Connecting (to) Cuba: Transnational Digital Flows between Havana and the Cuban Diaspora

Abstract

For several years Cuba's paquete has attracted international attention for its ability to procure and circulate much foreign digital content, with many supposing that this content is imported to Havana from the nearby diasporic center of Miami. This article explores how the island's domestic networks of digital media sharing are in fact also exported to the Cuban diaspora as an object both for public exhibition and for personal consumption. Cubans in the diaspora import el paquete as a means of connecting with their homeland and with media that invoke nostalgia for them, but also as a way of maintaining a variety of choice that they once enjoyed in Cuba but that, because of US copyright restrictions, remains prohibitively expensive for them to access in the diaspora. Meanwhile, others in the Cuban diasporic community are seeking ways of inserting targeted advertising for Miami businesses into el paquete, in the hope of drumming up further business via relatives and remittances. This article thus argues that quite apart from being an isolated or unconnected island, Cuba is in fact highly interconnected with multiple transnational communities, and that by tracking el paquete and flows of digital media, we see the island as central in connecting these otherwise-disparate digital communities.