Bloggers Unplugged: Amateur Citizens, Cultural Discourse, and Public Sphere in Cuba

Abstract

This article reconstructs and close-reads the encounters and dialogues between the alternative blogosphere and key intellectual and cultural actors in contemporary Cuba. These exchanges tell the story of voices that, having forced their entrance into the public arena, go from being subjects of an imposed anonymity – the refusal by various authorities to name them in public – to becoming an inevitable, and increasingly visible, referent for authorities as well as for other citizen initiatives. I argue that the rearrangement of the ‘official’ discourses about them codify an exclusion of speech in tactics rehearsed and ingrained in cultural and intellectual discourses associated with the survival of the revolutionary political order. In turn, the way these blogs respond to these strategies provides both a sustained critique of the limitations of the current debates on political and cultural autonomy in Cuba, and a model for democratic sociability through blogging. This analysis also provides opportunities to examine the effects of digital technology on emergent notions of citizenship and cultural participation, a key issue in contemporary communication research and media studies.