Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean

4. Weapons of the Geek: Romantic Narratives, Sonic Technologies, and Tinkerers in 1930s Santiago, Cuba

55 Weapons of the Geek Romantic Narratives, Sonic Technologies, and Tinkerers in 1930s Santiago, Cuba Alejandra Bronfman In 1923, a columnist in Santiago de Cuba’s La Independencia applauded the achievements of a sound medium, the telegraph, noting that “with its magic touch it has eliminated the isolation and loneliness in the middle of the sea and in deserted places.” With emphasis on the isolation felt in a small city, especially in an island nation, the author relished the ways an array of sonic technologies created new roles and capacities for sound. The column also noted the progression from telegraph to telephone, culminating with the latest invention, radiotelephony, which broadcast radio programs through telephone wires. This, the author proposed, offered not just the wonder of “Hertzian waves that are the invisible messengers of human thought,” but more practically, “the solution for education within nations .”1 Santiago’s connections to the media that delivered sound would be transformative, he predicted, in many spheres of daily life. Sound would propagate education and cultural understanding, assuage class differences as both the wealthy and the not so wealthy enjoyed broadcasts of music or ( ( ( 4 56 • Alejandra Bronfman sports in the comfort of their homes, and prevent accidents or provide aid during natural disasters.2 The writer was silent, however, about the role of sonic technologies in political struggles. Yet, as Friedrich Kittler points out, telegraph and wireless radio emerged as part of military endeavors to improve communications in wartime.3 Admittedly, this was a less bucolic use of mediated sound that lent itself more to the vocabularies of conflict and repression than of harmony and wonder. The information conveyed through wires or over airwaves, after all, might divide and threaten as easily as it might unify and uplift. One of the episodes I will take up in this chapter involves a youth who was arrested because he “had knowledge of telegraphy.”4 As such, it speaks to an alternative, equally powerful understanding of technology . If some residents of Santiago seemed enthralled with the possibilities offered by new media, others were attendant to the possibilities for sabotage and subversion, especially in the hands of those with some knowledge of how these new devices operated. Both the optimistic and the suspicious views are rooted in a shared romance of technology and modernity. In Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative , Holism, and the Romance of the Real, Richard Coyne argues that communications technologies are often the subject of romantic, teleological narratives of progress, which produce “a surplus of expectation.” These narratives grant extensive powers to sound, making it not just an actor in a variety of scenarios but a heroic one, working to soothe, instruct, deliver vital information, or save lives. They also involve a “quest for unity,” imagining for media the power to create and transform communities.5 In many cases, narratives about communications technologies imagine that they deliver liberation in some form, be it from isolation, or parochialism, or sheer loneliness. By the same token, one community’s salvation could be another’s downfall. Even so, a narrative presuming the power of technology remains. Historians of the Caribbean have become attuned to romantic narratives in part due to David Scott’s evaluations of their implications.6 Romantic accounts of revolution, such as those found in C. L. R. James’s early edition of Black Jacobins, may have served to rouse nations on the brink of decolonization, inspiring the nationalist impetus as well as the makers of memory in subsequent generations.7 Yet, argues Scott, the postcolonial present is not particularly well served by romantic narratives that clearly distinguish good from bad, darkness from light, and control from revolt. Weapons of the Geek • 57 The promises they made have gone largely unfulfilled, if not betrayed outright . Rather than search for new and better endings to romantic hopes for revolution or social justice, it may be more apt to ask different questions about the past. In Scott’s eloquent phrasing, “to my mind thinking through the dead-end present we live in requires less a story of what we have been excluded from than a story of our desire for that inclusion.”8 I intend to ask how the romance of technology might be put into conversation with Scott’s critique. The challenge is twofold. The first part entails uncovering and analyzing some of those romantic narratives about technology, along with considering the ways individuals inserted themselves into...