The inhabitants of Cuba's capital, Havana, are using semipublic group chats on messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram to access food, hygiene products, medication, and other basic necessities during times of scarcity. This has been especially prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such chat groups created digital spaces in which locals swap scarce goods and share vital information about the availability of products in the government-run shops, creative entrepreneurs offer online delivery services, and black-market vendors sell commodities that are in short supply. We examine the conflicting value systems that shape the interactions on these messaging apps, where solidarity and sharing as well as market-mediated exchanges come to coexist and must be negotiated on an everyday basis. The article is accompanied by a series of "screen walks"-that is, short mobile phone videos, in which research participants explain the dynamics of the groups they participate in. [barter, Cuba, informal economy, moral economies, social media] R e s u m e n Los habitantes de La Habana, la capital de Cuba, utilizan chats grupales semipúblicos en aplicaciones de mensajería como WhatsApp y Telegram para acceder a alimentos, productos de higiene, medicamentos y otros productos de primera necesidad en épocas de escasez y, en particular, durante la pandemia de COVID-19. Estos grupos de chat
To compensate for their lack of internet access, Cuban video game enthusiasts and programmers have built vast grassroots computer networks, the biggest of which, SNET (Street Network), at one point connected tens of thousands of households across Havana. This vernacular infrastructure generated not only new means of access but also new relations between people and fostered new political subjectivities. SNET is heavily shaped by a local cultural ideology of resolver, of collectively navigating resources and limitations in a context of scarcity. Using the metaphor of modding (modifying), a communal practice within gaming cultures that describes alterations by players or fans that change the look or functionality of a video game, we show how SNET makers were forced to constantly adapt to the shifting technical, political, and social frameworks in Cuba. Expanding anthropological theory on infrastructures that shows how breakdown in many parts of the world is a constitutive part of how people experience them, we argue that makers of human infrastructures such as SNET must not only deal with material breakdown but also navigate the breakdown of social relationships.
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