The Archive of Cuban Socialism (ArchCuS) is a repository of Cuban material culture spanning from 1959, when the Cuban Revolution seized power, until the collapse of the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the U.S.S.R., by the turn of the 1990s. 

Fidel Castro’s endorsement of socialism in 1961 radically transformed life—and material culture—in the country. Thirty years later, the disintegration of the Soviet Union brought an end to the Cuban socialist experiment—if not to the Cuban communist regime—and once again changed material practices and environments, as the country lost most foreign partners and entered into a deep economic crisis from which it never fully recovered. ArchCuS documents the artifacts, clothing, and memorabilia that Cubans produced and consumed during the three decades in between, the material culture that inspired them to build a communist utopia, that allowed the state to surveil and repress, and that helped many to craft alternative lives. ArchCuS archival project is guided by the belief that, to understand present-day Cuba, it is necessary to understand the material legacy of its revolutionary and totalitarian past. 

ArchCuS is a project of María A. Cabrera Arús, a sociologist who studies the impact of fashion and domestic material culture on regime stability and legitimation, with a focus on state socialist regimes and the Caribbean region during the Cold War. ArchCuS is the offspring of the Cuba Material blog, which Cabrera Arús created in 2012 to initiate a public debate on the politics of Cuban socialist material culture. It is supported by the non-profit Tower of Babel.