It's 10:00 a.m. at the Plaza Hotel a few yards from Havana's Capitol building. A smell of moisturizer wafts from the bodies of tourists rushing through their coffee so they can go out and explore the city. On one side of the lobby several people line up at the entrance to a small office where there are six computers connected to Internet. Inside the room, anchored to the wall, a security camera focuses directly on keyboards and the faces of people who use the service. No one speaks. Everyone seems very focused. Any web page can take several minutes to open and some give up after an hour without being able to read their email.
But most surprising is that most of those sitting there are not foreigners, but Cubans seeking the oxygen of information and communication. They seem willing to sacrifice even one-third the average monthly salary for 60 minutes of surfing on the great World Wide Web.
While outside our borders there is increasing debate between permissibility versus control on the web, 11 million Cuban citizens wonder if 2012 will be the year that we will finally become Internet users. We feel as if we're abandoned and motionless by the side of the expressway, with ever faster and unattainable kilobytes speeding by us. Again and again the announced deadline for providing us with mass access to cyberspace has failed, leaving us isolated from and behind the rest of the world.
July 2011 was the last official date for the fiber optic cable laid between Cuba and Venezuela began to function, and to multiply by 3,000 times the Island's scant connectivity. But for now, the status of implementation is one of the country's best kept secrets, second only to reports of the health of former President Fidel Castro.
Some say corruption, technical incompetence and mismanagement have left the modern cable -- laid at a cost of $70 million -- not functioning. Others murmur that is already operational but only available to "very reliable" agencies and institutions, such as the Ministry of Interior. The most credible version, however, appears to be that the Cuban government has stopped its implementation for fear of the flow of information it would bring to the nation. A fear, it seems, that the house of cards of government power -- held up at the expense of secrecy and censored news -- would come tumbling down.
Official journalists have been warned not to touch the subject of the cable, and prices for access from the hotels continue to vary between 6 and 12 dollars an hour, or more. Having a home connection is a privilege given only to the most politically reliable, or the result of the audacity of those who pirate a state account.
Instead of opening up to social networking and other interactive tools, the authorities have offered in vitro versions of Facebook or Wikipedia style sites to schools and workplaces. They spend thousands of dollars from the national budget to create highly controlled programs and interfaces -- for local use only -- that will keep local readers far from the hubbub of the democratic Internet.
Each day they postpone our entry into the virtual village, the country's academic and professional capital plummets a little more. In addition, they thereby delay our development as citizens, and keep us oblivious to the debates and trends that are occurring in the world today.
Right now the controversy between intellectual property and free exchange of files across the network gains strength far from our ears. While news headlines all over the planet announce the arrest of several directors of the Megaupload site, it's embarrassing to know that the vast majority of Cubans do not even know the existence of this portal.
Echoes of the criticisms over the new content controls on services like Twitter reach us, but lacking any framework, we can't decipher their real implications. When we do manage to read the critical analysis of the so-called SOPA Law (the Stop Online Piracy Act), or of Spain's controversial Sinde Law (that country's version of an online anti-piracy act), we wonder what the name of the ministerial -- or presidential -- directive is that keeps us far from the great World Wide Web. Worst of all is that we can't even complain about such limitations by filling the forums with texts or images of protest, or decreeing a blackout day on the social networks.
They have reasons to suspect web surfers and many motives to remain vigilant and active before what is happening. Because not only the times of sharing music, movies and software may be coming to an end. The fight against piracy has become the fight against the Web 2.0 itself, putting at risk the most public and dynamic part of this advance. But the doubt that assaults Cubans is whether the Internet -- as it is known today -- is going to die before we ever experience it, if it will become a cage before we could have used it as wings.
