Boys to (New) Men: Youth Reformatories and Urban Inequality in 1960s Havana

Starting in 1959, the new Cuban government launched a series of reform projects designed to transform supposedly wayward subjects into model revolutionary citizens. As recent scholarship has shown, the targets of these reforms included former residents of shantytowns and women alleged to have earned a living through sex work. One of the longest-running of these efforts was the government’s juvenile delinquency program. Revolutionary officials and social scientists conceived of youth reformatories as vehicles to address latent social ills and mold young people into living examples of the hombre nuevo – the “new man” – a selfless, politically conscious, and hardworking ideal revolutionary subject. Yet the theoretical underpinnings and regular practices of these institutions did not radically depart from those which had characterized similar projects prior to the 1959 revolution. And the children and teenagers most often subject to coercive reform projects came from the same poor and working-class, disproportionately Afrodescendant communities that had been home to many of the young people pulled into such programs in the past. This paper examines the evolution of youth reformatories and juvenile delinquency programs in Havana and situates them in an urban environment marked by major housing reforms in the 1960s that were, nonetheless, insufficient to address longstanding residential inequality and entrenched race-and-class segregation. It reveals that significant continuities in these various features of life in revolutionary Havana contributed directly to the persistent targeting of poor and working-class people of African descent through Cuban carceral projects during the 1960s. Over time, the effects of such selective policing practices and housing constraints became especially clear in moments of crisis – including during the mass migration from the island in 1980 and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.