YouTubers and Urban Everyday Narratives in Havana

Introduction

On August 12, 2017, a group of youngsters gathered in a park at Paseo de los Presidentes, a popular avenue in the upscale Vedado neighborhood in Havana. They were attending Cuba’s YouTubers’ first meetup following a call that Dina Fernández, founder of the channel Dina Stars, attributed to Michel Boutic, a digital content distributor who later turned into a reggaeton music producer (DinaStars 2017; López 2019). The attendees were moved by a desire shared by young people elsewhere: to be seen and become famous. Their goal seemed unreachable, pursued in a country with one of the lowest connectivity rates in the Western Hemisphere (Grandinetti & Eszenyi 2018). The informatización de la Sociedad, Cuba’s state-oriented, organized, and massive expansion of information technologies launched in 2015 (Consejo de Estado 2019), had not yet materialized into broad public access to the internet. In addition to networking and meeting with their followers, some participants expected to learn how to earn money from what others, mainly their parents or older people, perceived as trivial.

Facing the challenges of high connectivity costs and constrained access to technologies while circumventing the U.S. economic sanctions on Cuba, some attendees eventually established sustainable livelihoods through content production. Moving across platforms, primarily YouTube and Instagram, gradually allowed them to generate revenue and secure sponsorships while cultivating an online community that often functioned as a support network. ‘Social media employment’ broadened their prospects for socio-economic mobility, offering, in numerous instances, a pathway to migrate abroad amidst the island’s most severe economic downturn in the last three decades. By 2020, being a YouTuber had emerged as a conspicuous and viable way to climb the social ladder, with dozens of people emulating the most successful formula I identified during the research: narrating the quotidian in Havana and other Cuban provinces to combat their own precarity. Although public access to the internet came to Cuba only in 2015, and the island can be considered the last bastion of the ‘socialism from above model,’ the gradual economic reforms that included the expansion of communication technologies propelled changes akin to those brought by the internet in other latitudes. These included the emergence of new actors within the public sphere and the birth of glocalized digital economies.

This paper presents the first scholarly inquiry into the Cuban YouTubesphere. It delves into the platform’s role as a technological affordance that facilitated the global visibility of local narratives -glocal narratives- authored and curated by ordinary internet users, ultimately propelling them to attain a microcelebrity status. Drawing on recent literature addressing the reconfiguration of the Cuban public sphere in the last few years (Cearns 2021a; Duong 2013; García & Henken 2021), the first part of the article contextualizes the YouTuber boom within the larger framework of the so-called Digital Revolution, characterized amongst other things, by the emergence of ‘new media agents’ (Duong 2021: 306), and identifies two cohorts of digital content creators. Borrowing key concepts on microcelebrity, internet fame, and social media influencing (Abidin 2018; Marwick 2015), the second part reflects on the implications of these glocal narratives as 1) an object of affection for both the digital diaspora and people interested in all things Cuban, 2) as a form of public space intervention, and 3) as a digital repository portraying the urban quotidian amidst societal transformations. I conclude by addressing self-censorship and censorship as phenomena that followed patterns similar to those identified by scholars specializing in the Cuban public sphere.

The research presented here juxtaposes the textual and visual examination of videos with netnographic and fieldwork observations. The former included analyzing approximately 500 YouTube videos produced by 26 people between 2017 and 2022, placed in the platform’s People, Entertainment, or Travel categories listed in Table 1. The main criterion for selecting content creators was their featuring of landmarks, attractions, and quotidian itinerances portraying Havana and the changes occurring within it and its representations through mobility practices (Cresswell 2010). Those changes included infrastructural developments, leisure space relocations, and questioning the generalized stereotypes of the island as a place frozen in time. The number of channels analyzed grew as new creators appeared or gained visibility. Because the curation of digital content was not exclusive to the capital city and comprised categories beyond my main selection criterion, three non-Havana-based channels (Anita Mateu, Malia Llovet, and Mari and Yoel) and two dedicated mainly to beauty and fashion (Emma Style & Dina Stars) were also included to identify whether specific patterns were situational, or part of a general trend related to the characteristics of microcelebrity cultures.

