A Digital Humanities Project Proposal
A Brief and Reductive Timeline
Though the birth of the Internet and digital technologies in Cuba stretches all the way back to April 1991, the nation and its peoples as a whole have generally lagged behind and even stagnated since the emergence of Web 2.0. Indeed, Cuba's difficult and fraught social, cultural, and historical context has led in many ways to severe structural limitations in telecommunications. In "The State of the Internet in Cuba, January 2011," Larry Press, a renowned and longstanding scholar in discourses around the Internet in Cuba, gestures to three prospective reasons for the lack of infrastructure in Cuba:
1) The U.S. Embargo,
2) the Cuban Economy, and
3) the Cuban government's fear of information freedom.
Throughout his report, Press makes it a point not to emphasize or favor one reason over another as to why Cuba's domestic telecommunications infrastructure has suffered so much over the past twenty odd years. What becomes clear in his analysis, though, is that one cannot understand Cuban digital literacies without first engaing with and analyzing Cuba's specific cultural contexts and historical trajectories.
If Cuba's domestic telecommunications infrastructure has not developed at the pace of other Western nations during this time as a result of government surveillance, lack of material access, and debilitating network and hardware limitations, it must be understood that the conversation does not start with brief, glib, and relativistic assertions about the state of the Internet and digital technologies in Cuba; rather, much like McPherson's notion of "lenticular logic" and her call for digital humanists to find meaningful ways in which to put issues of race and difference in conversation with technological design and coding, digital humanists and other scholars should further contextualize and substantiate what Cuban digital literacies mean in the twenty-first century. Which is to say that Cuba's domestic telecommunications infrastructure is not a discourse all its own but one deeply embedded in and implicated by a history marked by colonialism, cultural appropriation, revolution, dictatorship, and disavowal.
Below you will find a brief and reductive timeline that offers just a glimpse and a snapshot into the sorts of social, cultural, political, and economic turns and obstacles that Cuba has faced since the late 1950s all the way up to the mid-1990s. Like any timeline that claims to do anything of substance, this timeline is equally flawed, but I hope to provide more insight into my specific argument in this section and in the remainder of my project proposal.
What makes these Cuban digital practices all the more fascinating is the social, cultural, and historical context through which they emerged. Indeed, with the first e-mail connection being established in April 1991, the proverbial birth of the Internet and digital technologies coincided in many ways with a time of extreme economic depression in Cuba; the fall of Cuba's greatest ally during the Cold War, the former U.S.S.R.; the demise of COMECON and, with it, the prospects for trading with a number of communist Eastern Bloc nations; and more intense restrictions and prohibitions to trade, travel, and family remittances to Cuba. From the late-1980s onward, then, President Fidel Castro and the Cuban government faced a new domestic threat: active dissent and a lack of confidence within its borders.
There is no mistaking that the increase in government surveillance, the lack of material access, the many network and hardware limitations, are in some way, shape, or form correlated with the sort of desperation and paranoia that beset President Fidel Castro and the Cuban government during this time, but what, then might we say about Cuban digital literacies?
Quite a bit, actually. Indeed, despite a host of obstacles in the way of material access to the Internet and digital technologies, the Cuban example includes a history of sharing, renting, and stealing passcodes to the Internet; building computers from parts purchased or traded for in the Cuban black market; accessing, generating, and hosting content in alternative servers, networks, and domains; and assessing, exchanging, and sharing otherwise-inaccessible and illegal content with thumb drives and other data storage devices. As such, Cuban digital practices generally represent profound forms of (h)ac(k)tivism that not only challenge existing state power but also signal the emergence of unique digital literacies that cannot be accounted for through material access alone.
In taking inventory of the emergence of Cuban digital literacies in post-embargo Cuba, though, I am aware of theories like "leapfrogging," which generally proposes the notion that areas that have not developed "stable" or "up-to-date" technological or economic infrastructures cannot necessarily move themselves forward through the adoption of contemporary systems without going through a series of intermediary steps of development. These theories are perhaps less interested in what takes place in the "interstices" of Cuba's social, cultural, and historical contexts, but they are certainly invested in the idea that these "interstices" should take the form of "intermediary steps of development."