Loving idols: K-pop and the limits of neoliberal solidarity in Cuba

Loving idols

“We see the pretty part of K-pop, but that’s not the reality,” Yenifer, ¹ a 34-year-old Cuban fan of South Korean popular media told me, as we sat chatting at the foot of a monument in Havana, Cuba, in December 2018. She continued. “They [K-pop idols] work really hard and have to put up with a lot from their fans, from their representatives, and from their agencies. But the only way that we can support them is to listen to and love their music.” Beginning in the late 1990s, the South Korean culture industry, dubbed Hallyu or the South Korean Wave by Chinese journalists, swept the globe. In the 2010s, Cubans, too, were bitten by the Hallyu bug. As Yenifer’s comment suggests, however, Cuban fans were often critical of the overwork and competition reputed to characterize K-pop. Such criticism, however, only reinforced fans’ support for the industry as they tried to make up for the pains their idols suffered through their own love and solidarity.

In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with K-pop fans in Havana, Cuba, to explore how this and other seemingly paradoxical understandings of labor, solidarity, and neoliberal capitalism played out in Cuban responses to Hallyu. As I show here, Cuban K-pop fandom amplified important socio-economic shifts in Cuba. Hallyu emerged as the result of neoliberal economic reforms carried out in South Korea in the 1990s and as part of a strategy of soft power. As of 2021, by contrast, Cuba remained one of the last state socialist nations and one of the few countries in the world with diplomatic relations with North instead of South Korea. From 2010 on, however, Cuba’s socialist model came under renewed pressure amidst state-led efforts to decentralize the socialist economy and expand the private business sector. New forms of hand-to-hand digital media piracy, meanwhile, bypassed state control over media distribution and the island’s limited internet access to facilitate the influx of global media, including K-pop.

In this context, Cuban youth turned to K-pop to reimagine the self, sociality, and Cuba’s place in the world. This article provides the first scholarly account of this local fandom. Beyond Cuba, Cuban K-pop fandom matters because it shows how desires for and anxieties about immediacy motivate K-pop fandom and its geo-political imaginaries, and because it reveals how a global capitalist industry can appeal to fans by offering relief from the neoliberal capitalism it nonetheless reproduces. K-pop, I demonstrate, appealed to Cuban fans by fostering fantasies of becoming successful enterprising individuals through what I term “neoliberal solidarity.” These aspirations depended on the imbrication of digital media and in-person sociality. They also continuously came up against fans’ worries that they might fail to achieve the intimate and immediate connections they desired with idols and other global and local fans.

In making these arguments, I build on research that has explored the sometimes contradictory links between Hallyu and neoliberalism. Scholars studying the reception of K-dramas in Latin America, for instance, have shown how these series provide an alternative to US media through which individuals reimagine modernity and fantasize about overcoming class divides (Carranza Ko et al., 2014; Han, 2019). Work on K-pop, meanwhile, has demonstrated how its new media genres foster global populism and self-commodification (Cho, 2019). In a surprising twist, however, K-pop has also played a role in contemporary activism, including in 2019 in anti-neoliberal protests in Chile (Pino Diaz, 2021) and in 2020 in Black Lives Matters protests in the US (Cho, 2020), even as, as Michelle Cho points out, such activism remains bound to commodity and celebrity logics.

K-pop fandom’s multivalent capacity to promote and protest capitalism and how this plays out in fans’ everyday lives is at the center of the story I tell here. I show how K-pop appeals to youth by offering up dreams of individual self-actualization via group solidarity, thereby reinforcing neoliberal values and practices not in spite of but rather through criticism of neoliberalism. In Cuba, I demonstrate, K-pop fostered desires for consumer goods as well as for a sense of self that resonated with what scholars have termed the “enterprising individual” (Rose 1996). By the late 2010s, however, international journalists and fans were drawing attention to the work-related struggles of K-pop idols, linking, for instance, a rash of suicides by performers in 2017 and 2019 to pressures by management companies, cyberbullying, and misogyny. In this context, Cuban fans, like other international fans, became increasingly critical of the industry and attuned to idols’ well-publicized narratives of struggle. Yet, as Yenifer’s comment that fans must love K-pop idols more in order to support them through their exploitative labor conditions suggests, a fantasy of solidarity cast in intimate and familial rather than class terms mediated between such criticism and the appeal of self-actualization. If K-pop appealed to Cuban youth, in other words, it was because it held out promises of thriving in precarious economic circumstances through the care of others, a fantasy that helped harness fans’ unpaid labor and skills in support of the K-pop industry and South Korean diplomacy and fueled their competition with one another.

