Miranda Miriam Garcia

MIRANDA M. GARCIA, then a graduate student at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, was awarded funding in August 2020 to aid research on ‘Independent Advertising in Cuba: A Lens on Economic and Social Change,’ supervised by Dr. Krisztina Fehervary.This project examines Cuba ten years after the legalization of small-scale, private enterprise on the island, and analyzes how everyday Cubans are embodying, projecting, and debating new subjectivities and visions of change through new media. Since 2010, there has been an explosion in the number of small businesses across the island, a sea-change that has occurred alongside increased and unprecedented access to new media ‘ from well-known social media platforms and messaging apps to home-grown alternatives like ‘el paquete,’ an offline, USB-based network for domestic and foreign media. This research looks at how new identities, like ‘entrepreneur,’ ‘influencer,’ and ‘consumer,’ are displayed and debated in these digital spaces and in commercial media, and how they are and are not reconciled with the Cuban revolution’s past and professed values. Finally, this project explores the implications for a new public sphere as Cuba slowly moves away from a planned economy, and potentially, the State-controlled media landscape.