Digital Dilemmas

Price: $24.95

Subtitle: The State, the Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba
Author: Cristina Venegas
Subject: Latin American Studies, Media Studies
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4687-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4686-5
Pages: 208 pages
Publication Date: February 2010
Series: New Directions in International Studies

Praise for Digital Dilemmas

"Cristina Venegas's well-researched and highly original work brings to the forefront an important and under-researched topic."—Yiedy Rivero, author of Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television

" This book will make an important contribution both to Cuban Studies and to Hispanic Media Studies."—Marvin D'Lugo, Clark University

The contentious debate in Cuba over Internet use and digital media primarily focuses
on three issues—maximizing the potential for economic and cultural development,
establishing stronger ties to the outside world, and changing the hierarchy of control. A growing number of users decry censorship and insist on personal freedom in accessing the web, while the centrally managed system benefits the government in circumventing U.S. sanctions against the country and in controlling what limited capacity exists.

Digital Dilemmas views Cuba from the Soviet Union’s demise to the present, to assess how conflicts over media access play out in their both liberating and repressive potential. Drawing on extensive scholarship and interviews, Cristina Venegas questions myths of how Internet use necessarily fosters global democracy and reveals the impact of new technologies on the country’s governance and culture. She includes film in the context of broader media history, as well as artistic practices such as digital art and networks of diasporic communities connected by the Web. This book is a model for understanding the geopolitic location of power relations in the age of digital information sharing.