This summer, while walking the streets of Havana, I saw an old man selling a jumble of books that he had haphazardly organized on the sidewalk. One in particular caught my eye, a yellowing hardcover Spanish language edition of Boris Pasternak’s classic dissident novel Doctor Zhivago. This book would have once been something Cubans would have kept secreted away in private libraries and only accessible by borrowing a copy from a friend. Today, its critique is so banal compared to the openly subversive media that everyday Cubans regularly consume through social media, that the only remarkable thing about the sale of Doctor Zhivago is how unremarkable it is. Thirty years ago, in the classic film Fresa y Chocolate (1993), private libraries with banned books were such a social fixture that they served as the inciting incident for the story. Today they are as much historical relics as the USSR itself.
This strange new Cuban media landscape, or “mediascape,” is the subject of media studies scholar Paloma Duong’s latest book Portable Postsocialisms: New Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History. In it, she invites us to reflect on how these changes have affected both foreigners’ perception of the island itself and Cubans’ perception of their country and the wider world. The book is as much a reflection on the how as the what of media consumption in Cuba, tracing what some scholars have termed Cuba’s "digital revolution" over the past 30 years, as millions of Cubans began to access digital media, first via sneaker nets like El Paquete to the explosive growth of mass internet access at relatively accessible prices over the past half decade.
Cubans were catapulted in little more than a decade from one of the most cut-off media audiences in the world to one as interconnected with the new global media culture as any other. In fact, given how widespread internet access is in Cuba, its residents are arguably more connected than many. The impact of the hit song “Patria y Vida,” a political song that challenged the government slogan of “fatherland or death” with “fatherland and life,” or the livestreaming of the explosive protests in 2021 illustrate that the transformations we are seeing across Cuba’s media landscape have already had massive consequences for the political life in the country—a shift that is likely to only become more marked with time.
For Duong, the titular concept of “postsocialism" does not simply mean “what comes after socialism,” but the complexities of life in societies that are trapped somewhere between the statist socialist models of the 20th century and the marketization that has come to define the post-Cold War realities of even those states that continue to claim to be socialist. Cuba remains an ideological mecca for political pilgrims who see it as a mirror through which to reimagine the post-capitalist futures of their own countries. But the island’s own political imaginary and media landscape are increasingly dominated by the same media of the capitalist world, especially the U.S. media, as in any country in Latin America. Even Cuba’s economy—nominally still socialist—is a hodgepodge of private enterprises and a for-profit military conglomerate, GAE S.A., which is run along capitalist lines but also uses the power of the state to enforce various monopolies and privileges to make it as profitable as possible. The era of the nigh total monopoly on media inaugurated after the 1959 Cuban Revolution is a shadow of its former self, as the “digital revolution” has fundamentally reshaped the country’s media landscape and, through it, its political imagination.
Portable Postsocialisms contains four short chapters on different aspects of Cuba’s changing post-Cold War mediascape. The first is an incisive critique of the evolving genre of leftist travel literature on Cuba as the island has transformed from a symbol of a socialist future to a place one has to visit “before it changes.” Duong explores how leftist political tourism to the island now fits in with the increasing marketization of the island’s economy with its role as a place of political pilgrimage, from an “exportable” model to a “portable” and “consumable but contained” product. The critique of this genre of leftist writing on Cuba is far from new, but given the present media revolution, fresh analysis is warranted.
The book’s second chapter focuses on the evolving sounds and music of Cuba and how even “subversive” music, like rock group Porno para Ricardo or, more recently, the collaborative hit “Patria y Vida,” have managed to make big impressions in Cuban culture despite state censorship and repression. The chapter describes a new Cuban reality where state media has broken down but does so without really digging into the policymaking, institutional reshuffling, or logistical details of how this has been made possible, except in passing and using publicly available sources and secondary literature. Much of the chapter is self-ethnographic, and its main focus is more on dissecting the discursive meaning in these songs rather than getting into the material factors that permit this new reality to take shape, a subject addressed in chapters three and four.
These final chapters are perhaps the book's most interesting contributions because they focus on the changing material realities that permit Cubans access to the broader digital world which escapes the media confines imposed on them by the state. Both explore the specifics of the evolving mechanisms by which information and media is exchanged, how varying degrees of state censorship (especially against the since-banned El Paquete) continue to shape and restrict what is easily available, and how we are witnessing a major expansion of consumer culture in Cuba. These are what will likely be the most helpful chapters for non-Cubanists interested in understanding the material basis for this transforming media culture. For example, how digital devices and the internet allowed the viral hit song Patria y Vida to become something nearly everyone in Cuba has heard multiple times, either intentionally or—because the bus driver or someone in the street was blasting it—unintentionally.
While Portable Postsocialisms offers fascinating analysis, the book’s methodology leads to some limitations. As with much media studies scholarship, this book is primarily built on cultural critique, self-ethnography, and secondary literature, which allows her to critique existing literature but prevents her from significantly adding to it.
For example, Duong’s criticism of leftist travelers to the island might have been enhanced by combining a systematic study of these classic texts and the substantial secondary literature. For example, the author could have referenced the way that Peak Oil activists in the 2000s popularized the myth of a food self-sufficient and ecologically sustainable Cuba or how projects like the new Tricontinental, funded by a Chinese millionaire, push a Marcyite line on Cuba to their followers. This approach would have been entirely in line with the author’s broader criticisms of the leftist travel literature on Cuba, which has consistently been more about using the island as a mirror for reimagining their own anti-capitalist futures at home than the island’s more complex realities. Instead, she focuses on the admittedly quite frustrating phenomenon of foreigners racing to see Cuba “before it changes.” While this genre of leftist travel writing on Cuba common during the 2010s is certainly irritating, it seems far less influential than the true intellectual descendants of the Cold War political pilgrims like Susan Sontag, who today would be Vijay Prashad or Manolo de los Santos.
The ways in which Cubans can now contest these romanticized discourses about Cuba is also a major shift that would have benefited from significantly more attention. Similarly, her analysis of the power of music in chapter two might have been stronger if she had combined her discursive analysis of the song's lyrics with analysis of the political economy behind Cuba’s new forms of unofficial cultural dissemination.
It is difficult not to come away from this book feeling conflicted. On the one hand, the book’s topic is a critical one for understanding Cuba’s evolving political landscape, necessarily shaped by its evolving mediascape. Duong offers not only insightful criticisms of various existing literature, such as the ubiquitous leftist travelogue genre but also tangible explanations of how the shifting mediascape is experienced in real life. For her field, the focus on self-ethnography is also entirely normal and thus not a major issue within her discipline. However, this methodological decision has come with significant costs to the book’s ability to speak to other disciplines and wider readership who would benefit from a more archivally based or systematic approach to the topic. This does not prevent the book from being helpful to readers entirely on its own terms, but it does limit the degree to which it can help inform a wider audience.
Andrés Pertierra is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Latin American & Caribbean History. He has appeared as an analyst on outlets such as BBC, DW, Reuters, Financial Times, and others. His research focuses on late Cold War and post-Cold War Cuban history.
Editor's note: This review was updated on December 15, 2024 to correct a spelling error.
