Alejandro de la Fuente (ed.), Cuban Studies 50

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.14.2.0365
• Pages: 365-370
• Published date: 20 January 2023
• Date: 20 January 2023
• Author: Al Campbell

BOOK REVIEWS 365

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Alejandro de la Fuente (ed.), Cuban Studies 50 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 2020), hbk 352pp. ISBN 13: 9780822946229

Reviewed by Al Campbell1

Issue 50 of the once-a-year journal Cuban Studies contains 13 “normal aca-

demic articles”. These are presented in four groups; Dossier 1: “Cuba y los

nuevos desafíos del sector privado, en el marco de las actuales transformaciones

de la Nación” with six articles; Dossier 2: “Packaging Cuban Media: Communities

of Digital Sharing in Cuba and Its Diaspora” with four articles; and two short

sections, one labelled “History” with two articles, and a final section labelled

“Culture and Society” with a single article. Then there is a section “Primary

Sources” with a single interview of Leonardo Padura, and a section “Premio

Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 2019” with a one-page reproduction of the artwork

that won that prize. The 12 book reviews of 20 books (one review essay of six

books and one of four books) are divided into three groups; “Diaspora”,

“History” and “Culture and Society.”

The organiser of Dossier 2, Jenifer Cearns, has selected for its subject a topic

that is currently both of great interest concerning, and importance to, many

issues in the changing social organisation of Cuba, el paquete. Noting that there

are “many different aspects associated with el paquete”, each of the four contri-

butions that follow her useful introductory overview addresses a particular one

of its aspects. These are reflected by their titles: “The Opium of the Paquete:

State Censorship, Private Self-Censorship, and the Content Distribution

Strategies of Cuba’s Emergent Independent Digit-Media Start-ups”; “Sounding

El Paquete: The Local and Transnational Routes of an Afro-Cuban Repartero”;

“Connecting (to) Cuba: Transnational Digital Flows between Havana and the

Cuban Diaspora”; and “Disrupting the Algorithm: The Streaming Platforms in

the Cuban Audiovisual Landscape: El paquete seminal, Netflix, and Mi

Mochila.” With this structure, Cearns aims to “draw together various aspects of

el paquete and media-sharing practices in Cuba today, focusing on the way new

and old communities alike are created, perpetualized, and redefined through

emerging digital networks and practices”. Two limitations strike one immedi-

ately to this collection – I do not want to call these “weaknesses”, as it is both

too simple and also inappropriate for a reviewer to criticise a work for what it

does not do, when it makes valuable contributions to doing what it clearly says

it intends to do. The first limitation is simply that, as Cearns points out, there are

1 Al Campbell is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and an

editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies.

DOI:10.13169/intejcubastud.14.2.0365