Following Kozinets, who proposed netnography as an approach to human experience from online social interaction that does not exclude the use of other research methods (2015), I conducted a cross-platform netnographic analysis on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter from April 2019 to November 2022. The research included ephemeral formats such as the ‘stories’ feature on Instagram and live transmissions on YouTube that are no longer visible. Sometimes, creators erased content following audience backlash or because of self-censorship. Participation of audiences in live transmissions often brought contentious issues related to their ideological positioning to the fore. The observations included interactions on social media and informed online private conversations with eight YouTubers recorded on fieldnotes. Initially, I recurred to netnography to better understand how YouTubers constructed their public personas across different digital platforms. However, the method became the most valuable research resource when the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic prevented further fieldwork.

The first fieldwork period was in the Summer of 2015, in the aftermath of the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the U.S., just before the first WiFi parks began functioning. It consisted of team and individual mobile ethnography, encompassing multi-sited participative observation, walks and displacements using public and privately operated transportation, and informal conversations. Extensive photography was employed to capture visual communiqués and everyday settings, complemented by detailed field notes. The second fieldwork period was conducted as part of the larger research project Cubaflux: Visualizing Urban Transformation in Havana. This time, using WiFi spots was also part of the participatory observations.

Additionally, I meticulously identified sites and trajectories marked in the videos I had analyzed in 2019 and engaged in informal brief encounters with four content creators. The utilization of mobile team ethnography allowed for comparing preliminary and subsequent data gathered from secondary sources, facilitating critical reflection on how researchers see and ‘unsee’ places, spaces, and urban transformation, influenced by their backgrounds. Contrasting such reflections with the video materials brought more clarity to the resources used by digital creators in the construction of their public personas.

1. The Digital Revolution And The Youtuber Phenomenon

My exploration of the Cuban YouTubesphere started accidentally when, back in January 2019, I began researching the forms in which the public image of Havana had changed after the normalization of Cuba–U.S. relations in December 2014. Tourist flows to the island sustained their ascending trajectory, and images of cruises and celebrities arriving at Havana started circulating in global media. Officials, particularly the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana established in 1938 to protect heritage, were devoting significant resources to Habana 500, a campaign to celebrate the city’s 500th anniversary. Official political propaganda was replaced in various sites by touristic and cultural advertising. When watching a documentary on YouTube featuring the office’s head, Eusebio Leal, as part of my background research, the platform’s algorithmic system recommended a video by habanero teenager Frank Camallerys, the creator of Camallerys Vlogs, a channel with 18,000 subscribers. My research took an unexpected turn, and I became invested in examining how Cuba’s nascent internet culture allowed people like Frank Camallerys to showcase images of the metropolis outside official channels. Did they present counter-narratives, sustain official visions, or forge their own paths amidst competing political visions?

In 2013, Cuba’s state-owned telecommunications company ETECSA opened its firsts navigation centers’ across the island (Henken & Voort 2014), making the internet technically accessible to Cubans for the first time. Previously, usage was limited to select groups like officials, academics, graduate students, and visitors. Cubans with resources to get into WiFi-equipped hotels and resorts could also connect, but the service was pricey and unstable. As I witnessed during fieldwork in 2015, people not fitting into a stereotypical tourist profile, mainly non-white and informally dressed, were often requested to leave such venues. Two decades earlier, Cubans were not even allowed near tourist attractions, as I learned during a study trip in 1999. Late in the Summer of 2015, after our first fieldwork period ended, ETECSA installed WiFi spots in several public spaces, mainly in Havana, initiating the de facto public internet expansion. Still, a one-hour prepaid internet card for WiFi cost about 5 USD, a significant portion of the average monthly salary of 30 USD. Despite the cost barrier, internet usage rose, evidenced by the sizable gatherings at WiFi parks and spots, where people primarily connected via cell phones (Editorial Board 2015).

In 2016, ETECSA launched Nauta Hogar, enabling home connectivity but with evident geographic coverage limitations (Fernández 2017). Thus, WiFi spots in public spaces remained central for online activity. In December 2018, a pivotal shift occurred with the introduction of 3G mobile connections, notwithstanding coverage, stability, and cost challenges. This advancement facilitated convenient access at home and mobile, leading to increased and more cost-effective use of social networks and platforms. Official estimates on internet access in Cuba vary, indicating 74% accessibility in 2020, a substantial increase from 21% in 2013. Alternative calculations suggest a more conservative 38% figure for intranet connections and occasional users (Concepción 2020a).

