Tropical Connectivity: Race, Affect, and U.S. Digital Capital in Contemporary Havana
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
American Studies
First Advisor
Ramos-Zayas, Ana
Abstract
“Tropical Connectivity: Race, Affect, and U.S. Digital Capital in Contemporary Havana” investigates the racial and affective imaginaries of U.S. technology executives and venture capitalists as they opened platforms in Cuba after the thawing of U.S.-Cuban relations in 2014. “Tropical Connectivity” documents how these platforms shaped the working lives of Havana’s residents and how the embrace of platform capitalism by an emergent entrepreneurial class has produced spaces of gender and racial exclusion in the city. “Tropical Connectivity” draws from 81 interviews I conducted in Havana and at a conference for technology executives in Montego Bay called “Tech Beach.” The dissertation also draws on extensive ethnographic work, which included research in Silicon Valley with the Google Cuba team, attending fifteen Airbnb Experiences in Havana, and participant-observation on a five-day tour of Havana with Silicon Valley investors. Beyond ethnography, “Tropical Connectivity” analyzes archival material related to histories of tourism and telecommunications in Cuba, architectural plans for digital spaces in Havana, and cultural objects from collaborations between Cuban companies and U.S. tech companies. The introduction develops my theory of “tropical connectivity.” Tropicality—or the construction of Cuba’s landscape as a frontier paradise and its people as imbued with a particular capacity for creativity and entrepreneurship—emerged as a central theme in my interviews with U.S. technology executives working in Havana. I argue that the emergence of U.S. platforms in Havana during the Obama Era is a manifestation of what I call “tropical connectivity,” a capitalist imaginary that leverages histories of U.S. occupation and affective scripts of U.S. benevolence to advance the interests of U.S. corporate platforms in developing digital infrastructures in the Caribbean. This theory highlights how contemporary forms of digital capitalist expansion move through connectivity and contact rather than solely through extraction and fragmentation. The first three chapters detail how tropical connectivity moves at the scale of the Caribbean, the nation, and the city. Chapter One draws from interviews with Airbnb and Google executives at a conference called Tech Beach to highlight the imperial and affective valences of Silicon Valley executives’ imaginations of their work in the Caribbean. Chapter Two documents how Google’s cultural and infrastructural projects with Havana’s creative entrepreneurs reframe the Cuban state’s socialist arts programs as capitalist assets and portray Google as a protagonist of nation building in Cuba. Chapter Three moves to the scale of Havana’s urban landscape by examining a Silicon Valley investment plan and the architectural renderings of a future co-working space in Havana’s El Fanguito neighborhood. While the first three chapters move from the Caribbean to the nation to the city, the final chapter investigates the more intimate scale of the home. In Chapter Four I track Airbnb’s use of Havana as an experimental city to launch “Airbnb Experiences,” a central part of the company’s new business model in which locals share their everyday lives on tours in their homes and neighborhoods. As affective and domestic laborers on tourist platforms, Havana residents work under U.S. corporate logics despite the physical absence of U.S. firms in Cuba. This chapter focuses on how Airbnb’s rating system and demand for affective labor have impacted the domestic and intimate lives of Airbnb Experience hosts and their families in Havana. The conclusion shifts from the scale of the home to the neighborhood to show how Airbnb Experiences produce social fissures along the lines of race, class, and gender in the city’s San Isidro neighborhood. It also further develops the dissertation’s contributions to the field of critical race and technology studies, a field which predominantly centers U.S. cases, by arguing that U.S. digital capitalist fantasies of digital development and connection in Cuba and the Caribbean reinscribe racial, class, and gender hierarchies that rest on histories of U.S. imperialism.
Recommended Citation
Speakman, Maile, "Tropical Connectivity: Race, Affect, and U.S. Digital Capital in Contemporary Havana" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 994.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/994
