The book’s conclusion considers its implications for histories of the Americas more broadly. The persistence of both intrapersonal and institutional racial discrimination in nations historically considered racial democracies has long been of interest to historians of the region. Hierarchies at Home contributes to a field of literature that uses the domestic sphere as a starting point to understand how racialized attitudes persist in and shape supposed “racial democracies.” It builds on that body of work by simultaneously considering how racial politics embedded in domestic service affects the archive and the documents to which historians have access, and by pointing out strategies to counteract the archival dearth. The conclusion also suggests directions for scholarship that builds on the book and briefly explores the complex situation of domestic service in Cuba in the twenty-first century.

The Epilogue explores the legacies of the state campaigns and shows that the New Family never succeeded in capturing Cubans’ lives and labor. It is for this reason, I suggest, that the Revolution’s official narrative has omitted many of the early campaigns to regulate the Cuban family, specifically women’s labor practices. Yet these silences in the grand narrative reveal how government goals and discourse have transformed over the past sixty years to meet the changing needs of the state. The government explanation for the country’s high rates of abortion and divorce and low rate of official economic productivity is ordinary Cubans’ laziness and lack of commitment to the Revolution. The epilogue argues, on the contrary, that these trends are in fact a direct consequence of government efforts to advance its own version of socialism. Specifically, the very state policies intended to construct the New Family inadvertently contributed to non-nuclear family forms and labor practices. Ordinary Cubans have responded to the discourse of the state with counter-narratives, which frame their non-normative actions as noble and legitimate. Laboring for the State, then, provides evidence of the historical continuity of Cubans’ exercises in autonomy and resistance to the government and its grand narrative.