From worker to owner: Moral economy and competing value regimes in Cuban return migration

Since reforms to Cuban migration policy and the expansion of licensed private enterprise in the 2010s, an increasing number of migrants based in Europe have resettled in Cuba. This article examines return as an evaluative moment: how returnees’ economic projects are judged in everyday interaction, and how vernacular distinctions between trabajo (waged work) and negocio (business), and between ‘European-style’ and ‘Cuban’ ways of doing business, become moral coordinates for assessing worth, obligation, and legitimacy. The analysis draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2005–2023) and intensive participant observation with 22 returnees (17 men, 5 women, mostly in their 40s–60s) in Havana and Viñales, complemented by multi-sited research with Cuban migrants in Spain (2012–2018). Based on fieldnotes and inductive, cross-case thematic analysis, the article shows that returnees narrate and attempt to enact a passage from worker to dueño (owner), but that such claims remain fragile under scarcity, shifting regulations, mistrust, and pervasive scrutiny about ‘success’ and ‘failure’. Returnees respond through performative labor, assembling proofs, mobilizing transnational resources, and enrolling others into projected futures, while also negotiating the practical and moral ambivalence of invento and trapicheo. The article mobilizes ‘moral economy’ as an analytic of how entitlements, obligations, and legitimacy are contested within shifting economic arrangements, rather than as a residual space outside them. The study relies on a purposive sample and speaks most directly to trajectories shaped by the post-2012 reform conjuncture prior to the post-2020 intensification of crisis.