Island in the Net: Digital Culture in Post-Castro Cuba

An exploration of Cuba’s emerging digital culture and Cubans’ creation of grassroots networks, digital black markets, and online spaces for public debate

Until just a few years ago, Cuba was one of the least-connected countries in the world. But as digital technology has become increasingly available, Cubans have found inventive ways to work around such remaining barriers as slow speeds, high costs, and inadequate infrastructure. In Island in the Net, Steffen Köhn examines Cuba’s nascent digital culture and how it has reconfigured the relationship between the state and its citizens. Köhn shows that through innovations including ＂sneakernets＂ (the physical transfer of information by flash drives and other devices), digital black markets, and online spaces for political debates, Cubans have successfully challenged the government’s monopoly on media and public discourse.

Drawing on multisited ethnographic research, Köhn documents Cuba’s digital awakening, from the introduction of accessible Wi-Fi in 2015 to the social media-fueled protests in July 2021. Cubans’ community-driven digital innovations, he suggests, could be models for potential alternatives to the current Big Tech-dominated internet.

Each chapter in Island in the Net is accompanied by a multimodal anthropology work: a video game, interactive installations, video art, an ethnographic documentary, and an expanded cinema installation. These unique media, created with Cuban artist Nestor Siré and other local collaborators, and accessible to readers via a QR code, bring the book’s argument vividly to life.

Steffen Köhn is associate professor of visual and multimodal anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the author of Mediating Mobility: Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration and his films and installation works have been exhibited internationally at the Seoul Museum of Art, the Warsaw Biennial, and other venues.