68 comms COUNTRY PROFILE

cuba calling
How are Cubans reacting to the sudden proliferation of mobile phones,
personal computers and other gadgets? And what is it like to own a PC in a land
where Internet access is severely restricted? Juan Pablo Conti finds out.

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When Fidel Castro finally
admitted in February that his
deteriorating health meant he
was not going to stand for
president again, after 49 years in
power, a sense of impending
change gripped the populace
of Cuba.
Five days after Castro’s
announcement, his younger
brother and long-term comrade
Raúl, who had been running the
country since mid-2006, was
confirmed as his successor by
the Communist Party of Cuba.
The new leader’s reputation as a
hardliner led political analysts
068-072_ET_issue18.indd 69
to predict little structural
change to the Cuban regime.
Raúl Castro’s inaugural
speech on 24 February did little
to dispel this view. The speech
promised a series of gradual
reforms aimed at lifting some
anachronistic restrictions,
without actually specifying
which restrictions, or when the
reforms would be introduced.
In the end, when the first set
of measures was announced a
few weeks later, it disappointed
those who had been holding out
hope for more radical change.
The prohibition on owning
private land, property or cars,
for example, remained firmly in
place, as did heavy restrictions
on foreign travel.
However, to the outside world,
the news that the Cuban govern-
ment was instead legalising
DVD players, TV sets (up to a
certain size), PCs, mobile phones
and microwave ovens for
personal use may have come as
somewhat of a surprise.
Many of us take for granted
the right to go to a shop, buy a
computer, bring it home and
plug it directly into the World
Wide Web. In Cuba, until April,
www.theiet.org/engtechmag 25 October - 7 November 2008 Engineering & Technology
69
buying a computer was illegal.
Now it isn’t, but even for those
who can afford one (in a country
where the average wage is less
than $20 a month), open Internet
access remains virtually
non-existent.
DISCONNECTED
“Internet use is severely
restricted in Cuba. A combina-
tion of Cuban government poli-
cy, the US trade embargo and
personal economic limitations
prevents the vast majority of
Cuban citizens from ever access-
ing the Internet,” reads the E
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70 comms COUNTRY PROFILE
“From now on all
Cubans will be allowed
to buy a PC, but it will
still be illegal to use!”
– a Cuban cartoon

F latest report on Cuba by the

OpenNet Initiative. This inde-
pendent group monitors how the
Web is filtered, and is jointly run
by the University of Toronto,
Harvard Law School, the
University of Cambridge and
Oxford University.
“The few who gain access are
limited by extensive monitoring
and excessive penalties for polit-
ical dissent expressed on the
Internet, leading to a climate of
self-censorship,” the report adds.
If you are a Cuban resident
intent on surfing the Web today,
you’ve got two or three options.
Contacting an ISP to come and
install a residential connection
is not among them, unless you
are a highly ranked government
official or a foreigner living in
the island.
The first option is to head to
your nearest Internet café – if
you’re fortunate enough to live
near one of only three Internet
cafés currently available for a
population of 11.5 million.
All three stores are in the
capital, Havana. Although
Internet cafés exist in other
cities, they’re reserved for
tourists. Cubans are banned Socialist propaganda features strongly in Cuban streets
from using them.
Havana’s Internet cafés are superhighway is to work for one not actually guarantee All the access you will gain
expensive, too. The cheapest of the state departments that employees will be able to surf through those machines is to a
charges $4 an hour, and the most enjoy Internet access in their the Web without restrictions. national intranet, where you
expensive $10 an hour. To make offices. Again, government “Yes, those computers are will only be able to see those
matters worse, the computers officials, but also scientists and connected, but only between websites that the government
are so slow and the bandwidth medical researchers, are said to themselves,” says JC, who asks lets you see.
feeding them so scarce that it enjoy this benefit. not to be identified in order to “There are places in Cuba
makes the whole experience – However, according to a protect his family from potential where you can access the open
after queuing for between one Cuban expatriate who emigrated reprisals by the Cuban govern- Internet: at Raúl Castro’s home,
and three hours to get in – quite to Chile in 1997 after 37 years ment. “You can’t use them to or that of his daughter,” he says.
irritating. living on the island, and has access the same Internet that “National Security garrisons or
The second option Cubans since been back a few times to you and I can access from any the international news office of
have to access the information visit his family, this option does other country in the Americas. the state newspaper Granma
will also have unfiltered Internet
access. But, obviously, ordinary
KEY INDICATORS Cubans are banned from
entering such premises.”
rst bes
t Another option is to go to one
wo
of the hotels offering Internet
Life expectancy at birth (years) 77 access to tourists. Up until April,
Literacy rate (% of people age 15+) 100 Cubans were forbidden from
Human development index (out of 177) 50 using these facilities: both using
the Internet access and staying
Rule of law (out of 208) 186 at these hotels was illegal. But
Voice and accountability (out of 208) 203 this was one of the restrictions
Digital opportunity index (out of 180) 126 that Raúl Castro saw as pointless
and lifted.
Internet users (% of population) 1.7 Finally, there are those who,
having bought a username and
Source (by indicator): World Bank 2006a, 2006a; UNDP 2006; World Bank 2006c, 2006c; ITU 2006, 2005 password on the black market

