As a country run by a communist party, Cuba appears to set itself apart from many of its neighbors in the Americas. One of the things that has largely been lost as a result is a nuanced understanding of the Cuban people’s perspective. Paloma Duong, an associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies and Writing Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, closely examines contemporary media, particularly online communities and music, to find out how Cubans think about the modern world and what they think. A new book that examines what’s going on has helped fill this void. Foreigners think about Cuba. The book Portable Postsocialisms: New Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History was just published by the University of Texas Press. Massachusetts Institute of Technology News I spoke with Ms. Duong about her work.
question: What is the book about?
answer: This book considers a specific moment in Cuba’s history, the first two decades of the 21st century, as a case study in the relationship between culture, politics, and emerging media technologies. This is a golden moment to have access to the internet and digital media technology. The 1990s are known as the “Special Era” in Cuba, a decade of economic collapse and disorientation. Despite the turn of the 21st century being a moment of great change, the image of Cuba frozen in time persists.
One of the focuses of this book is to explore the cultural and political discourses of change and continuity produced in this new media context. This reflects the post-socialist experience of Cubans, in which socialism as a radical project of social change is no longer viable for a group of people, although the old referents of socialism are still present in everyday experience. What does that tell us about the moment when it no longer appears as a goal? And what, in turn, does this tell us about the more general global experience of the end of, and aspirations for, socialist utopia in our time?
This question also requires consideration of how global narratives and images about Cuba circulate. The symbolic weight of Cuba as the last bastion of socialism is one of it, as an inspiration and cautionary tale that exists outside of historical time. I consider Cuba as an object of travel media invested with competing political desires. Even during the Prohibition era in the United States, you can already hear and see in songs and advertisements of the time that Cuba offered transgressive desires to the American imagination.
Top-down narratives are routinely imposed on Cubans, either by their own government or by foreign observers who exoticize Cubans. I wanted to know how Cubans talk about their experiences of change. But I also wanted to recognize the international impact of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and explain how voters around the world experienced its culmination.
question: The book examines Cuban culture with references to music, fashion, online communities, and more. Why did you decide to explore all these cultural artifacts?
answer: It seemed impossible to choose just one medium, as I was looking at both Cuban accounts of post-socialism and Cuba as an object of imagination traveling around the world. The way we construct images of the world and ourselves is inherently multimedia. We don’t get all our information only from literature, movies, and news media. Instead, I focus on specific narratives and images of change such as womanhood, economic reform, and internet access, and how they are reproduced and contested across media practices and cultural objects. I’m watching to see what happens.
I use the term “portable” in different ways to describe these operations. For example, songs can be carried in different ways. Digital, and especially streaming media, opens new circuits of musical exchange and consumption. But the aesthetic experience of the song itself is portable. It will remain with you forever. And whether analyzing songs, advertisements, memes, etc., I study objects and practices that allow me to see Cuba’s dual status as both symbol and experience.
In this sense, this book is as much about ourselves as it is about Cuba. We tend to view Cuba through a Cold War framework that places it as an exception to the former socialist countries, Latin America, and the capitalist world.But what if we look at Cuba as [also] Are we participating in that world not as an exception, but as a special experience of broader transformation? I’m not saying Cuba is like any other place. But the premise of this book is that Cuba is not an exceptional place outside of history. Indeed, I argue that stories of exceptionality are the key to understanding our shared historical moment and the politics of our cultural and media practices.
question: How do you think this approach relates to other studies on contemporary Cuba?
answer: There are other, more traditional academic approaches to Cuba. Some perspectives foreground repression and censorship, emphasizing liberal individuals standing up to authoritarian states. Others focus instead on the Cuban nation-state’s resistance to global markets and transnational capital.
There are benefits to this perspective. However, when those perspectives alone dominate, we overlook the ways in which both the state and the market can disenfranchise ordinary citizens. When you look at people’s cultural responses, you see that they recognize the fact that the world market is leaving them behind, and the nation is leaving them behind. They have neither the social welfare promised by the state nor the upward mobility promised by the market. By abandoning Cold War-era analytical frameworks and considering the ways in which cultural and media practices shape our political experience, this book provides insight not only into Cuba but also into our own global present. It shows that new understanding can be provided.