Shared Dreams and Red Cockroaches: Cuba and Digital Culture

Antique trumpets warming up. Castanets. Yuleidys. Udelvis. "Hacer patas," i.e., "leave a trace." Who will just sit and chat balanced on the edge of evanescence. Those long trails of graphic footprints left on vellum. No running water. There is no on and off, only degrees of change. No place for pedestrians: walking is simply a dance in and out of traffic. "Boca" as in "bocadillos." Un contestador. "Guarnición a su elección." With the money from my rent, they bought a sink! You can see it in an oscillograph.

–Loss Pequeño Glazier, Territorio libre.

Digital culture in Cuba is a sphere of overlapping zones of expression and experiences. These zones form a complex structure made up of individuals, commerce, and the state. The resulting geography reveals the movement of capital, the power of stakeholders, and spaces of intimacy. It is a map of interrelated consciousness. As such, Cuban digital culture depends on local histories and characteristics and responds to transnational exchanges and relays. While living within infrastructures of power and technology, people use digital technology to "sense the world," build creative social experiences that reshape the virtual contours, and produce new infrastructures. What are these digital Cuban environments? Where can they be found? What do they tell us about ways of living and learning that develop despite controls on information and activity? How do new networks of culture help people adapt to changes triggered by globalization? What new forms of knowing, language, and art arise out of this complex web of elements? The following essay answers these questions, finding clues inside public spaces (hotels, government buildings), "underground" spaces (black market), and in the hardware or the architectural core of computer networks.

Spaces of appropriation and tensions left over from the Cold War are good places to begin a survey of digital Cuba. Until 2001, the Soviet Union and, later, the Russians had the largest radar base in the Western hemisphere, located in the Cuban locality of Lourdes. At first glance the site appeared to be a normal residential neighborhood of five-story block apartment buildings characteristic of the anonymous Socialist high-rises built during the post-1959 period. However, an enormous parabolic antennae and a military zone designation signaled that this was no typical communal housing sector. Rather, it was the Lourdes Radar Base, where Russians "listened to telephone conversations, intercepted faxes, and followed United States military movements, communicated with their atomic submarines in this part of the world and with their embassies throughout America" (Carlos). They also shared the information with Cuban Intelligence agents. Established in 1964, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the base became a strategic location for both the Soviets and the Cubans. Data gathered about the Americans brought Cuba a measure of national security.

Thirty-nine years later, in October 2001, and under the specter of September 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the closure of the Lourdes Base, which by then was set to bring in 200 million dollars in "rent" to Cuba. The money was never paid, and President Putin, under pressure by the Bush administration, and to the dismay of Russian generals, scheduled the immediate dismantling of the base. Reminiscent of past transformations of spaces and their uses (like Ciudad Libertad, a major educational center that had previously been the Columbia Military Base in Marianao and the symbol of military rule under Batista), the forty-five square mile secret compound was transformed by 2002 into UCI, the twenty-first-century high tech University of Information Sciences, where 6,000 students now live while they study to become part of the worldwide informatics labor force. Investing heavily in the education of software programmers and engineers, Cuba has transformed the Cold War "listening post" and its military and strategic purpose into a classroom for future civil information experts.

UCI represents one of the paradoxes of the Cuban state: in a place where Internet access is limited and highly guarded, students have the latest hardware and software in classrooms and dorms, putting it to use under what amounts to a new social contract between...