Worldmaking on digital platforms: A study of Cuban comedy in social media

Abstract

This article studies the digital-cultural labor of three Cuban Instagram comedians and the worldmaking they promote. The comedians, Marlon, Chupetin, and Kende, immensely popular among Cuban audiences, create content that centers their Black working-class and street-smart identity. Through a close analysis of how these comedians utilize performance as rhetorical tools, I examine the entanglements and possibilities that marginalized content creators face when making symbolic and embodied meaning not sanctioned by the nation-state's meta-narratives of normative identity. I draw on theories of performance studies, media anthropology and Caribbean studies, to conceptualize the political, cultural, and personal stakes that come with the ‘world-making’ labor of Cuban Instagram comedians. I argue performances of estranged ways of being, distributed through transnational digital networks, enact aspirations of redressing long-standing desires and anxieties about national identity and personal agency. Ultimately this article situates social media platforms as vital spaces of worldmaking in a digital era.

Introduction

If we are to believe an ingenious Cuban teen, we would believe that Autoline LLC is Florida's best car dealer. He goes by the artistic name of Kende de Cayo Hueso or Kende. Cayo Hueso, where he is from, is a neighborhood inside another neighborhood: Centro Habana. ¹ Like many Cayo Hueso residents, he is Black and from a working-class background. Although Kende is not a car dealership expert, he integrates sponsors like Autoline LLC into his jokes. In the Instagram video referencing Autoline LLC, he is at a gym in Havana. In the opening scene, Kende plans to work out until he realizes that another guy is trying to impersonate him to gather attention from the girls in the locale. He (El Kende de Cayo Hueso, 2020b) exposes the impersonator in his usual vernacular wittiness:

¡Llegó el elegido papi! Me traicionate me oiteee. ¡Me traicionatee! Tu sabes por qué tu no puedes ser el Kende, papi. Mira tu mika y mira mi mika, papi. Tienes la mika cuartiaa … por eso es que las personas como tu … no les crece el pelo. El feo vino por cuota, y te quisiste empinar del pomo …

[The chosen one has arrived, papi! You betrayed me, you know?! You know why you can’t be me? Look at your mika (hair style) and look at mine … your mika is breaking apart, that is why your hair won’t grow. Ugliness came through the ration cards, and you wanted to drink directly from the bottle …] ²

After ridiculing the impersonator, he leaves the gym with the girls, who are excited to be with the true Kende. In the video's storyline, the girls look happy to go with him because of his stardom and because he has a car (a rare commodity in Cuba). The vehicle is a Soviet-made LADA, one of the most common car brands in Cuba, that were imported from the Soviet Union during the ’80s. But when a friend asks how Kende got the car, he says that Autoline LLC sent it to him, that he should visit them at their offices in Hallandale Beach, Florida. The proposition that a US-based car dealership is sending Soviet cars to Cuba is laughable for anyone familiar with everyday Cuban life. Still, Kende needs to include the sponsor for his video, so if that shout-out ends up being unbelievably funny, all the better. Before getting into the car, the friend asks where will they take all those girls since they have no money to invite them for a drink? Kende responds: ‘Papi tranquilo, mi billetera tiene más telaraña que el parque de Maceo. Escúchame a mí, ahora esa gente se van a bajar solas cuando las metamos de cara contra la cola de la gasolina en el cupet.’ [Papi, don't worry, my wallet has more spider webs than Maceo's ³ monument. Listen to me, they will get out of the car on their own initiative as soon as we stop by the gas station and make them face the line.] ⁴ (El Kende de Cayo Hueso, 2020b).

