In short: manually transferring data between computers by physical storage devices = e-resistance

The year is 2016. Cuban-American relations thaw after half a century of embargo before subsequent administrations slid the counter-ideological petri dish into the freezer again. The DeLorean time machine is a 1954 Pontiac. In the same month President Obama makes his historic trip to Havana, I visit the island to study visual culture through its art, architecture, and design, led by Professor John Elliot, whose expertise encompasses material and ecological literacy in design. 

Between architectural site and artist studio tours, some of us more underground-attuned students maximized evenings with rum-spirited side quests—doubling as ethnographic studies if obligated to contend with authority. Local flings, love triangles, sunrises from corroded Soviet brutalist structures, cheap máquina joy rides, oceanic séance with Yemaya, and clubbing. Jersey Shore could never. 

Bureaucracy’s rigidity cannot contain culture’s vaporous nature. While on the way to meet a lithograph artist, our taxista plugs a USB flash drive into his makeshift radio, out blares Drake’s Hotline Bling. The 50-year-old medically trained chauffeur smugly reclines in the 1980s Moskvich seat impressing his new American friends. Passenger side, close to the action, I’m amused yet bewildered by a USB and Drake juxtaposed in such a dated context. Back at home, my group chat debates Drake’s orbital success suspiciously intersects streaming ubiquity. 

Dumbfounded by a stick I typically reserve for uploading word documents to print at the library, forgetting a DJ license isn’t required to carry music on one. Communicating from a time after now: I indulge my inner child and revert to an iPod shuffle for neighborhood strolls. Long live its serendipitous, straight forward user experience. 

Beyond Cuba’s built environment from Cienfuegos to Havana, another ecology fascinates me, propagating beneath our noses: how people physically organize to circulate electronic media, challenging the disembodied vision of digital culture and pop consumption. USBs make a continual cameo in side quest excursions, setting an unsettling American ambience—a persistent artifact signaling a covert operation. 

Cuba has one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in the world because their internet is offline. El paquete (the package) is a weekly one terabyte collection of the hottest global entertainment (audiovisual media). A unifying ritual nostalgically reminiscent of Morning Music Videos airing before school, and once upon a time, supplying homeroom conversation. Its curators veiled. El paquete is sentient and fleshy. 

Internet milkmen. Here’s how it works: every Sunday, Cubans bring their own hard drives (the memory vessel) to storefront distributors, participating in what has been the primary source of entertainment for millions since 2008. Original source of pirating is unknown but they’re one of the largest employers on the island coalescing the peer-to-peer suppliers. 

Our half-aware insistence to search is a detached involvement with media, without distance or physical reference point. Distinct to the Cuban’s tactile and intentional fetching from a physical marketplace and later plugging into radios and monitors. We peruse a forrest of branched possibilities in real time, while they retrieve a weekly index. One could argue we haven’t consumed subequal, prepackaged media since the dominance of newspapers.