows that also quantum tomograms are strictly related with appropriate functions (positive-type)on the group. In this paper we present, by means of very simple examples, the tomographic description emerging from the set of ideas connected with the $C^\star-$algebra picture of quantum mechanics. In particular, the tomographic probability distributions are introduced for finite and compact groups and an autonomous criterion to recognize a given probability distribution as a tomogram of quantum state is formulated

Remittances and morality: family obligations, development, and the ethical demands of migration

Remittances have moral dimensions that, albeit implicitly addressed in migration literature, have not yet been the focus of explicit attention and analysis by social scientists. Building on recent developments in the anthropology of ethics and morality, this article proposes theoretical and analytical pathways to address this important but often neglected aspect of remittances. It does so mainly via a critical analysis of existing scholarship on remittances, and ethnographic data drawn from research among Cuban migrants in Cuba and Spain. The reflexive scrutiny of scholars’ moral assumptions about remittances opens the way for the study of the moral dilemmas and ethical demands articulated by remittance senders and recipients. Family roles and obligations, and the uses of the money sent by migrants, are identified as key areas of moral difficulty. Their analysis shows how remittances inform moral reassessments of family relations, individual responsibility, economic practice, and development. The notion of ‘moral remittances’ is proposed as a heuristic comparative tool that serves to illuminate the moral aspects of remittances. This notion is put into perspective to complement and reconsider more metaphorical takes on remittances, notably the concept of ‘social remittances’, of which it helps reveal some epistemological limitations while opening future research avenues.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Lorentz Transformations as Lie-Poisson Symmetries

We write down the Poisson structure for a relativistic particle where the Lorentz group does not act canonically, but instead as a Poisson-Lie group. In so doing we obtain the classical limit of a particle moving on a noncommutative space possessing $SL_q(2,C)$ invariance. We show that if the standard mass shell constraint is chosen for the Hamiltonian function, then the particle interacts with the space-time. We solve for the trajectory and find that it originates and terminates at singularities.Comment: 18 page

The quantum-to-classical transition: contraction of associative products

The quantum-to-classical transition is considered from the point of view of contractions of associative algebras. Various methods and ideas to deal with contractions of associative algebras are discussed that account for a large family of examples. As an instance of them, the commutative algebra of functions in phase space, corresponding to classical physical observables, is obtained as a contraction of the Moyal star-product which characterizes the quantum case. Contractions of associative algebras associated to Lie algebras are discussed, in particular the Weyl-Heisenberg and $SU(2)$ groups are considered.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figur

Groupoids and the tomographic picture of quantum mechanics

The existing relation between the tomographic description of quantum states and the convolution algebra of certain discrete groupoids represented on Hilbert spaces will be discussed. The realizations of groupoid algebras based on qudit, photon-number (Fock) states and symplectic tomography quantizers and dequantizers will be constructed. Conditions for identifying the convolution product of groupoid functions and the star--product arising from a quantization--dequantization scheme will be given. A tomographic approach to construct quasi--distributions out of suitable immersions of groupoids into Hilbert spaces will be formulated and, finally, intertwining kernels for such generalized symplectic tomograms will be evaluated explicitly