Within the Revolution, Everything

🎙Xarxa de Ràdios Comunitàries de Barcelona https://bit.ly/3Ept3oi
🎙Spotify https://spoti.fi/3vZmDZZ
🎙Ivoox https://bit.ly/3EoAM64

This presentation of Ernesto Oroza deals with popular digital practices that update, or “crack,” the cultural politics of the Cuban Revolution. To this end, we analyze three vernacular and unregulated computing protocols that have spread across the island since the first decade of the 2000s, and which are articulated as ways of making based on practices that are collectivist, anti-monopoly, and of cultural resistance, and disobedience:

1. SNet (Street Net), or RoG (Red of Gamers): a system of Local Area Networks (LAN), developed by teenagers in order to game in their neighborhoods, which became an enormous, wireless urban intranet. SNet was self-sustaining and independent until it was dissolved and regulated by the state in 2020.
2. El Paquete Semanal/The Weekly Package: a system of distribution, on a national scale, for a terabyte of pirated digital content. External hard drives are used for distribution; these contain series, movies, soap operas, documentaries, music, videoclips, reality shows, memes, comics, animated films, software, apps, antivirus software, language courses, magazines in PDF format, and ads. 
3. Revolico/The Lists: a webpage for classified ads that reorganized and proposed a new use for “the lists” (text-based documents [spreadsheets] created by workers, containing information for buying, selling, and trading products, which circulate over the state’s intranets). Revolico has an online version and an offline version, which is updated and distributed by the matrices of The Weekly Package.

The Cuban cultural production of the last two decades has been caught, pierced, and interconnected, in one way or another, by the use of these three systems. This presentation explores some of these connections. 

*This session will be conducted in Spanish

In conversation Blanca Callén