Octopuses, remoras, and surfers: speculative stories from the offline space of digital circulation in Cuba

This paper focuses on the inventive everyday digital practices that Cubans have put into place to surf the waves of digital scarcity. The paper itself is an experiment in what Donna Haraway calls SF stories (Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation or Speculative Feminism). We will engage in a process of speculative narrative exploring stories about digital practices in Cuba by connecting them to the animal world. Through the use of metaphors belonging to the world of aquatic creatures emerging in our collaborators' stories, we will address everyday digital practices as symbiotic assemblages. We argue that the speculative mixture of fabulation and aquatic metaphors can function as an antidote to simple dualistic reductions, perhaps offering a critical understanding of the meaning of digital technologies outside Western deterministic and dualistic categories. Part of a larger project on digital culture in Cuba, this paper aims to present a speculative work of fabulation where the animal world meets technology, creative writing and situated stories.