Moving Media in the Americas

Circulating Media in Cuba

Thursday December 4, 2025  | 1:45PM-3:30PM

Diboll Gallery, The Commons

Presenters

  • Mike Levine (Christopher Newport University), “Technological Disobedience in Offline Cuba: Packaging and Sharing Music Through El Paquete Semanal”

El paquete semanal (the weekly package) dominates Cuba’s musical landscape. The one terabyte collection of digital material traded weekly between subscribers provides a viable alternative to a nation-wide lack of internet access. Its USB-based file structure is simple, yet comprehensive and ever changing. Curators who determine the network’s content are organized within a hierarchical structure, yet this content becomes democratized after fans purchase the paquete and trade its music with one another on privately owned USB sticks. I regard these material exchanges (and the social tensions they incubate) as an example of what Ernesto Oroza terms “technological disobedience.” Using ethnographic observations and methods of digital archaeology, I reflect on these tensions; positioning practices of prestar (lending), copying, and trading conducted between fans against the capitalist concerns of the hierarchy of paqueteros (deliverers of the package), promoters, and artists that profit from the paquete’s unique mode of categorization and curation. By elaborating on the paquete’s role as a container for digital music traded through in-person encounters, this paper likewise provides an entry point to study the strategies of reparto fans as they seek representation in Havana’s competitive public spaces. I argue that the frictions this network embeds—its mix of hierarchical and egalitarian structures within an online/offline form of trade—provides a viable method to dilute both the power of the Cuban state and “Big Tech’s” marginalizing algorithms. In doing so, this paper highlights what simple digital technologies can achieve when developed and traded by a committed community of artists and fans.

  • Isdanny Morales Sosa (Tulane University, chair and moderator), “Sugar Intimacies in Contemporary Cuba: Remembering the Mill on Facebook Groups”

For centuries, sugar was the cornerstone of the Cuban economy. However, the sugar industry has been in constant decline since the 1990s. In 2002, the Cuban government initiated the “Tarea Álvaro Reynoso,” a plan to reorganize the country’s sugar industry. As part of this initiative, half of Cuba’s sugar mills were shut down. Today, only fifteen mills remain operational across the island, and sugar has become one of the scarcest commodities. Cuba lacks meaningful institutions or museums that preserve the multiple memories ofits sugar-producing past. However, following the digital revolution on the island, former sugar mill workers and residents of the surrounding communities or bateyes have created numerous digital memory groups on Facebook that complicate how that past is remembered. individual presentation 

“En la caliente” is a multimedia series composed of photographs, soundscapes, and video clips gathered by Boudreault-Fournier during June and July 2025 in Santiago de Cuba. Using the metaphor of the pressure cooker, the presentation explores the “valves” through which Cubans release the pressures of daily life amid ongoing social and economic strain.

This work reflects on the circulation—or stagnation—of air as a way to engage with the lived impact of Cuba’s current energy crisis. Drawing from over twenty-five years of ethnographic research in Eastern Cuba, the presentation considers various forms of pressure—blood, air, sound—through an audio-visual format that looks both backward at enduring struggles and forward toward emerging challenges.

Rooted in lo real maravilloso, as articulated by Alejo Carpentier, En la caliente moves beyond documenting hardship. It taps into the realm of the invisible, the imaginative, and the poetic to examine how Cubans creatively navigate, subvert, and momentarily escape the intensities of daily life.

  • LZ Humphreys (Tulane University, chair and moderator), “Analog Video as Domestic Labor in Cuba”

Streaming services are transforming television around the world, and yet much of the world cannot access this content by official means due to limited internet services, prohibitive cost, and lack of credit and debit cards. This contradiction demands an on-the-ground exploration both of how television content circulates in regions where access to paid services is limited, and of how such contemporary distribution builds on earlier modes. In this presentation, I take on this project by providing a historical account of the circulation of analog video in Cuba. Studies in both the Global North and the Global South have often equated analog video with movies—most famously, U.S. action films—and have centered the experiences of the men who controlled these networks. In this paper, I instead draw on oral histories and archival research to make two key interventions. First, I show how analog video was closely tied to the rise of satellite delivery systems and Global South television industries (specifically, Mexican television). Second, I show how women’s paid and unpaid labor and media consumption fueled illegal analog video distribution. In Cuba as in many Global South contexts, I conclude, analog video served as an early example of media convergence that both presaged and laid the groundwork for later digital video and media distribution, including, in the case of Cuba, offline circulation and the paquete.