Some of Cuba's most recognizable Instagram-native comedians are Carnota, Chupetin de Cuba, El Kende de Cayo Hueso, and Marlon el Guapo Natural. When I began gathering data for this project in 2020, they all lived in Cuba. As of 2024, only Chupetin and Marlon reside on the island. This article studies the content of the last three. Several reasons inform my choice. Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin were among the first content producers in Cuba to produce comedy for Instagram exclusively. In Cuba, where unlimited data plans are nonexistent, Instagram was slow to be adopted by the broader population, given its high data upload/download demands. However, by 2019, young video content creators on the island began using the platform to participate in the broader global influencer economy and community. By choosing Instagram to upload their video content, Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin position themselves not merely as Cuban comedians but as peers of other young content creators and influencers that have come out of Cuba and the Caribbean region in recent years. In addition, their prolific output on the platform allowed them to monetize their content by connecting with diaspora audiences and businesses that use the platform, which in turn allowed them work full-time as content creators and entertainers. ⁵ But there is another essential feature of Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin's comedy: their worldmaking. In their comedic performance, the co-presence of multiple times, peoples, and locations, the here and there, now and future, offer ‘a point of departure, a process, a building of’ (Muñoz, 1999: 200) that practices a new world in the present. I argue that such performances of disidentification are facilitated by the estranged ways of being of the performers, who evoke and invoke not only multiple times and spaces but also copresences, which in turn power the transnational networks of Cuban affective symbolism. This article is interested in the Cuban estranged way of being that trespasses time and space in the material and symbolic sense. Indeed, these comedians tap into their estranged ways of being to enact agency through connecting possibilities of internet-based and digital technologies.

Internet studies have conceptualized ways of being as self-expressions mediated by internet and computer technologies (Markham, 1998). Adding to the understanding of ways of being as mediated self-expressions within the digital, I describe estranged ways of beings as those- performative, embodied, rhetorical, or economically and technologically informed- that have been historically alienated from legally sanctioned ways of existence. It is a way of being that has been made an ‘other’ and whose ‘otherness’ is also understood as a capital by those who possess it. Estranged ways of being is a way of existence that dissents against the norm. I explore how in the Cuban post-socialist contemporary era, non-normative production and distribution of digital entertainment is increasingly counted among the richest sites of collective imagination and worldmaking, particularly as the state's enunciative credibility about national identity continues to obliterate and consecutive waves of migration push Cubans apart.

I begin by contextualizing digital access and media circulation on the island, and then proceed to conduct close, thematic analysis of 12 Instagram videos created by Kende, Marlon, and Chupetin. The videos were chosen based on highest level of interaction ⁶ at the time they were gathered in 2020. In my analysis of results, I draw on theories from performance studies, media anthropology and Caribbean studies, to conceptualize the political, cultural, and personal stakes that come with the ‘world-making’ labor of Cuban Instagram comedians. I explore how advertisement, location, diaspora, development of characters, and language become rhetorical tools used in their comedy as they perform disidentifying acts. I examine how this labor, facilitated by co-present embodiments (Beliso-De Jesús, 2015) and acts of disidentification, produce new worlds that serve as ‘a utopian blueprint for a possible future while, at the same time, staging a new political formation in the present’ (Muñoz, 1999: 200). Ultimately, this article argues that as digital content creation continues to grow as space and method for worldmaking by Cubans, the performance of estranged ways of being distributed through transnational digital networks enacts, in the present, future aspirations while redressing normalized yet incomplete national imaginations. This article adds to discussions about how cultural practices and identity in the Caribbean inhabit digital technologies and social media platforms (Brunton, 2022) for the negotiation of political and social agency (Arroyo, 2023). It adds to the growing body of literature concerned with the mobility affordances of mediated technologies and – paradoxically- the growing immobilities that it perpetuates, particularly among diasporic, displaced, and migrant communities (Cabalquinto, 2023; Hill, 2023; Leurs and Patterson, 2020; Ponzanesi, 2019).