Such feelings of intimate collectivity or neoliberal solidarity, in turn, depended on efforts within the K-pop industry to foster what scholars have termed “immediation” (Mazzarella, 2006; Ranjan, 2017). As William Mazzarella points out, mediation – whether produced through electronic or digital media or through language and other semiotic processes – is essential to social and political life. Yet dreams of bypassing mediation have historically shaped visions of modernity. In the 21st century, these aspirations combined with new digital technologies to accelerate practices of immediation, or the use of ever more complex media systems to produce a form of sociality that denies the mediations through which it is achieved. Hallyu scholars have documented how new digital media genres and the imbrication of embodied presence and digital technologies produce feelings of liveness and intimacy in K-pop (Cho, 2018; S Kim, 2018). With important exceptions (Käng, 2014; Otmazgin and Lyan, 2013), however, much of the scholarship on K-pop relies on political economy, textual analysis, or interviews alone, with the result that it prioritizes online over in-person activities and can take for granted that promises of intimacy enfolded in media genres are achieved in practice.

My work instead draws on over a decade of fieldwork experience in Havana, Cuba, and five months of participant observation-based fieldwork in 2018 and 2020 with Havana’s K-pop fans. This included participating in and observing events organized by Cuba’s first and largest Hallyu fan club, ARTCOR or the Club Amistad de Arte Coreano (Korean Art Friendship Club), socializing with fans and South Korean officials at informal events and gatherings, and conducting semi-structured interviews with 53 Cuban fans. This immersive ethnographic research revealed both how digital media and in-person sociality intertwined to produce intimacy, and how the pursuit of immediation was plagued by fears of its failure.

Anxieties over immediation, finally, had important consequences for South Korean soft power efforts. Just as the Trump administration was increasing sanctions against Cuba, South Korean officials were using Hallyu to try to build allegiances with Cuba, with mixed results. On the one hand, Cuban fans recounted growing curiosity about South Korea and exhilarating experiences of resonance with one another and with K-pop idols. On the other hand, desires for immediacy established new racial and geo-political hierarchies, as Cubans interpreted their marginality from K-pop circuits as a sign of their own peripheral modernity or, conversely, asserted the superiority of foreign fans and forged regional identities. In what follows, then, I show how Cuban fans experimented with neoliberal selves and sociality through K-pop, demonstrating how a global culture industry can appeal to young people by fostering experiences of solidarity while reproducing neoliberalism and geo-political and racial divides.

Hallyu comes to Havana

As has been well documented, the rise of Hallyu is closely tied to neoliberal reforms in South Korea. Following the partition of Korea into the communist North and the Western-allied South, a succession of military governments took a developmentalist approach in South Korea, rapidly industrializing the nation through protectionist policies in conjunction with chaebols – large, family-owned conglomerates that often provided for employee welfare in a corporate model likened to extended family (Song, 2003: 406). This developmentalist model began to shift in 1987, when mass protests led to the first direct presidential election, ushering in a new emphasis on individual freedom, consumption, and globalization. These trends were further entrenched in 1997–8, when a financial crisis in East Asia prompted South Korea to seek out a multi-billion-dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As with similar bailouts around the world, this loan came with requirements for reform. The South Korean government opened up domestic markets to foreign investment and instituted corporate downsizing of the chaebols, while South Koreans faced growing unemployment and the loss of earlier standards of living and job security.

As part of these reforms, the South Korean government also developed the nation’s creative industries, transitioning from protectionist policies designed to safeguard national culture from foreign influence to promoting cinema, television, and music as export commodities. The year 2002 was a key turning point in the spread of Hallyu to Latin America (Han, 2017). As part of nation-branding efforts during the World Cup jointly hosted by South Korea and its former colonial occupant, Japan, South Korean embassies in Latin America distributed series for free or at low cost to Latin American television stations. K-pop, by contrast, took off in Latin America and globally in the 2010s thanks to the industry’s exploitation of new social media platforms and genres (Lee and Nornes, 2015; Min et al., 2018).

In Cuba, the popularity of Hallyu coincided with this second wave and important changes in the nation’s politics, economy, and media. Following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the new state nationalized all major media outlets. In the 21st century, Cubans encountered new obstacles to media access. In 2009, Cuban state statistics recorded internet access at only 2.9% of the population (ONE, 2010). These statistics steadily improved thanks to the establishment of public wi-fi hotspots in 2015 and the rollout of 3G services in 2018. As of 2020, however, getting online remained time-consuming and expensive. Nonetheless, by 2010, Cubans had found new methods to overcome these limitations and to challenge the state monopoly over media distribution. That year, under the new leadership of Raúl Castro, the government announced plans to shift several thousand workers from the state sector to the private sector, instituting economic reforms that have been pursued by his successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel, since the latter took over the presidency in 2018. Building on this decentralization of the economy, as of 2010, a handful of collectives on the island created what is referred to as the “paquete” or the “package”: 1 terabyte of pirated digital media that is organized into labelled folders and circulated across the island weekly using flash drives and hard drives. While the paquete itself is not legal, many of those involved in its distribution operate under state licenses as DVD vendors or computer technicians.

