Michael Levine, Ph.D. 2022

Advisor: David Garcia

Dissertation Title: “Lo Encontré en El Paquete”: Reparto Music, Media Piracy and Cultural Exchange in Cuba’s Offline Internet

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Dissertation Abstract:

My dissertation, “Lo Encontré en El Paquete,” considers digital piracy’s role in providing equitable solutions for a Cuban music community. For the members of this community, digital piracy is a necessary fixture of daily life to close gaps of internet scarcity. Specifically, I regard el paquete semanal (“the weekly package”) as a crucial technology for the pirate trade of digital cultural products. The peer-to-peer based platform is one terabyte of data downloaded weekly, sold to Cuban nationals for the equivalent of $2US, and surreptitiously shared across the island on USB drives.

A controversial style of Cuban reggaetón (or reparto) is circulated through el paquete semanal. Though the Havana-based musical style is banned from broadcast through Cuba’s nationalized television and radio, it has, thanks to the efforts of the mainly Black Cuban artists who move new songs through el paquete semanal’s peer-to-peer platform, become one of the most popular styles of music in Havana and in neighboring Miami’s Cuban diaspora community. Long-studied for its capacity to smuggle international media to everyday Cubans, my research instead explores the ways in which el paquete semanal’s one-terabyte of digital material also circulates domestically produced songs, reparto music in particular, within Havana. The nation-wide circulation of reparto music challenges assumptions regarding how technological precarity is conventionally understood. Drawing from music and internet studies, I argue that el paquete semanal’s pirate digital network provides a viable model to circulate the cultural products of a transnationally-based community of reparto artists and music fans. By storing and sharing their music on the USB drives that transport the digital contents of el paquete semanal, participants use the network to represent and empower themselves and their communities, defying significant technological and political limitations in the process.

Dr. Levine is currently an Assistant Professor of Musicology at Christopher Newport University. He has written for “Sounding Out!,” Cuban literary and arts magazine Hypermedia, the journal Cuban Studies, and published on Cuba’s J-11 protests in the journal Twentieth Century Music.