During the height of its power over everyday life, between 1968 and 1993, the Cuban Communist Party outlawed virtually all non-state labour and exchange. Since then, however, its continuity in power has increasingly depended on devolution: shifting responsibility for the provision of basic goods and services from failing state enterprises back to the self-employed. The latter now produce the majority of food and basic products; receive most of the national income from tourism, remittances and foreign investment; and generate most new jobs. Nevertheless, they subsist under a subaltern regime of fragile and conditional freedoms. The article adapts James Scott's consideration for the subaltern's ‘hidden transcripts’ and agencies to contemporary Cuba. It analyses the unavoidability of informal and illegal practices for daily subsistence; their naturalisation in society in contrast with their delegitimisation as opportunistic self-enrichment in party-controlled media; and how the self-employed resist such judgements in favour of more conciliatory civic visions.

Scholars have long argued that leaders manipulate foreign policy, sometimes even initiating wars in order to enhance their domestic political position. But diversionary wars are relatively rare given the high costs of conflict. In this project, we examine data from major Syrian daily newspapers over a 30-year period (1987–2018) to explore how autocratic regimes use diversionary rhetoric. We find that before the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Syria's state-controlled media concentrated on Israel as a security and political threat. Emphasis on Israel as a diversionary threat decreased during peace negotiations between Syria and Israel, probably in a bid to prepare the Syrian public for normalization of bilateral relations. After 2011, scrutiny of Israel—and other long-standing topics of state discourse—was displaced by discussion of foreign plots and conspiracies against the Syrian state. Our analysis illustrates how authoritarian regimes make use of diversionary strategies as well as how political shocks generate discontinuities in authoritarian rhetoric.