ISSUE 78 - Vol.3 - MAY 2020 - COPIES

Cuba's Internet Restrictions Continue to Crumble as It Legalizes Private Wifi and Imported Routers

Man holds a phone with an app called Sube, Cuba’s homegrown version of UberPhoto: AP.

If you want to get online in Cuba, you currently have to go to a government-sanctioned hotspot, build your own illicit hotspot using illegal routers, or create a hotspot with an expensive 3G connection on your phone. But that will soon change, according to the Associated Press.

Cuba’s Ministry of Communication (Mincom) announced on Wednesday that the government will allow people to set up their own private wifi networks at home. State-owned telecom company Etecsa, the only internet provider on the island, will continue to operate without competition but the country will reportedly liberalize policies that prohibited the importation of routers for personal use. The changes are expected to be formally allowed by this July.
Cuba has historically had some of the most restrictive internet laws in the world, banning any news website that’s critical of the Cuban government. But the past few years have seen slow but steady change, allowing people to get online in a way that they hadn’t before. Cubans were only recently granted access to mobile internet on their phones in December 2018.
As the German news outlet DW notes, the changes around private wifi could potentially also allow for private internet cafes to operate soon, though that’s just speculation at this point. State-run internet cafes were first opened in 2013, but the enormous cost is still prohibitive for the majority of Cubans. An Etecsa data package for 600 megabytes costs roughly $7, but that’s a problem when the average salary in Cuba is just $30 to $50 per month.
From DW:
Announcing the measures, Mincom said the changes would: “Contribute to the computerization of society, the well-being of citizens, the sovereignty of the country and the prevention against the harmful effects of non-ionizing radiation.”
Google tried to establish a presence in Cuba back in 2014, even before President Barack Obama made moves to normalize relations with the Communist country. But Cuba has been hesitant to let too many outsiders control its information infrastructure—perhaps with good reason. The U.S. tried to create its own anti-government “Cuban Twitter” from 2009 until 2012 under a social network called ZunZuneo, operated through text messages. ZunZuneo is based on Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s tweet. The goal was to artificially create a popular uprising against the Cuban government, which obviously failed.
That program, run through the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID) was shut down but only became public after a reporter from Associated Press broke the story in 2014. Google signed a deal this past March to create its own internet connection to Cuba, though the details are still sketchy.
Google did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

Matt Novak is the editor of Gizmodo's Paleofuture blog

Google Reaches a Deal to Improve Internet Speed in Cuba

Silicon Valley giant Google Inc has signed a deal with Cuba, raising hopes of speeding up internet connectivity on the island by linking its undersea fibre optic cables with the United States’.
Internet service in Cuba is very slow, because it is powered by a single submarine cable running under the Caribbean to Venezuela that has been unable to support its relatively small but growing number of internet users.
Under the deal signed with state-run telecom firm Etecsa, engineers from Google will explore ways of connecting the network with other cables. Such an action will speed up internet service, making it easier for Cubans to browse Google sites such as YouTube and Google Maps etcs.
The communist government opened mobile internet for its citizens only late last year. However, nearly two million people have already signed up to 3G service, according to Associated Press.
However, most Cubans are dependent on internet cafes or outdoor wifi hotspots to browse the web. The search engine giant has been trying to improve internet service on the island ever since the previous Barack Obama administration started easing tensions with Cuba.
Google Inc is in fact the first to provide Cubans with high-speed internet. Its online technology center in Havana offers a free internet service at speeds nearly 70 times faster than public Wi-Fi hotspots.
But its deal may be criticised in Washington, because President Donald Trump is talking of getting tough on Cuba, accusing the communist government of supporting Venezuelan socialist government led by Nicolas Maduro.
Caribbean CUBA Cuba Internet access Google Venezuela

 

Narayan Ammachchi

News Editor for Nearshore Americas, Narayan Ammachchi is a career journalist with a decade of experience in politics and international business. He works out of his base in the Indian Silicon City of Bangalore.

US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government

USAid started ZunZuneo, a social network built on texts, in hope it could be used to organize 'smart mobs' to trigger Cuban spring

Associated Press in Washington
Thu 3 Apr 2014 08.34 EDT Last modified on Fri 14 Jul 2017 18.26 EDT

 
  

Students gather behind a business looking for a internet signal for their smartphones in Havana. Photograph: Ramon Espinosa/AP

 In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government.
McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the US government.
McSpedon didn't work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the US Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in US humanitarian aid.
According to documents obtained by the Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones "Cuban Twitter," using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba's strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet.
Documents show the US government planned to build a subscriber base through "non-controversial content": news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize "smart mobs" — mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban spring, or, as one USAid document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society."
At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the US government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.
"There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement," according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord, one of the project's contractors. "This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission."
The program's legality is unclear: US law requires that any covert action by a federal agency must have a presidential authorization. Officials at USAid would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it. McSpedon, the most senior official named in the documents obtained by the AP, is a mid-level manager who declined to comment.

USAid spokesman Matt Herrick said the agency is proud of its Cuba programs and noted that congressional investigators reviewed them last year and found them to be consistent with US law.
"USAid is a development agency, not an intelligence agency, and we work all over the world to help people exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, and give them access to tools to improve their lives and connect with the outside world," he said.
"In the implementation," he added, "has the government taken steps to be discreet in non-permissive environments? Of course. That's how you protect the practitioners and the public. In hostile environments, we often take steps to protect the partners we're working with on the ground. This is not unique to Cuba."
But the ZunZuneo program muddies those claims, a sensitive issue for its mission to promote democracy and deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable — which requires the trust of foreign governments.

GO TO PAGE # 12

Silicon Valley Has Officially Invaded Cuba

Matt Novak

 

 

Cuban sculptor Alexis Leiva Machado, better known as Kcho, has helped Google open a small “technology center” in Havana that offers free internet via Chromebooks, complete with those goofy cardboard VR headsets. And it’s a State Department dream.The opening is a small but vitally important victory for both Google and the US State Department, both of whom would love to see US tech firms provide internet services on the island nation.Brett Perlmutter, head of Google’s Cuban operations, has been courting the country along with other Google execs since at least June of 2014. Notably that was months before President Obama’s surprise announcement (a surprise to the American public, at least) in December of 2014 that the US would begin to normalize relations with the country.

As the Associated Press notes, the connection at the new Google “technology center” is provided by Cuba’s national telecom company. It wasn’t clear who financed the new high-speed fiber connection, though Kcho told the AP he paid for it himself without providing specifics.

Curiously, the new Google technology center also dons the logos of companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, and Apple’s Safari browser.

 

Previously the US ran covert tech operations in Cuba, introducing “Cuban Twitter” from 2009 until 2012 with the aim of stirring a revolution. The messaging service, known as ZunZuneo (Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s tweet), was secretly financed by the US Agency of International Development and only became public after an investigation by the Associated Press.

But the State Department and Silicon Valley no longer need to force their way into the relatively isolated communist country. They’ve been let in the front door, thanks to the slow but significant normalization of relations with Cuba.

Google is still standing in the foyer, but they’ll no doubt be invited into Cuba’s dining room, basement, and bedroom in short order.

Why even Google can't connect Cuba

Reports say Google intends to help wire Cuba and bring the island into the 21st century. But that's not going to happen.

By Mike Elgan

Contributing Columnist, Computerworld | Apr 18, 2016 3:00 am PDT

When President Obama said in Havana last month that Google would be working to improve Internet access in Cuba, I wondered what Google might do in Cuba that other companies could not.
Today, Cuba is an Internet desert where only 5% of trusted elites are allowed to have (slow dial-up) Internet connections at home, and a paltry 400,000 people access the Internet through sidewalk Wi-Fi hotspots. These hotspots have existed for only a year or so. Also, some 2.5 million Cubans have government-created email accounts, but no Web access.
I spent a month in Cuba until last week, and I was there when the president spoke. I'm here to report that those government Wi-Fi hotspots are rare, slow and expensive. While in Cuba, my wife, son and I spent about $300 on Wi-Fi. In a country where the average wage ranges from $15 to $30 per month, connecting is a massive financial burden available only to a lucky minority with private businesses or generous relatives in Miami.

[ Keep up on the latest thought leadership, insights, how-to, and analysis on IT through Computerworld’s newsletters. ]

Google's equipment exists in just one building at Havana's Museo Orgánico Romerillo. But Google branding is everywhere, including this snack bar on the other side of the museum compound.

And this is why I think the possibilities of what Google might accomplish in Cuba are misunderstood.

It's not as if Cuba would have ubiquitous, affordable and fast Internet access if it just had the money or expertise to make it happen. The problem is that Cuba is a totalitarian Communist dictatorship.
The outrageous price charged for Wi-Fi in Cuba can't possibly reflect the cost of providing the service. The price is really a way to restrict greater freedom of information to those who benefit from the Cuban system.

The strange Wi-Fi card system is also a tool of political control. In order to buy a card, you have to show your ID, and your information is entered into the system. Everything done online using a specific Wi-Fi card is associated with a specific person.The Cuban government allows people to run privately owned small hotels, called casas particulares, and small home restaurants, called paladares. The owners of these small businesses would love to provide their guests with Wi-Fi, but the Cuban government doesn't allow it. Nor does it allow state-owned restaurants, bars and cafes to provide Wi-Fi.

Google is connected to the global Internet through satellite networks. Cuba is connected to the Internet by an undersea fiber-optic cable that runs between the island and Venezuela. The cable was completed in 2011, and it existed as a "darknet" connection for two years before suddenly going online in 2013.So here's the problem with Google as the solution: The Cuban government uses high prices and draconian laws to prevent the majority of Cubans from having any access to the Internet at all. The government actively prevents access as a matter of policy. It's not a technical problem. It's a political one.In other words, Cuba doesn't need Google to provide hotspots. If the Cuban government allowed hotspots, Cubans would provide them.

Everyday Google tech is 'Art' in Cuba

While I was visiting Cuba, a permanent "exhibit" called Google+Kcho.MOR was on display at an art and cultural center in Havana that also promotes technology. Kcho (pronounced "KAW-cho") is the nickname of a brilliant, enterprising, prolific and self-promoting Cuban mixed-media artist named Alexis Leiva Machado. Kcho lives at the center, which he deliberately built in the traditionally poor Havana neighborhood of Romerillo, where he grew up. The M-O-R at the end of the exhibit's name are the initials of the walled, multibuilding compound: Museo Orgánico Romerillo.

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I took a Cuban death-cab to the Museo Orgánico Romerillo. And, no, the cab wasn't one of those awesome American classico beauties from the 1950s that you see in all the pictures of Cuba. The vehicle was a tiny, charmless Eastern European clunker from the 1970s with a top speed of about 45 mph, stripped on the inside of all paneling and lining (presumably by a fire, because everything was black inside) and held together by wire, tape, glue and optimism -- and I swear the exhaust pipe was somewhere inside the car. (Oh, what this correspondent isn't willing to do for his cherished readers.)The exhibit is an astonishing oddity to Cubans who have never traveled abroad, but it's packed with oldish, cheap, everyday Google gear: 20 Chromebooks, Google Cardboard goggles powered by Nexus phones -- and something that has never, ever existed anywhere in Cuba: free Wi-Fi.Of course, there's no such thing as free Wi-Fi, especially in Cuba. Kcho reportedly pays the Cuban government some $900 per month for the access. The free Wi-Fi, which I saw scores of locals using with their phones, is really subsidized. The Cuban government still gets paid. (The password for the free Wi-Fi is abajoelbloqueo -- which translates, roughly, to "down with the embargo.")The free Wi-Fi is the same slow, unreliable connection that a minority of Cubans elsewhere get to enjoy, minus the cost and the cards. The Chromebooks, on the other hand, offer a magic Google connection some 70 times faster than regular Cuban Wi-Fi. Only 20 people at a time can enjoy the fast-connection Chromebooks, and each for just one hour at a time. When I was there, every Chromebook was in use, and each user's focus on the screen was total, as you can imagine.
The "exhibit" also had Google Cardboard viewers. (I had read the center has 100 of them, but I saw only about a dozen.) To use them, you ask a guy working there, and he grabs a Nexus phone from a drawer and walks you through the process of launching the Cardboard app and starting it. Each Cardboard viewer has preloaded content -- in my case I enjoyed a Photosphere of Tokyo.
During the half hour I spent in the Google+Kcho.MOR space, nobody else tried Google Cardboard. And that makes sense. With no ability to create or explore Carboard content, it's just a parlor trick to be enjoyed for a minute or two. I got the feeling that all the people there had "been there, done that" with Cardboard and resumed their obsession with Internet connectivity.
It was, however, obvious that the two people helping us were used to minds being completely blown by the Google Cardboard and Chromebook experiences. I didn't have the heart to mention that I've owned several pairs of Cardboard for two years and Chromebooks for three years.
The Google+Kcho.MOR installation is called an "exhibit," but it's not. In reality, it's a co-marketing, co-branding effort.

