Answering "the why DH question": Cuban Digital Rhetorics and the Emergence of a Broader Ecology of Interactional Prospects

As I move closer and closer to composing, revising, and submitting a proposal for my digital humanities project regarding the topic of Cuban digital rhetorics, it is important to also pause at this stage in order to meditate on how and why, specifically, the digital humanities might serve as an appropriate platform for my particular project. In once again broaching the concerns, readings, and topics that emerge from existing digital humanities projects, scholarship, and pedagogies, I begin to understand that my prospective efforts to explore Cuban digital rhetorics is embroiled in the sorts of questions and conversations about language, literacy, and culture that comprise what has come to constitute the digital humanities as a deeply-sensitive and incisive platform for organizing, delivering, and welcoming content or information in digital spaces. Indeed, the aforementioned questions and conversations within my particular project crop up issues ranging from access (in all of its varieties) all the way to collaboration and critical engagement. In what follows, I hope to provide a brief and exploratory snapshot of the manner in which a majority of the primary concerns espoused within the digital humanities also inhere in the work that I aim to engage in with my own digital humanities project regarding the topic of Cuban digital rhetorics.

In order to help situate my ultimate claim that the digital humanities are ultimately indispensable to conversations about Cuban digital rhetorics, it is first important to understand the role that access and surveillance have played within interpersonal rhetorics between and among Cuban peoples inside and outside of Cuba itself. Interpersonal rhetorics are an integral context through which to analyze all of these issues because of the ongoing and general (but not complete) absence of interactional prospects between Cuban citizens and those who reside outside of Cuba. In many ways, these diverse but interrelated Cuban populations and their interactional prospects have been shaped and re-organized by revolutions, diasporas, and discontent. Having experienced at least three major waves of diasporic and migrational activity away from Cuba for various political, religious, economic, and familial reasons since the late-1950s, the Cuban population has generally experienced the sorts of fractures and traumas that problematize efforts to articulate and deliver a stable conceptualization of what constitutes Cuban identity or Cuban rhetoric writ large. Made all the more extreme by the broad and inescapable ideological underpinnings that have informed the United States governments' long-standing embargo against Cuba and the ever-palpable stink of enmity that has inhered in the relationship between these nations, interactional prospects among Cuban peoples inside and outside of Cuba have been dictated and surveilled to the extent that little or no direct or productive interaction has taken place between these Cuban populations following the aforementioned diasporic and migrational activity. Despite even the most recent and unprecedented developments within diplomatic relations between the nations, interactional prospects as a whole have remained rather limited by virtually insurmountable issues of access and surveillance, foregrounded and in effect maintained by the Cuban government itself.

Though the number of Cuban citizens who currently have even temporary material access to digital technologies, including cellular phones, personal computers, and other related digital media still remains paltry compared to much of those Cuban populations residing outside of Cuba, as these numbers continue to rise more and more Cuban citizens are making their digital presence felt by extending their interactional prospects into platforms ranging from e-mail, blogs, social media, Wikipedia, and so forth. These Cuban citizens have therefore taken to and operated digital media and digital technologies in rather profound, creative, and important ways, ways that cannot necessarily be reduced to an umbrella term, like "digital literacy." Rather, they have carved out unique and personalized digital spaces in which new and exciting rhetorics and interactional prospects have emerged, many of which have been used to establish a generalized digital presence that aims to reach as wide and robust an audience as possible.

My interests within my own digital humanities project about Cuban digital rhetorics is certainly concerned and cognizant of the ways in which increased levels of material access have allowed some (not all) Cuban citizens more opportunities to expand their wheelhouse house of interactional prospects and to construct more public and socially-visible identities within various digital media and digital technologies. However, I am perhaps even more interested in how these emerging trends towards increased material access to digital media and digital technologies have prompted many Cuban citizens to expand their interactional prospects in the direction of more private, dedicated, and interpersonal rhetorics, rhetorics that have led many-a-Cuban back to the friends, families, and communities they lost complete touch with following the diasporic and migrational activity that followed from the events of the late-1950s onward. Considering the deafening silences and perhaps even enmities that existed between and among the Cuban populations residing inside and outside of Cuba, these interpersonal contexts ought to play a more significant role in how we consider, discuss, and circulate information about Cuban rhetorics, digital or otherwise.

The digital humanities serves as an appropriate and timely platform for doing work in and around Cuban digital rhetorics, because it offers unique and important opportunities to really explain and situate this push towards increased interactional prospects within the very medium that seems to be expanding these prospects in many different (yet interrelated) directions at once. In order to construct, frame, and preserve the space that might host this sort of digital humanities project as one that might facilitate collaboration and participation between and among the Cuban populations residing inside and outside of Cuba, though, it will at the very least be important to ensure that the terms and coding that organize this space are designed in accordance with much of the existing hardware and software in Cuba. While this might not resolve issues of material access in the short- or long-term, it might allow content contributors, coders, software developers, etc. in Cuba to co-construct and (hopefully) co-habit this digital space. In giving deep consideration to seemingly "micro-level" concerns with development, though, these methods will also impact opportunities for end-users as well. Moreover, locating this digital space within concerted efforts to speak more directly to minimal hardware and software requirements or capabilities will frame this digital humanities project as one that is deeply concerned with the sort of critical engagement with existing digital technologies that constitutes much of what theorists dub, "creating," as opposed to its swift and uncritical counterpart, "making." Ultimately, I see a great deal of potential in the marriage between my project about Cuban digital rhetorics and the sorts of affordances and possibilities inherent to the digital humanities, affordances and possibilities that I hope to continue to expand on as I massage and refine my proposal.