Cuban digital landscapes

On 4 October 1965, the Cuban newspaper Granma published its first edition to much fanfare. The event marked the final consolidation of the national media system under the direction of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) (Lockwood, 1990: 115). Before the Revolution, the legal structure of the Cuban Media System favored privatization and commercialism (Rivero, 2015). In the 60s, the new system was set up to be publicly owned and regulated by the State's political apparatus, ensuring that any other form of media ownership was deemed illegal (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2017). This government-controlled media system endures today, yet in 2010, the PCC signaled a relaxation in the Party's media policy (Castro, 2010; Morales-Suárez, 2017). Soon after, journalists and entrepreneurs began setting up small news and entertainment outlets (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2017). In the years since, political instability and growing public dissent have been met with a return to government crackdowns and harassment. However, the State's media system has not been able to recuperate its monopoly, even when they hold it on paper.

The reason it has lost so much mediatic terrain had less to do with the formation of alternative media outlets than with the globalization forces of digital technologies and the internet. The 1990s saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union and fall of the Eastern Block, ushering a profound economic and social crisis in Cuba. The crisis forced the Party to relax economic and cultural policies. Many tourists and Cubans in the diaspora began visiting the island, inaugurating an era of rapid cultural and technological exchange. (Venegas, 2010). Knauer (2009) has described some of the technology exchanges within these Cuban transnational circuits as ‘audiovisual remittances,’ given the increased exchange value and impact of technologies in everyday life in the country. Laguna (2017) has also argued that these ‘remittances’ have played an important role in forming contemporary popular Cuban culture across both sides of the Florida stretch.

For most of the 2000s, Cubans did not have access to online digital technologies, which led to the development of a sophisticated content distribution network known as ‘el paquete.’ This ‘peer-to-peer digital file sharing network’ (Cearns, 2023: 112) expanded gradually. Most of the content distributed in ‘el paquete’ are international entertainment productions, local music, video games, and reading materials (Dominguez and Calás, 2021). As Duong (2024) has argued, expanding transnational and offline digital practices have defined the Cuban post-socialist mediascape, whose multiple perspectives and narratives are still unfolding and developing.

As for the internet, a submarine optic fiber cable reached the island in 2012. Two years later, citizens were allowed access to a government-run email service called Correo Nauta on their phones (Morales-Suárez, 2017). The government-owned telecommunication corporation ETECSA made Wi-Fi spots available a year later in anticipation of the US-Cuba thaw, and in 2017, began offering household internet access followed by 3G access on mobile phones (Morales-Suárez, 2017). As internet penetration grew on the island, Cubans started experimenting with creating and consuming entertainment content from social media platforms like vlogs, challenges, and tutorials (De la Cantera, 2018). Late 2019 and 2020 saw a particular proliferation of content creation on Instagram. The proliferation of content was due, among other things, to global expansion trends in the platforms (Newberry, 2021). In 2019, Instagram became the preferred platform for a particular kind of Cuban content creator: self-made comedians who use personal phones to create content. On the island, this has meant that comedic performance is no longer the purview of ‘professional’ comedians accredited by cultural institutions such as the Centro Promotor del Humor.

Content creators in Cuba inhabit a unique place as entertainers. Their labor practice is still unregulated in the country, yet despite their public profile, they have managed to avoid, for the most part, the political harassment usually reserved for other media creators, like independent journalists. For example, the government's legislative crackdown on freedom of expression, Decree Laws 370 and 349, ⁷ have primarily been used to target and arrest independent journalists, conceptual artists, and activists (Dunham, 2020). However, even if Instagram comedians avoid creating content that is overtly critical of the government, their performance of Cuban life is far from what the government sanctions as respectable or normative. Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin's comedy contrasts with the more formal content broadcasted through the national media system. They make a living as comedians, yet their operations are informal, mostly one-person sketches filmed in private or impromptu spaces and distributed on social media platforms as regular user content.

