Resumen Este artículo está basado en quince meses de trabajo de campo etnográfico en Cuba, los EE. UU., México, Panamá y Guyana para describir una red transnacional emergente de circulación de materiales que llamo el “circuito mula.” Muestro cómo los cubanos movilizan vastas redes transnacionales para realizar sus sistemas de circulación de materiales en la actualidad. Estas redes equivalen a una economía en sí misma que está redefiniendo lo que significa ser cubano dentro y fuera de la isla. Muestro cómo esta economía informal se basa en esferas de circulación e intercambio de género preexistentes, así como en nuevas modalidades de poder, cuyos efectos se pueden sentir lejos de la propia isla. De hecho, esta red, que surge de una escasez material histórica desde el socialismo, está conduciendo a la reificación de nuevas estructuras de clase, que la Revolución se había propuesto inicialmente desmantelar.

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Miami's sizeable Cuban diaspora has long used museums and galleries to produce and preserve their sense of community, united through the loss inherent to exile. Recent influxes of migration from Cuba (and beyond) are increasingly interpreted as a threat to the cultural forms many consider an “authentic” preservation of something now lost to Castro's Revolution. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic research within several of these organizations, this article argues that a recent proliferation of new museum spaces and their physical distribution across the city indicate growing anxieties and conflicts between diasporic cohorts. Drawing upon Foucault's concept of heterotopias, the article maps these conflicts onto other measures of difference, such as ethnicity and socioeconomic class. The article concludes that hegemonic and normative public spaces are being weaponized in a diasporic struggle over Cuban identity, while newer arrivals are responding in kind through the inauguration of counter‐spaces of cultural representation.

This article examines the role of digital ethnographic methods in an emerging research landscape struck by COVID-19, whereby more traditional anthropological methods have been rendered impossible due to social distancing restrictions. It argues that while anthropology has long privileged physical proximity and presence as a central tenet of ethnographic method, digital methods can also afford a certain sense of social distance, which in fact can be beneficial to the research process. It draws upon experiences of conducting fifteen months of fieldwork both online and offline amongst marginalised groups in Cuba and its diaspora in Miami to reveal the ways in which digital distance can level the relationship between researcher and researched, and ultimately lead to a more ethical way of carrying out fieldwork amongst vulnerable communities.

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