Manufacturing the other in Post-Revolutionary Cuban politics: emigrants

This article -based on a deductive methodology- analyses the uses that the post-revolutionary Cuban policy has made of emigrants -be it of closeness or estrangement- and discusses the perspectives of this process for the future of Cuban society. Cuban emigration has meant for the island state both a source of income, as well as political resources. It has been ideologically built as representative of a past without a return, and as such it was stigmatised and excluded. Nowadays, however, the Cuban society, as a result of the intensification of links between both parties, becomes increasingly transnational. This is an opportunity for the launch of the island's society after a quarter of a century of depression and impoverishment, but to do so, it requires policies of rapprochement and a radical change in the very conception of citizenship.