For the Kcho "brand," it's a "gateway drug" to lure Cuba's youth to the museum and get them excited about art, culture and the world of Kcho. Along with a cheap snack bar, the free Wi-Fi and the hour a day on the fastest laptops in Cuba successfully bring hundreds of Cuban kids to the center each day, and the Google+Kcho.MOR is the main event.For Google, it's a massive branding effort. (Google declined to comment for this story.)Nobody was willing to talk about it, but it's clear that Google is spreading some cash around here. There's so much Google branding on everything in and on the Google+Kcho.MOR building, it looks like it could be at the Googleplex itself.Even elsewhere in the compound, the Google logo is everywhere. It's in several outdoor spots where the free Wi-Fi is used, including all over the snack bar that serves coffee and soda.
If you're reading this, you probably live in a country awash in marketing, co-marketing and branding on every surface. But the ubiquity of Google branding at the entire Museo Orgánico Romerillo compound may be unique in Cuba. This is a country without a single Coca-Cola sign or billboard, zero ads anywhere for anything (other than political propaganda for the revolution and its leaders and ideals).
During the month I spent in in Cuba, I saw exactly six major public consumer branding units, and all of them were at the Museo Orgánico Romerillo, and all of them were about Google (and Kcho). That makes Google by far the most heavily branded and marketed company in Cuba -- in fact, the only one.
As far as I can tell, Google is getting away with it only because Kcho is massively favored by the Castro regime and the marketing is all presented as "art" or in the promotion of art.

What Google is really accomplishing in Cuba

Google appears to have begun its entry into Cuba in June 2014, when its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, visited Cuba after slamming the U.S. embargo in a Google+ post. The visit was not reported in Cuba at the time.
Schmidt was accompanied on his trip by Brett Perlmutter, who was later appointed Cuba lead for Alphabet, Google's parent company, as part of the Jigsaw organization, a "think tank" that actually initiates programs for making the world a better place, and was formerly known as "Google Ideas."
In January 2015, Perlmutter, as well as Jigsaw's deputy director, Scott Carpenter, toured Cuba together.
One of their goals on that trip was to visit computer science students at the University of Information Science, as well as young Cuban Internet users. Another goal, it's easy to guess, was to meet with cultural figures like Kcho, and also key figures in the Cuban government.
Put another way, Google has been making friends and laying the groundwork for a future when the Cuban government allows greater and better Internet access.

 Amira Elgan

The author discusses the popularity of Google Cardboard with Cubans at the Museo Orgánico Romerillo.

- + -

No, Google isn't laying fiber, launching balloons or installing equipment all over Cuba. It's not planning to sprinkle fast, free, magic Google Wi-Fi all over the island.The best Google can do for now is make friends and influence people.Cuba won't join the rest of the world in ubiquitous Internet access until the Cuban government either becomes less repressive, or falls out of power. When that happens, Google, as the dominant and best-connected tech brand, will be ready.Until then, no amount of magic Google pixie dust can help the Cuban people.

Related:

• Internet of Things
• Wi-Fi
• Regulation

Mike Elgan is a technology-obsessed journalist, author, blogger, podcaster and digital nomad. He writes a weekly column for IDG’s Insider Pro. Learn more at his website: elgan.com.

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Cuba has a hidden internet system based on trading USB sticks

By Timothy Revell 

Cuba has a very special kind of internet. Few people have an internet connection at home because it’s so expensive. Instead a weekly collection of websites and entertainment is physically swapped on USB sticks and portable hard drives.

Each week, millions of Cubans meet their nearest dealer armed with a storage device ready to download parts of El Paquete Semanal – the weekly package. It’s filled with the latest content, including films and TV shows, as well as websites, apps, and e-books.

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In Cuba, An Underground Network Armed With USB Drives Does The Work Of Google And YouTube

In a country nearly devoid of Internet access, the weekly distributors of El Paquete create a window to online content.

By Sarah Kessler

Huddled around a laptop at the bottom of a stairwell in Havana, a group of three teenage boys banter as they skip between video clips and music. A fourth arrives with some ice cream, which completes a scene reminiscent of teenagers killing time on YouTube. They play an amateur music video in which the singer, looking for a laugh, periodically bangs his head against the wall. Then Beyoncé. Chris Brown.

But this being Cuba–where the Internet is, for the most part, only available at some professional jobs, in foreigners’ homes, and in expensive hotels–this isn’t YouTube. What looks like a few teenagers surfing the web is actually a small part of an only-in-Cuba business that gives locals access to content from the Internet, offline, thanks to an army of human middlemen and thousands of flash drives.

I pass my own small drive to the boy who owns the computer, and he asks me what I want. He scrolls through the little blue files on his desktop, which have labels like “movies,” “music,” “videos from Cuba,” “applications,” and “video games.” After I ask for videos from Cuban artists, he plugs my drive into his computer and asks me to come back in 10 minutes.

Airbnb’s Secret To Scaling In Cuba

There are similar booths that sell El Paquete Semanal (“the packet of the week”) across Havana. Some are run casually, like this one. Others are part of more formal businesses, with signage and separate store space, that also offer services like printing or software updates. But everyone, from the young waiters at restaurants to the lawyer who rents me his home, seems to have a source for El Paquete, their link to a connected world that would be taken for granted in most modern countries. A retired woman who plugs her flash drive into her television recommends that I watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith. My taxi driver plays local music videos from a portable player mounted on his dashboard. And when I meet with the founder of a company that functions like a Yelp for Cuba, he peppers his stories with Game of Thrones references. All of them are getting access to this media either by purchasing content from an El Paquete vendor, or by copying from the computer of a friend who has purchased it.In a country where the government, as per the constitution, owns all media, El Paquete allows Cuban people to access content that would never be found on official media outlets, even if it’s nothing more subversive than the latest episode of House of Cards. It is not a static library of files, but a weekly updated resource that includes some of the same living resources that you might find on the Internet.

Revolico

One local app available on El Paquete, called Revolico, for instance, works like an offline Craigslist, with people posting ads for furniture, jobs, and homes. Another, AlaMesa, is a directory of about 600 restaurants, some of which pay to add extras like menus or special offers to their listings. Another, Conoce Cuba, is a guide app with GPS-enabled maps. Local magazines, like a richly designed music and culture publication called Vistar, also release new issues on the platform. “In Cuba, there are a lot of new artists with a lot of talent, and they never had something like this to show what they do,” says its creative director, a 28-year-old graphic designer named Robin Pedraja. “Before us, this would happen and nobody knew.” The publication has more than 20 people in its masthead and is working on its 16th issue.“All media was the property of the state before,” says Elaine Diaz, a journalism professor at the University of Havana who is launching a publication called Periodismo Del Barrio (Neighborhood Journalism) that she plans to distribute through El Paquete. “Now we have underground ways to publish and you don’t need permission.”

This underground publication system operates in a legal grey area, though the government has for the most part tolerated El Paquete. And though using El Paquete as a platform may not require permission, it does require some centralization.Where El Paquete comes from and how it is distributed has been something of a mystery in Cuba. When I asked technology entrepreneurs and El Paquete vendors how it works, I got answers like, “It’s an urban legend” and “Who knows?” El Paquete vendors have sources who have sources. David Mas, who worked on a publication about Cuban businesses called EnlaHabana that was distributed through El Paquete (it has since closed) described the way the business is structured as “like drugs,” in which case the name that one of its top distributors goes by, El Transportador (The Conveyor), seems appropriate.His real name, it turns out, is Elio Hector Lopez, and he’s a 26-year-old with a passion for music who started working on what became El Paquete while employed by a bank. At first, he used the Internet access at his job to download music, and he gave what was essentially a mix tape of his best picks to local DJs in the area. As it became popular, he started to charge for the music, and, he tells me through a translator when I meet him one Sunday morning at a Havana café, “What began as a hobby became serious.”

Around 2008, Lopez started to get in touch with other people who had started similar businesses with different types of content–video games, movies, video clips, TV shows–and they decided to collaborate to make a bigger business. Their first collaborative packets were about 500 GB and included a tiny text file with an email address inside that people could use to make requests for the next week’s El Paquete. Then Lopez and his partners would look for it. “It was like doing a Ph.D. in Internet to find this stuff,” Lopez says.

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•  

He won’t say exactly how the group currently acquires the 1 terabyte of new content that he says it sells to seven top-level vendors every week, except that part of it involves an illegal capture of a satellite channel and another several paid collaborators with Internet access (according to Internet freedom watchdog Freedom House, between 5% and 26% of Cubans have access to the open Internet, or access to Internet not controlled by the government). The hard drives travel via bus or plane to major Cuban cities, where their purchasers sell copies of the content to other vendors, who sell it to other vendors, and so on down the line until some slice of the original terabyte reaches the stairwell where I purchase about 16GB for the equivalent of U.S. $2.00. The system does bear a structural resemblance to an illicit drug business.But even though Lopez and his partners have created what is arguably the most accessible open media consumption channel in Cuba, they aren’t getting rich doing so. They sell each of the seven primary hard drives for $20 or less. It may seem crazy to sell such an influential product for so little–until you remember that many media companies, including this website, give their content away for free.

El Paquete operates on the same business model. It’s not just a way to access content that Cuba’s nationalized media outlets don’t provide; it is also an advertising business that depends on wide distribution.For a fee, Lopez and his partners will post an advertisement at the end of a popular movie or television show. They will also include your music or your magazine (Vistar doesn’t pay because Lopez is its “coordinator & promoter”). Lopez says this advertising business makes about as much money as selling the content itself, and there are similar businesses further down the chain. If you want an advertisement for your restaurant or salon on your local version of El Paquete, some local distributors also sell advertising services.

Staff members of Vistar in their office

None of this–the publications, the advertising businesses, or El Paquete itself–is expressly legal. Cubans need licenses to do private business in the country, and Lopez’s license is for selling hard drives. But the government probably won’t shut it down. “It is stupid to prohibit it,” says Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a professor and former Cuban diplomat. “You don’t have a way of doing it. You will have to deploy so many resources to stop it from happening. That’s impossible.” Lopez offers another explanation. “If they shut down the package in the whole country, people will be mad and it won’t be good for the government.” In order to avoid antagonizing the government, El Paquete has a strict rule that bans politics and pornography.

What might ultimately be more threatening than the government to the web of small businesses on El Paquete is the Internet. Cuba’s government announced recently that it would open 35 public Wi-Fi hotpots that Cubans can access for about $2 per hour. That’s still well beyond the reach of most Cubans, who earn on average the equivalent of $20 per month, but it signifies a new willingness of the government to tolerate the Internet. If the Internet becomes more widely available in Cuba, what becomes of the business under the stairs? To the Craigslists and the Yelps of Cuba? To magazines like Vistar?
“The packet will disappear,” says Lopez. But he believes the rest of his business, and businesses like it, can move online. Some, like Vistar, which publishes online, have already started. AlaMesa, Revolico, and Conoce Cuba have websites in addition to the apps they publish in El Paquete. And Lopez hopes that, with the Internet, El Paquete itself will remain an advertising channel, “like YouTube.”

About the author

Sarah Kessler is a senior writer at Fast Company, where she writes about the on-demand/gig/sharing "economies" and the future of work. 


Read More

Cuba’s Internet paradox: How controlled and censored Internet risks Cuba’s achievements in education

 Open Networks Closed Regimes

III. IMPEDIMENTS TO HUMAN RIGHTS IN CUBAN LAW

El Paquete: How Cuba's data pirates hand-feed an internet-starved nation

Elio 'El Transportador' sells offline internet access to Cubans via secret thumb drives

Matt Kwong

Reporter

Matt Kwong is a Washington-based correspondent for CBC News. He previously reported for CBC News as an online journalist in New York and Toronto. You can follow him on Twitter at: @matt_kwong

• @matt_kwong

CBC News · Posted: Apr 12, 2016 5:00 AM ET |

Men gather around a laptop to watch videos in a cellphone repair shop in Old Havana. Without widespread internet access, Cubans rely on 'el paquete,' the weekly package of digital media, delivered on USB thumb drives and external hard drives. (Sarah L. Voisin/Getty Images)

The traffickers often move by bicycle, criss-crossing Havana with the week's digital stash tucked in small slipcases.
They ply their trade in the backs of cellphone repair shops, or climb stairs in creaky tenements to make their drops at clients' doors.

In internet-starved Cuba, these black-market suppliers push a coveted product — curated offerings from the World Wide Web for $2 to $3 US.

Havana residents' faces are lit up by the glow of their smartphone screens as they gather on the steps of the Pabellon Cuba in Vedado. The area is a rare Wi-Fi hot spot in a nation lacking open internet access. (Matt Kwong/CBC)

Cubans call it "El Paquete Semanal," or the weekly package.
It comes in the form of a one-terabyte re-up of newly pirated information each Monday. Think international movies, newspapers, the latest Afro-Cuban hip-hop tracks, Korean and Australian soap operas, mobile apps, Wikipedia pages, PDFs of National Geographic magazine, the entire run of Netflix's House of Cards, even classified ads from Revolico, Cuba's take on Craigslist.
"It's what I call our national internet," says Isbel Diaz Torres, a Havana package subscriber who consumes American culture through reality-TV cooking shows like Chopped and Top Chef.

• Spark: Cuba's underground alternative to the internet 
• Obama's Cuban foray: 'Too much goodwill' to turn back the Cold War clock 

"You have your films, your music, your articles," says Torres, 40, drinking a malted cola on a steamy afternoon in March.
El Paquete was how Torres's boyfriend caught February's Oscars ceremony.