Follow Yoani Sanchez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yoanifromcuba
BBC News - Cuba welcomes new internet cable link with Venezuela
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: RESTRICTIONS ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN CUBA- Amnesty International Publications 2010
CONTROL OF INTERNET ACCESS
In Cuba, access to the internet remains under state control. It is regulated by the Law of Security of Information, which prohibits access to internet services from private homes. Therefore, the internet in Cuba has a social vocation and remains accessible at education centres, work-places and other public institutions. Internet can also be accessed in hotels but at a high cost. In October 2009, the government adopted a new law allowing the Cuban Postal Services to establish cyber-cafés in its premises and offer internet access to the public. However, home connections are not yet allowed for the vast majority of Cubans and only those favoured by the government are able to access the internet from their own homes.
However, many blogs are not accessible from within Cuba because the Cuban authorities have put in place filters restricting access. The blogs affected are mainly those that openly criticize the Cuban government and its restrictions on freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly and movement. For example, Generation Y is one of the dozens of blogs that are filtered or intermittently blocked by the government and are not accessible inside Cuba.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR25/005/2010/en/62b9caf8-8407-4a08-90bb-b5e8339634fe/amr250052010en.pdf
There is no such law. Most Cuban homes are, unfortunately, still served by the old analogue telephone system which simply hasn't the capacity to carry large volumes of internet traffic.
As usual, as far as Cuba is concerned, Amnesty International plays fast and loose with the truth. Perhaps it's enough to know that everything they publish about the island comes from those self-styled 'dissidents', tainted as they are by a bitter, self-loathing perception of their own country, and more importantly, their own desperately insignificant status within it.
Cuba should embrace the modern world and look to their future rather than shuttering their doors. An open society, free trade and billions in tourism await once the rulers get out of the bomb shelter. A Dominican friend told me recently that the island is full of untapped potential: lumber, minerals, coal. These represent clear opportunity for jobs and improved living standards for Cubans, if only Castro and gang weren't so xenophobic. A normalized relationship with the United States - long overdue - would not mean the end of 'communism' nor their reign of power, but the prospect of the people learning that everything the government has told them not being true drives the dictatorship to great lengths. It is a new day, gentlemen. I'll wager that with new jobs, money, and travel available at last, you'd find that folks would still want to be Cubans, and no mass exodus would take place. Afraid of criticism? Heck, up here we give our leaders lots of guff and challenge, yet they still hold power.
Perhaps you, and others of like mind, should make the effort to see the world as these countries do. You might find that you've been corralled into an information straightjacket every bit as restrictive and powerful as you think you perceive elsewhere.
And there's nothing mysterious about the Cuban government's priorities. As has been often stated, education, business and government itself come top of the list, way before private access.
And it's worth repeating that all this wouldn't be just happening now; it would have been all done and dusted long ago if it hadn't been for the USA's illegal and immoral blockade/embargo, a point that seems to have evaded Sánchez and her handlers/translators completely.
The Cuban regime, more wary of bloggers than traditional dissidents, decided to expand its online presence to combat them. Now that Venezuelan fibre optic cable is available on the island, the authorities have what they need to improve connection speeds and lower costs. There are fewer and fewer excuses for maintaining censorship or keeping the population away from the Web. Are we witnessing signs of a Web Springtime, now that the journalists persecuted during the Black Springtime of March 2003 have all been released from prison?
Fibre optic cable in Cuba: Unprecedented potential for growth?
According to the authorities, nearly 10% of Cuba’s population is connected to the Internet. That does not necessarily mean that they have access to the World Wide Web. Two parallel networks co-exist on the island: the international network and a closely monitored Cuban intranet consisting only of an encyclopaedia, email addresses ending in “.cu” used by universities and government officials – a sort of “Cuban Wikipedia” – and a few government news websites such as Granma.
http://en.rsf.org/internet-enemie-cuba,39756.html
"British press baron Lord Northcliff said, "News is something that someone, somewhere wants to keep secret, everything else is advertising." If this is true, then U.S. government funding of Reporters Without Borders must be news, because the organization and its friends in Washington have gone to extraordinary lengths to cover it up. ..... "
http://tinyurl.com/6xp599m