Ears

This chapter opens with an exploration of audience research techniques and the ways that even those conducting the research acknowledged the impossible nature of their task. This sets out the paradox that structures the chapter: even while there was no guarantee that listening publics were listening, they came to occupy a central position in the political struggles of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The notion of fidelity runs through the chapter as it traces the mediated strategies with which institutions and entities vied for the loyalty of listeners and laid the ground for the media battles of the anti-Batista struggle in Cuba. The “radio wars” that erupted in the Caribbean, a series of clandestine broadcasts urging the overthrow of Castro, Trujillo, and Duvalier in the early 1960s, speak to the centrality of mediated interventions in the changing geopolitics of the Cold War. The chapter ends with an emphasis on silence, as it attends to the ways that Jamaican broadcasting continued to speak only to limited publics and tendered a deaf ear to the creole-inflected sounds of politics on the eve of decolonization.

Receivers

Picking up in the early 1920s, this chapter tracks the shift of radio technology from military to commercial uses. It follows linkages among the changing material conditions for Caribbean workers, the radio industry’s search for materials like mica and bakelite, and the generation of new markets. Having placed broadcasting in its ecological and political contexts, the chapter uses the trajectories of two amateur radio operators, John Grinan, a New Yorker/Jamaican son of a plantation owner and a member of the team which produced the first transatlantic wireless signals, and Frank Jones, an American plantation manager in Cuba, famous for his self-promoting shortwave transmissions to recover the world of the tinkerers’ romance with an ether jammed with distant sounds. It traces the creation of audiences and publics for the emerging technology, arguing that radio appealed to listeners not because it shrank distances, but because it underscored them, demarcating the Caribbean as exotic and remote. Ironically, it was the deeper technological connections that would propel the mapping of these imagined boundaries between the “tropics” and “the world.”

Circuits

This chapter relates the workings of circuits of information in U.S.-occupied Haiti (1915-1934). Upon their arrival, Marines encountered rich yet elusive circuits of news, rumor and gossip driven by Haiti’s peripatetic market women. Attempts to access or bypass these circuits with nascent wireless and telephone networks had limited success. These circuits came together most strikingly in the U.S. Marines’ use of radio sets as torture devices to electrocute Haitians during interrogations.

Signal

The book opens with an account of Frank Butler’s journey to Guantánamo, Cuba to build the region’s first wireless station. This introductory chapter frames the advent of both cables and wireless communication technologies through their encounters and difficulties with nature, and uses these anecdotes to situate the book’s analysis within histories of technology and of empire. It places the research as engaged with the work of scholars of radio and colonialism, language and politics and the creation of listening publics, including Frantz Fanon, Kamau Brathwaite, Michael Warner and Kate Lacey.

Resistors

This chapter relies on Anna Tsing’s suggestion that global phenomena are underwritten by the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” to refer both to the increased presence of wires, cables and electronic material in the environment and ways those materials animated certain repertoires of political action. The public spheres in urban settings such as those in 1930s Port au Prince and Santiago were fundamentally shaped by this dynamic. In Santiago, Cuba, rebels regularly cut wires or sabotaged transmitters, but they also seized radio stations as a first step in political activism. In Port au Prince, anti-imperialists criticized the proliferation of public loudspeakers while local businessmen built radio stations in order to wield influence. As the power of telegraphs, telephones and wireless became increasingly evident, historical actors from all sides of the ideological spectrum came to comprehend electronically transmitted sound as the idiom through which politics could be conducted.

Sign-Off

This concluding chapter serves as an epilogue and situates the relevance of broadcasting to present-day concerns in the Caribbean. It offers an account of the archives and sources on which the book is based, and ends by connecting the themes of the book with the writing of authors including Caryl Phillips and Edwidge Danticat.

Voice

Taking up the problem of whether and how radio broadcasts spoke to Caribbean audiences, this chapter explores the introduction of the sounds of blackness throughout the region. The sounds of what Kamau Brathwaite called “nation language” entered the soundscapes of Haiti and Kingston with implications for the politics of belonging in the late 1950s. The voices and sounds of people speaking--in addition to singing—in creole generated a new interest in broadcasting. Radio personalities like Louise Bennett revitalized a marginalized medium and convinced ordinary people that the radio could speak to them. In Haiti, one of the first regular programs to use creole was “Le Quart d’Heure de Frère Hiss,” sponsored by Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and staffed by Haitian actors and writers. The traditions of creole and the technological innovations that enabled the implementation of broadcasting in the Caribbean should not be imagined as two forms of media in conflict with one another. Rather they were both necessary to the production of broadcasting as a modern medium.