Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba

3. Tourism and the Social Ramifications of Media Technologies

t 3 TOURISM AND THE SOCIAL RAMIFICATIONS OF MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES In 1995, the newly opened, Spanish-and-Cuban-financed Meliá-Cohiba Hotel in Havana placed a computer in the lobby. The screen featured a hypertext tour of the hotel’s services and sophisticated accommodations, built solely for the visitor from abroad. In this monolithic ocean-front hotel, where an ice cream even then cost US$6 and a room upward of US$200, the computer provided a new interface between the physical and the virtual world, its foreign origin and funding and its segregated use and users unintentionally highlighting the political, ideological, economic, and social contradictions of Cuba’s unique geopolitical space. The Meliá-Cohiba hotel itself stood as a larger symbol representing the redirection of the Cuban economy in the 1990s that put capitalism in the service of socialism. The construction of this hotel complex, allegedly a copy of a Japanese counterpart, was to a large degree rationalized as a source of new revenue and jobs to help jumpstart the Cuban economy. At twenty-two golden stories of metal and glass, this first structure in the wave of postSoviet investments generated controversy from the start (fig. 2).1 The scale of the hotel’s postmodern architecture dwarfs its immediate neighbor, the 1950s American-style Hotel Habana Riviera. Although architectural contrast was not new to the Havana skyline—Cuban author Alejo Carpentier once described the city as having a “style without a style”—the Meliá-Cohiba towered over historic promenades and oceanfront walkways as a symbol of foreign capital. Its size and placement paid no regard to the vernacular or to the need for green and open spaces, advocating instead urban TOURISM AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES 99 development, with an eye to international capital. Consistent with the drive behind media technologies, from satellites to cell phones, the hotel loomed above and apart from the spaces these media were helping to shrink across the globe. An ostentatious product of foreign investment, the Meliá-Cohiba linked Cuba to emerging international trends. Since connection to the Internet was still in the future for Cuba, the computer in the lobby only anticipated the new interface between people and global computer networks, creating the illusion of connection to the world of up-to-the-minute information and entertainment, for tourists and residents alike. The lack of international press on the hotel newsstand served, in contrast, to remind tourists of the ongoing U.S. embargo. The computer, a proudly showcased artifact in a sea of gleaning marble and lush tropical plants, would two years later be relegated to the business center (fig. 3). Here, as part of a local computer network used for hotel administration and guest 2. Hotel Meliá Cohiba, Havana, Cuba 100 DIGITAL DILEMMAS services, it provided an island of Internet access, offsetting the meager offerings at the newsstand. The original virtual tour on the computer nevertheless was more than a sign of postmodernity in a new tourist space. The postmodern glow of the hotel could be experienced not only by looking at its shiny, reflective exterior, but also by traversing its digital interior via the computer screen. The use of hypertext turned the luxury space into code, through a graphic interface that exemplified the types of multimedia applications that served as “training wheels,” in the early 1990s, for the World Wide Web. This software taught users to understand virtual space and information by clicking on-screen buttons. Today, transformed from novel display to regular function in spaces of administration and personal computing, computers and their uses in Cuba challenge allegations of technological backwardness. Even under dire economic constraints, the country has consistently demonstrated the will to invest in modern technological projects, but citizen access to these services, particularly to the Internet, is dispensed by the state through carefully sanctioned spaces, which include the hotels along the Havana seafront. 3. Lobby, Hotel Meliá Cohiba, Havana, Cuba TOURISM AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES 101 The original hypertext tour in the hotel lobby was a symbol of the Sol Meliá Hotel Group’s new push into telecommunications. As one of the ten largest international hotel chains in the world, the Spanish-owned Sol Meliá sought to differentiate its services in the competitive field of tourism by visibly featuring technology. More than a decade after the Meliá-Cohiba was built, virtual tours of most of its luxury hotels in Cuba are still featured...