PDF issues of the independent Cuban artist magazine Vistar are included in 'el paquete semanal,' or the weekly packet. (Screenshot)

The clandestine service was also how Carlos Alejandro Rodriguez Halley, a 28-year-old actor and restaurateur in the Cuban capital, watched the film The Revenant before some of his American friends.
"If you want to know about hockey scores, probably it's in the package," he said between drags of a Hollywood brand cigarette. "Someone in this corner, in this block, I bet you every week they pay to get the package."

An 'offline internet'

It's not just about entertainment. The weekly digital delivery reportedly informed many Cubans in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden via foreign news.
The "offline internet" trade, as locals describe it, is not strictly legal. The state controls Cuban news and entertainment media. But some speculate the Castro regime turns a blind eye to the underground sneakernet, reasoning it keeps the public desire for widespread internet access at bay.

Cuban youths use their smartphones to surf the internet, using a password-protected Wi-Fi network coming from a five-star hotel in downtown Havana. (Desmond Boylan/Associated Press)

"You have everything you want to find in the internet on El Paquete," Torres says.
"Everything," he adds, "except for communication."
It's one way the package falls short as more locals yearn for their country to come online.

Digital dark ages

U.S. President Barack Obama urged the Cuban government during his visit here last month to emerge from the digital dark ages.
"New technology has come and we need to bring it to Cuba," Obama said.
The isolated nation's internet penetration rate could be as low as five per cent, according to the global democracy and civil-liberties watchdog Freedom House.

Carlos Alejandro Rodriguez Halley, 28, says most Cubans will have at least heard of el paquete, the underground sneakernet system of physically moving digital data from person to person, via USBs and large-capacity external hard drives. (Matt Kwong/CBC)

Wi-Fi hot spots remain elusive, though several parks allow for access via pre-paid scratch cards. Even then, loading times are agonizingly slow. It's also expensive, costing $2 for a one-hour Wi-Fi scratch card in a city where average wages are about $20 a month.
One young entrepreneur, who did not want to give his name, admitted to hoarding scratch cards, then jacking up prices to $3 for the resale market. Another of his odd jobs, he said, is as a dealer of El Paquete.
"In my opinion, it's too difficult to get connected to Wi-Fi here," he said of the often spotty service. "So many people, like me, for example, have lost all their credit while waiting, trying to get connected."

The photo on the left shows the price of an internet scratchcard, 2 CUCs, or $2 US. The photo on the right shows the back of the card, with a 12-digit code that is revealed when the card is scratched. (Matt Kwong/CBC)

Still, pass through a park in the central La Rampa ward at night, and you may see dozens of faces illuminated by phone and tablet screens, checking Facebook or video chatting with relatives abroad.
"It's kind of a crazy situation. It's very crowded, and you sometimes have people sitting next to you, talking about very personal stuff. Family stuff," says Jorge Duany, a Florida-based Cuba scholar who tried the island's Wi-Fi for the first time in February.

'El Transportador'

Internet minutes are precious.
A common practice is to load up an email inbox, then disconnect to read and draft replies offline. Users log back in once they're ready to batch-send responses.

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Few people will waste time loading up the latest viral YouTube video.

Cubans internet users check their Facebook pages at a Wi-Fi hot spot in Havana. Internet speeds at these outdoor hot spots are usually slow, and it costs 2 Cuban convertible pesos, or $2 US, for a scratch card code allowing one hour of connectivity. (Matt Kwong/CBC)

That's what El Paquete is for, says Julio Alberto Hernandez, a 22-year-old courier for a mini digital-media empire started by Elio "El Transportador," or the transporter. (A competing package kingpin in the city goes by the moniker Dany "El Paquete.")
On a park bench near the University of Havana, Hernandez got downright philosophical.
"If entertainment is a necessity to Cubans," he said, "then the package is a necessity."

Julio Alberto Hernandez, 22, works as a 'runner' for the el paquete impresario known as Elio 'El Transportado.' Hernandez bikes around Havana delivering the weekly digital package to clients. (Matt Kwong/CBC)

Swirling an icy cherry granizado cocktail, he broke down the business model.
Subscribers who receive the latest terabyte either keep it for several hours to browse and download the entire contents, or parcel it out onto smaller-capacity USB thumb drives for further distribution.
Monday clients pay a premium for the latest content, sometimes $6 US. Prices drop throughout the week. Most will pay $2.
But other logistics of the operation remain somewhat shrouded. How, for example, are the packages assembled so quickly every week?

A screenshot of the Revolico website, Cuba's version of Craigslist. Saved pages from the online classifieds are uploaded and included in el paquete. (Screenshot)

Reached by phone in the U.S., where he temporarily lives, El Transportador, whose real name is Elio Héctor López, said "nobody understands the answer."
But he acknowledged his family in the States has premium internet service, allowing for faster downloads.
"If I have the package, I have friends in the neighbourhood come to my house [in Cuba]," just to copy material for dispersal. "They bring their own USB flash drives," he said.

Elio Hector Lopez, better known throughout Cuba as 'El Transportador,' or the transporter, began selling weekly data packages of digital content to Cubans in 2008. The 27-year-old now lives in the U.S. (Courtesy Elio Hector Lopez)

A report by Vox suggested that some El Paquete collating happens in Cuba, and that illegal satellites disguised as rooftop water tanks might accommodate big downloads.
Hernandez, the package runner in Havana, said that at least some downloading happens at a large Cuban tourist hotel with good Wi-Fi.
He estimates that the Transportador network has 80 major paquete subscribers in Havana. The digital data is also smuggled outside the capital to rural areas.
"Of course we send this to other provinces. By car, bus, plane, whatever," Hernandez said.
López, his boss, was warned by authorities not to distribute anti-regime propaganda through the package. There's another restriction: "No hay pornografia," Hernandez said.

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For now, at least, El Paquete is apparently tolerated by the government, though López denies rumours that the regime is secretly behind the movement.
"They don't stop the package, but nobody in the government helps to make the package," López insisted. "This is something started from the people."

FROM PAGE # 5

US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government

"On the face of it there are several aspects about this that are troubling," said Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and chairman of the appropriations committee's State Department and foreign operations subcommittee.
"There is the risk to young, unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who had no idea this was a US government-funded activity. There is the clandestine nature of the program that was not disclosed to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibility. And there is the disturbing fact that it apparently activated shortly after Alan Gross, a USAid subcontractor who was sent to Cuba to help provide citizens access to the Internet, was arrested."

The Associated Press obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the project's development. The AP independently verified the project's scope and details in the documents — such as federal contract numbers and names of job candidates — through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with those directly involved in ZunZuneo.
Taken together, they tell the story of how agents of the US government, working in deep secrecy, became tech entrepreneurs — in Cuba. And it all began with a half a million cellphone numbers obtained from a communist government.
___
ZunZuneo would seem to be a throwback from the cold war, and the decades-long struggle between the United States and Cuba. It came at a time when the historically sour relationship between the countries had improved, at least marginally, and Cuba had made tentative steps toward a more market-based economy.
It is unclear whether the plan got its start with USAid or Creative Associates International, a Washington for-profit company that has earned hundreds of millions of dollars in US contracts. But a "key contact" at Cubacel, the state-owned cellphone provider, slipped the phone numbers to a Cuban engineer living in Spain. The engineer provided the numbers to USAid and Creative Associates "free of charge," documents show.
In mid-2009, Noy Villalobos, a manager with Creative Associates who had worked with USAid in the 1990s on a program to eradicate drug crops, started an IM chat with her little brother in Nicaragua, according to a Creative Associates email that captured the conversation. Mario Bernheim, in his mid-20s, was an up-and-coming techie who had made a name for himself as a computer whiz.
"This is very confidential of course," Villalobos cautioned her brother. But what could you do if you had all the cellphone numbers of a particular country? Could you send bulk text messages without the government knowing?
"Can you encrypt it or something?" she texted.

She was looking for a direct line to regular Cubans through text messaging. Most had precious little access to news from the outside world. The government viewed the internet as an Achilles' heel and controlled it accordingly. A communications minister had even referred to it as a "wild colt" that "should be tamed."
Yet in the years since Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul, Cuba had sought to jumpstart the long stagnant economy. Raul Castro began encouraging cellphone use, and hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly using mobile phones for the first time, though smartphones with access to the Internet remained restricted.
Cubans could text message, though at a high cost in a country where the average wage was a mere $20 a month.
Bernheim told his sister that he could figure out a way to send instant texts to hundreds of thousands of Cubans— for cheap. It could not be encrypted though, because that would be too complicated. They wouldn't be able to hide the messages from the Cuban government, which owned Cubacel. But they could disguise who was sending the texts by constantly switching the countries the messages came from.

"We could rotate it from different countries?" Villalobos asked. "Say one message from Nica, another from Spain, another from Mexico"?
Bernheim could do that. "But I would need mirrors set up around the world, mirrors, meaning the same computer, running with the same platform, with the same phone."
"No hay problema," he signed off. No problem.
___
After the chat, Creative hired Bernheim as a subcontractor, reporting to his sister. (Villalobos and Bernheim would later confirm their involvement with the ZunZuneo project to AP, but decline further comment.) Bernheim, in turn, signed up the Cuban engineer who had gotten the phone list. The team figured out how to message the masses without detection, but their ambitions were bigger.
Creative Associates envisioned using the list to create a social networking system that would be called "Proyecto ZZ," or "Project ZZ." The service would start cautiously and be marketed chiefly to young Cubans, who USAid saw as the most open to political change.
"We should gradually increase the risk," USAid proposed in a document. It advocated using "smart mobs" only in "critical/opportunistic situations and not at the detriment of our core platform-based network."
USAid's team of contractors and subcontractors built a companion website to its text service so Cubans could subscribe, give feedback and send their own text messages for free. They talked about how to make the website look like a real business. "Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial enterprise," a proposal suggested.
In multiple documents, USAid staff pointed out that text messaging had mobilized smart mobs and political uprisings in Moldova and the Philippines, among others. In Iran, the USAid noted social media's role following the disputed election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009 — and saw it as an important foreign policy tool.
USAid documents say their strategic objective in Cuba was to "push it out of a stalemate through tactical and temporary initiatives, and get the transition process going again towards democratic change." Democratic change in authoritarian Cuba meant breaking the Castros' grip on power.
USAid divided Cuban society into five segments depending on loyalty to the government. On one side sat the "democratic movement," called "still (largely) irrelevant," and at the other end were the "hard-core system supporters," dubbed "Talibanes" in a derogatory comparison to Afghan and Pakistani extremists.

A key question was how to move more people toward the democratic activist camp without detection. Bernheim assured the team that wouldn't be a problem.
"The Cuban government, like other regimes committed to information control, currently lacks the capacity to effectively monitor and control such a service," Bernheim wrote in a proposal for USAid marked "Sensitive Information."
ZunZuneo would use the list of phone numbers to break Cuba's internet embargo and not only deliver information to Cubans but also let them interact with each other in a way the government could not control. Eventually it would build a system that would let Cubans send messages anonymously among themselves.
At a strategy meeting, the company discussed building "user volume as a cover ... for organization," according to meeting notes. It also suggested that the "Landscape needs to be large enough to hide full opposition members who may sign up for service."
In a play on the telecommunication minister's quote, the team dubbed their network the "untamed colt."
___

At first, the ZunZuneo team operated out of Central America. Bernheim, the techie brother, worked from Nicaragua's capital, Managua, while McSpedon supervised Creative's work on ZunZuneo from an office in San Jose, Costa Rica, though separate from the US embassy. It was an unusual arrangement that raised eyebrows in Washington, according to US officials.

McSpedon worked for USAid's Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote US interests in quickly changing political environments — without the usual red tape.
In 2009, a report by congressional researchers warned that OTI's work "often lends itself to political entanglements that may have diplomatic implications." Staffers on oversight committees complained that USAid was running secret programs and would not provide details.
"We were told we couldn't even be told in broad terms what was happening because 'people will die,'" said Fulton Armstrong, who worked for the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Before that, he was the US intelligence community's most senior analyst on Latin America, advising the Clinton White House.
The money that Creative Associates spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan, government data show. But there is no indication of where the funds were actually spent.

Tensions with Congress spiked just as the ZunZuneo project was gearing up in December 2009, when another USAid program ended in the arrest of the US contractor, Alan Gross. Gross had traveled repeatedly to Cuba on a secret mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology typically available only to governments, a mission first revealed in February 2012 by AP.
At some point, Armstrong says, the foreign relations committee became aware of OTI's secret operations in Costa Rica. US government officials acknowledged them privately to Armstrong, but USAid refused to provide operational details.
At an event in Washington, Armstrong says he confronted McSpedon, asking him if he was aware that by operating secret programs from a third country, it might appear like he worked for an intelligence agency.
McSpedon, through USAid, said the story is not true. He declined to comment otherwise.
___
On September 20, 2009, thousands of Cubans gathered at Revolution Plaza in Havana for Colombian rocker Juanes' "Peace without Borders" concert. It was the largest public gathering in Cuba since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998. Under the watchful gaze of a giant sculpture of revolutionary icon Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Miami-based Juanes promised music aimed at "turning hate into love."
But for the ZunZuneo team, the concert was a perfect opportunity to test the political power of their budding social network. In the weeks before, Bernheim's firm, using the phone list, sent out a half a million text messages in what it called "blasts," to test what the Cuban government would do.