Three Cuban Instagram comedians

The Instagram comedians studied here, Marlon, Chupetin, and Kende, are unlike most Cuban content creators. They are Black, grew up in a poor working-class neighborhood of Havana, and embody a culture of ‘calle’ or street-smartness that, as Dache (2019) argues, represents for Afro-Latinx and Afro-Caribbeans a mode of social capital that seeks to resist the cultural supremacy of whiteness. These comedians use their resourcefulness in and outside of their performance, creating content without the official work accreditation granted by the institutional agencies and unions that attempt to control all forms of formal labor in the country (Perry, 2015). They earn an income as digital content creators through their connections to informal marketplaces ⁸ –such as sponsorship deals with small diaspora businesses- within Cuban transnational digital networks. Such subjectivities contrast them to official and normative standards of what a Cuban comedian and a content creator resemble. ⁹ Their estranged subjectivities, which in Marlon's case also expands to being differently abled and, in Chupetin's, identifying as a queer man, have not impeded their success with audiences. On the contrary, their comedy attracts weekly audiences, shown by growing media engagement and exposure.

While historically, artists, comedians, intellectuals, and everyday Cubans have subverted the state's policing through a myriad of ingenious tactics, such as doble sentido / ‘double meaning’, ¹⁰ performing for an audience in Cuba remains a risky business. Cultural producers and content creators whose work or public remarks have angered public officials are usually banned, if not prevented, from membership in national institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and professional guilds ¹¹ (Fernandes, 2003). Not having work accreditation legally prevents performers from accessing artistic venues -whether private or public (Ministerio de Justicia, 2018). Therefore, those who face these kinds of bans or deinstitutionalization will encounter significant limits in their ability to perform for an audience in Cuba. In addition, governmental institutions rarely explain why they prohibit or disenfranchise some cultural expressions, and motives can range from banning content critical of the state to excluding content producers that they do not consider ‘artists’ (de la Hoz, 2012; Miller, 2008; Wagner, 2012). However, digital technologies permit the ‘barred to the margins’ cultural practices to be enjoyed and co-produced by Cubans on the island and in the diaspora simultaneously (Cearns, 2023) by bypassing some of the consequences of the government's disfranchisement.

Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin stand out among Cuban influencers, who are mostly white, urban, middle-class creators making typical YouTube content like hauls, challenges, and vlogs. (De la Cantera, 2020). Yet, Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin create content rooted in a calle identity and imagination of Cuba as a third, alternative space (Brunton, 2022). All three were born and raised within Centro Habana. A former business hub neighborhood in the capital during the Cuban Republic (1901–1959), Centro Habana is now primarily a working-class neighborhood divided into sections such as Pueblo Nuevo and Cayo Hueso. Centro Habana's cultural and sociohistorical context is too extensive for this article to cover. However, it must be highlighted that in common Cuban parlance and popular culture, the neighborhood is referenced as a place with a strong Blackened identity, defiant people, and a prolific culture of calle. ¹²

In the videos studied, Centro Habana is vital. Its streets, housing, and daily rhythms form the backdrop of the comedic sketches, with everyday life unfolding in the background. The neighborhood also features symbolically in Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin's performances, reflecting its calle culture in their speech, thoughts, and movements. Centro Habana's calle culture represents the spatial and communal constitution of ontological Cuban Blackness. Consider for example the following quotes from two of the videos studied:

Deja ver si me boto sin sal por ahí, que ahora mismo al estafador ese lo voy a barrer.

[Let me go and throw myself away without salt ¹³ (or face off) that swindler so that I can sweep him (roll all over him)] ¹⁴ (El Kende de Cayo Hueso, 2020a)

No te puedes tomar un lague con tranquilidad … Y eso que vengo en un tur … vengo dando guerra … en un tur que no me dejan morir mis amigos …

[You cannot even drink your lager in peace … even if I am in a tur (rental car) … I am making war (living my best) …. In a tur because my friends don’t let me die (leave me behind struggling) …] (Chupetin de Cuba, 2019d)

With a Centro Habana twist, they evoke the figure of the neighborly joker or trickster that is a common trope within Cuban radio and television comedy shows. From ‘La Tremenda Corte’ (1941–1961) to ‘Jura decir la verdad’ (2001–2009) to ‘Vivir del cuento’ (2008- present), Cuban comedy shows have often featured characters that center their identities around everyday life in a Cuban neighborhood (Laguna, 2019). Despite some of the similarities with established television and radio shows, Chupetin, Marlon, and Kende offer a different representation of the neighborly joker, one in which the culture of calle as a Blackened ontology is central to the comedy and not relegated to diluted forms of token representation. Their work stands in contrasts with the historical comedic representation of Cuban Blackness in the Cuban Teatro Bufo and Zarzuela tradition, in which white Cubans construed Blackness for the amusement of a white audience (Thomas, 2008).