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‘I am a blind blogger,
a cybernaut with a
leaky raft that manages to
float through the support
of a spontaneous
network of citizens’
Yoani Sánchez, Cuban blogger

from someone with authorised dents living abroad, and often in

residential Internet access, wait
until after midnight to set up
what Cubans call an ‘under-
ground connection’. These are
made via slow, dial-up modems
using fixed telephone lines.
But the servers used to access
this traffic are still owned,
monitored and filtered by the
government through ETECSA,
the country’s only telecommuni-
cations company. People know
this, so their use of such
clandestine links is limited to
chatting with remote friends
and family or registering with
job agencies.
This whole scenario may help
explain why – as of April 2007
and according to figures from
the OpenNet Initiative – there
were only 190,000 regular
Internet users in Cuba, less than
2 per cent of the population.
THE BLIND BLOGGER
The emergence and growing
popularity of the blogging
phenomenon that is Yoani
Sánchez has come to symbolise
the daily struggle that ordinary
Cubans face to express
themselves on the Web.
While blogs about Cuban
affairs abound on the Internet,
most are written by Cuban dissi-
Miami, where the biggest
expatriate community is based.
Sánchez, a 33-year-old philolo-
gist-turned-computer enthu-
siast, is one of a very small
group of bloggers posting
content (counter-revolutionary
in nature) from inside Cuba –
and possibly the only one stating
her name and even showing
photos of herself and her
identity card.
As of May 2008, her site (http://
desdecuba.com/generaciony) was
receiving an average of 12 million
hits per month. Any one of her
posts, which she normally uses to
describe aspects of daily life in
her Havana neighbourhood,
normally receives between 1,500
and 4,000 comments.
To avoid direct control by
Cuban authorities, Sánchez uses
a server located in Germany to
host the site. However, two
recent international awards (the
2008 Ortega y Gasset Prize for
Digital Journalism and the
inclusion of her name in the last
edition of the Time 100 list of the
world’s most influential people)
were always going to catch the
attention of the censors.
Since the end of March 2008,
‘Generacion Y’, as the blog is
called, has been filtered out from
After 49 years of Fidel Castro, power has passed to his brother Raúl
the few public Internet cafés
and hotels that regular Cubans
(including Sánchez) use to
get online.
Not one to be deterred, the
blogger has found a way to
circumvent the blackout: “I
send my texts by email and my
friends [abroad] publish them,
and then email me back the
remarks that are left by
readers,” she wrote in her 1 July
post. “I am a blind blogger, a
cybernaut with a leaky raft that
manages to float through the
support of a spontaneous
network of citizens.”
That network of citizens is
also responsible for the blog’s
new English, French, Mandarin,
German, Italian, Japanese,
Portuguese, Polish and
Lithuanian versions. The trans-
lations are done by volunteers
around the world who have
never met Sánchez but who
sympathise with her cause.
Once Sánchez receives each
email containing the thousands
of comments triggered by her
latest post, she makes and
distributes digital copies of this
material in the form of CDs and
minidisks that allow her fellow
countrymen and women to –
modestly – join the debate.
Just as many Cubans had
managed to get around the
now-lifted ban on buying a PC by
building their own machines
using components acquired in
the black market, a well-oiled E