The decentralization of media distribution enabled by the paquete and related forms of offline media exchange was key to establishing Hallyu fandom in Cuba. While the fans I worked with went to great lengths to access South Korean media online, they invariably combined such efforts with hand-to-hand circulation. Adela (age 18) and Sandra (age 17), for instance, reported that they and their friends took turns using the application VidMate to download the newest K-pop music video from the public wi-fi hot spot near their high school, which they then shared among themselves through Zapya, a peer-to-peer file sharing app that allows users to transfer media directly between smart phones. Efforts to circumvent limited internet access also played a central role in the foundation of Cuba’s first official Hallyu fan club. After Cuban state television broadcast a handful of K-dramas in 2012, a number of older women drawn to the television programs started a discussion about the shows over Facebook. In 2015, they created ARTCOR so that, as one of the original founders explained to me, “people who couldn’t access social media could participate in our conversation.” Emphasizing the centrality of offline media circulation to the club, one of the first events held by ARTCOR was what organizers termed a “festival de copia” or copy festival, during which members met to copy media over laptops, flash and hard drives, and smart phones. As of 2020, this event remained one of the club’s main offerings, while other social events provided further opportunities to share media.

From 2015 on, membership in ARTCOR quickly grew, reaching what organizers estimated as 5600 members in December 2020. The older women who founded the club were drawn primarily to K-dramas, but ARTCOR soon attracted a younger membership interested in K-pop. The first to join were young women aged 14 to 25. By 2018, a growing number of young men were participating in the club, drawn either by interests in K-pop and dance or, as some of ARTCOR’s organizers wryly commented to me, because they had figured out where the girls were. In August of 2016, ARTCOR was granted official status as a socio-cultural project under a municipal branch of Cuba’s Ministry of Culture, a move that was justified by arguing that the club used Korean culture to inculcate social respect in youth. By 2018, ARTCOR was receiving regular financial support from KOTRA, a state-funded South Korean organization that represents the nation’s business interests abroad, and from the South Korean embassy in Mexico. By 2020, fan clubs had sprung up in other cities across the island. ARTCOR remained the largest and most important of these, however, serving as host for nation-wide competitions and as liaison with South Korean officials and institutions.

Enterprising individuals in neoliberal solidarity

As noted earlier, however, as of 2021, Cuba’s diplomatic ties were to the communist North rather than to capitalist South Korea. This discrepancy thus raises questions about how K-pop fandom speaks to changing values on the island as it undergoes economic reform and what new light this reception might shed on K-pop’s global appeal. The Cuban fans with whom I worked provided myriad reasons for why they were so passionate about K-pop, including its catchy rhythms and complete spectacle, as well as the cutting-edge style and beauty of K-pop idols. Of the many attractions cited by fans, however, two stood out: individual hard work and love. Here I show how these appeals upheld an ideal of neoliberal subjectivity with a twist, sustaining fantasies of becoming self-actualizing individuals through the care of others.

In a classic definition of neoliberal subjectivity, Nicholas Rose (1996: 154) argues that the enterprising individual “will make an enterprise of its life, seek to maximize its own human capital, project itself a future, and . . . shape itself in order to become that which it wishes to be.” Under neoliberalism, individuals ideally find fulfillment not in spite of but through work, a project that they undertake by transforming themselves into commodities, continuously acquiring new skills, and trading in job security for the promise of autonomy and creativity. Contrary to this depiction of the self as hyper-autonomous and self-exploiting, at least outside of South Korea, K-pop idols have more often been likened to the cookie-cutter products of a Fordist factory system. Yet becoming an idol notoriously entails a disciplined self-commodification that makes of the performers model neoliberal subjects.

Key to the success of K-pop was a vertically integrated production system established in the late 1990s by SM Entertainment, one of the “big three” entertainment groups that dominate the K-pop industry. Following this model, by the mid-2000s South Korean idols were typically all-boy or all-girl groups with anywhere from 4 to 21 members who fused pop genres with synchronized dance performance. Potential idols are recruited at young ages from among thousands of competitors, then sent through rigorous voice, dance, and foreign language lessons.

Ultimately, only some of these recruits are selected to form part of carefully crafted idol groups who compete for fans in a racialized regime. Dredge Käng (2015) describes K-pop idols as part of a new class of “white Asians,” while John Lie (2012: 355) notes that K-pop remakes inner-city genres to conform to middle-class notions of propriety. Giving truth to these assessments, South Korean entertainment companies reportedly select idols for their porcelain skin, require them to keep to strict diets, enact control over their social lives, and enforce a demanding schedule, including training, live performances, appearances on variety and reality TV programs, and a continuous release of behind-the-scenes videos and images posted to social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and V-Live, a South Korean video streaming service.

