Island in the Net – Emergent Digital Culture and its Social Impacts in Post-Castro Cuba

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Steffen Köhn
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428086777

Cuba has one of the lowest internet penetration rates in the world with access being restricted by three main causes: Government policies that ban all independent private media for fear of freedom of information and expression, the US trade embargo that prevents greater access to new information and communications technologies, and the continuing crisis of the Cuban economy that prohibits investments in digital infrastructure. Yet, things are beginning to change. Since 2014 a fiber-optic cable to Venezuela finally connects the island to a global broadband architecture. Under the growing influence of Miguel Díaz-Canel, the new Cuban president, the state has begun to provide its citizens more unrestricted access. Since March 2015, the public squares of many cities have been equipped with WiFi hotspots. Since December 2018, a 3G cellular network is being rolled out that does not yet cover the whole island but finally provides mobile internet for users who possess smartphones. Service remains slow, unreliable and expensive, yet for the majority of users it constitutes their first regular access to the net. The persisting digital scarcity has led Cubans to develop vernacular infrastructures, alternative offline data-sharing networks that compensate for the limitations of the state-supported digital architecture by extending, bypassing or replacing it. The research project I propose has three main objectives: (1) To investigate the impacts of increasing connectivity for the everyday lives and practices of Cuban people and to examine the creative strategies with which users negotiate their growing participation in the state-provided online infrastructure, as well as their engagement in informal data-sharing practices. (2) To explore nascent Cuban digital culture through the lens of the broader economic and social reforms the government has implemented in recent years as an arena in which the relationships between citizenry and the state are currently being transformed. (3) To trace what Cubans experience as 'the internet' as a particular conglomerate of differing horizons of technical and social possibility.The project draws on the methodological perspectives of digital ethnography as well as on the analytical framework of the anthropology of infrastructures. It is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the capital Havana, the central site of both state-sponsored innovation and parallel practices, the provincial town Placetas in the center of Cuba, and Miami, the heart of the Cuban exile community. The main research methods are participant and non-participant observation in offline and online contexts, interviews, as well as qualitative media analysis of both the official state discourse on digitalization and the visual, audio, and textual data that circulate along informal distribution networks.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Denmark