The team hired Alen Lauzan Falcon, a Havana-born satirical artist based in Chile, to write Cuban-style messages. Some were mildly political and comical, others more pointed. One asked respondents whether they thought two popular local music acts out of favor with the government should join the stage with Juanes. Some 100,000 people responded — not realizing the poll was used to gather critical intelligence.
Paula Cambronero, a researcher for Mobile Accord, began building a vast database about the Cuban subscribers, including gender, age, "receptiveness" and "political tendencies." USAid believed the demographics on dissent could help it target its other Cuba programs and "maximize our possibilities to extend our reach."
Cambronero concluded that the team had to be careful. "Messages with a humorous connotation should not contain a strong political tendency, so as not to create animosity in the recipients," she wrote in a report.
Falcon, in an interview, said he was never told that he was composing messages for a US government program, but he had no regrets about his involvement.
"They didn't tell me anything, and if they had, I would have done it anyway," he said. "In Cuba they don't have freedom. While a government forces me to pay in order to visit my country, makes me ask permission, and limits my communications, I will be against it, whether it's Fidel Castro, (Cuban exile leader) Jorge Mas Canosa or Gloria Estefan," the Cuban American singer.
Carlos Sanchez Almeida, a lawyer specializing in European data protection law, said it appeared that the US program violated Spanish privacy laws because the ZunZuneo team had illegally gathered personal data from the phone list and sent unsolicited emails using a Spanish platform. "The illegal release of information is a crime, and using information to create a list of people by political affiliation is totally prohibited by Spanish law," Almeida said. It would violate a US-European data protection agreement, he said.
USAid saw evidence from server records that Havana had tried to trace the texts, to break into ZunZuneo's servers, and had occasionally blocked messages. But USAid called the response "timid" and concluded that ZunZuneo would be viable — if its origins stayed secret.
Even though Cuba has one of the most sophisticated counter-intelligence operations in the world, the ZunZuneo team thought that as long as the message service looked benign, Cubacel would leave it alone.
Once the network had critical mass, Creative and USAid documents argued, it would be harder for the Cuban government to shut it down, both because of popular demand and because Cubacel would be addicted to the revenues from the text messages.
In February 2010, the company introduced Cubans to ZunZuneo and began marketing. Within six months, it had almost 25,000 subscribers, growing faster and drawing more attention than the USAid team could control.
___
Saimi Reyes Carmona was a journalism student at the University of Havana when she stumbled onto ZunZuneo. She was intrigued by the service's novelty, and the price. The advertisement said "free messages" so she signed up using her nickname, Saimita.
At first, ZunZuneo was a very tiny platform, Reyes said during a recent interview in Havana, but one day she went to its website and saw its services had expanded.
"I began sending one message every day," she said, the maximum allowed at the start. "I didn't have practically any followers." She was thrilled every time she got a new one.
And then ZunZuneo exploded in popularity.
"The whole world wanted in, and in a question of months I had 2,000 followers who I have no idea who they are, nor where they came from."
She let her followers know the day of her birthday, and was surprised when she got some 15 personal messages. "This is the coolest thing I've ever seen!" she told her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra Valdes, also a journalism student.
Before long, Reyes learned she had the second highest number of followers on the island, after a user called UCI, which the students figured was Havana's University of Computer Sciences. Her boyfriend had 1,000. The two were amazed at the reach it gave them.
"It was such a marvelous thing," Guerra said. "So noble." He and Reyes tried to figure out who was behind ZunZuneo, since the technology to run it had to be expensive, but they found nothing. They were grateful though.
"We always found it strange, that generosity and kindness," he said. ZunZuneo was "the fairy godmother of cellphones."
___
By early 2010, Creative decided that ZunZuneo was so popular Bernheim's company wasn't sophisticated enough to build, in effect, "a scaled down version of Twitter."
It turned to another young techie, James Eberhard, CEO of Denver-based Mobile Accord Inc. Eberhard had pioneered the use of text messaging for donations during disasters and had raised tens of millions of dollars after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
Advertisement
Eberhard earned millions in his mid-20s when he sold a company that developed cellphone ring tones and games. His company's website describes him as "a visionary within the global mobile community."
In July, he flew to Barcelona to join McSpedon, Bernheim, and others to work out what they called a "below the radar strategy."
"If it is discovered that the platform is, or ever was, backed by the United States government, not only do we risk the channel being shut down by Cubacel, but we risk the credibility of the platform as a source of reliable information, education, and empowerment in the eyes of the Cuban people," Mobile Accord noted in a memo.

Read More

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Dictatorships in the Digital Age: Some Considerations on the Internet in China and Cuba

GO TO PAGE # 11

10 Most Censored Countries

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Repressive governments use sophisticated digital censorship and surveillance alongside more traditional methods to silence independent media. A special report by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

 
Eritrea is the world's most censored country, according to a list compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The list is based on CPJ's research into the use of tactics ranging from imprisonment and repressive laws to surveillance of journalists and restrictions on internet and social media access.
Under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to seek and receive news and express opinions. These 10 countries flout the international standard by banning or severely restricting independent media and intimidating journalists into silence with imprisonment, digital and physical surveillance, and other forms of harassment. Self-censorship is pervasive.
In the top three countries--Eritrea, North Korea, and Turkmenistan--the media serves as a mouthpiece of the state, and any independent journalism is conducted from exile. The few foreign journalists permitted to enter are closely monitored.
Other countries on the list use a combination of blunt tactics like harassment and arbitrary detention as well as sophisticated surveillance and targeted hacking to silence the independent press. Saudi Arabia, China, Vietnam, and Iran are especially adept at practicing these two brands of censorship: jailing and harassing journalists and their families, while also engaging in digital monitoring and censorship of the internet and social media.
The list addresses only those countries where the government tightly controls the media. The conditions for journalists and press freedom in states such as Syria, Yemen, and Somalia are also extremely difficult, but not necessarily attributable solely to government censorship. Rather, factors like violent conflict, insufficient infrastructure, and the role of non-state actors create conditions that are dangerous for the press.

1. Eritrea

Leadership: President Isaias Afewerki, in power since 1993.
How censorship works: The government shut down all independent media in 2001. Eritrea is the worst jailer of journalists in sub-Saharan Africa, with at least 16 journalists behind bars as of December 1, 2018; most have been imprisoned since the 2001 crackdown, and none received a trial. According to freedom of expression group Article 19, the 1996 press law includes a requirement that the media must promote "national objectives." The state retains a legal monopoly of broadcast media, and journalists for the state media toe the government's editorial line for fear of retaliation. Alternative sources of information such as the internet or satellite broadcasts of radio stations in exile are restricted through occasional signal jams and by the poor quality of the government-controlled internet, according to DW Akademie. Internet penetration is extremely low, at just over 1% of the population, according to the U.N. International Telecommunication Union. Users are forced to visit internet cafes, where they are easily monitored. A March 2019 report by the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa suggests that the authoritarian state is so "brutal or commanding" as to "render ordering overt internet disruptions unnecessary." However, on May 15, 2019, the BBC reported a social media shutdown in Eritrea, ahead of the country's Independence Day celebrations. With the opening of the border with Ethiopia in mid-2018, some foreign journalists received special accreditation to visit Eritrea, according to The Economist, but access was tightly controlled.
Lowlight: As many as seven journalists may have perished in custody, according to reports that CPJ has not been able to confirm due to the climate of fear and tight state control. The government has refused all requests to provide concrete information on the fate of imprisoned journalists. In June 2019, more than 100 leading African journalists, scholars, and rights activists wrote an open letter to Afewerki, asking to visit long-imprisoned journalists and activists; this request was soundly rejected, and deemed "inappropriate" by Eritrea's Ministry of Information.

Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed during a ceremony marking the reopening of the Eritrean Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on July 16, 2018. A recent thawing of relations between the two countries did not lead to improved conditions for the media in Eritrea. (Reuters/Tiksa Negeri)

2. North Korea

Leadership: Kim Jong Un, who took over after his father, Kim Jong Il, died in 2011.
How censorship works: Article 67 of the country's constitution calls for freedom of the press, but nearly all the content of North Korea's newspapers, periodicals, and broadcasters comes from the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), which focuses on the political leadership's statements and activities. KCNA, which is highly restrictive in its coverage of foreign news, reported extensively on the brief visit by U.S. President Donald Trump to North Korea in June 2019, and praised it as an "amazing event," the BBC reported. The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse have small bureaus, but international correspondents have been denied entry, detained, and expelled. Access to the global internet is restricted to the political elite, but some schools and state institutions have access to a tightly controlled intranet called Kwangmyong. Bootlegged foreign TV and radio signals and smuggled foreign DVDs are the main sources of independent information for the majority of North Koreans, according to a report by InterMedia. Since Kim Jong Un took power, authorities have stepped up the use of radio signal blockers and advanced radio detection equipment to prevent people from sharing information, according to The Diplomat. As of March 2019, at least four million North Koreans subscribe to Koryolink, North Korea's main mobile network, according to South Korean daily The Hankyoreh, which cited Statistics Korea; however, subscribers are not able to access content outside North Korea.
Lowlight: In September 2017, a North Korean court sentenced two South Korean journalists and their publishers to death in absentia for "insulting the dignity of the country." Son Hyo-rim of Dong-A Ilbo and Yang Ji-ho of The Chosun Ilbo interviewed the authors of "North Korea Confidential," a 2015 book detailing ordinary lives in North Korea, and reviewed the book for their newspapers.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a visit in Beijing, China, in a photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency on January 10, 2019. North Korea continues to be one of the most repressive countries in the world for journalists. (KCNA via Reuters)

3. Turkmenistan

Leadership: President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, in power since 2006.
How censorship works: Berdymukhamedov enjoys absolute control over all spheres of life in Turkmenistan, including the media, using it to promote his cult of personality. His regime suppresses independent voices by detaining and jailing journalists and, according to U.S.-Congress funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, forcing others to flee the country. All media outlets are owned or tightly controlled by the government. A handful of independent Turkmenistan-focused media outlets, such as Khronika Turkmenistana (Chronicles of Turkmenistan), operate in exile, and anyone who attempts to access the website can be questioned by the authorities, OpenDemocracy reported. Correspondents for RFE/RL's Turkmen service work under pseudonyms and have been imprisoned, attacked, and banned from traveling. Only around 21% of the country's population had access to the internet, according to the U.N. International Telecommunication Union. The regime blocks independent online publications and bans the use of VPNs and other anonymizing tools, according to IREX's 2017 Media Sustainability Index. Access for foreign media is rare; ahead of the 2017 Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, authorities revoked the accreditation of several British journalists, according to the Guardian. RFE/RL reported in February 2019 that authorities "have actively pursued Western surveillance technology."
Lowlight: In March 2019, freelance journalist Soltan Achilova, 69, who contributes to Khronika Turkmenistana and who has previously contributed to RFE/RL's Turkmen service, was barred from boarding an international flight. Achilova, who chronicles daily life in Turkmenistan, has previously been detained by police, physically assaulted, and threatened due to her journalism.

Independent freelance journalist Soltan Achilova, as seen in November 2017 in her house in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, has been detained, physically assaulted, and threatened due to her work. (CPJ via Khronika Turkmenistana)

4. Saudi Arabia

Leadership: King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, in power since 2015. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in power since 2017.
How censorship works: Under Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's already-repressive environment for the press has suffered sharp deterioration. Anti-terror and cybercrime laws and specialized courts give authorities free rein to imprison journalists and bloggers who stray from the pro-government narrative; 16 journalists were behind bars as of December 1, 2018. Saudi authorities detained at least nine additional journalists in the first half of 2019 alone. At least four of the journalists detained under bin Salman's crackdown have been abused and tortured in Saudi prisons, according to medical assessments prepared for King Salman and leaked to The Guardian newspaper. Under a 2011 regulation, websites, blogs, and anyone posting news or commentary online must have a license from the Ministry of Culture and Information. Authorities have expanded control over digital content, where the use of cybersurveillance is ubiquitous, according to The Washington Post. According to reports in The New York Times and other sources, the authorities utilize surveillance technology and troll and bot armies to suppress coverage and discussion of sensitive topics, including the war in Yemen, and to allegedly monitor dissident Saudi journalists. Saudi authorities block websites they deem objectionable, as well as access to VPN providers that would bypass blocks, according to Freedom House's Freedom on the Net report. Foreign correspondents do report from Saudi Arabia, but authorities are capricious in granting entry and international reporters often face restrictions on their movements, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.
Lowlight: In October 2018, Saudi agents--including those connected to bin Salman--brutally murdered Washington Post columnist and government critic Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, after luring him there to obtain paperwork. A June 2019 UN report called the murder a "premeditated execution" for which the Saudi government "is responsible," and called for an investigation into bin Salman's role.