As with Japanese popular culture before it (Lukács, 2010), this cross-platform exploitation of performers commodifies idols’ life experiences and identities while encouraging fans to believe that they know their idols intimately. Dayana (age 24), for instance, enthused to me about a documentary that followed her favorite K-pop group backstage. “They are too much like gods up on stage,” she commented. “This documentary showed they are exactly like us.” K-pop’s competitive selection process and rigorous schedules, meanwhile, reinforced perceptions of the industry as requiring extraordinary and even excessive effort. While some of the Cuban fans I spoke with admired the South Korean system of recruiting and training idols, many were critical of the industry’s demanding conditions. Yet these conditions also played an integral role in establishing idols as resilient and self-actualized enterprising individuals.

This is particularly the case for the seven-member boy group, BTS, which rose to fame after winning Billboard’s top social media artist award – a fan-voted category for best use of social media – in 2017, 2018, and 2019. BTS is managed by Big Hit Entertainment, a relatively small entertainment company thought to allow its artists more artistic input. As such, BTS earned their global following thanks in part to their reputation for creative autonomy as well as for the group’s oft-repeated message that youth should work hard to realize their dreams. This message came to the fore, for instance, in a speech BTS leader RM gave at the UN in September 2018 for the launch of UNICEF’s “Generation Unlimited” program, which aims to prepare youth for the workforce. RM encouraged young people to “speak themselves,” describing how he had gone from trying “to jam himself into the molds that other people made” to achieving his dream of becoming a musician in spite of the many “hurdles” and moments when he “just wanted to quit” (N Kim, 2018). This call to pursue one’s dreams in spite of societal pressures arguably resonates with neoliberal efforts to create disciplined, risk-assuming workers through appeals to self-realization.

Yet as RM’s references to the difficulties that BTS faced suggest, the group also emphasizes the challenges confronting youth. The group earned the UN invite thanks to the “Love Myself” campaign that they launched in 2017 with UNICEF to end violence against youth. They are also known for speaking out against eating disorders, bullying, suicide, and, in their hit 2015 track, “Silver Spoon,” for criticizing repeat injunctions that youth “try harder” in impossible economic circumstances. Such challenges, the group insists, are not ones that youth should have to overcome alone. In his UN speech, RM argued that he had achieved his dream thanks to “my other BTS members by my side and because of the love and support of our fans.”

These messages of self-actualization through group solidarity have particular resonance in Cuba. Paralleling South Korea’s own shifts in the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic crisis that followed in Cuba saw a growing emphasis on individual desires as citizens grew resistant to state demands for sacrifice for the collective. As shortages of everything from food to toilet paper multiplied, and the relative purchasing worth of state salaries plummeted, career aspirations shifted. While the state continued to prioritize medical education within its fully funded university programs, for instance, youth often longed instead to study and train for more remunerative careers in the tourist or creative industries. Finally, the 2010 reforms to the economy accelerated criticism of state socialist work practices. Raúl Castro himself argued that decentralization was necessary to “erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working” (Peters, 2012: 7).

In this context, K-pop fandom resonated with a growing emphasis on individual discipline and self-actualization. Claudia (age 18) explained to me that she liked BTS because:

They communicate messages of loving yourself and pursuing your dreams, of continuing to fight even when people tell you that you can’t do it or the economy is against you. Because look at what they have achieved. They started almost without fans and now they’ve spoken in the UN; they’ve won prizes. You see the results of the work they’ve put in for five years – their suffering. We just see them as pretty but they suffer, they go hungry, they go on diets, they injure themselves. They work hard for our enjoyment.

As in RM’s speech to the UN, in Claudia’s comment, awareness of the K-pop industry’s demanding labor conditions fuels a narrative of struggle and success. For Claudia, this narrative held personal meaning. After she was offered a university placement in medicine, engineering, or education rather than in the program of her choice – foreign languages – she took a year out from formal studies. Thanks to connections made through ARTCOR, she studied French and Korean while preparing to retake the university placement exam, thereby holding onto her dream of becoming a translator and traveling abroad, an opportunity that is heavily restricted because of Cubans’ limited financial means and because most countries view Cubans as immigration risks.

In other cases, youth were inspired to cultivate new skills and devote their unpaid labor to producing content that expanded K-pop’s global reach. Dayana (cited above) recounted how, at a time when she felt BTS was suffering from excessive online criticism, she learned how to produce and direct a music video in which some 80 participants danced to a BTS song, and uploaded it to YouTube so that BTS “would see it and would know that here in Cuba there are ARMY [BTS’s fan base] who were supporting them.” As I recount in the next sections, Cuban fans were also actively involved in international K-pop and Hallyu competitions, training rigorously in the hopes of securing local and international fame, and providing hours of volunteer work that benefitted the K-pop industry and South Korean diplomacy in Cuba.