For Marlon, El Guapo Natural (the natural ruffian) creating content revolves around his thuggish Instagram persona. In his videos, he portrays a ‘guapo’ living a lavish life in Centro Habana. Despite being differently abled, Marlon's speech, including some phonological disorders, is exaggerated for comedic effect. The contrast between his mispronunciations and his gangster-like persona is part of his signature performance. In one video, he features a neighbor playing the role of a long-lost father returning from the diaspora. Marlon, in the video, loses no time, and after very small talk confronts the supposed father directly with his typical bravado: ‘¿Y el dinero mio?’ [Where is my money?] (Marlon El Guapo Natural, 2020) The supposed father tells him that life ‘outside’ i.e., the diaspora, is hard and he is broke, he has no money. Then Marlon replies while walking away from the screen in his best performance of a ruffian: ‘Oh, si no pirate entonces, tu no eres el puro mio na ¹⁵ ’ [get lost then, you are no father of mine] (Marlon El Guapo Natural, 2020). Their performance uses language to turn risky subjects such as scarcity, high prices, or black-market business into comic relief for some of the harshest realities of a life governed by economic suspense:

Yo ando mal, malísimamente mal. No, hay que formar algo, obligado hay que hacer….

[I am doing bad, very bad (economically). We need to concoct something, we must…] (El Kende de Cayo Hueso, 2020d)

Cada vez que hay un motivito mami tú lo hechas todo. No, ¡todo lo liga! Es la ensalada, el congri, todo el mundo junto, no te importa nada.

[Every time there is a party you grab everything. And everything gets mixed (in your bag) the salad, the rice and beans. Everyone gets mixed, but you don’t care.] (Chupetin de Cuba, 2019c)

Si yo estuve un tiempo viviendo en el campo, tuve que sembrar boniato, cebolla y ají.

[Yes, I had to live in the countryside for a little bit, I had to plant yams, onions, and peppers.] ¹⁶ (Marlon El Guapo Natural, 2020)

The performances of the Instagram comedians offer a look into the non-broadcasted world of poor working-class Cubans – that is often implied on other Cuban comedy, but rarely performed by the people who directly live it. Even the riskiest comedic representation of everyday life in Cuba that is broadcasted on national TV, Vivir del Cuento, constrains its work to a manicured set that remains spatially and visually distant from real neighborhoods. In addition, shows like Vivir del Cuento, center Cubanness to the experience of Cubans within the island, where Cuban lives beyond the borders are often absent.

While the format of videos and content varies among Kende, Marlon, and Chupetin, they often produce performances that mix locations, temporalities, geographies, and objects. Their comedy asks us to defy common beliefs and knowledge. These performative and narrative acts within their comedy are acts of disidentification that claim social and personal agency (Muñoz, 1999) through the imagination and performance of ‘other worlds’ in which their aspirations are included.

