1024665

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ICS0010.1177/13678779211024665International Journal of Cultural StudiesHumphreys

International Journal of Cultural Studies

 ­
2021, Vol. 24(6) 1009–1026
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13678779211024665
https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779211024665
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Original Article
Loving idols: K-pop and the
limits of neoliberal solidarity
in Cuba

Laura-Zoë Humphreys
Department of Communication, Tulane University, USA

Abstract
In the 2010s, new forms of hand-to-hand digital media piracy displaced state control over media
distribution in Cuba and facilitated the influx of global media, including K-Pop, just as Cuban
socialism came under renewed pressure through economic reform. In this context, this article
contends, Cuban youth turned to K-pop to reimagine the self, sociality, and Cuba’s place in
the world. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows how K-pop appealed to fans
by fostering fantasies of becoming enterprising individuals through neoliberal solidarity. These
aspirations were reinforced by the industry’s pursuit of immediation, that is, its use of digital
media to produce intimate and immediate connections that denied the mediations on which they
depended. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how desires for and anxieties about immediacy
motivate K-pop fandom and its geo-political imaginaries and how a global capitalist culture
industry can appeal to fans by offering relief from the neoliberal capitalism it reproduces.

Keywords
Cuba, Hallyu, immediation, K-pop, Latin America, neoliberal solidarity, neoliberalism,
postsocialism, socialism, transnational media

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

Corresponding author:
Laura-Zoë Humphreys, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Tulane University, 1229
Broadway St., 219 Newcomb Hall, New Orleans, 70118-5665, USA.
Email: lhumphreys@tulane.edu
1010 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(6)

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 indi-
viduals 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 connec-
tions they desired with idols and other global and local fans.
In making these arguments, I build on research that has explored the sometimes contra-
dictory links between Hallyu and neoliberalism. Scholars studying the reception of
K-dramas in Latin America, for instance, have shown how these series provide an alterna-
tive to US media through which individuals reimagine modernity and fantasize about over-
coming 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-commodifica-
tion (Cho, 2019). In a surprising twist, however, K-pop has also played a role in contempo-
rary 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 solidar-
ity, 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
Humphreys 1011

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 journal-
ists and fans were drawing attention to the work-related struggles of K-pop idols, link-
ing, 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 medi-
ated 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 aspi-
rations 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 infor-
mal 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
1012 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(6)

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 repro-
ducing 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 conjunc-
tion with chaebols – large, family-owned conglomerates that often provided for employee
welfare in a corporate model likened to extended family (Song, 2003: 406). This devel-
opmentalist model began to shift in 1987, when mass protests led to the first direct presi-
dential 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 statis-
tics 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-con-
suming and expensive. Nonetheless, by 2010, Cubans had found new methods to over-
come 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”
Humphreys 1013

or the “package”: 1 terabyte of pirated digital media that is organized into labelled fold-
ers 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 pro-
grams 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 esti-
mated 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 grow-
ing 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 incul-
cate 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 passion-
ate 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,
1014 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(6)

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 prom-
ise of autonomy and creativity. Contrary to this depiction of the self as hyper-autono-
mous 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 perfor-
mances, 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 exploi-
tation of performers commodifies idols’ life experiences and identities while encourag-
ing 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 resil-
ient 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
Humphreys 1015

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 reso-
nance 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 collec-
tive. 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 decentraliza-
tion 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 dis-
cipline 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 medi-
cine, engineering, or education rather than in the program of her choice – foreign lan-
guages – 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
1016 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(6)

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 criti-
cism, 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 repeat-
edly 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 con-
trasted K-pop to what they decried as reggaetón’s misogyny, consumerism, and vulgar-
ity. 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 hierar-
chy 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 threat-
ened 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.
Humphreys 1017

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 oth-
ers 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 danc-
ing 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 ener-
getic 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 appropri-
ately muscled chest. While such displays of ecstatic emotion are typical for all pop
1018 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(6)

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.
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 cam-
era, 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 cry-
ing 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.

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
Humphreys 1019

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, stalk-
ing 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 fan-
dom. 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.
1020 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(6)

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
Humphreys 1021

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 soli-
darity 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 per-
son; 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 “emo-
tionally, 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).

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
1022 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(6)

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 estab-
lishing 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 col-
leagues 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 popu-
lar 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 trac-
tion 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 volun-
teer labor. ARTCOR administrators, meanwhile, insisted that in spite of the club’s offi-
cial 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
Humphreys 1023

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 repre-
sentations 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 busi-
nesses 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:

1024 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(6)

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 dem-
onstrated 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 conse-
quences 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 eco-
nomic 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 resem-
blance 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.
Humphreys 1025

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Hongwei Thorn Chen and David Oh for their insightful reading and comments on
numerous drafts of this article; to Carolina Caballero, Ruth Goldberg, Benjamin Han, Ana López,
Eric Herhuth, Susan Lord and the participants at Tulane Anthropology’s colloquium series and the
2019 Kyujanggak Symposium on Korean Studies for their generative feedback on early presenta-
tions and thoughts about this project; to the editors and anonymous reviewers at IJCS for their
careful revision and editing; and to the ARTCOR organizers and fans and South Korean repre-
sentatives in Cuba who so generously shared their stories with me.

Funding
This research was funded by generous awards from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Tulane
University’s COR Research Fellowship, the Carol Lavin Bernick Faculty Grant, the Stone Center
for Latin American Studies, and Newcomb College Institute.

Note
1. Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of participants. Quotes are taken from
interviews conducted by the author in Havana in 2018 and 2020. All translations are my own.

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Author biography
Laura-Zoë Humphreys is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane
University. Her research focuses on cinema and censorship, digital media piracy and urban place-
making, media ethnography, and post/socialism. Her monograph, Fidel between the Lines:
Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema (Duke University Press, 2019) tracks
the changing dynamics of social criticism, censorship, and allegory in state-funded and independ-
ent Cuban cinema from 1985 to 2017. Her work has also appeared in Social Text and Mediapolis.