Spanish Taster Session - "Visions of Havana on Instagram"

Havana is often fetishized as a place "frozen in time:" the sort of place people often wish to see "before it changes". But what do we base this expectation on? This lecture explores how Instagram is an important way that outsiders imagine and experience the city. Further enabled by the features of Instagram’s format to ‘age’ photos and highlight specific textures and colours, Instagram photos draw on and add to a nostalgic vision of an exotic, underdeveloped Havana. However, with the majority of images created and circulated by tourists rather than the city's residents (due to a relative lack of access to digital technologies in Cuba) the resulting vision is somewhat lopsided.