Transnationalism and copresence

Chupetin de (of) Cuba opened his comedic Instagram account in mid-2019, featuring short monologues that address everyday issues in Cuba with a ‘choteo’ tone and queer campiness. Choteo in Cuba is defined as the act and way of being where nothing is taken seriously, and the ‘choteador’ makes fun of everything, even the most serious matters (Laguna, 2010; Mañach, 2010). Chupetin's videos also chime in on social gossip circulating in Cuban online spaces. Small details such as who is tagged or mentioned are defining aspects of this new wave of content creators in Cuba: the audiences, creators, and platforms are part of a flux of transnational meaning creation. For example in May, 2019 Chupetin uploaded a video to his profile under the caption ‘Gracias y mil gracias @boncoquinongo la mejor 95.7’ [Thank you, many thanks, @boncoquinongo 95.7 the best] (Chupetin de Cuba, 2019a). In the video we see two Radio DJ's Franjio Useche and Bonco Quiñongo of the Miami local station Ritmo 95.7 play a recorded shout-out that Chupetin sent them. We can hear Chupetin's voice saying that the DJs and the station is the most ‘stellar of all Miami’ to which the DJs respond saying that Chupetin is the newest influencer revelation of Cuba and end the video saying ‘Chupetin in thaaaa house’ (Chupetin de Cuba, 2019a). In another post uploaded when he was just starting his influencing page, we see him celebrating achieving eight thousand followers while posing for the camera with a cap of famous Miami nightclub E11even. (Chupetin de Cuba, 2019b). In his comedic performances and other posts uploaded to his profile, Chupetin constructs the Cuban experience transnationally, even when he has never left the island.

For the Cuban American scholar Muñoz (1999: xii), disidentification is a bid to take space in a society that has been colonized by the logics of normativity. Through the digital-cultural practice of disidentification or the performance of identities-in-difference (Muñoz, 1999), the comedy of Marlon, Kende and Chupetin create symbolic and embodied worlds of new national signification and belonging. I argue that these constitute the remaking of a popular identity and national reality that seeks to undo state-crafted imaginations and regulations of the permissible. In these performances, place gets reimagined in multiple cultural geographies, with Cuba being performatively located both in Havana and Miami. Geopolitical hostilities, local and international laws and regulations are disregarded, unacknowledged or bypassed. In this performed Cuba, time and space become porous because they come to exist in the digital, affective, and commercial transnational networks that contest established understandings of Cuba, Cubaness and its diaspora.

In addition, Muñoz's theory of disidentification is tied to the worldmaking capacities of queer performances as an enaction of futurities and utopia. Queer worldmaking is central to the disidentification act (Muñoz, 1996). Like Beliso-De Jesús (2015), I understand queer as a way of being that is strange in the world, or as Otis and Dunn (2021) abound while drawing on Muñoz: ‘a way of seeing and feeling the world differently’ (p. 9), that goes beyond sexual and gender identities. As a matter of fact, like Muñoz and Beliso De Jesús, I am also interested in how racialized subjectivity constitutes estranged embodiments or queerness, that informs worldmaking and disidentification acts. In Chupetin's Black queer choteo, we see how estranged ways of being power the imagination and enaction of new Cuban worlds.

This queerness and this estrangement are constantly present in the worlds that Chupetin, Kende and Marlon create. That is how a dog can be any breed they decide once they named it as such, and Soviet cars are sent ‘from’ Florida to Havana, and Cuba and the US seem not to be separated by decades of political- at times violent- schisms. Their ontological estrangement allows them to disrupt a temporal, spatial and national normativity while creating comedy that feels undeniably Cuban. The expressions and bustle of humble neighborhoods in the background pins the videos to contemporary life in Cuba, yet it is not fully the ‘real’ Cuba, or the ‘real’ anywhere for that matter. By intermingling the geographies and places of the diaspora, Soviet cars with Florida dealerships, neighborhood street fights sponsored by flooring companies in Miami, their comedy asks us to believe in an alternative third space. In articulating their disidentification through comedy, Marlon, Kende and Chupetin help us understand not only how laughable and ridiculous ‘reality’ can be, but also ask us to participate in the worldmaking, because for comedy to work, audiences must join in ‘the joke.’ A disidentification from a Cuba that excludes the Cuban diaspora and Cuban comedy that excludes the racialized realities of being calle. The disidentification and imagination of this alternative third space – a world just made- crafted by their estranged ways of being. However, because Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin have commercial incentives to cater to a wide variety of Cubans across sexual, racial, class, geographical, and political spectrums, they rarely build an explicitly racial, sexual, classed, or political argument in their jokes. Their performances do not directly address the power structures and supremacist thinking that have made their identities estranged. However, they neither perform a classless, asexual, heteronormative, post-racial, or politically unified Cuba. Instead, they create a comedy in which all or some of those components are mixed and forced to begin with: the infamous Cuban arroz con mango. ¹⁷

