Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes an original understanding of digital music “piracy” when the state is complicit in practices understood, outside Cuba, as legally problematic.

Paper long abstract:

Due to health reasons, Fidel Castro resigned as Cuba's head of state in February 2008. His brother, Raul Castro, took the reins of power. Rather than pursuing the dictatorship of his older brother, the new president brought legal changes which confirmed that Cuba had entered a state of rapid transition: a period of late socialism. Among those changes, which considerably affects the everyday lives of Cubans, the Ministry of Work and Social Insurance allows some sectors of the economy to flourish on a private basis (Resolution 32/2010). This means that small companies owned by individual Cubans (with one employee allowed for specific professions) became legal for the first time since the Revolution (1959). This new approach towards small enterprises, effective since late 2010, targeted 178 professions. One of them is "Buyer and seller of CDs." In legalizing this activity, the Cuban state becomes fully complicit in the grassroots distribution of copied music through CDs and other devices - such as memory sticks. This paper proposes an original understanding of "piracy" when the state is complicit in practices understood, outside Cuba, as legally problematic. A historical and economic contextualization of music and film piracy in Cuban mass media will allow us to better grasp how intellectual rights are officially dealt with in this context. Finally, in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Havana among buyers and sellers of CDs deconstructs the idea of music piracy as illegal in contemporary Cuba and contributes to the theoretical debate on how music piracy should be approached.