Cold War Paquetería: Snail Mail Services Across (and Around) Cuba’s “Sugar Curtain”

• In Event: Cuban Diasporas Across Time: Dialogue and Divergence

Abstract

In recent years, the DIY file-sharing service known as “El Paquete” has brought into sharp relief the connective webs (of digital goods, in this case) linking Cubans on island and off in a transnational economy. But fifty years before “El Paquete,” there were “Servicios de Paquetería”—businesses through which Cuban exiles in the post-1959 diaspora organized and shipped packages of needed material goods to their family members back home. Ironically, in the same community publications advocating anti-communist hostility and isolation, exiles advertised numerous material channels for piercing through the divide, often via Canada or Mexico.

Building on my ongoing research on diverse kinds of correspondence that flowed between Cuba and Miami in the 1960s, this paper situates the transactional politics and practice of “paquetería” in a wider historical field. The existence of such services, I argue, necessarily complicates pat understandings of an island simply “divided in two” by Revolution. But more than this, “paquetería” suggests that the transnational linkages so frequently observed today have their origins in certainly more precarious, but no less important practices of the Cold War era.

Author

• Michael Bustamante, Florida International University