As both RM’s speech and this fan labor in service of their idols suggests, however, fans appreciated BTS not only for their individual achievements but also for how these were cast as the result of mutual care. Celia (age 18) explained to me that BTS member Jung-kook Jeon (aka Jungkook) was her “bias” – a term used to refer to one’s favorite idol – “because he works hard to sing perfectly. I like people who make an effort.” If Jungkook’s perceived work ethic played an important part in Celia’s devotion, however, so did his familial dedication to his group members. She explained: “He started in the K-pop industry when he was only 14 years old and the other members are people he has had around him all this time, so he sees them as brothers and fathers.” Fans also repeatedly emphasized how such belonging extended beyond idols. If they loved BTS, fans told me, this was because BTS “does everything for its fans.”

Nonetheless, there were limits to the solidarity inspired by BTS and other groups. While some Cuban fans also enjoyed American pop music and reggaetón, many contrasted K-pop to what they decried as reggaetón’s misogyny, consumerism, and vulgarity. Notably, reggaetón has historically been linked to Black and non-white, urban, working-class communities. In Cuba, K-pop thus arguably contributes to a hierarchy of taste that keeps whiteness and middle-class respectability at its apex, even if this hierarchy takes Koreans rather than Caucasians as its standard. At other times, as we shall see, anxiety over Cuba’s marginality to K-pop circuits and competition among fans threatened hopes for solidarity through K-pop.

Community and competition

As outlined earlier, Cubans’ reliance on offline methods of media circulation contributed to a strong sociality among fans. Yet while Cuban fan practices responded to the island’s infrastructural challenges, they also revealed how the K-pop industry itself promotes face-to-face activities. By the 2010s, K-pop groups were regularly releasing what are termed dance practice videos, where groups perform the choreography for their songs in a dance studio in casual clothing, excluding the cuts and storytelling of music videos. In Cuba as elsewhere (Käng, 2014; Otmazgin and Lyan, 2013), dance practice videos prompted fans to practice and perform choreographies together, fueling feelings of group solidarity (Figure 1). But these activities also contributed to anxieties about failing to achieve the intimate and immediate connections fans desired, as Cuban youth engaged in fierce competition with one another or worried about the island’s peripheral location in a new geo-political hierarchy with South Korea at its center.

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Figure 1.

Two young women emulate the dance moves of K-pop idols in a dance practice video while others look on at an outdoor celebration held by ARTCOR in a park in Vedado, Havana

In Havana, for instance, the emphasis on performing K-pop choreographies with others led to one of ARTCOR’s most popular events: dance parties held bimonthly and later weekly termed “discoreas.” First held in a cafeteria in December 2015, by the summer of 2018, the club had moved the discorea to a large, centrally located, state-owned concert space that accommodated an estimated 800 participants. Youth came from all over Havana to attend discoreas, traveling for an hour or more on Havana’s crowded and infrequent public transit. Inside, meanwhile, the scene was regularly chaotic, as young people dressed in their best K-pop finery packed into the auditorium, singing and dancing along to K-pop music videos projected on enormous screens to either side of a large stage or gathering in a corner to share media over smartphones using Zapya. For songs with simple choreographies well-known to most, such as Psy’s “Gangnam Style” or Big Bang’s “Bang Bang Bang,” the entire auditorium would suddenly transform into an energetic and enthusiastic mass moving and singing in synchrony. Lesser-known songs or more complicated choreographies, meanwhile, elicited performances by small groups while others looked on or moved as inspired to the music.

Participants praised the discoreas for providing them with an opportunity to escape the discrimination they, like other Latin American fans, felt was directed at K-pop fans and to socialize with others who shared their interests. Yet the discorea and its mix of in-person and digital media sociality also raised concerns about Cuba’s place in the new geo-political order established through Hallyu. The discorea was notorious for its din, as fans burst into screams when their favorite idols appeared on the monitors or, in one instance, when a young idol in a concert video tore open his shirt to display an appropriately muscled chest. While such displays of ecstatic emotion are typical for all pop fandoms, what is curious with the discoreas is that they took place in the absence of the physical presence of performers.

Fans’ reflections about this experience spoke to the anxieties of immediation. When I asked Celia (cited above) and her friend, Sheyla (age 27), why they screamed when their favorite idol appeared on the monitors at the discorea, Sheyla replied “it’s emotion. Because you don’t have that person near you and the only thing that you do have is that video and since the video is close to you it’s like you have your idol in front of you” (Figures 2 and 3). If, in this interpretation, video secured the intimate connection of fans to idols, for Celia it was a bitter reminder of peripherality. If Cubans screamed at videos, she explained, it was because the island was excluded from K-pop tours so that Cuban fans would never know the pleasure of seeing their idols perform live.

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Figures 2 and 3.

