Laura-Zoe Humphreys

LAURA-ZOE HUMPHREYS, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisianna, was approved funding in October 2019 to aid research on “Pushing Culture: Digital Media Piracy and the Politics of Entertainment in Cuba.” Following the success of the 1959 revolution, the Cuban state nationalized all major media outlets and has endeavored to control them ever since. In the 1980s, analog video and satellite television threatened this monopoly: citizens pirated satellite television dishes and copied their contents to analog video for further circulation. In 2010, the state lost control over distribution to the “packet” or el paquete: approximately 1 terabyte of pirated digital media, including US and international streaming content, which was downloaded by independent entrepreneurs and circulated across the island through hard drives and flash drives. While the paquete had its origins in analog video/satellite television networks, efforts to decentralize the socialist economy gave it further fuel when the state granted small business licenses to DVD/CD vendors. This book project presents an alternative history of internet-distributed television in a Global South society through oral histories, participant observation, and archival research. It reveals how analog and digital video distribution in Cuba circumvented the U.S. embargo, state censorship, and technological and internet limitations, while also providing gendered opportunities for creative labor, financial gain, and social care amidst growing national precarity and isolation.