The commodification of mobile and internet communications under state socialism in Cuba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current processes of commodification in Cuba’s mobile and Internet communications surface in the form of an incongruent relationship between the (relatively high) prices for accessing these amenities, provided by a state-owned company, and the (relatively low) salaries of the state-employed workers. While criticizing state-led commodification, this thesis de-naturalizes the idea of communication commodities as private goods, and historicizes the articulation of commodification under state socialism in Cuba. It argues that, on the side of the state socialist management, the commodification of wireless and Internet communications is a state-led strategy for capturing hard currency from the sphere of circulation. Specifically, these processes of commodification are related to transnational value circulation processes such as remittances (income transfers sent to Cubans from family or friends living overseas), and to local commodification processes such as the TRD scheme (state-run hard currency stores) deployed by the socialist state to capture hard currency from remittances since the economic crisis in the 1990s. The research attempts to offer an explanation for commodification on the basis of Political Economy of Communication (PEC) scholarship, however empirical work demonstrates the inability of some of the PEC frameworks developed in the Global North to address commodification under state socialism given its historical complexity. As a result, the analysis grows beyond the proposed framework to suggest the integration of theories on imperialism and political economy from the periphery in future research in order to contribute to the development of a Political Economy of Communication under State Socialism. Finally, the thesis suggests the potential for grassroots-based decommodification of communications in Cuba in the form of state/civil society alliances which could counteract the existing pressures towards commodification that spring from the capitalist and imperialistic relations of production, distribution and exchange that characterize the telecom sector on a global scale.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".