A young woman at a discorea holds her hands over her heart and then reaches them out to make the heart symbol popularized by Hallyu as a favorite idol group makes an appearance on the video monitors, showing how digital media can fuel fans’ feelings of intimate immediacy with idols

Amalia (age 14) echoed this ambivalence. In 2017, BTS created a video greeting for their Cuban fans that was subsequently played repeatedly at discoreas. In the video, the seven members of the group, dressed in matching collared shirts and addressing the camera, thank their Cuban fans for loving them and promise to continue delivering their “blood, sweat, and tears,” a line taken from a 2016 song. “We always said that BTS didn’t know anything about Cuba – that for them Cuba didn’t exist,” Amalia observed, recalling her reaction upon seeing this video for the first time. “When I saw the video, I started crying and screaming, because it didn’t seem possible that they knew about Cuba.” This is in many ways a story of successful immediation. Prompted by BTS’s direct address mediated through video letter, Amalia’s sense of connection to her idols was so forceful it moved her to paroxysms of emotion. Like Celia, however, for Amalia such feelings remained entangled in concern about Cuba’s marginality to K-pop circuits.

For others, by contrast, the din at the discoreas indicated the threat that Hallyu fandom posed to Cuban autonomy and fan solidarity. Fans repeatedly emphasized that their passion for South Korean media in no way diminished their cubanidad, yet at times they seemed less than confident in this assertion. K-pop fans are often stereotyped as going to extremes, stalking their favorite performers or engaging in practices of “anti-fandom” in which individuals criticize competitors to raise the profile of their favorite idols. ARMY was considered by many to be the most aggressive. María (age 24), for instance, complained that the popularity of BTS had introduced a rivalry between K-pop fans that she deemed foreign to Cubans. “Cuba is a society that is more open, more relaxed,” she observed:

We aren’t into this fanaticism – that if I like this idol then why don’t you like him, or if I like this idol then you need to like the other. As a 24-year old, my generation doesn’t understand this ultra-fanaticism among teenagers.

Others concurred that interest in BTS was behind a growing divisiveness in K-pop fandom. Marcos (age 24) noted that his favorite K-pop group was Got7 because “they are a big family where the problems of one are the problems of all.” He then quickly mobilized this praise to criticize the behavior of ARMY. “This shows you that K-pop should be like a big family. [Got7] gets along well with other K-pop groups. And yet ARMY spends all of its time misbehaving with IGot7 [the Got7 fan club].”

Tensions between solidarity and competition were even more apparent in another event central to Cuban and international K-pop fandom. In 2011, South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs began collaborating with private corporations to produce an annual cover dance competition, the K-pop World Festival, which takes place yearly in Changwon, Korea. Contestants for the festival are selected from competitions around the world, the winners of which are provided with an all-expenses paid trip to Changwon. The recorded version of the festival, meanwhile, emphasizes its soft power goals. In the 2018 festival, interviews with contestants and a video montage representing their nation of provenance, often hopelessly stereotypical, preceded each performance, drawing the contestants into an Olympics-style performance with the celebration of South Korea at its heart.

ARTCOR held its first preliminary competition for the Changwon K-pop World Festival in 2017. By the summer of 2018, young people had organized themselves into cover dance groups. Members of these groups frequently emphasized the obstacles they had to surmount to put together their performances in a resource-scarce context like Cuba. To assemble outfits that resembled those of the idols they covered, for instance, fans worked with family members or seamstresses to sew costume elements themselves. In other cases, they saved up money to purchase items through relatives abroad or “mules” – individuals who acquire goods from nearby countries to sell on the island. In the absence of access to dance studios, meanwhile, the dancers practiced in one another’s homes, parks, school yards, or at the foot of public monuments. In one instance, I spent hours on a Friday evening recording a group practice on a wharf in Old Havana (Figures 4 and 5). Ships gliding across the harbor echoed the young women’s dreams of traveling elsewhere, while a group of young men who had been skateboarding on the wharf settled in to watch.

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Figures 4 and 5.

Young women in a cover dance group practice their routine for Cuba’s 2018 K-pop World Festival on a wharf in Old Havana

These material limitations, however, also allowed dancers to cast their hobby in terms that emulated their idols’ stories of individual success and group solidarity. One cover group that performed in the 2018 competition described in detail how they liked BTS because of the group’s messages about perseverance and being “one family,” then went on to apply this analysis to their own efforts. “When you see the end result, it makes you want to cry,” explained Adriana (age 18), a member of this group. “Because we have worked a lot and against a lot of challenges: waking up early in the morning, going to one another’s houses, learning the choreography.” “We are like siblings,” her groupmate, Carolina (age 15) elaborated. “If one person has a problem then everyone gets involved.” For dancers, the synchronized dance style of K-pop groups itself emblematized the solidarity to which they aspired. BTS is very “united,” explained Bianca, the mother of a dancer in an all-boys cover group. “Nobody wants to stand out more than the other person; everyone has an opportunity.” “This is how I try to work as well – to make sure that everyone gets a chance to stand out,” elaborated her son, Yasmany (age 18). “I’m the leader of the group but I don’t want to be the only person who is in the center of the choreography.”

