The world in a package

By Lisandra Díaz Padrón and Claudio Peláez Sordo

Photos by Claudio Peláez Sordo

Once again, Cubans cleverly solve their relative isolation. The solution is popularly known as the “Package of the Week,” weighs one terabyte and soothes — or at least it tries to — the information hunger created by the new technologies of information and communications.

It is, as some say, a simulated access to an Internet that still hasn’t come; a palliative to remedy a still small television menu that leaves the expectations of many unfulfilled; a domestic “hand-crafted” solution that provides cultural material that is varied and modern.

It is also unquestionably a way to augment the increasingly fewer sources of entertainment.

While Cuban TV shows the 87th chapter of the current Brazilian soap opera, “Avenida Brasil,” Amelia amuses herself with another soaper, the Spanish “Aida.” And so she goes, sidestepping the local television menu, viewing telenovelas from several countries, ignoring the programming of each of the five channels of national TV. It’s her way of being a “televiewer.” “Avenida Brasil” still has 200 episodes to go, but Amelia and her family devoured it in four days, to the last kiss and the last tear. It came in “the package.”

Ricardo, 24, has found another way to bring money into his pockets. From Tuesday to Sunday, he goes house to house, distributing “the package” to some 15 clients who pay willingly for the service. Protected by a license as a “self-employed information vendor,” he distributes an alternative that the State neither regulates nor persecutes and daily becomes a way to buttress some areas of the emerging private economy.

The so-called package of the week began as a 300-gigabyte offering; today it’s up to 1 terabyte. It carries mainly international content, such as series, soap operas, movies, “doramas” (Korean soapers), documentaries, cartoons, videoclips, music, reality shows, software for computers, APPs, antivirus updates, language courses, magazines of all kinds and anything else you can imagine. That entire universe is available for between 2 and 5 CUC. [about $2 to $5.]

“The price goes down with every passing day. The closest to Sunday that you get it (Sunday is the day when distribution begins), the better chance you have to be the first,” says Ricardo, who doesn’t know for sure where that news flood comes from.

Speculation is rampant about who selects and compile the files. There’s talk of people who record the entire week and never sleep; there’s talk of 16-hour shifts. Others assume that the stuff arrives by sea or by air, that it is recorded in hotels and embassies.

Daniel, a third-hand distributor, believes that “everything that has to do with sports, mainly those games that are not broadcast by Cuban TV, the Spanish-language shows and soapers, are downloaded through an antenna. But the movies, the series, the music videos, the applications and the updates are downloaded from the Internet.”

But everybody makes sure not to include any pornography or “iffy” political content. “At least in what I distribute, I try not to include anything that’s subversive or goes against the government,” Ricardo says.

This distribution of “the package,” which has enjoyed a stunning expansion throughout the country, seems to be caused by the same need/demand that created the BETA and VHS “banks” in the 1990s, when videocassette players came into the homes of ordinary people.

With tourism came the installation of antennas everywhere. Rooftops bloomed with small, parabolic, camouflaged antennas, the more desired, the more hunted down. In the 2000s, cable TV came to entire neighborhoods. It was a coaxial cable stretched from balcony to balcony, from house to house. It was a door or pathway to television “out there,” an open secret and a flank that some individuals managed to outflank.

The DVD was the cusp, especially when USBs became available. Julio, a young Guantánamo man living in Havana, returned home to the mountains after six months in the capital. He found his father watching on DVDs the same series that he had watched in Havana one week earlier.

The Internet of the disconnected users

According to the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), only 257 Cubans out of 1,000 have access to the Internet, in most cases without a chance to access multimedia because the bandwidth does not allow it.

“With a 56-kB-per-second connection to the Internet (which most Cubans have), downloading a 650-mB video takes about six days and 16 hours,” says Ricardo, sarcastically.

For the past year, Javier has received the package weekly. It is brought to his home. In the past, he paid 1.50 CUC [$1.50] for almost 500 gigabytes but ever since he broadened his storage capacity, he prefers to pay 2 CUC for a whole terabyte. His provider comes almost always on Wednesday, and after copying the material for three hours, he begins to select what he’ll watch in the next seven days.

“There’s too much. Of course, I cannot see it all in one week. Generally, I watch movies, some series and documentaries. My mother always chooses soap operas, shows or some classic movie, many of which are now included,” says Yasmany, 24, who happily pays 50 Cuban pesos for the entire package.

