Technological Disobedience in Offline Cuba: Packaging and Sharing Dissent Through El Paquete Semanal

El paquete semanal (the weekly package) dominates Cuba’s musical landscape. The one terabyte collection of digital material traded weekly between subscribers provides a viable alternative to a nation-wide lack of internet access. Its USB-based file structure is simple, yet comprehensive and ever changing. Curators who determine the network’s content are organized within a rigidly hierarchical structure, yet this content quickly becomes democratized after fans purchase the paquete and subsequently trade its music with one another on privately owned USB sticks. I regard these material exchanges (and the social tensions they incubate) an example of what Ernesto Oroza terms “technological disobedience.” Using ethnographic observations and methods of digital archaeology, I reflect on these tensions; positioning practices of prestar (lending), copying, and trading conducted between fans against the capitalist concerns of the hierarchy of paqueteros(deliverers of the package), promoters, and artists that profit from the paquete’s unique mode of categorization and curation. By elaborating on the paquete’s role as a container for digital music traded through in-person encounters, this paper likewise provides an entry point to study the gap between online and offline musicking practices. I argue that the frictions this network embeds—its particular mix of hierarchical and egalitarian structures within an online/offline form of trade—provides a viable method to dilute both the power of the Cuban state and “Big Tech’s” marginalizing algorithms. In doing so, this paper highlights what simple digital technologies can achieve when developed and traded by a committed community of artists and fans.