Once more, however, such solidarity had limits. While members of different cover groups were often friendly, competition could become acute. Following the 2018 national competition, one dancer was so frustrated with her group’s failure to place that she broke a toe kicking a wall backstage. Others questioned the fairness of the judging, leveling arguments of favoritism against the Cuban dance professionals and the South Korean embassy representatives who flew in from Mexico to judge the competition. One woman in ARTCOR’s leadership noted that the festival kept youth “active and alert” but “emotionally, socially, it causes chaos. They fight with one another, they don’t get along, they say things.” For another ARTCOR organizer, the source of the rivalries was clear. “You know how Cubans are,” she observed. “The minute there’s interest, the problems start. Cubans in general want to leave the country and now, if you win the competition, you get to go to Korea.” The closing of the 2018 Havana competition, meanwhile, emphasized ARTCOR’s efforts to balance desire for South Korea with cubanidad. As the judges convened, a salsa group entertained the audience with a creative rendition of a classic song, interspersing the choral injunction to “mueve la cintura” (move your hips) with lines such as “mañana nos vamos para Corea” (tomorrow we’re going to Korea). “¡Corea! ¡Corea! ¡Corea!” chanted the audience in response as they danced in the aisles waiting to hear who had won the coveted prize (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Performance at Cuba’s 2018 K-pop World Festival by the cover dance group, Limitless. After winning the Cuban competition, Limitless became the first Cuban group to travel to Changwon, South Korea, to compete in the festival

K-pop diplomacy

As scenes such as this make clear, South Korean diplomacy and corporate activity have also been critical to the explosion of Hallyu fandom in Cuba. The 2010s saw an uptick in South Korean media interest in the island and in Latin America more broadly (M Kim, 2020), which often reinforced images of the island as exotic and peripheral. In 2017, the South Korean reality TV show, One Night and Two Days, featured a group of actors and musicians who traveled to Cuba and Kazakhstan to test whether or not their fame had spread to these “distant” parts of the globe. In 2018, tvN released a new K-drama, Encounter, where the protagonists break loose from Korean social restrictions to fall in love in Havana in scenes shot on location that employed Cuban Hallyu fans as extras. A diplomat from the South Korean embassy in Mexico explained this growing interest to me at Cuba’s 2018 K-pop World Festival competition. “We have tried to negotiate establishing an embassy,” he told me, when I asked him why the South Korean government promoted such events. “But for now, that’s impossible. This is the best way forward for us.” “They love us!” he exclaimed a moment later, looking around him at the excited audience. Indeed, just then a group of Cubans approached the diplomat and his colleagues to ask them to pose for a picture, as though nationality itself were enough to transform them into idols.

In the early 2000s, political scientist Joseph Nye argued that nations should use popular media as part of a strategy of “soft power” to win international influence. Scholars have questioned the coherence of Nye’s theorizations of power while Nye himself, along with Youna Kim (2013), acknowledges that pop culture doesn’t necessarily produce an image of the nation that serves diplomatic endeavors. Whatever its conceptual failings, however, as the examples above demonstrate, arguments about soft power have had traction in diplomatic practice. This returns us with a twist to questions posed earlier. How do Cuban fans reconcile South Korea’s neoliberal capitalism with state socialism? And how does Hallyu, with its promises of immediate and intimate transnational collectivity, impact Cuban views of South Korea and South Koreans?

K-pop diplomacy can be deemed successful in at least one regard: foreign fans are often willing to do the work that diplomats and others deem part of their portfolios. By 2018, the Korea Foundation, which operates under the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was employing a visiting Korean language professor in Havana. Her job, she told me, was not just to teach language but also to “let the world know Korea and Korean culture,” including through hosting events. But she was blocked from carrying out such activities by her Cuban supervisor, who was afraid of political repercussions. ARTCOR stepped into this gap, facilitating connections to Cuban institutions and hours of volunteer labor. ARTCOR administrators, meanwhile, insisted that in spite of the club’s official state status, they too often encountered resistance from Cuban officials suspicious of their involvement with South Korea. In order to navigate such obstacles, at least in Spanish, the name of the club carefully designated “Korean art” broadly writ rather than South Korean media as its focus, while organizers and members of ARTCOR often insisted that “la cultura de Corea es una” (“the culture of Korea is one.”)

Also, as in many other parts of the world, interest in Hallyu inspired Cuban fans to develop a passion for Korean culture more broadly. Numerous fans noted that they enjoyed historical K-dramas as an opportunity to learn more about Korea. Others were studying Korean with the Korea Foundation professor, South Korean missionaries living in Havana, or teachers supplied by the Casa Cuba Corea (Korea-Cuba House), a museum dedicated to Korean immigrants to Cuba that was founded in 2014 with help from the South Korean embassy in Mexico and the active involvement of non-Korean Hallyu fans. As in other Latin American contexts (Min, 2020; Min et al., 2018), Hallyu fandom also prompted many non-Asian Cubans to re-examine racial prejudices. My interlocutors insisted that their interest in Hallyu helped them to overcome tendencies in Cuba to group all East Asians together as Chinese without regard for origin, noting that they were quick to correct those who referred disparagingly to their interests in “esos chinos” (“those Chinese”) by asserting the Korean origins of K-pop and K-dramas.