People holding pictures of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi attend a symbolic funeral prayer for Khashoggi at the courtyard of Fatih mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, on November 16, 2018. Khashoggi's murder is one of the most extreme examples of the Saudi regime's recent crackdown on the independent press. (Reuters/Huseyin Aldemir)

5. China

Leadership: President Xi Jinping, in office since 2013.
How censorship works: China has the world's most extensive and sophisticated censorship apparatus. For nearly two decades, the country has been among the world's top jailers of journalists, with at least 47 behind bars as of December 1, 2018. Both privately and state-owned news outlets are under the authorities' supervision, and those who fail to follow the Chinese Communist Party's directives are suspended or otherwise punished, according to news reports. Since 2017, no website or social media account is allowed to provide news service on the internet without the Cyberspace Administration of China's permission. Internet users are blocked from foreign search engines, news websites, and social media platforms by the Great Firewall. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in March 2018 announced new regulations that ban unauthorized VPNs, which internet users rely on to circumvent the firewall. Authorities monitor domestic social media networks, using surveillance programs and trained censor professionals. Foreign social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are banned; they are accessible via VPNs, but censorship efforts have extended to knocking on doors to order people to delete their tweets, according to The Washington Post. International journalists working in China face digital and human surveillance, with visas delayed or denied. In August 2018, the Hong Kong Journalists Association said press freedom in the territory had deteriorated under the "one country" policy, with the media practicing more self-censorship without laws to safeguard freedom of information.
Lowlight: In the northwest Xinjiang region, where the authorities have detained up to three million Uighur and Turkic Muslims in so-called reeducation camps, surveillance and censorship are widespread. Journalists in the region risk imprisonment for everyday reporting, on charges such as being a "two-faced" party official. The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China in January 2019 said many members who travel to the region are followed and surveilled.

Visitors take pictures under blooming cherry blossoms near a high-resolution artificial-intelligence camera at Yuyuantan Park in Beijing, China, on March 19, 2019. China has a vast and sophisticated censorship apparatus that is used to monitor journalists as well as ordinary citizens. (Reuters/Stringer)

6. Vietnam

Leadership: President and Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, in power since 2018.
How censorship works: The Communist Party-led government owns and controls all print and broadcast media in Vietnam. A raft of repressive laws and decrees sharply curtails any media criticism of the one-party government, its policies, and its performance. The 2016 Press Law states that the press must serve as the voice of the party, party organizations, and state agencies. Censorship is enforced through government directives to newspaper, radio, and TV editors, commanding which topics are to be highlighted and omitted. There are no independent, non-state online news outlets allowed to be based in Vietnam apart from the Catholic church-run Redemptorist News and foreign news bureaus whose reporters are tightly surveilled and movements restricted. Foreign journalists who travel on media visas are required to hire a government minder who follows them. A new cybersecurity law came into effect on January 1, 2019, giving authorities sweeping powers to censor online content, including provisions that require technology companies to disclose user data and take down content viewed as objectionable by authorities, according to Reuters. The law builds on Decree 72, a 2013 order that gave the state broad authority to censor blogs and social media; internet service providers that disseminate banned content face fines or closure, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Censored topics include human rights and the activities of political dissidents. Censorship is enforced through filtering and surveillance, including through a military-run, 10,000-strong cyber warfare unit known as "Force 47" tasked with tackling "wrong views," according to the Financial Times. Independent journalists and bloggers who report critically on sensitive issues face harassment or detention on anti-state charges; at least 11 were behind bars as of December 1, 2018.
Lowlight: Radio Free Asia blogger Truong Duy Nhat, known for his critical exposés on the Communist Party, went missing in Thailand in January 2019 amid widespread speculation he was abducted by Vietnamese agents. He re-emerged in March in Hanoi's T-16 prison, where he was being held without charge, according to news reports.

Blogger Truong Duy Nhat stands trial in Da Nang, Vietnam, on March 4, 2014. In January 2019, he disappeared in Thailand, and in March was reported to be detained in Hanoi's T-16 detention center. (Vietnam News Agency via AFP)

7. Iran

Leadership: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in power since 1989. President Hassan Rouhani, in office since 2013.
How censorship works: Iran's government jails journalists, blocks websites, and maintains a climate of fear with harassment and surveillance, including of journalists' families. Domestic media must adhere to tight government controls. All journalists working in Iran must receive official accreditation; those permissions are regularly suspended or revoked. Foreign bureaus are permitted but work under intense scrutiny; correspondents from international outlets have had their permission to work suspended for periods of time, and in some cases permanently. Authorities arrest and impose harsh prison sentences on journalists who cover topics deemed sensitive, including local corruption and protests. The government suppresses online expression by spying on domestic and international journalists, jamming satellite television broadcasts, and blocking millions of websites and key social media platforms, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran and U.S. Congress-funded Radio Farda. When nationwide anti-government protests took place in late 2017 and early 2018, authorities throttled and shut down the internet and mobile networks, according to Newsweek. They banned circumvention tools and used hacking and trolling campaigns targeted at domestic and international reporters, Radio Farda reported. The National Cyberspace Council has banned Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube--and the messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp--but these are accessible via VPNs, according to Bloomberg.
Lowlight: In January 2019, Iran's judiciary sentenced Yashar Soltani to five years in prison on anti-state charges after he published a series of articles that unveiled alleged corruption in Tehran land deals. Soltani worked for Memari News, the now-defunct independent website focusing exclusively on architecture and urban affairs.

A man uses his cell phone, with a photo of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran, on October 13, 2017. The government in recent years has stepped up internet and digital censorship, including bans on social media sites and messaging apps. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

8. Equatorial Guinea

Leadership: President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, in power since 1979; Africa's longest-ruling head of state.
How censorship works: The government maintains a tight grip on how and what journalists report in Equatorial Guinea. All broadcast media are government owned, except for RTV-Asonga, a network owned by the president's son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang, who is also the country's vice president. Local and international broadcasters have been banned from covering certain subjects deemed threatening to the image of the country or those close to the president. While privately owned newspapers do exist, journalists work under threat of prosecution for coverage deemed critical of the president, his family, or the government in general, and thus frequently self-censor, according to a June 2019 report by Civicus. Websites of foreign news outlets and the political opposition are among those regularly blocked, according to an October 2018 civil society submission to the U.N. Universal Periodic Review. The 1997 Press, Printing and Audiovisual Law restricts journalistic activity, including allowing for official prepublication censorship, and defamation and libel remain criminal offenses under the penal code, according to Civicus and Freedom House's Freedom of the Press report. In November 2017, the internet was shut down on the day of voting for parliamentary and municipal elections, and Facebook was blocked for about three weeks prior to the vote, according to news reports and civil society group EG Justice.
Lowlight: In September 2017, cartoonist Ramón Nsé Esono Ebalé--who had been living in exile--was arrested by Equatorial Guinean authorities while in the country to renew his passport; he was interrogated about his drawings and blog that featured critical commentary on the president, and imprisoned for six months on false charges of money laundering and counterfeiting. After his release in March 2018, the authorities refused to renew his passport for several months, preventing him from returning home to his wife and child in El Salvador.

Equatorial Guinean cartoonist Ramón Nsé Esono Ebalé in court in Malabo on February 27, 2018. Ebalé, whose drawings and blog feature commentary critical of the president and the government, was released in March 2018 after being imprisoned for six months on false charges of money laundering and counterfeiting. (AFP/Samuel Obiang)

9. Belarus

Leadership: President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994; Europe's longest-ruling head of state.
How censorship works: Authorities in Belarus exercise almost absolute control over the media; and the few independent journalists and bloggers face harassment and detentions. The state systematically targets influential media outlets and individuals, often in very public ways, arresting journalists, raiding newsrooms, and initiating criminal probes for reporting. In recent years, the government blocked independent news websites including Charter 97, founded by now-exiled journalist Natalya Radina. As the government squeezes independent news outlets, more Belarusians rely on social networks. In recent legislative moves to tighten its grip on digital media, the government in 2018 approved a bill on "fake news" and adopted amendments to the Law on Mass Media that tightened control over news websites and social media. The government has the authority to oversee internet service providers (ISPs), set standards for information security, conduct digital surveillance of citizens, and manage Belarus' top-level domains, according to Freedom House's Freedom on the Net report.
Lowlight: In March 2019, Maryna Zolatava, editor-in-chief of independent news outlet Tut.by, was found guilty of accessing a state-run news site with someone else's log-in information and fined 7,650 Belarusian rubles ($3,600).

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is seen on TV screens inside a shop during a briefing in Minsk, Belarus, on February 3, 2017. The government recently tightened its control over news websites and social media. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

10. Cuba

Leadership: President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who succeeded Raúl Castro in 2018.
How censorship works: Despite some improvements in recent years--including the expansion of mobile internet and Wi-Fi access--Cuba still has the most restricted climate for the press in the Americas. Print and broadcast media are wholly controlled by the one-party Communist state and, by law, must be "in accordance with the goals of the socialist society." In a missed opportunity, a referendum on constitutional changes, approved in February 2019, did not include any loosening of media restrictions. Cuba rolled out home internet access in 2017 and mobile data plans in 2018, but the services are prohibitively expensive for most Cubans, with 4 gigabytes of data costing around $30, the equivalent of the average state monthly salary in 2017. Although the internet has opened some space for critical reporting, the state-owned service provider, ETECSA, is ordered to block objectionable content, and restricts access to some critical blogs and news platforms, according to a report by the Open Observatory of Network Interference, which collects data on network tampering. Some independent journalists and bloggers use websites that are hosted overseas. The government targets critical journalists through harassment, physical and online surveillance, short-term detentions, home raids, and equipment seizures. Natural disaster coverage is one flashpoint: authorities detained multiple journalists reporting on the aftermath of hurricanes in October 2016 and September 2017. Visas for international journalists are granted selectively by officials, according to Freedom House's Freedom of the Press report.
Lowlight: In April 2019, police agents detained Roberto Jesús Quiñones, a contributor to the news website CubaNet, outside the Guantánamo Municipal Tribunal where he was covering a trial, and beat him while he was being transported to the Guantánamo police station. Quiñones had been harassed by Cuban authorities in the past, is barred from leaving the country, and has been detained several times, according to CubaNet.

A man sits in front of a poster of Cuba's late president, Fidel Castro, at the Cuban State Television and Radio headquarters in Havana, Cuba, on March 14, 2017. Cuba has the most restricted climate for the press in the Americas. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)

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Methodology: The 10 Most Censored Countries list assesses direct and indirect government censorship based on CPJ research, as well as the expertise of the organization's staff. Countries are evaluated based on a series of benchmarks, including:

• Absence of and/or restrictions on privately owned or independent media
• Criminal defamation laws; criminal restrictions on the dissemination of false news
• Blocking of websites
• Jamming of foreign broadcasts
• Blocking of foreign correspondents
• Surveillance of journalists by authorities
• Restrictions on journalists' movements
• License requirements to conduct journalism
• Restrictions on electronic recording and dissemination
• Targeted hacking or trolling campaigns

https://cpj.org 

 

Read More 

“I Was Duped. I Was Used.”

Cuba's Repressive Machinery: Human Rights Forty Years After the Revolution

Black Markets and Secret Thumb Drives: How Cubans Get Online

In 2007, it was illegal to purchase a PC in Cuba. Now Cubans use a variety of crafty solutions to get online. How did we get here? Will Fenton travels to Havana to find out.

 

By William Fenton

 

In 2009, Alan Gross faced 15 years in prison for setting up a Wi-Fi network in Cuba. Today I can sit on a bench in Havana with a Materva soda and a bag of chiviricos (fried dough) and surf the New York Times website using a government-issued navigation card.
Seven years ago, Gross traveled to Cuba under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development and created three satellite Internet networks via Jewish synagogues in Havana, Santiago, and Camagüey. He was arrested, and served more than five years in prison before he was released through a prisoner exchange. That date—December 17, 2014—wasn't just the day that Gross returned to the United States; it was also the day the Obama Administration announced it would begin to normalize relations after more than 50 years. Alan Gross was the linchpin in this so-called "Cuban thaw."
When he created his underground networks, Gross used a Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) terminal about the size of a notebook. He positioned the terminal so it faced south toward a satellite, and nudged the panel until it could send a signal to the satellite that reflected down to a teleport. Connection established. For Gross, it was a moment of transcendence. "When you lock onto the satellite, you've lit a candle," he said in an interview with PCMag. "It's a feeling of elation. After I did it the first time, that's all I wanted to do. Go around the world lighting candles."

 

In 2009, lighting candles in Cuba was deemed a threat to the "integrity of the state." Today, that very state sells Internet access. Cuban president Raúl Castro's approach to reform translates to "without haste, without pause." Some Cubans use it to praise initiatives, others use it ironically to critique the pace of reforms. The existence of a private rental market, family-run kitchens, and growing Internet access suggests that change is coming, though the pace of that change can feel uneven.
Cuba's Internet access remains notoriously poor. According to Freedom House, Cuban Internet penetration is somewhere between 5 and 30 percent, about half that of Russia. However, since 2007, when it was illegal to purchase a computer, the government has connected to a Venezuelan fiber-optic cable (ALBA-1), opened dozens of Internet cafes and Wi-Fi hotspots, cracked the door to foreign telecoms, and announced a pilot for residential broadband.
"I think there's a leak in the bucket that's going to get bigger and bigger, and they're never going to be able to fix it like they did in the past because Cubanos are getting a taste of something they've only had a whiff of previously," Gross argued.

I traveled to Cuba as a tourist to find out for myself. In my eight days on the island, I saw firsthand how ordinary Cubans jailbreak the World Wide Web using a combination of hacked apps, Wi-Fi extenders, and cached websites traded on hard drives. This is how Cuba gets online.

"You Want Internet?"

