The Morality of Friendship in Touristic Cuba

Abstract

This article focuses on friendship and its controversial enactments in touristic Cuba, paying particular attention to its moral implications. It starts by considering how the issues of authenticity, transience and inequality played out and informed the possibilities for friendship between foreign tourists and members of the Cuban population, leading the protagonists involved to formulate their moral assumptions about friendship, outline its main challenges in the tourism context, and envisage possible solutions to those challenges. The second part of the article examines how notions and experiences of friendship were worked over in response to such difficulties, most notably the tension between ‘interest’ and ‘affection’, alternatively leading to the formation of ‘hybrid’ or ‘purified’ versions of friendship. By drawing attention to the moral, idealistic and aspirational qualities of friendship in touristic Cuba, the article contributes to the current anthropological literature on friendship, showing some of its limits as well as possible analytical pathways for the future research. Keywords: anthropology of friendship, morality, interest, sentiment, aspirations, tourism, Cuba