This rhetorical worldmaking and acts of disidentification represent the possibility of a paycheck through product placement, but the signification transcends the business transaction. Diaspora artists have long sung to the dreams of seeing a Cuba where Cuban-American businesses and brands populate Havana's streets as a way of imagining the possibility of a return. But articulating such visions was, until recently, exclusively in the realm of the Cuban diaspora. Songs such as Willy Chirino's La Habana D.C., where he dreams that the Cuban-American Sedano's supermarket chain has a place on Galeano Street in Centro Habana, have been articulations of such a dream.

Yet when Marlon, Kende, or Chupetin, promote Cuban-American businesses and build a narrative in their comedy that articulates a present relationship between the businesses of the Cuban diaspora and everyday life in Cuba, they have begun to materialize such imaginations in their localized performance. Their sponsors might not have a brick-and-mortar space on the island, but the diaspora's dreams to have a business presence are no longer farfetched. Their performance transnationally networks Cubans in the diaspora and on the island, making both groups copresent, albeit in a limited temporal way.

Copresence as a social interaction theory has been extensively studied by sociologists, organizational science, and virtual environment (VE) researchers (Campos-Castillo, 2012; Goffman, 1966; Licoppe, 2004; Zhao and Elesh, 2008). In general, copresence is understood as a form of togetherness that transcends co-location (Zhao and Elesh, 2008). While co-located individuals are within a mutually present sensory range (Goffman, 1966), copresent individuals ‘are not only located in each other's close proximity but also pay close attention to each other, ready to engage and be engaged’ (Zhao and Elesh, 2008: 570). Therefore, as Zhao and Elesh (2008) argue, copresence is best understood as a form of ‘being with’ instead of ‘being in’ others’ presence.

As digital technologies have challenged what ‘being with’ means, copresence as a form of social interaction is also understood across geographies and time zones (Campos-Castillo, 2012; Sydow, 2018). At a baseline, this type of copresence is observable in Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin's videos through their interactions with online audiences from outside Cuba, or by wearing a hat from a Miami nightclub. However, they mobilize another kind of copresence, where being with is expanded to being within, and where media is not only the vehicle for transnationalism but the witness and the record of embodied transnationalism. In their videos, the Cuban Instagram performers often pretended to have access and familiarity with goods or services offered by diasporic businesses:

Habiqo flooring, mi hermano. Escuchame a mi. Esa gente, esa gente son amigos mios. Podemos llegar a un acuerdo. Esa gente tienen los mejores pisos laminados, los mejores lozas certificadas. Madera, vinil …. De todooooo! Te dejan el gao mejor que el de Usher.

[Habiqo flooring, brother. Listen to me. They are my friends, we can reach an agreement. They have the best laminated floors, the best certified tiles, wood, vinyl, everythiiiiiing! They leave your crib better than Usher's]

(El Kende de Cayo Hueso, 2020c)

By recommending diasporic businesses to other Centro Habana residents in the sketch, Kende enacts a reality that creates some questions that he does not bother to answer. How are they, in Havana, going to access services and products located in Miami? Perhaps people in Cuba will tell their families abroad to send them flooring from Habiqo? Would those in Cuba recommend that brand to their diaspora families in a transnational circulation of product recommendation? Or are these sponsors hoping to target mostly the diaspora-based audiences of these Instagram Cuban comedians? While some of these options are more feasible than others, contemporary Cuban comedy enacts narratively a copresent reality that displaces material and physical separations between the Cubans on the island and the diaspora, and rather imagines a constant exchange and cohabitation, that can have but does not require digital mediation. This form of copresence goes beyond the earlier one established by sociologists and VE researchers.

