“There Ain’t No Fuel!” Addressing Material Scarcity in Urban Mobility in Santiago de Cuba

In this article, we address the dearth of research on urban cases of large-scale and long-term reduction of resource consumption. We focus on mobility in Santiago de Cuba, a city where geopolitical embargo has caused material scarcity, severely reducing access to fuel, vehicles, and spare parts. Consequently, mobility is both restrained and decoupled from individual motorized transport, and largely depends on collective transport. We explore how the local state and society address scarcity by developing governance models and social practices that follow a dual strategy of collectivization and privatization of transport. Questioning the usual vectors of knowledge transfer in geography, we argue that Santiago’s response to scarcity provides valuable lessons for other urban contexts, and informs the debates about sustainability, transport efficiency, commoning mobility, and urbanizing degrowth. Consequently, it showcases the importance of maximizing the benefits obtained from available mobility resources, restricting individual vehicle ownership, positioning the state as central actor in provision and regulation of transport, and enabling self-managed practices among workers and passengers. Taken together, these dynamics raise a question about the extent to which transport sustainability is achievable in capitalist societies—a transition that might instead require aligning mobility with socialist principles that consider mobility not as question of individual behavior, but collective need and labor.