Shop

 
On one street in Miramar, a residential district of Havana, I counted seven cell phone workshops—private businesses that sell and service smartphones. Inside one store, several children were jailbreaking iPhones, a mother was downloading bootleg apps onto an Android device, and a father was soldering a new chipset into an aging smartphone.
These workshops look nothing like a typical Sprint or Verizon store in the U.S.; most of the phones for sale were two or three years old. A Samsung Galaxy S4 sold for 220 Cuban convertible pesos (CUC), or $220 U.S., while an unlocked Blu Dash was about 100 CUC.
Just about everyone I met in Cuba had a smartphone. Given that Cubacel is effectively the only provider, it has little incentive to offer affordable plans. Last year, Cubacel announced a rate of 1 CUC per megabyte, but that is out of reach for most residents, particularly those who rely on a state salary of 25 or 30 CUC per month.
Given the extraordinary expense, Cubans largely eschew data and rely instead on the more than 65 Wi-Fi hotspots located across the country.

Hotspot

One such hotspot in Central Havana might best be described as a block party. Most of the "park" is paved, and people duck under sparsely planted trees and golf umbrellas to escape the sun. Even in the early morning, all the benches are occupied. Some visitors even reserve seats for friends by plunking down backpacks. By early evening, people tote fold-up chairs and beers. Several teenagers lean against buildings, balancing laptops on knees. A group sits in a circle on the ground. An entrepreneur takes advantage of the crowds, selling snacks.
Millennials own this park, and while they don't fit into our hipster aesthetic, they possess all the tech you might expect of NYU undergrads, including smartphones, tablets, and MacBooks.
I asked one teenager where she got her iPad Air, and she said she had a "friend" in Miami. This is commonplace. Although many Cubans purchase phones and tablets at cell phone repair shops, many procure their devices through the States. In Miami, there's a thriving market for "mules," individuals whose sole profession is to transport technology to and from Cuba via charter flights.

Park
To connect to a hotspot, you need a navigation (nav) card, available via Cuba's government-run telecom carrier, ETECSA, which provides an hour of Internet access for 2 CUC. Every ETECSA office I visited had a line out the door, and one ran out of official tickets, prompting workers to use folded printouts.

Etecsa

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Not surprisingly, a nav card black market has emerged. The process is simple: Take a seat on a bench, look around furtively, and within minutes one or two vendors (they often compete) will sidle up to you and ask, "You want Internet?" Give them 3 CUC and they'll slip you a nav card. The most conspicuous part of the transaction is that these unofficial vendors tend to carry nav cards in plastic shopping bags, which makes the entire transaction feel like an inept drug deal.

The downside is that these nav cards cannot be easily shared among devices, and the network often becomes sluggish when too many people connect. I noticed several visitors throw up their hands in frustration.

Navcard

 
One of the reasons for the congestion is that many Cubans use their phones as hotspots via the Connectify app, which local repair shops can install on phones. Those who live within a few blocks of a hotspot tend to own repeaters so they can connect to and extend connections. I stayed in two casas particulares (private houses) in Havana: Both were in proximity of a Wi-Fi hotspot, both hosts owned repeaters, and both hosts complained that they couldn't get online after 10 a.m.—there were just too many simultaneous connections.
The Cuban government opened Internet cafés, though, compared with the Wi-Fi hotspots, they're inadequate. In addition to requiring users to sign in to computers, which puts them at risk of surveillance, the government-run cafés simply can't keep up with the demand for Internet access. As of 2013, the cafes had just 473 PCs, or one computer for every 24,800 Cubanos.
Women in Park

The Internet Without the Internet

Earlier this year, the Castro government announced—and quickly scaled back—a program for residential broadband in Old Havana. Hiram Centelles, a cofounder of the popular Cuban classified platform Revolico, is skeptical.
"They're talking about expanding Internet to specific areas in Havana," he told me via Skype. "I have no expectations. In two or three years it might have some impact."
Centelles, who currently lives in Madrid, was more optimistic about the prospects of the hotspots. "The government is doing this quickly because it's cheaper," he added. "And the people are using these hotspots in very creative ways."
Some of the most creative modes of "Internet" access, in fact, don't even require an Internet connection.
The embargo precludes any real enforcement of U.S. copyright in Cuba. You see this when you visit a cell phone repair shop with a homespun Apple logo. You watch it when a proprietor downloads hundreds of apps onto a jailbroken iPhone. And you experience it at "CD and DVD" stores, where you can purchase copies of any American movie, TV show, or album at staggeringly low prices.

USB Taxi
This is what Cuba's top blogger and dissident, Yoani Sánchez, calls "the Internet without Internet." However, there's another permutation of exchange, what you might call last week's Internet, in a box.
Perhaps the most peculiar way that ordinary Cubans connect with the outside world is through "El Paquete," or "The Package," a cache of weekly materials from the Internet that circulates on hard drives. A couple of subscribers, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that their entire office goes in on one Package for about 2 CUC. Every Monday, a delivery man drops off the drive, they download whatever they want onto their computers, and send The Package to the next subscribers when the delivery man returns six hours later.
The subscribers I met allowed me to take a look at one such Package. Content was neatly categorized in folders such as "Games" (where I found ROMs and emulators for Mario Galaxy), "Humor" (YouTube video files), "Fashion" (clips from video blogs), and "Reality" (the latest episodes of everything from American Idol to The Tonight Show). Cubans can listen to Adele's latest album, read last week's issue of The Economist, browse the classifieds, or watch a surprisingly large cache of Korean soap operas.

Paquete
It should come as little surprise, then, that Cuban entrepreneurs and businesses use The Package as they would the Internet. Instead of posting songs to SoundCloud or YouTube, Cuban artists circulate albums via The Package.
Although Revolico is accessible through a labyrinth of proxy sites, Centelles suspects that thousands of Cubans access listings via The Package. He considers Package compilers "friends," not competitors; so much so that he hired a sales force that works on the ground helping "offline" customers promote premium listings online.
Robin Pedraja's Vistar Magazine also circulates through an unofficial iPhone app available in The Package and through various cell phone repair shops. He does so not to escape censorship, but to expand access. In fact, in contrast to Centelles and Sánchez, who have had their sites blocked, Pedraja describes a "new" largely harmonious relationship with government officials.
"They don't kill ideas anymore," Pedraja said. When the Office of Media contacts him, it's not to harass him, but to learn from him. "They care about us because we represent the voice of a new generation," he added.

"In Cuba, You Never Know Who's Listening"

Not everyone shares Pedraja's optimism. While popular sites like Facebook and nytimes.com are accessible, services like Skype, WhatsApp, and YouTube are blocked. More surprising is the sense that Cubans don't know why some sites just "don't work."
Since Revolico launched in 2007, the Cuban government has repeatedly blocked the Craigslist-style site, and has "yet to offer any explanation," Centelles said.

Together with friend and partner Carlos Peña, Centelles has tried numerous workarounds, from changing IP addresses hourly to creating new domains, tactics that worked to a degree. "The government got tired of blocking our domains," Centelles explained. "When they realized that it was a game of cat and mouse, they gave up."

Still, the main site, Revolico.com, is inaccessible in Cuba. It gets 8 million page views each month, largely from abroad. Centelles's main goal is to get it unblocked there in order to grow and better compete with rivals like Port La Livre and Cubisima.
"Cubans use Revolico as a verb, even when they're using another site," he said.
Investigative journalists face greater challenges. Sánchez, who has seen her blog, Generation Y, blocked inside of Cuba, pointed to a government-run propaganda initiative, Operation Truth, to discredit critics and promote the government's plans.
In my experience, the surveillance state exerts itself implicitly and explicitly. I found it exceedingly difficult to coordinate with contacts in advance of my visit because, as one put it, "In Cuba, you never know who's listening."
Given the inchoate state of Internet infrastructure in Cuba, the sophistication of surveillance tools is likely overestimated; nevertheless, I understand Cubans' trepidation given the government interference. You feel it not just on the Internet, but also on the city streets. For example, when I was walking along the Malecón, Havana's popular waterfront promenade, a police officer reprimanded me for taking a photo of the Nico oil refinery, even though you can see its flames from almost anywhere in Havana.

"Then I Left"

It's tempting to assume that Cuba is a despotic state in which citizens are quarantined from the outside world—early accounts from emigrants support such a reading. However, the Cuba I visited didn't tell such a simple story. Despite woefully inadequate broadband infrastructure and a paranoid central authority, the Revolution has bestowed gifts, including a strong social pact, universal health care, and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, unlimited access to higher education.
Although few commercial opportunities await graduates, Cubans often acquire advanced degrees that they put into practice through a growing freelance economy. In fact, Cuba spends about 10 percent of its central budget on education, compared with around 2 percent in the United States, according to UNESCO. Cuba may not have a Harvard or a Princeton, but the public universities do offer degrees in engineering, programming, and computer science. It seemed as if everyone I met had an advanced degree.

University
My first host, Dania, is pursuing a PhD in Computer Systems. Her mother works as television news journalist, her father as a surgeon. Her sister, a journalist, married a man with a PhD in Information Systems. Contrary to the stereotype that Cubans are trapped at home, Dania has family in the Netherlands and Italy.
To get a better sense of what higher education looks like Cuba, I visited the University of Havana, the neoclassical architecture of which conveys much of the grandeur one might expect from a prestigious American university. In contrast to the noisy streets outside, the campus felt like an oasis: Students chatted on benches, lounged under trees, and sunbathed on steps. Nevertheless, there was a great deal of activity. Contractors were renovating several buildings, including the Aula Magna building (below), which has hosted many important scientists and political statesmen, including Jimmy Carter in 2002 and, reportedly, President Obama this week.

Room
The university's CS program graduates around 100 majors per year and has grown so much that Math and Computer Science now occupy what was once the General Sciences building, one of the largest and most beautiful structures on campus.

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The problem is that there's more supply than demand, something Centelles saw with his graduating class at Cujae, Havana's main engineering and science university. "Many ended up working in low-level or non-technical positions, which is really a shame," he told me.
Centelles emigrated to Spain after he completed his engineering degree. "I had to ask for permission to leave before graduating," Centelles said. "Then I left."
Typically, graduates conduct "social work" in university departments, research institutes, and government software enterprises, which provides guaranteed, though not lucrative, state employment. After two years, graduates can freely pursue other positions including private work outside of Cuba. Some University of Havana students have landed jobs at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
However, the students I spoke with admitted that limited Web access posed the greatest impediment to finding work. Though university students receive Internet access, data usage is capped between 300MB and 800MB per month. Connections are fast by Cuban standards—26Mbps—though they pale in comparison to U.S. broadband.
In the case of the University of Havana, administrators are working to improve the Wi-Fi network, though it's still not sufficient for teleconferencing. During the day, the university even constrains access to Facebook to free up bandwidth.

Student

"Cuba Has Two Parallel Economies"

Many Cubans finish their degrees and seek a second—or third—job far afield. If you own a car, you operate a taxi or a rideshare. If you can cook, you run a paladar, a family-run kitchen. And, if you have a spare room, you open a casa particular. Even these well-established marketplaces—which data back to the early 1990s—are being cracked open as a Web-savvy generation of Cubans embraces the Internet.
Perhaps the most significant game-changer for tourism is Airbnb. The platform can deposit greenbacks directly into Cuban hosts' bank accounts, and enable Americans to reserve rooms for as little as 20 or 30 CUC per night—a bargain compared with traditional hotels, which can cost upwards of 200 or 300 CUC per night.

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Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE) last year and is among the handful of U.S. CEOs traveling to Cuba this week, tweeted that approximately 4,000 of the estimated 8,000 casas particulares now use Airbnb; 1,700 guests will use Airbnb this week alone. "In the past year, Americans from all 50 states have visited Cuba on @Airbnb," he wrote, adding that Airbnb estimates 10-20 percent of all U.S. travelers to Cuba in 2016 have stayed with Airbnb hosts. Starting April 2, in fact, Airbnb will begin serving guests from around the world.
Unfortunately, all that availability may be moot if Cubans cannot access online reservations. For example, after Dania couldn't connect to the Internet for three days she lost reservations and had her account suspended.
"Cuba has two parallel economies: one with the state and one with private business," said Bernardo Romero (pictured below), the founder of the hardware and software company Ingenius. "In private business, no one can live off $30. In a family, perhaps one person will work for the state. Everyone else works in some kind of private business."

Romero
As one of Cuba's growing class of cuentapropistas, or self-employed entrepreneurs, Romero sometimes benefits from Cuban particularities. For example, Ingenius creates software for tracking payments in the country's two currencies—the CUC and the traditional peso.
Others straddle the line between the public and private economies, like Syncware founders Adriana Sigüenza and Manuel Bouza, who serve private Cuban companies as well as clients owned either partially or fully by the state. Although Cuban law precludes the company from working directly with foreign businesses, Syncware acts as a "bridge" to foreign investors. Yes, it develops software, sets up Microsoft technology, and offers IT support, but it also helps businesses scale up operations by developing business plans, deploying CRM software, and designing business process management and enterprise architecture.

"A Cab Driver Shouldn't Be a Former Nuclear Engineer"

While Romero, Sigüenza, and Bouza take advantage of Cuba's bifurcated economy, others struggle in a country that does not have enough jobs for its highly educated residents.