Globally, the arrival of the Internet in Cuba sparked hope for societal change (Editorial Board 2015). Indeed, during the second fieldwork period, several interlocutors pointed out an inevitable opening brought by the arrival of online information and their own possibility to ‘be seen’ by the world. Internet access provided many Cubans with new information and alternative communications (Lima 2021: 51). Most importantly for this article’s purposes, it bolstered the production of local imagery of Cubans and their nation outside official state media channels and beyond the ‘exoticizing foreign gaze’ (Duong 2021: 306). In other words, it allowed many to be in the spotlight, enabling them to showcase their experiences regularly to global audiences. Although the history of those (g)local narratives dates back to the appearance of the ‘contentious Cuban blogosphere,’ with the subsequent growth of ‘citizen journalism’ and the later blooming of digital news platforms in the early 2010s (Henken 2021: 2–3; García 2021), they reached new proportions during the public internet expansion.

The small group of primarily young internet users turned into YouTubers that I follow in this article started to showcase their (g)local narratives while situating themselves outside the officiality, often interplaying with the foreign gaze while vindicating a sense of authenticity, that they obtained by posing as ‘the ordinary Cuban.’ When the production of narratives turned into a source of income, they became ‘digital entrepreneurs’ akin to those mentioned by Cearns, who has studied how Havana’s ‘digital millennials’ use digital media networks to forge and further their career paths without explicit political agendas or claims for global visibility (2021b). While the YouTubers I concentrate on did not push for political agendas identified in the binary officiality/dissidence either, at least in most cases and while they lived in Cuba, their main aspiration was precisely to attract a wide audience beyond the island. On the one hand, due to connectivity prices, YouTubers did not expect to have a large audience in their own country; even those earning substantial income at some point acknowledged not watching videos online and not being ‘consumers.’ On the other hand, not all views are worth the same: revenue depends on the advertisement costs set by YouTube at specific national locations. When planning their content, creators tended to concentrate on those national segment audiences that gave them more earnings.

2. Urban Everyday Narratives: Affection, Public Interventions, And The Digital Repository

I have previously identified YouTube videos as glocal narratives that, in the cases here studied, showcase itinerances through Havana. Their novelty stems from being presented mainly by younger generations, who chose to perform as cubanos de a pie, individuals free from political agendas that appeal to global audiences. By situating these narratives in a liminal space that rejects binary political engagements, the content creators I focused on reproduced the common rhetorical device of not discussing politics, a de facto self-censorship mechanism, to bypass state censorship. Everydayness functioned as well as a quality for internet celebrity by means of curating mundane and ordinary aspects to create a sense of community and trust (Abidin 2018: 31–33).

When Anabelle Vigo published the first video on her Channel Anita con Swing, it featured the supermarket 3ra. y 70, as part of a viral trend challenging people to present shops and products acquired. Anita’s second-most-watched piece is divided into three moments: the walk to the supermarket, the showcase of the alleys, and the description of the purchased goods (Anita 2018). Nothing is seemingly remarkable in the video, but it offers a site-bounded experience perceived as ‘exotic’ by escaping the culturally normal. It is a sneak peek into consumption practices in a post-socialist Cuba marked by scarcity. This resource crosscuts the content of most YouTubers, even beyond Havana, as Anita Mateu’s video of a supermarket in Matanzas demonstrates (2022).

In a sort of spin-off, YouTubers who have left Cuba return consistently to the supermarket trope, reenacting what dozens of video commentators consider one of the most traumatic experiences of Cuban émigrés: finding oneself able to have what those left behind cannot. Simultaneously, the non-Cuban public cannot avoid expressing the perceived privileges of ‘capitalist societies’. The videos featured in Yoel and Mari, in which a Cuban and a Cuban American document the former’s ‘migrant journey’ experience, present good examples of the appeal of Cubans’ discovery of the ‘capitalist world’ (2021). Whereas these videos are not exclusive to Cubans, we can observe how they trigger emotional responses from the Cuban diaspora and people interested in Cuba and its inhabitants. These emotional responses, often reproducing binary political rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War era, eclipse the already dark logic of the Cuban market economy, in which consumers are forced to buy essential goods in foreign currencies or the black market.

