In the past weeks, rumors have flown in Cuba and over social media about new state legislation that went into effect on Sept. 19 and that many feared would ban private businesses from selling digital audiovisual content. Such a ban would deal a significant blow to the “paquete” or “packet,” Cuba’s robust offline system of media distribution that, since 2010, has come to constitute the main source of global entertainment on the island.
Concerns about the paquete and its future demonstrate the unique status of media piracy in Cuba. While the Cuban state widely disregards international intellectual property law, it remains wary of citizen piracy. This is because, in Cuba, to control media piracy is to control media distribution, a strategic area that the state has long reserved for itself.
Following the 1959 Cuban revolution, the new government quickly nationalized key industries, including media production and distribution. The ICAIC, a national film institute entrusted with cinema production and exhibition, was founded in March 1959. By May 1961, the government had nationalized the remaining U.S. movie distribution companies on the island. Coupled with the U.S. embargo – which, since 1960, forbade the sale of most American goods to Cuba – nationalization left the island’s movie screens in a lurch. Prior to the revolution, as Sara Vega Miche and Mario Naito López have shown, U.S. films dominated Cuban screens, although films from Mexico and Argentina were also popular.
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The ICAIC responded with an exhibition strategy designed to create a “new spectator.” Small teams of film specialists traveled to markets worldwide to negotiate exhibition rights for rates far below market value. These efforts secured the best of world cinema for Cubans for a low entry fee — a single peso — and reshaped Cuban film tastes. Yet the demand for U.S. films remained strong in Cuba. After a decade in which the only U.S. films screened were those in Cuban archives, in 1970, piracy became the dominant way to circumvent the embargo.
The advent of satellite television and analog Beta and VHS video exponentially increased state media piracy. While at first Cuba operated only with Intersputnik, the USSR’s international satellite communication services, by 1979, the nation had also installed the U.S.-based satellite network, Intelsat. This expanded Cuban access to U.S. film and television content. One economist recalled watching the specialists at Cuba’s satellite ground station record U.S. films in 1985. This content was then subtitled by Cuban state television and aired, often over what Cubans refer to affectionately as “la película del sábado,” or the Saturday movie.
Since the early 1980s, both pirate copying of 35 mm film prints and of U.S. satellite transmissions likely functioned as sources for Omnivideo Corp., a line of analog videos that carried titles distributed by U.S. companies. The Omnivideo logo claimed the company was based out of Los Angeles, while legal warnings against unauthorized reproduction on the cassette cover and label added to its authenticity. Yet it was an open secret that Omnivideo was operated by the Ministry of Interior, i.e. the Cuban secret police.
Analog video also enabled citizen media piracy for the first time. The sale of VCRs was restricted, but Cubans obtained machines through diplomats, sailors, and Cubans living abroad, especially in the U.S. Clandestine video libraries and salons cropped up to meet demands for content. The Cuban state contended that citizen video operations carried pornography and prioritized profit, which it sought to counter through police raids and its own video services. The first state video library and state video salon opened in 1986, and by the end of the decade, services had spread across the country. Ironically, state and citizen video piracy fueled one another. Private video library owners reported turning to Omnivideo and state video libraries for content, while state specialists used videocassettes obtained through police raids.
Advances in satellite television technology exacerbated conflicts between state and citizen media piracy. In the 1990s, when the state purchased a package of satellite television channels and transmitted it from Hotel Habana Libre to surrounding hotels, technicians pirated the signal through makeshift antennas. By the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s, Cubans on the island gained access to commercial satellite companies through hacked cards or as extensions of packages paid for by U.S.-based subscribers. These illegal extensions became the source of new satellite and video infrastructure. Technicians strung cables connecting multiple households in a neighborhood to a source satellite dish. Others copied content from satellite dishes to videocassettes that furnished video libraries. The operations of video libraries also diversified. In some cases, clients rented from collections housed in garages or the front rooms of homes. To avoid attracting the attention of police, messenger services also developed in which young people walked or biked with backpacks filled with cassettes to client homes.
The paquete updated Cuba’s analog video network for a digital age. Collectives of individuals, referred to as “matrices,” access global movies, television shows, and other content through satellite transmissions, internet downloads, and social media. They then copy this content onto hard drives and circulate it across the island. Using hard drives and flash drives, the paquete bypasses Cuba’s limited internet infrastructure. Although the internet has improved in Cuba over the past decade, downloading larger media files remains too expensive for many Cubans.
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Yet the key difference between this digital media infrastructure and the earlier analog era is the legal status of video libraries. As part of new efforts to decentralize the socialist economy, in 2010, the Cuban state opened licenses for small businesses, including “comprador vendedor de discos” (purchase and sale of disks). This license was taken up by vendors who used the contents of the paquete to burn DVDs of pirated telenovelas, reality TV shows, and other content, and, in later years, shifted to copying individual files directly onto clients’ hard drives and flash drives. As pirate video vendors went from evading police to paying taxes, the paquete flourished. The state, in turn, lost official control over media distribution for the first time since 1959.
Yet many limits to citizen media piracy remain. In 2013, the state shut down private businesses that had been operating 3D cinemas, leaving exhibition under the purview of the state. Numerous state officials, including Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel, have criticized the capitalist content of the paquete. But they also recognize that censoring the paquete will only fuel its circulation. Cuban copyright experts, for their part, have objected to the de facto legalization of private piracy. Such objections may have been behind a 2017 decision to stop granting new disk vendor licenses. Those who already held the license were nevertheless allowed to continue operating, and new video businesses opened under licenses in related areas such as computing and printing.
Significantly, it was the legal status of video libraries that many feared was under threat by the new legislation instituted on Sept. 19. There was therefore much relief when the director of Cuba’s national copyright center, CENDA, explained that the regulations would only extend the ban on exhibition to digital audiovisual content, while sales could continue, provided vendors operated with existing licenses for disk sales and paid royalties. For others, however, these statements provoked further questions: was the ambiguity of wording in the regulations strategic and designed to allow authorities to ban the paquete in the future? What would happen to vendors who did not comply with copyright law as outlined by the official?
For now, the state’s truce with the paquete remains intact. But these suspicions point to ongoing uncertainty about the limits of state tolerance for citizen control over media piracy, which in Cuba, means controlling distribution.
Laura-Zoë Humphreys is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University and the author of Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema (Duke UP, 2019). Her work on Cuban media piracy can also be found in boundary 2 and The International Journal of Cultural Studies. Daymar Valdés Frigola is a specialist in Cuban cinema at the Cinemateca de Cuba. They have been collaborating on ethnographic and historical research of analog to digital video in Cuba with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Louisiana’s Board of Regents ATLAS Program.
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