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"A cab driver shouldn't be a former nuclear engineer," said Tomas Bilbao, managing director at Avila Strategies and advisor to the Policy Council at Engage Cuba.
Consider my host Dania, who runs a bed-and-breakfast despite her advanced degree, or Centelles, who left the country entirely.
Still, Centelles remains hopeful. "Supply continues to outstrip demand, but it's changing," he explained. "After the December 17 announcement, a lot of Americans are trying to get access to this kind of labor."
Centelles sees a marked increase in private companies specializing in outsourcing. These intermediaries typically pay newly minted computer science graduates between 200-500 CUC per month. If these kinds of arrangements are agreeable to graduates, they're far from ideal for the state—unless it aspires to become a low-wage outsourcing center.
Perhaps the most formidable barrier is the embargo. Sigüenza, for example, cannot negotiate with Microsoft, which means that Syncware, and its clients, overpay for products and services. Meanwhile, Centelles incorporated Revolico in Spain to collect Google AdSense revenue.

Scene

 
Short of lifting the embargo, Bilbao argues that the U.S. needs to lower banks' risk calculations. The sooner Google and Visa can operate in Cuba, the sooner Cubans can collect compensation for their labor. As long as the embargo remains in place, Cubans will struggle to move money into and out of their country. As any American tourist knows, most U.S. banks do not operate inside Cuba. (One noteworthy exception is Stonegate Bank, which announced last year that it would open a corresponding bank account in Cuba.) The status quo may inconvenience visitors—I took cash out in advance because I knew that my debit card wouldn't work—but it harms ordinary Cubans.
Incorporating businesses is a challenge, as well. Although the government offers more than 200 categories of employment under its lineamientos, or economic guidelines, about three-quarters of those categories do not serve skilled workers, especially in tech, where Bilbao argues that the government needs to create new categories of employment.

This, too, is not an academic exercise for Cubans. Neither Ingenius nor Syncware could be incorporated as IT consultancy businesses. Instead, founders applied for two licenses (Computer Programming and Electrical Repairs) through which they use a loophole to conduct consulting.

Finally, while Bilbao commended the government for expanding access via the Wi-Fi hotspots, he noted that without a clearheaded understanding of infrastructural shortcomings, the government and private sector partners won't be able to make smart investments.
The Cubans who have stayed in Cuba, and the expats who have recommitted to their country since the U.S. reopened diplomatic relations in 2014, appear willing to endure these burdens. It's a testament to their pride, as well as a daily demonstration of their ingenuity and indefatigable spirit.
"I had the opportunity to leave Cuba and develop a profession elsewhere," Romero explained. "I chose to live in Cuba, to develop my business in Cuba, to start my family in Cuba. And, in a few years, I think I will be better off in Cuba."
Alan Gross agreed, though he suspects it might take more than a few years.
"I absolutely support reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba," he told PCMag. "If we had diplomatic relations, I might not have had to forfeit five years of my life. We have constructive engagement for a reason."
Still, "I think it will take years before we have normalized relations because Cuba does not exist in a normalized state."

"Without Hurry, Without Rest"

When Castro describes his reforms as "without haste but without pause," he intentionally or unintentionally cites an American lineage. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in a famous 1841 essay, "Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events."
A decade before he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, exiled Cuban dissident José Martí penned his now-widely anthologized eulogy to Emerson. Martí claimed Emerson made "idealism human," and as Martí himself gained an almost mythical status within Cuba, so too did many of the attributes he assigned Emerson. Castro's reforms recast Emerson's vision, which, after Martí's hagiography, have come to suffuse Cuba's revolutionary ethos.

If there is something of Emerson's history in Castro's refrain, then there is also something of Emerson's idealism alive in Cuba. It can be glimpsed in the bootstrapped networks, hotspots, and hardware that ordinary Cubans use to connect with the outside world. You can see it in Cubans who refuse to incorporate businesses elsewhere, the students who pursue advanced degrees despite enduringly grim job prospects, and the entrepreneurs who start businesses despite untold practical, technical, and legal challenges.
In 2009, the networks that Gross created were deemed a threat to the "integrity of the state." Today, they are provided by the state. If the curvaceous automobiles of the 1950s epitomized Cuba under the embargo, today it is the Wi-Fi–equipped public park where countless Cubans gather, with lawn chairs and laptops, and wait to light their candles.
Top Photo Credit: Alan Gross. Check out the slideshow above for more scenes from Havana.

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Communist-run Cuba starts rolling out internet on mobile phones

Sarah Marsh
HAVANA (Reuters) - Communist-run Cuba has started providing internet on the mobile phones of select users as it aims to roll out the service nationwide by year-end, in a further step toward opening one of the Western Hemisphere’s least connected countries.
Journalists at state-run news outlets were among the first this year to get mobile internet, provided by Cuba’s telecoms monopoly, as part of a wider campaign for greater internet access that new President Miguel Diaz-Canel has said should boost the economy and help Cubans defend their revolution.
Analysts said broader web access will also ultimately weaken the government’s control of what information reaches people in the one-party island state that has a monopoly on the media. Cuba frowns on public dissent and blocks access to dissident websites.
“It’s been a radical change,” said Yuris Norido, 39, who reports for several state-run news websites and the television. “I can now update on the news from wherever I am, including where the news is taking place.”
Certain customers, including companies and embassies, have also been able to buy mobile data plans since December, according to the website of Cuban telecoms monopoly ETECSA, which has not broadly publicized the move.
ETECSA has said it will expand mobile internet to all its 5 million mobile phone customers, nearly half of Cuba’s population, by the end of this year. ETECSA did not reply to a request for more details for this story.
Whether because of a lack of cash, a long-running U.S. trade embargo or concerns about the flow of information, Cuba has lagged behind in web access. Until 2013, internet was largely only available to the public at tourist hotels in Cuba. But the government has since then made increasing connectivity a priority, introducing cybercafes and outdoor Wi-Fi hotspots and slowly starting to hook up homes to the web.
Long before he took office from Raul Castro in April, 58-year-old Diaz-Canel championed the cause.
“We need to be able to put the content of the revolution online,” he told parliament last July as vice president, adding that Cubans could thus “counter the avalanche of pseudo-cultural, banal and vulgar content.”

Cuba could use subsidies to encourage the use of government-sponsored applications, analysts said. Last month, ETECSA launched a free Cuba-only messaging application, Todus, while Cuba’s own intranet with a handful of government-approved sites and email is much cheaper to access than the wider internet.
In a 2015 document about its internet strategy that leaked, the Cuban government said it aimed to connect at least half of homes by 2020 and 60 percent of phones.
But many Cubans are skeptical. ETECSA President Mayra Arevich told state-run media in December it had connected just 11,000 homes last year.
“I’ve been many times to the ETECSA shop to ask if they can give us home access,” said Yuneisy Galindo, 28, at a Wi-Fi hotspot on one of Havana’s thoroughfares. “But they tell us they still aren’t ready and will call us.”

Most mobile phone owners have smartphones, although Cuba is only now installing 3G technology, even as most of Latin America has moved onto 4G, with 5G in its final testing phase.
“This rollout will expand slowly at first and then more quickly, if the government is increasingly confident that it can control any political fallout,” said Cuba expert Ted Henken at Baruch College in the United States.
The price could prove the biggest restriction for many, though. Hotspots currently charge $1 an hour, compared with an average state monthly wage of $30.
It was not clear what most Cubans will pay for mobile internet, but ETECSA is charging companies and embassies $45 a month for four gigabytes.
Reporting by Sarah Marsh; additional reporting by Nelson Acosta, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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FROM PAGE # 9

US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government

To cover their tracks, they decided to have a company based in the United Kingdom set up a corporation in Spain to run ZunZuneo. A separate company called MovilChat was created in the Cayman Islands, a well-known offshore tax haven, with an account at the island's Bank of NT Butterfield & Son Ltd. to pay the bills.
A memo of the meeting in Barcelona says that the front companies would distance ZunZuneo from any US ownership so that the "money trail will not trace back to America."
But it wasn't just the money they were worried about. They had to hide the origins of the texts, according to documents and interviews with team members.
Brad Blanken, the former chief operating officer of Mobile Accord, left the project early on, but noted that there were two main criteria for success.
"The biggest challenge with creating something like this is getting the phone numbers," Blanken said. "And then the ability to spoof the network."
The team of contractors set up servers in Spain and Ireland to process texts, contracting an independent Spanish company called Lleida.net to send the text messages back to Cuba, while stripping off identifying data.
Mobile Accord also sought intelligence from engineers at the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, which organizers said would "have knowledge of Cubacel's network."
"Understanding the security and monitoring protocols of Cubacel will be an invaluable asset to avoid unnecessary detection by the carrier," one Mobile Accord memo read.
Officials at USAid realized however, that they could not conceal their involvement forever — unless they left the stage. The predicament was summarized bluntly when Eberhard was in Washington for a strategy session in early February 2011, where his company noted the "inherent contradiction" of giving Cubans a platform for communications uninfluenced by their government that was in fact financed by the US government and influenced by its agenda.
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They turned to Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, to seek funding for the project. Documents show Dorsey met with Suzanne Hall, a State Department officer who worked on social media projects, and others. Dorsey declined to comment.
The State Department under then-Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton thought social media was an important tool in diplomacy. At a 2011 speech at George Washington University, Clinton said the US helped people in "oppressive Internet environments get around filters." In Tunisia, she said people used technology to "organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change."
Ultimately, the solution was new management that could separate ZunZuneo from its US origins and raise enough revenue for it to go "independent," even as it kept its long-term strategy to bring about "democratic change."
Eberhard led the recruitment efforts, a sensitive operation because he intended to keep the management of the Spanish company in the dark.
"The ZZ management team will have no knowledge of the true origin of the operation; as far as they know, the platform was established by Mobile Accord," the memo said. "There should be zero doubt in management's mind and no insecurities or concerns about United States Government involvement."
The memo went on to say that the CEO's clean conscience would be "particularly critical when dealing with Cubacel." Sensitive to the high cost of text messages for average Cubans, ZunZuneo negotiated a bulk rate for texts at 4 cents a pop through a Spanish intermediary. Documents show there was hope that an earnest, clueless CEO might be able to persuade Cubacel to back the project.
Mobile Accord considered a dozen candidates from five countries to head the Spanish front company. One of them was Francoise de Valera, a CEO who was vacationing in Dubai when she was approached for an interview. She flew to Barcelona. At the luxury Mandarin Oriental Hotel, she met with Nim Patel, who at the time was Mobile Accord's president. Eberhard had also flown in for the interviews. But she said she couldn't get a straight answer about what they were looking for.
"They talked to me about instant messaging but nothing about Cuba, or the United States," she told the AP in an interview from London.
"If I had been offered and accepted the role, I believe that sooner or later it would have become apparent to me that something wasn't right," she said.
___
By early 2011, Creative Associates grew exasperated with Mobile Accord's failure to make ZunZuneo self-sustaining and independent of the US government. The operation had run into an unsolvable problem. USAid was paying tens of thousands of dollars in text messaging fees to Cuba's communist telecommunications monopoly routed through a secret bank account and front companies. It was not a situation that it could either afford or justify — and if exposed it would be embarrassing, or worse.

Associated Press in Washington

Cuba's Digital Millennials 

 Internet in Cuba: How to Get Wifi in Cuba in 2020

January 5, 2020 by Ayngelina

 

One of the first questions people ask me is how can I work in Havana with such slow internet in Cuba.  People are so afraid to travel here because of wifi in Cuba.
This post is long but it’s because I wanted to be thorough. TLDR: Yes tourists can get a Cuban SIM card!
Here’s the real deal, there are lots of posts about internet in Cuba. This information is usually outdated and internet changes so quickly here. This post was last updated February 13, 2020.

Internet in Cuba is changing rapidly, every year the price decreases, more locations open up and it gets faster. In 2016, Cuba partnered with Google to add more servers for a faster internet connection. Cuba now has 4G service.
I’ve based myself out of Havana for the last two years to work on a Cuban food and travel guide, yes you can actually work online in Cuba. It’s not the cheapest or the fastest but it is possible.
That said, please keep in mind I’m living in Havana.
So wifi in Havana is going to be much better, faster and more prevalent than wifi in small towns.
When I visit spots like Vinales, Varadero or Las Terrazas Cuba I only travel with my phone, not my laptop and my internet use is less intensive.

FROM  TO PAGE # 16

US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government

In a searing evaluation, Creative Associates said Mobile Accord had ignored sustainability because "it has felt comfortable receiving USG financing to move the venture forward."
Out of 60 points awarded for performance, Mobile Accord scored 34 points. Creative Associates complained that Mobile Accord's understanding of the social mission of the project was weak, and gave it 3 out of 10 points for "commitment to our Program goals."
Mobile Accord declined to comment on the program.
In increasingly impatient tones, Creative Associates pressed Mobile Accord to find new revenue that would pay the bills. Mobile Accord suggested selling targeted advertisements in Cuba, but even with projections of up to a million ZunZuneo subscribers, advertising in a state-run economy would amount to a pittance.
By March 2011, ZunZuneo had about 40,000 subscribers. To keep a lower profile, it abandoned previous hopes of reaching 200,000 and instead capped the number of subscribers at a lower number. It limited ZunZuneo's text messages to less than one percent of the total in Cuba, so as to avoid the notice of Cuban authorities. Though one former ZunZuneo worker — who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about his work — said the Cubans were catching on and had tried to block the site.
___
Toward the middle of 2012, Cuban users began to complain that the service worked only sporadically. Then not at all.
ZunZuneo vanished as mysteriously as it appeared.
By June 2012, users who had access to Facebook and Twitter were wondering what had happened.
"Where can you pick up messages from ZunZuneo?" one woman asked on Facebook in November 2012. "Why aren't I receiving them anymore?"
Users who went to ZunZuneo's website were sent to a children's website with a similar name.
Reyner Aguero, a 25-year-old blogger, said he and fellow students at Havana's University of Computer Sciences tried to track it down. Someone had rerouted the website through DNS blocking, a censorship technique initially developed back in the 1990s. Intelligence officers later told the students that ZunZuneo was blacklisted, he said.
"ZunZuneo, like everything else they did not control, was a threat," Aguero said. "Period."