Solutions to chronic scarcity by informal means, resolver, are a conspicuous element in the narratives of the everyday in the urban context exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. When officials limited access to public and commercial venues, regulated mobility to restricted zones, and suspended public transportation services at times, YouTubers were forced to leave behind the videos of landmarks and attractions. They resorted to content produced in domestic spaces or to filming videos while running errands. The latter formula proved extremely attractive to viewers and initiated the habit of visiting neighborhoods during live streams. The channels Nanditta and Grethel Space often featured such itinerances, often suggested in real time by diaspora spectators wishing to visit their old neighborhoods virtually (2020).

What I will call ‘the mobile genre,’ which features live mobile displacements, became popular during the pandemic as a way of virtual tourism. Around the same time, most creators started to offer memberships. The feature launched by the YouTube Partnership Program in 2018 grants perks to payees: private chat groups in which the creator discloses her private phone number, exclusive content, greetings, or the right to suggest video themes. For Google Inc., which owns YouTube, this feature generates more interactions translated into revenue through direct donations, advertising, and more intensive data extraction. For YouTubers, however, the program was an opportunity to obtain more income and to weave digital networks of care and support (Baldassar & Wilding 2020) cultivated in everyday interactions inside and outside the platform, which proved indispensable during the pandemic.

A way in which these networks become visible is through the publication of unboxing videos. An integral part of the broader YouTube economy, these videos can also reflect a pattern of caregiving through a transnational cycle of gift exchange (Mowlabocus 2020; Lima-Becker 2021). They consist of opening packages sent by ‘subscribers,’ ‘followers,’ or ‘members,’ usually containing scarce goods like toothpaste, soap, aspirins, or ‘capitalist delicacies’ such as candy and beauty products. In return for their sometimes anonymous generosity, donors see videos with joyful reactions and expressions of gratitude.

As an urban space intervention, everydayness refers to irruptions in public space that reveal social, economic, and political power relations embedded in quotidian or trivial interactions. Again, Pedrito el Paketero illustrates this matter well by showcasing videos in which he presents nuanced questions to passersby, asking individuals their opinions about ‘people from Miami’ (2019). The question is sufficiently open to avoid controversial responses endangering the interviewee, but it teases prospective audiences to expect mentions of segments of the Miami diaspora opposing the Cuban regime. Pedrito el Paketero based its popularity on public space disruptions through rogue inquiries, albeit receiving accusations of being an agente de la Seguridad del Estado, an intelligence and counterintelligence officer, the manifestation of an oppressive political structure.

Positioning himself as a vernacular pundit, Pedrito leveraged conversations to provoke discussions about his own presence in public spaces and online. During the pandemic, along with Juanmy and Frank el Mákina, he created the escuadrón de la verdad, truth’s squad, which broadcasted live discussions. In June 2020, they invited Adrián, the lawyer behind the channel Picante Cubano, to discuss internet legislation and privacy. The conversation stemmed from an incident in which a police officer confronted Pedrito during a livestream in Centro Habana for accidentally filming a police car. While the discussion concentrated on legal technicalities, we can also interpret it as a conversation on police brutality, repression tactics, freedom of expression, and the presence of transnational publics as witnesses of such incidents (Juanmy Records 2020).

In a more superfluous manner, public space dissensus appeared occasionally as the protagonist of the videos of creators that tended to avoid social commentary. For instance, in 2019, Frank Camallerys dealt with the celebrations of the 500^th anniversary of Havana’s foundation. The shots display the street renovations as a cosmetic make-over that, while visible, is interpreted as a resource to eclipse the metropole’s problems (Camallerys 2019). In previous content, Camallerys had dedicated his time to showcase those precise infrastructural changes using the trope of Havana as a city ‘frozen in time’ as an allure and not as a form of critique. Beyond the election of sites and words used to describe changes and the conveyed intention, the video showcases radical transformations in the urban landscape while presenting them as a site of dissensus. As observed during fieldwork, the idea of ‘Havana is falling down, but they build hotels’ is recurrent.

