To Örebro University

This paper examines the case study of “El Paquete Semanal” [The Weekly Package], a one terabyte collection of pirated data – films, videos, e-magazines, music, games, and applications – consumed every week by approximately 90% of the Cuban population, even when a consolidated broadband infrastructure around the country does not exist (Dye et al. 2018). It is still not precisely known how the group of individuals so-called “Los Maestros” [The Masters] access high-speed connection sufficient to make the project viable – one of the main suspicious is that it is through clandestine antennas, hidden inside water tanks, on the top of specific buildings –, or to what extent the Cuban Government, which has tried to introduce a popular alternative to the product, entitled a “La Mochila” [The Backpack], monitors the activity. If during the first years of the Revolution, Cuban films were an important and effective tool to mobilize the population and helped to legitimize the socialist government, it is possible to observe that the government currently adopts a defensive position, through the production of its own package to reduce the “collateral effects” of “El Paquete”. Stored into external hard drives and physically delivered to consumers by car, motorcycle, bicycle - or even on foot - “El Paquete” is a national phenomenon, neither regulated nor illegal, that permits the Cuban population to consume the latest films and TV series, challenging dominant conceptions regarding distribution and exhibition of moving images. In this sense, this study exposes the necessity of considering socio-historical aspects in film scholarship (Parks 2013), as the emergence of “El Paquete” and its “modus operandi” cannot be comprehended without considering the consequences generated by the United States embargo against the country and the historical development of the Cuban Revolution. Finally, this paper reinforces the importance of rejecting a teleological view of film history (Elsaesser 2006).

References:

Dye, Michaelanne, David Nemer, Josiah Mangiameli, Amy S. Bruckman, and Neha Kumar. 2018. “El Paquete Semanal.” In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–12. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174213

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2006. “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Anna Watkins Fisher, and Thomas Keenan, 13–25. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203643839.

Parks, Lisa. 2013. “Walking Phone Workers.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, 1st ed., 243–55. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315857572.ch23.