In her study of transnational Santeria practices, Beliso-De Jesús (2015) documented how for religious practitioners of Afro-Cuban Regla de Ocha, copresence is a Blackened ontology that is constituted through the experience of media ¹⁸ and transnationalism (p. 215) and therefore shifts the ways that environments and presence are experienced and envisioned (p. 219). This form of copresence means that places, people, beings, customs, and rituals- despite their material separation- can be conjured in everyday life to embody ways of being and togetherness. The other is not merely invited to ‘being with,’ but is acted as to be ‘within’ oneself and surroundings. The copresent in Marlon, Kende and Chupetin's comedy disidentifies Cubans from their realities of geographic and political separation. In their comedy there is not in or out (of Cuba). Exile and insularity – two defining features of the contemporary Cuban experience, become an ontological impossibility.

By publishing their content online, Chupetin, Marlon, and Kende assert their subjectivity and estranged ways of being in the digital public while circumnavigating infrastructures of exclusion. Their performances of disidentification constitute ‘spectacles […] that offer the minoritarian subject a space to situate itself in history and size social agency’ (Muñoz, 1999: 1). But in doing so they have also extended social agency to their audiences, that can feel included in this expansively imagined and performed Cuba. They have centered and displaced Centro Habana, the nation, and diasporic spaces like Miami far beyond its borders, a disidentification act that reminds us that space and being cannot be contained and tucked away, because new worlds can be carried with and within others, no matter how estranged they have been made to feel.

Cuban subjectivity in a digital era

This article has discussed how three content creators are translating their estranged ontologies into social media platforms. In doing so, they are joining others in an act of co-creating a digital transnational network of cultural distribution that helps them circumnavigate the forced separation into which geopolitics have thrust them. The work of Marlon, Kende and Chupetin subvert geographical separation and material limitations by embodying in the present and through performance, worlds of their own making.

In a sense, they are living a media life (Deuze, 2011) that many of us live, in a constantly mediated experience. Yet, as I have shown here, they go further in their mediated experience by producing a visual and comedic thirdspace where notions of inside or outside the locus of belonging – the nation- become murkier and, at times, irrelevant. Because Cuba's contemporary era is characterized by a growing diaspora (Nationwide Encounters, 2023) Marlon, Kende, and Chupetin's work offer insights into how communities respond to these challenges through digital affordances and platform use.

Digital technologies are transforming the relationships between states and their citizens, between nations and their nationals – whether inside or outside the national geographical boundaries (Bernal, 2014). However, the digital is still trapped in a myriad of asymmetries, surveillance and precariousness (Duffy and Chan, 2019; Freelon et al., 2022). Yet, despite its limitations, digital technology penetration in Cuba has meant that the diaspora and island residents communicate at rates not seen before. Cubans on the island are also challenging the government's policies in increased numbers (Augustin et al., 2021). In addition, content creation in social media platforms has allowed Cubans to build a sustained and fruitful connection of symbolic and ontological re-significations that circumnavigates the nation-state's own preferred connections, and that finds alternative ways of making a living in an increasingly precarious economy. Once the audiences and the content creators found each other, currency, goods, and purveyors followed. Cuban businesses, audiences, and creators are building a network as though a nation (Bernal, 2014).

Amid those changes in Cuba's media landscape, it is perhaps unsurprising that Black, queer and differently abled Cubans are the ones who have managed to create comedy that imagines geographically dispersed people as being together and within each other. They build upon legacies of Blackness, ability and queerness in Cuba and the Caribbean, that yield an ontological position that evades and subverts constructions of the real.

In these re-significations and embodied performances, Cubans – the comedians and their audience- have begun to intuitively enact community beyond the time(s) and space(s) of the nation. But the nation cannot be fully avoided, so re-imaginations are always in conversation with everyday life experience in the country. It is this lived experience that in part fuels the imagination of worldmaking practices via social media. Overall, their work asks us to recognize cultural practices as a technology that, contextualized within localized historical and material conditions, will yield new reinterpretations of existing and belonging in/outside of digital worlds.