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

Introduction

t INTRODUCTION Until 2001, the Russian government operated the largest radar base in the Western Hemisphere, located in the Cuban village of Lourdes, a few kilometers south of Havana. Set amid palm trees and tropical fields, the site at first glance appeared to be one of the island’s rural residential neighborhoods of anonymous, post-1959 high-rise apartment buildings. However, a military zone designation and an enormous dish antenna signaled that this was no typical communal housing sector. Rather, the base had been “RadioElectronic Station/Cuba,” where Russians conducted telephone espionage monitoring U.S. military and commercial movements, and also communicated with Soviet nuclear submarines.1 Established in 1964, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, this base became a strategic location for both the Soviets and the Cubans, with Cuba’s intelligence agents sharing valuable information with the Russians. Despite a drastic change in Soviet economic agreements with Cuba in 1991, the Lourdes base remained open, a remnant of the Cold War, housing some fifteen hundred Russian personnel, for another decade. Data gathered about American operations continued to bring Cuba a measure of national security during these years. In October 2001, thirty-nine years after the founding of the Lourdes radar base, and under the specter of September 11, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced the base’s closure, with rent owing to Cuba of 200 million dollars. The money was never paid. What had happened was that President Putin, looking to the United States for economic alliance, instead had found pressure from the Bush administration, and, to the dismay of Russian generals , agreed to schedule the immediate dismantling of the base without consulting the Cuban government. In a diplomatic coup, the United States had 2 DIGITAL DILEMMAS taken advantage of the “War on Terrorism” to force the Russian president’s hand over Cuba. In a move reminiscent of past transformations of spaces and their uses,2 the 28-square-mile secret compound was converted by 2002 into the hightech University of Information Sciences (UCI), housing fifteen thousand students, faculty, and staff. Cuba has invested heavily to transform the Cold War listening post into a center for the education of software programmers and engineers to be inserted into the worldwide informatics labor force.3 In doing so, the Cuban government has mobilized human, technological, and economic resources to foster a new Cuban economic direction. If the Lourdes base, with its extensive system of satellites, embedded Cuba within a Cold War network of spies, military infrastructure, and invention, UCI shows the state repositioning communication and information within a chain of education , production, consumption, and finance linked to global networks of labor and economics.4 That it does this in the model of an “elite” campus, under the centralized tutelage of the state, is evidence of ideological traces lingering from the compound’s original purpose of espionage. Cuba thus uses digital technology to redirect the country away from an essentially defensive orientation and into an offensive economic strategy. This is one of the Cuban government’s choices as it works to resolve its digital dilemmas. The political and social uses the government confronts in the process raise serious questions about digital development far beyond the island. In this book, I analyze the impact of the Internet and digital media on media policies, procedures, and practices in Cuba, as well as their broader social effects and implications. I seek to understand institutional and human networks evolving out of contested public and private interests through new technologies, and the artistic and personal terrain these technologies help to construct. And indeed, I find that a mix of openness and restriction stemming from government policies, beginning in the 1990s, reveals a process of shifting institutional relations heavily influenced by the role of information technologies. The theoretical framework thus strikes a balance between a view of the state in determining the development and deployment of media technology and its uses and users, and an investigation, prompted by the exhaustion of an ideological paradigm, into the way individual challenges have imposed limits on such development/deployment in the context of globalization. Locating the social uses of, and motivations for, the appropriation of media technology by governments and individuals serves, I argue, to INTRODUCTION 3 correct views of technology as progress; rather, focusing on intentionality reveals a complex set of forces that normalize, renew, regulate, and reform. The present volume grows out of...