That same dissensus is presented in the video documenting Anita con Swing’s return to Cuba. An articulated account of the implications of returning to the island that starts with shopping for essentials for her family before leaving Madrid, the video features borrowed footage from the July 11 protests and the explosion of the Saratoga hotel in 2021. As the sequence progresses, the YouTuber walks the emblematic Prado, approaching the seafront avenue Malecón while discussing the value of the city’s architectural heritage contrasting with its continuous decadence. Calling attention to the emptiness of the streets, she finds her immigrant-self questioning issues not commonly present in the content she has long assumed as ‘a performance.’ At some point, she adds: ‘How painful it is, as a Cuban, to see your city falling apart while hotels are built in the corners of strategic zones. How rapidly can a hotel be rebuilt while there are people who never get their homes repaired?’ (2023) The video is simultaneously a carefully crafted visual summary of the places she featured while living in Cuba, a testimonial of the perceived transformations and reminiscences of the post-pandemic city, and an allusion to the journey that about 300,000 Cubans have experienced in what is considered one of the most significant exodus from the island in the last 40 years.

Conclusive remarks

On July 11, 2021, the #SOSCuba hashtag became a global social media trend. Images of people taking to Havana streets demanding food and freedom circulated worldwide. In the aftermath of the protests, some YouTubers informed having joined the demonstrations in situ and online, while others remained voluntarily silent. In the days that followed the most significant wave of protests since the triumph of the Revolution, reports of police brutality and apprehensions abounded, too. The YouTuber DinaStars was arrested during a live interview with international media, an apprehension some social media users suspected to be a fabrication. Real or not, it was showcased as an exemplary punishment that, along with the systematic digital blackout imposed by the authorities, instigated fear in many YouTubers. When the government enacted new internet-use regulations after July 11 (Committee 2021), the resort to the non-politics card lost momentum.

By October 2023, only 9 of the 26 YouTubers whose videos were analyzed for this article remained on the island. Most of them migrated for economic reasons, reportedly thanks to the income obtained from YouTube or using the networks of care and solidarity they had forged. After leaving, some of them publicly admitted being intimidated by the intelligence police, stating it was one of the reasons for leaving Cuba. Usually, those who no longer have close family members on the island are open in their critiques of censorship mechanisms and current events. For instance, Frank Camallerys maintains the channel CamallerysXCuba, using a correspondent and focusing on societal problems. A third cohort of post-pandemic content creators that identified content production as an instrument to leave the island has also emerged, and we can find cases not studied here in which irregular border crossings are well documented.

Humphreys identifies the presence of ‘cautious hopes for change’ in the context of the U.S.-Cuba rapprochement, which she saw soon overshadowed by state-censorship scandals like the one involving the film Return to Ithaca from 2015 and the apprehension of artist Tania Bruguera (2019: 210–218). Indeed, our collaborators and interlocutors in intellectual and artistic circles disagreed with the optimistic views expressed by most of the YouTubers studied. A recent case involved the Ministry of Culture and the prohibition of the screening of a film selection at a cultural forum. The list included Juan Pin’s La Habana de Fito and Existen. Resistencia del Arte Urbano en Cuba, directed by Fernando Fraguela and Yulier Rodríguez (2022). Existen charts the history of graffiti in Havana and was born by the initiative of Rodríguez, one of Cuba’s most prominent street artists, and collaborator of the Cubaflux project. Rodríguez made the documentary publicly available on YouTube on November 30, 2022. He did so hoping to avoid jail time, anticipating the enforcement of the new penal code on December 1, which criminalized the receipt of funds aimed at ‘subverting the constitutional order’ in Cuba. Rodríguez had received a personal grant from our project, part of which he used to finance the post-production of the documentary.

Further research on the configuration of Cuba’s post-digital diaspora(s) may shed light on how censorship and self-censorship shape everyday narratives in microcelebrity cultures, online cultural communities, and for people without social media visibility. For researchers, studying Cuba still risks falling into binary visions of Cuban phenomena that operate in a Cold War-like setting despite the island’s global interconnectedness.

Data Accessibility Statement

The project’s online visual archive is available at https://cubaflux.utu.fi.

Ethics and Consent

The research for this article was conducted within the project Cubaflux approved by the Ethics Committee for Human Sciences at the University of Turku (Statement 55/2019). No formal interviews were conducted for this article. YouTubers’ identifiable personal information comes exclusively from public sources. For ethical reasons, private interactions here referred have been anonymized and were registered in netnographic or fieldwork notes in possession of the author.

Funding Information

Research funded by the Kone Foundation.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.