Many Cubans still have to rely on using payphones in the street, although the availability of mobile phones is increasing

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72 comms COUNTRY PROFILE
Cubans can now access the
Internet at the Hotel
Nacional de La Habana,
but website filtering is rife
F mechanism was also in place
to circumvent the ban on owning
a mobile phone. It consisted of
approaching a willing tourist
and convincing him or her to
buy a cellular contract, which
would then be used by the inter-
ested Cuban.
ETECSA operates a national
GSM network on the 900MHz
THE VENEZUELAN CONNECTION
Why is the Cuban government so
reluctant to allow Internet access
for all citizens? Cuban dissidents
insist the only reason is to prevent
access to, and dissemination of,
information opposed to the
revolutionary cause.
However, Cuba’s information
and communications minister
Ramiro Valdés puts the blame
squarely on the US economic
embargo imposed on the island
45 years ago. He says that, even
though major international fibre-
optic cables run very close to
Cuban shores, the embargo
prevents any Cuban company from
connecting to them.
This has left Cuba with a much
costlier alternative: satellite
connectivity. For the past few years,
the only link between a phone in
Cuba and anywhere else in the
world has been a satellite channel
offering just 124Mbit/s downlink
and 65Mbit/s uplink speeds.
This limited bandwidth is Cuba’s
only digital bridge to carry all
getty images, corbis
telephone and all Internet traffic to
and from the rest of the world. This
explains the high costs of using
international telecommunication
services in Cuba and the exorbitant
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068-072_ET_issue18.indd 72
band that began being deployed in
2001. An earlier TDMA network
on 800MHz that was launched in
1991 is now being phased out.
The lifting of the restriction on
mobile telephony, which became
effective on 14 April, means that
the thousands of Cubans who
already owned a line can register
them in their own names.
phone rates to call any number
there from abroad.
But things might be about to
change. Venezuelan president
Hugo Chávez (Fidel and Raúl
Castro’s closest ally in the region),
has offered to build a 1,550km
fibre-optic cable linking both
countries’ national infrastructures
to bring Cuba out of its current
state of semi-isolation.
The submarine cable will be laid
and operated by a newly created
company called Gran Caribe
Telecommunications, a joint venture
between Telecom Venezuela and
Cuba’s Transbit. Two pairs of cables
will run from the Venezuelan state of
Vargas to the province of Santiago de
Cuba. One will route traffic exclu-
sively to Cuba, while the other one
will expand communications to
other parts of the Caribbean.
The new cables will be able to
transport 64 channels of 10Gbit/s
each, a 3,000-fold increase in
Cuba’s international bandwidth.
Apart from dedicating this extra
capacity to improving voice and
Internet connectivity, the govern-
ment hopes to be able to launch
new television, telemedicine and
tele-education services.
By 24 April, ETECSA
announced 7,400 mobile
contracts had been signed. The
telecoms operator expects to sell
1.4 million new lines in the next
five years.
At first glance, such ambition
would appear unrealistic for a
service that costs over $100 (or
five months’ salary) just to set
China, Cuba’s other big political
and commercial ally, will also take
part in the project. The only equip-
ment suppliers invited to submit
technical proposals were Chinese
ZTE, Huawei Technologies and
Alcatel Shanghai Bell.
Should everything go to plan,
the Venezuelan connection will
up. The price of the handset then
needs to be added, and these will
be sold with a 200 per cent
mark-up, just as DVD players
and other now-legal consumer
electronics gadgets will.
For a cubano de a pie (or
‘Cuban on foot’, the islanders’
term for ordinary Cubans) this
will be beyond reach. However, it
is estimated that 60 per cent of
the population boost their
meagre state salary by either
receiving cash remittances from
relatives living abroad, renting
rooms to foreigners, getting tips
from tourists or earning
bonuses through their work in
factories and farms.
It is from this group of
Cubans that the new mobile
contracts will emerge. In the
process, the Caribbean nation
will try to close the gap that
means it currently has the
lowest cellular telephony
penetration in Latin America. L
have been built by the end of 2009,
and will start working in the first
half of 2010.
By then, if Cubans still find it
difficult and expensive to get
online and check what Yoani has to
say in her blog, the Imperialist
embargo won’t look so much
like the culprit.
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