In spite of ARTCOR administration’s argument that the club does not distinguish between North and South Korea, meanwhile, interest in Hallyu clearly went hand in hand with an admiration for South Korea’s consumer modernity. A number of fans noted their fascination with the up-to-date fashions featured in K-pop and the fancy cars, modern home interiors, and state-of-the-art kitchen appliances in K-dramas. Others suggested that as a small, formerly colonized nation, South Korea was a particularly relevant model of economic growth for Cuba. Those members of the club who had been fortunate enough to win opportunities to travel to South Korea, meanwhile, repeatedly remarked on the country’s development.

Even as fans admired South Korean technology and social order, however, they remained ambivalent about other aspects of South Korean society they gleaned from South Korean media. Many of my interlocutors, for instance, were scandalized by representations of class divides in South Korean media. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, socio-economic differences between Cubans grew as those with funds to start small businesses or access to remittances from family abroad did better than those reliant on state salaries. Hallyu fans in Havana acknowledged such differences, but insisted these were minor compared to South Korean class disparities. In Cuba, claimed Tania (age 24), “some people have a little more money than others, but everyone has to stand in the same line to buy bread and nobody is treated as though they are superior to others.” In South Korea, by contrast, noted Mario (age 19), “people of a higher economic class are almost untouchables and they mistreat people from lower classes.”

Fans’ belief in the greater equality and solidarity that existed among Cubans thanks, ironically, both to the lingering ideals of state socialism and to widespread necessity, often translated into feelings of national and regional superiority. Here, Cuba’s distance from South Korea and the dominant pathways of K-pop circulation ceased to be a source of anxiety and instead became a strength. In what was a common refrain, Adela (cited above) explained:

We’re not like the Koreans who have [the idols] beside them every day. Because really the people who support BTS the least are Korean ARMY – they’re always criticizing them, saying that they are too skinny or too ugly instead of supporting them just as they are.”

Her friend Sandra (cited above) elaborated:

Korean and Latin American fans are always fighting on the internet because we Latin Americans say that you have to leave them alone: they aren’t dolls who you can manipulate. They are people who have feelings, who have the right to eat.

As I have shown throughout this article, Cuban fans responded to K-pop’s exploitative work conditions by promising to become better, more loving fans. Adela and Sandra’s responses make clear how such feelings of intimate solidarity with K-pop idols fueled regional antagonisms and disparaging views of South Koreans, even as they reinforced fans’ support for the K-pop industry.

Conclusion

From the time I first visited Havana in 2003 through 2020, Cubans of all ages repeatedly complained to me that they were “losing all their values,” trading in an earlier solidarity for mounting individualism and self-interest. Digital media piracy has exacerbated such concerns as it dislodges state control over media distribution, at once allowing citizens to circumvent state censorship and undermining the Cuban state’s long-standing efforts to ward off American and capitalist cultural imperialism. Ironically, however, as I have shown, K-pop’s popularity rests in part on how it filled the vacuum left by earlier forms of socialist solidarity, offering up a neoliberal solidarity that promises individual success through collective care even as it reinforces class, race, and geo-political divides. In pursuit of immediation, Cuban K-pop fans disciplined themselves into hard-working units in extreme competition with one another while supporting the K-pop industry and South Korean diplomacy through their unpaid labor and skill. Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts through pop culture mixed with racial and national stereotypes. Cuban fans demonstrated genuine curiosity about South Korea while criticizing South Koreans; South Korean media introduced Cuba to Korean audiences but reproduced stereotypes of Cuba as an exotic land of passion; and denigration of reggaetón by comparison to K-pop risked perpetuating idealizations of whiteness and middle-class respectability. The consequences of K-pop’s promise of neoliberal solidarity are all the more glaring when one considers that Hallyu captured Cubans’ imaginations against the backdrop of an economic crisis worsened by the pandemic and reforms that will continue to disadvantage Black Cubans, the elderly, and those without family abroad.

Yet there is also something more at stake in K-pop’s pleasures. In an article often cited in analyses of the industry, Siegfried Kracauer (1995) argues that the mass ornament formed by the Tiller girls, who, like K-pop idols, were chosen for their physical resemblance and disciplined to dance in unison, emblematized alienation. For Kracauer, the mass ornament had the potential to challenge capitalism by laying bare its mechanisms to viewers. K-pop, by contrast, demonstrates how a culture industry can gain global popularity by giving voice to dissatisfaction with neoliberalism while falling short of demanding meaningful transformation. Nonetheless, K-pop also holds out a utopian dimension, offering up experiences of pleasure and self-fulfillment through solidarity that may yet be mobilized into more liberating form.