The People’s Mixtape’: Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Without the Internet in Contemporary Cuba

Astley provides an ethnographic account of the use of USB devices in contemporary Cuba as tools to disseminate ‘problematic’—ideologically and logistically—foreign cultural texts. Albums, songs, music videos, films, television series, books and pictures, all largely unavailable through official media, are swapped among friends in private spaces, forming a complex network of cultural dissemination dubbed by Vincente Morín Aguado ‘the people’s Internet’. By tracing the socio-technological lineage through burned CDs, cassettes and foreign radio, Astley connects this latest practice to a longer history, arguing that these cultural texts are woven into, and made sense of through, a distinctly Cuban cultural lens. He suggests that, because of this selective, interpersonal nature, a more apt term for this peer-to-peer file sharing might be ‘the people’s mixtape’.