Technology and Culture

Cuba's Digital Revolution, edited by Ted A. Henken and Sara Garcia Santamaria, brings into focus the tension between the Cuban Revolution's state socialist model and Cuba's increasing participation in the "worldwide digital revolution," which has incrementally challenged the state's control over Cuba's media landscape. Since 2013, Cuba has experienced both top-down, government-sponsored public access to the Web, as well as the citizen inventos or workarounds to create, share, and access digital content. Each chapter provides an original contribution to the study of Cuba's evolving mediascape, and the collection argues that technology is dramatically "reconfiguring the evolution of the cultural, economic, and political project that is the Cuban Revolution" in multiple and previously unseen ways (p. 2). In doing so, the collection brings together scholars and media professionals from an impressively wide range of disciplines and specialties including anthropology, Spanish literature, journalism, law, political science, communication, computer information systems, sociology, and Latin American and media studies. It also represents a transnational perspective on Cuban media, with contributors representing a variety of nations across the Americas (including Cuba) and Europe.

The book is divided into five parts that represent key approaches for understanding the mismatched media objectives of the Cuban government and its citizen media innovators. These sections respectively focus on history, politics, journalism, business/economy, and culture. The sections on politics and journalism have the most contributors and, therefore, the most heft within the collection. The first section on history—particularly useful for historians of technology—provides readers with the appropriate context to understand the island's history of the Internet and telecommunications policy since the 1990s, as well as the role of "alternative" or "oppositional" media in Cuba from the late nineteenth century until the most recent decades. The politics section explicitly addresses and theorizes the way that the "digital revolution" is impacting the ongoing politics of the Cuban Revolution. This includes analyses of the tension between the Cuban state and civil society, and how geopolitical relations between the United States and Cuba impact that tension.

A particularly fruitful outcome of increasing technological access in Cuba is its growth in online independent journalism since 2008. Thus, a large section of Cuba's Digital Revolution is dedicated to journalism and focuses specifically on the competition for readers and legitimacy between the "official" state press and the independent digital press. The section concludes [End Page 1205] with an important case study and comparison of two independent digital media projects—El Estornudo and Periodista de Barrio—that coauthors Abel Somohano Fernandez and Merya Marquez Ramirez suggest may be opening the Cuban mediascape in distinct ways.

The final two sections of the collection focus on business and culture and provide analyses of the ways that Cubans have harnessed technology to advance commerce and culture (music, literature, fashion) in creative ways. In the business section, Jennifer Cearns's chapter analyzes the way Cuban millennials in Havana are becoming digital entrepreneurs even as state surveillance remains the norm on the island. Her chapter also addresses the low-cost and inventive (now illegal) use of the "street net" (SNET) local area networks and the paquete system (door-to-door transfer of digital content via USB or hard drive) to share information and entertainment with others on the island. Interestingly, it is in the business section that the Cuban diaspora is most directly addressed, in the context of their purchasing power to support or assist those on the island—a fact that itself goes against the Cuban Revolution's desire for autonomy and echoes the tension between the state and its citizens' increasing digital access.

Cuba's Digital Revolution provides a significant and much-needed look into the recent impacts of the increasing access to digital technology in Cuba. As the editors acknowledge, however, the chapters based on ethnographic fieldwork privilege Havana-based digital activities. Still, its coverage of recent...