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| El Paquete |
El paquete semenal (“The Weakly Package”) is a system of offline digital distribution in Cuba, where hard drives with weekly selections of books, newspapers, music, films and tv programming, as well as software tools, mobile apps and even websites, are delivered to subscribers against a small payment of 2 cuban convertible pesos. As Cuba has been under a US embargo since 1958, with particularly crippling effects since the end of the Cold War, the internet infrastructure was slow to develop. When combined with government restrictions, this has meant that Cubans have gained access to the internet very late. Before the recent arrival of mobile phones, it was available primarily through public access points, offering very limited bandwidth. Therefore, since the mid-2000s Cubans have had to rely on El paquete to access both local independent and foreign digital content.
El paquete is a “sneakernet”, a transfer of digital information by means of physical media. Sneakernets were everywhere the dominant form of distribution of digital music, films and books before the arrival of broadband. If it weren't for the HARRYFAN CD, a collection of hand-typed Sci-Fi texts in Russian, purportedly there wouldn't be LibGen today.
El paquetes are created by “matrices” who have access to broadband and copying infrastructure necessary to compile content coming from the disks arriving from abroad, independently produced Cuban content and downloaded content. They pass the content down to “paqueteros”, who invest a bit of money into USB drives, which they recoup through the distribution to their subscribers. As long as matrices and paqueteros steer away from political propaganda, they are tolerated to distribute a broad gamut of information.
El paquete functions in Cuba as a parallel internet to the expensive internet provided by the state telco ETECSA and used only for communication. Significantly though, this is not a form of access exclusive to digital goods: amid the scarcity of Cuban economy, informal systems of social provision have been the mainstay of Cuban life, a necessary form of access to non-essential and sometimes essential goods.