Radio Taino and the globalization of the Cuban culture industries

This dissertation is about La Habana's farandula , a group of musicians, writers, radio and television personalities, music producers, advertising designers and other sorts of cultural intermediaries who actively engaged in innovative discourses and practices to confront the crisis of socialism in the 1990s. These cultural entrepreneurs, still linked to the socialist apparatus, were located at the interface of global mass culture trends and tastes, incoming corporate stakeholders, and the socialist hierarchy of knowledge and power. Their successful negotiation of socialist and capitalist ideology, ethics and aesthetics was key to the maintenance of the regime and, just as importantly, their own situation of privilege amidst increasing social stratification.; The dissertation seeks to bridge theories of cultural globalization and the literature on regime transition based on post-1989 Eastern Europe by considering the particular formation of late socialism in 1990s Cuba as revealed both in approaches to labor, value, leisure, citizenship and identity, and in an audiovisual landscape that includes commercial advertisements, political propaganda, transnational music and avant-garde aesthetics. It theorizes cultural production and circulation in the context of a state-led liberalization of the economy intended to ensure the survival of the socialist social project, and problematizes the different notions of capitalism held by both transition and globalization theories, as well as questions the separation of society into autonomous spheres posited by transition models. It holds that like capitalism, socialism is not only a system of domination and an ideology, but is also a culture in a sense that encompasses both the action and the imagination of social players---their public representations and narratives, their labor and leisure practices, and their consciousness of self and identity. My focus is thus on cultural production and reproduction, to highlight the salience of labor and production---rather than leisure and consumption---as a focal position from which to negotiate value and identity under late socialism, particularly among emergent elites. In this way, I engage with theories of cultural circulation, post modernism, and late (millennial) capitalism.