La revolución digital: mobile media use in contemporary Cuba

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on mobile internet use in the Global South highlights access disparities, along with shifting social practices that accompany greater web connectivity. Cuba is part of the Global South, and ranks among the least internet connected countries in the world. Venegas’[2010. Digital dilemmas: The state, the individual, and digital media in Cuba. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press] thorough account of technology use in Cuba positions Cuban digital media as an assemblage of political, economic, historical, and global factors. Recently, however, mobile digital technologies in Cuba have undergone rapid transformation. Continuing tensions between the US and Cuba remain part of how the country's infrastructure and internet practices develop in location-specific ways. In this paper, we utilize ethnographically-informed data to provide a case study of the mobile internet adaptations in Havana, Cuba. Specifically, we draw upon Sutko and de Souza e Silva [2010. Location-aware mobile media and urban sociability. New Media & Society, 13(5), 807–823] framework for location-aware mobile media and urban sociability to examine the unique communication and coordination practices of Havana internet culture. Additionally, Massey [2005. For space. London: Sage] and Wiley and Packer [2010. Rethinking communication after the mobilities turn. The Communication Review, 13(4), 263–268] notions of space allow investigation of Cuban cultural technologies within a larger social field. These theoretical lenses enable interrogation of mobile device adaptations on mobility, sociability, and space to position Cuban media use as an assemblage of local and global forces.

KEYWORDS:

• Cuba
• mobilities
• Global South
• space
• sociability
• Havana

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Justin Grandinetti is a third-year PhD student in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media department at North Carolina State University. He is interested in scholarship on mobilities, particularly the impact of increasingly mobile streaming production and consumption practices. His work utilizes media archeology and spatial materialism in studying the ongoing production of space, place, and subjectivity with regard to mobile streaming media [e-mail: [email protected]].

Marie Elizabeth Eszenyi is an independent scholar in Durham, North Carolina. She holds an MA in Communication and Advocacy from James Madison University [e-mail: [email protected]].

Notes

1 CUC is the Cuban convertible peso, otherwise known informally as chavito. One CUC has a fixed value equal to one US dollar.

2 As explained by Whitefield (2016), the Cuban National Office of Statistics places the average monthly salary at 25 CUC, while other surveys found the number to be closer to 100 CUC a month, particularly in urban areas.

3 Rhodes (2017) explains that Google did take advantage of the brief period of relaxed US–Cuba relations under former President Obama to forge new agreements with the Cuban government, but the future of these partnerships are now less clear.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill [Travel Award]; James Madison University [Department of Communication Studies Research Award, Office of International Programs Research Award, Office of the Provost for Research and Development]; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research].