Laura prefers not to pay so much, because she lacks a computer and a hard disk with enough capacity to store so many gigabytes. Every week, she goes to a movie store where, for 2 Cuban pesos (about 0.10 CUC) she gets every chapter of the series she’s watching. That’s how she obtained three language courses, software included, for 2 CUC each.

Technology plays an important role in the use of this option. Distributors and users have created strategies to circulate the information contained in the packages.

“Users range from the rich to the poor, because if someone doesn’t have the capacity to store all the gigabytes [a DVD] contains, he can go to the movie store or my house and record whatever he wants in an 8- or 16-gigabyte memory stick,” says Ricardo as he walks swiftly through the Vedado sector of Havana, on his way to deliver information.

“More than the Internet of the poor, the package is a bundle of offerings that an ordinary person has no way to buy and enjoy,” reflects Victor Fowler, a movie critic, writer and an enthusiastic user of “the package.”

Advertising ‘on the sly’

The package has become a mechanism of promotion for those who cannot access the few formal means to launch their publicity. Yasmany, a regular buyer, says that he has found advertisements for bars, laptop and cellphone repair shops, a professional masseuse and even the promotional video of a magician. The Yellow Pages of ETECSA (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba), the only ones so far authorized to carry advertising for private businesses, do not satisfy the need to publicize created by this emerging economy.

“Lately, this medium is showing another face,” Fowler says. “Many files contain brief commercials from the world of the new economy. This sounds odd to us Cubans, even annoying at times, because many ads are inserted at the end of a movie and cover up the credits, but evidently it’s a logic of the new economy, an expression of the lack of space for advertising.”

The package thus becomes a tool for second-level commercial relations. It is the basis for other markets that appear on the trade sites such as Revolico, Porlalivre, or Cubisima, inserted in their structure as well. This way, these online alternatives, almost always blocked by the institutional connections, find another channel of entrance.

Package v. Television?

Recently, Abel Prieto, former minister of culture and today advisor to the president of the Councils of State and Ministers, said that “the answer is not in banning the package of audiovisuals that many people spread through flash drives but in competing with them with programming that’s consistent with our cultural identity and the nation’s political interests.”

Although the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) has tried hard to offer varied programming, the quality of its offerings, especially those produced in-country, does not attract people’s attention on a sustained basis.

“People feel that the quality of TV programming has declined,” says Vanessa Márquez, a specialist at the ICRT Research Center, who has investigated the phenomenon. “At this time there are fewer national programs even though there are more channels. We have abandoned the usual spaces for feature shows, such as adventure films, musicals, comedy shows and the police series on Sunday. All this has somehow contributed to reduce television’s attractiveness.”

During 2007, the programming of channel Cubavisión was extended to 24 hours a day. Joining Cubavisión and Telerebelde were the Educational Channel in 2001, Educational Channel Two in 2004 and Multivisión in 2008. Other positive reforms were made by the provincial television centers, which, beginning in 2006, broadened their programming for the additional purpose of defending Cuban air space from the Miami-based broadcasts of Radio and TV Martí.

But the strategies don’t quench the thirst. And the new state of digital technologies stimulates in consumers the freedom to choose when and what they wish to consume.

The results of the 2012 Census of Population and Housing revealed that in Cuba there were about 2.8 million color TV sets, about 2 million video reproducers and approximately 414,000 computers. This in a population of 11,167,325 inhabitants and 3,885,900 “units of dwelling,” as the statisticians call them.

“I think people have become tired of the type of discourse and audiovisual products that traditionally have emerged from one center,” says Gustavo Arcos, a movie critic. “There is a sort of rhetoric, routine, boredom toward the products issued by only one outlet. What have they censored? What have they banned? What have I been able to consume? What books, literature, press, magazines, movies, TV shows, sports programs have I not consumed for these many years?”

Fowler, who says he won’t quit buying “the package” every week, evaluates the way in which the institutions might react.

“It is not a question of unleashing an insane competition that forces them to meet 10 times a week to see how they’re beating ‘the package.’ National producers simply must improve and we the spectators deserve that. Logic demonstrates that when national production is good, the public is more attune to its reality.”

[The video that follows of ‘the package’ comes only in Spanish.] 

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