UC Davis

Several modes of accessing the internet became prevalent in Cuba over the decade of the 2010s - making it a compelling site for observing the means by which the medium's meaning becomes created, contested, and deployed. The particular epoch of media forms have gradually crept into Cuban life, a slow drip throttled by a tangled web of stagnant post-soviet infrastructure and series of complications between the Cuban people, their state, and various stakeholders invested in global information networks .

By the early 2010s, there was little access to what much of the Global North thought of as commonplace access to the “internet”, but multiple practices became locally constituted in its stead. Throughout the island locally constructed Ethernets link thousands of humans across city blocks, widespread “sneaker-net” systems of ferried media are circulated via USB drives, and small crowds gathered in public spaces to share limited, expensive, state-provided bandwidth to the wider global web. These distinct networks of technology, politics, and human actors reconfigured and forged anew senses of comunidad: how Cubans conceptualize relationships between each other, their state, and their world. These situated practices are not entirely unique to Cuba, as of course the medium’s spread plays out along axes of development, race, and income on the global stage. But that does not detract from the discrete factors at play in Cuba - these were/are situated practices in which the emergent Cuban internet forms a complex socio-technical assemblage - a blurry mix of use, technique and understanding iterated to this place at this time.

My introduction lays out the logistics of the work itself: methods of research, the project’s genesis, timelines, key conceptual formations, and some edifying details of the process of doing research work in Cuba as a U.S. citizen.

Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to dissertation project broadly, with the wider lenses of histories of Cuban media and sovereignty used as entry-points for the larger questions in the work that follows. There I give a brief history here of U.S./Cuba relations, as this lays the groundwork for later conceptualizations of both the politicization of the internet in Cuba and the ethical ramifications of my own work there. This is juxtaposed alongside historical renderings of prior media paradigms within Cuba.

Chapter 2 delves into various constellations of the mediated Cuban imaginary - the ways in which iterative media spheres in Cuba are thought of - by Cubans, by outsiders, even by peer researchers of the internet. Multiple ethnographic threads are brought to bear upon some of the popular facing discourse of the internet in Cuba, highlighting some of the troublesome/too-easy ways we might conceive of the Cuban “lack” of access, alongside the way in which conceptualization of the culture of the “resolver” travels in and outside Cuba. This chapter aims to complicate those familiar narratives and compound conceptualizations of what cuban networks are/can be. It is paired with an ethnographic media experiment grappling with what can and cannot be captured by visual ethnographic techniques.

Chapter 3 serves as the bulk of the long-form ethnographic material in this project, focusing on detailing time spent across multiple organized mutual aid Free/Libre/Open software-oriented trips, contrasting with the lived experiences of multiple Paqueteros, people’s whose work was to ferry hard-drives of pirated media content across neighborhoods. These are situated practices in which the emergent Cuban internet forms a complex socio-technical assemblage that is often contested in meaning, with participants engaged in negotiating varied understandings. They are practices that are in part developed locally through the entrenched Cuban DIY resolver engineering culture, but also traverse other potent influences, such as legal, infrastructural, and economic flows amidst a varied range of global discourses about the medium.

Chapter 4 draws from ethnographic and archival research to excavate significant ideological underpinnings to contemporary renderings of network cultures in the Global South. Highlighting the role of prominent anthropological thought during World War II and the entanglements of communications into a technoscientific post-war order, I seek to implicate these renderings of media in the global south as complicit in modes of control exercised through U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century. I present research regarding the Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson- spearheaded “Committee for National Morale”, explicating the role of my disciplinary forebears. In doing so, I aim to elucidate the means by which we (as both a disciplinary and Western “we”) have arrived at the now common figures of “open” and “closed” media systems through configurations of “culture” via ICT as hegemonizing force.

Concluding then, I take cues from conversations covering oft-problematic interventions in the name of human rights, seeking to highlight how this constellation of discourse and practices link the medium to utopian ideas of a democratic public sphere but instead may have hidden results: as vessel allowing explicit threats to local autonomy. This dissertation asks: Is there such a thing as a distinctively Cuban internet? What does asking this question presuppose and configure as an inquiry? What can this broad field of inquiry, and the ways we might answer - tell us about the ways contemporary forms of power wield “the internet”?