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In incorrect Spanish, ZunZuneo posted a note on its Facebook page saying it was aware of problems accessing the website and that it was trying to resolve them.
" ¡Que viva el ZunZuneo!" the message said. Long live ZunZuneo!
In February, when Saimi Reyes, and her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra, learned the origins of ZunZuneo, they were stunned.
"How was I supposed to realize that?" Guerra asked. "It's not like there was a sign saying 'Welcome to ZunZuneo, brought to you by USAid."
"Besides, there was nothing wrong. If I had started getting subversive messages or death threats or 'Everyone into the streets,'" he laughed, "I would have said, 'OK,' there's something fishy about this. But nothing like that happened."
USAid says the program ended when the money ran out. The Cuban government declined to comment.
The former web domain is now a placeholder, for sale for $299. The registration for MovilChat, the Cayman Islands front company, was set to expire on March 31.
In Cuba, nothing has come close to replacing it. Internet service still is restricted.
"The moment when ZunZuneo disappeared was like a vacuum," Guerra said. "People texted my phone, 'What is happening with ZunZuneo?'
"In the end, we never learned what happened," he said. "We never learned where it came from."

America faces an epic choice...

... this year, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times. Over the last three years, much of what the Guardian holds dear has been threatened – democracy, civility, truth. This US administration is establishing new norms of behaviour. Anger and cruelty disfigure public discourse and lying is commonplace. Truth is being chased away. But with your help we can continue to put it center stage.
Rampant disinformation, partisan news sources and social media's tsunami of fake news is no basis on which to inform the American public in 2020. The need for a robust, independent press has never been greater, and with your support we can continue to provide fact-based reporting that offers public scrutiny and oversight. Our journalism is free and open for all, but it's made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers like you across America in all 50 states.
On the occasion of its 100th birthday in 1921 the editor of the Guardian said, "Perhaps the chief virtue of a newspaper is its independence. It should have a soul of its own." That is more true than ever. Freed from the influence of an owner or shareholders, the Guardian's editorial independence is our unique driving force and guiding principle.
We also want to say a huge thank you to everyone who generously supports the Guardian. You provide us with the motivation and financial support to keep doing what we do. Every reader contribution, big or small is so valuable.

The F.B.I. Is Quietly Contacting Cubans in Florida, Raising Old Alarm Bells

 

Demonstrations in Miami in 2015 against the opening of the U.S. embassy in Havana.Credit...Michele Eve Sandberg/Corbis, via Getty Images

By Frances Robles

Julio V. Ruiz, a 71-year-old retired psychiatrist with a long history of participating in talks with the Cuban government, tried to ignore the persistent knocking at his door by two strangers when they showed up uninvited one afternoon last week. The rapping on the door went on for 15 minutes. It was the F.B.I.
“Everyone tells you not to speak to them and to call your lawyer,” Dr. Ruiz said. “But you get scared. I was measured in what I said, and gave them a brief history of Cuba going back to the 19th century.”
At least five Cuban-Americans in Miami, including Dr. Ruiz, who have opposed a trade embargo with Cuba and promoted better relations with the communist government in Havana, said they received surprise visits in the past week from federal agents.
The law enforcement representatives were vague about their intentions, gave only their first names, and asked questions that seemed intended to learn about contacts with Cuban diplomats, Dr. Ruiz said.

For many, the questions triggered decades-old concerns dating back to a time when ideological divisions in the Cuban exile community were more pronounced, and sometimes were coupled with law enforcement scrutiny. Those contacted were among a large group of exiles who came to the United States as children in the early 1960s, fleeing the Castro dictatorship. As adults, they supported engaging with the Cuban government, even when doing so was deeply unpopular in South Florida and often caused them to be ostracized.Some of those contacted said they feared that they were being targeted as part of President Trump’s moves to curtail travel to Cuba and roll back new openings with Havana that had been enacted by the Obama administration.The meetings come in the wake of a series of bizarre ailments, which some suggested could be linked to possible sonic or microwave attacks, that afflicted more than three dozen American diplomats and family members in Cuba and China. The incidents in Cuba resulted in a diplomatic rupture between Havana and Washington, and the U.S. embassy in Havana is down to a skeleton staff.But there was no sign that the recent meetings were connected to any investigation of those reports. A brochure the agents left with one of the men suggested that the agents were trying to alert him to the possibility that he was being targeted by spies.
The brochure, also published on the F.B.I.’s website, describes the process of “elicitation,” which it says is “a technique used to collect information that is not readily available and do so without raising suspicion that specific facts are being sought.” The pamphlet appears intended to train people on how to spot warning signs.
Miami has long been a hotbed for Cuban spies. It’s not clear if the F.B.I. had specific information on attempts to infiltrate the activist groups and wanted to warn them.
“In the course of our duties, the F.B.I. regularly and openly interacts with members of the communities we serve to build mutual trust around combating potential criminal activity and possible threats to the American public,” the agency said in a statement. “The F.B.I. has always relied on the cooperation of the American people to keep our country safe, and maintaining open lines of communication helps the F.B.I. to be more responsive to community concerns.”

President Trump speaking about policy changes toward Cuba at the Manuel Artime Theater in the Little Havana neighborhood in Miami last year.Credit...Raul E. Diego/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images

Only two of the five activists contacted by law enforcement officials actually spoke to the agents. The others either refused or were unavailable when the investigators showed up.
It is unclear whether more people were visited around the nation or in South Florida.
“I think it borders on harassment, because it isn’t illegal to talk about stuff with the embassy of the country where you were born,” said Elena Freyre, 70, president of ForNorm, a foundation that promotes the normalization of relations between Washington and Havana. “And it’s kind of weird to have the F.B.I. asking questions about that.”
Ms. Freyre said agents went to her former place of employment last week and did not find her there. An agent later left a voice mail message, identifying himself only as Ian. The agents who visited Dr. Ruiz identified themselves as representing the F.B.I. and briefly flashed badges, but said they did not have business cards. One of them wrote her name and phone number on a piece of paper: Susy.

 Foreign Correspondent: Does Cuba Censor the Internet? Think Again.

So far, U.S. government attempts to kickstart a Twitter revolution have failed.
by Reese Erlich
 
January 25, 2019

A group of Cubans stare intently at their smart phones here in Old Havana, checking emails and Googling news stories. They, and the millions of other Cubans who got access to Internet upgrades last month, defy the image of Cuba as a totalitarian state where citizens face Internet censorship.
Cubans can now subscribe to monthly plans providing roaming Internet connections for $7 per month. Others access the Internet from wifi hotspots for even less.
The Cuban government blocks access to the U.S. propaganda station TV Marti, as well as to some pro-U.S. blogs, but citizens have easy access to The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and even the ultra-conservative Spanish edition of the Miami Herald. Twitter, Facebook, and cell phone apps such as IMO are also easily accessible.
“There's virtually no Internet censorship in Cuba.”
“There's virtually no Internet censorship in Cuba,” a U.S. journalist based in Havana told me during a recent trip.
Cuba has vastly improved Internet connectivity over the past fifteen years, but only about 40 percent of Cubans have Internet access, compared to a projected 61 percent for the rest of Latin America. This is largely because all smart phones must be imported and remain expensive for the average Cuban, who earns about $30 per month. I saw older model Samsung phones priced at $60 at one Havana store. A monthly plan providing 1 gigabyte of broadband with roaming costs $10.

---

Conservatives in the U.S. have argued that the Cuban government deliberately uses the high cost of connectivity to keep Cubans unaware of the benefits of U.S.-style democracy. When I first began reporting on the issue in the early 1990s, connecting to the Internet meant paying $12 an hour at a tourist hotel. In the ensuing years, Cubans could use a computer at a local post office at the rate of $5 an hour for an extremely slow connection.
But Internet access improved after 2012, when Venezuela laid a new optic cable to Cuba. More Cubans became able to use home dial-up connections along with wifi hotspots in parks, cyber cafes, and other public spaces. Students at University of Havana and other colleges now have free, but slow, wifi access.
Cuban government officials told me that the U.S. embargo on business dealings with Cuba serves to keep connectivity costs high for some users. The U.S. government stopped U.S. phone companies from laying new cables from Florida to Cuba, forcing the island to rely on far more expensive satellite connections.
Juan Fernández, a professor at the University of Information Sciences and advisor to the Communications Ministry on Internet issues, told me during a previous trip that U.S. companies control a lot of the computer hardware used for modern Internet connections.
“The U.S. is very close and could sell everything very cheap,” he said. “Yes, we can buy it in Asia, but it’s more expensive.”
“We face great pressure, practically an economic war, from the most powerful country in the world,” Fernández continued. “Every day the United States tries to make our system disappear. For fifty years the United States has been trying regime change in Cuba.”
The Office of Cuba Broadcasting, the U.S. government agency in charge of propaganda broadcasts to Cuba, has admitted to promoting mobile phone apps that spread propaganda. It distributed free smartphones loaded with programs called ZunZuneo and Piramidio, designed to foment discontent with the government.
“My students started getting text messages on their cell phones with news reports about demonstrations that never happened,” Néstor García Iturbe, a former Cuban diplomat at the United Nations, once told me. “The United States is trying to create a climate to protest against the Cuban government.”
“My students started getting text messages on their cell phones with news reports about demonstrations that never happened.”
In 2009, the Cuban government arrested Alan Gross, a USAID contractor, for distributing satellite phones aimed at establishing wifi hotspots to be used by Cuba’s small Jewish community. He was convicted of spying and sentenced to fifteen years. He was released in 2014 when the U.S. and Cuba established full diplomatic relations under President Barack Obama.
So far, U.S. government attempts to kickstart a Twitter revolution have failed. In addition to Internet access, many Cubans buy the “Paquete” (Packet), a weekly download of massive amounts of news and entertainment. A customer brings a thumb drive to a Paquete distributor, pays as little as 50 cents and can get the latest foreign newspapers, magazines, TV shows, movies, and even U.S. propaganda broadcasts.
But the most frequently downloaded choices, according to many Cubans I interviewed, are soap operas.

Reese Erlich’s syndicated column, “Foreign Correspondent,” appears regularly in The Progressive.

 

 

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Freedom on the Net 2019

 

  Let's Take it Slow on Overtures to Cuba

COMMENTARY BY

Peter Brookes @Brookes_Peter

Senior Research Fellow

Peter researches and develops Heritage's policy on weapons of mass destruction and counter proliferation.

 

If you're hoping for major changes in Cuba following the White House's announcement Monday of the easing of some restrictions on interactions with the island -- think again.
Sure, for humanitarian purposes, it's fine to allow separated families to see each other more regularly than once every couple of years - even though Cubanos aren't allowed to visit the United States.
And, allowing remittances to American relatives in Cuba can ease some suffering due to the regime's failed policies - even though at least 20 percent of the money sent to Cuba will be siphoned off by the government.
But in the end, it's still the brothers Castro, Fidel and his successor Raul, who will decide whether there is an opening to the United States -- or not.
And in usual Cuban-regime style, in response to the White House announcement, Fidel Castro stood defiant, barely recognizing the change in long-standing U.S. policy.
Instead, and predictably, Fidel called for an end to el bloqueo (the blockade) on Cuba - without any offer of change from the regime holding 11 million people in its iron grip.
So much for Obama's magic spell on the world's bad actors.
The concern among many is that liberal criticism and a lack of a positive Cuban response will lead the White House to make even more concessions in an effort to create an opening.
Of course, the big empanada is the 1962 U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, which is unquestionably the thing Havana most wants ended.
Lifting the embargo on Cuba won't normalize relations, but instead will legitimize - and concede defeat to - Fidel's 50-year struggle against the Yanquis.
It'll also pour plenty of cash into the Cuban national coffers, allowing Havana to repress more at home and hop-up its anti-American agenda abroad.
The last thing we need to do is line the pockets of the communist regime, which they'll use to control the Cuban people. Cuban human-rights are grim enough.
The totalitarian state manhandles all aspects of the Cuban people's lives - not to mention the more than 200 political prisoners, languishing in rat-infested dungeons. Freedom of speech, press, assembly or association? Forget it.
Cuban security services closely monitor domestic and international journalists, restrict both Internet access and foreign news -- and censor domestic media.
We also don't need a re-invigorated Cuba becoming a major menace to U.S. interests in this hemisphere. There'd be no joy in seeing Cuba team up with Venezuela in advancing their leftist, anti-American agenda down South.
Indeed, the embargo has kept Cuba in its box since the loss of Soviet sponsorship in the early 1990s. Anyone noticed the lack of trouble Cuba has caused since then? Contrast that with the 1980s.
Regrettably, 110 years after independence from Spain (courtesy of Uncle Sam), Cuba still isn't free. Instead it labors in the yoke of a Castro-imposed dystopia.
The U.S. embargo remains a matter of principle - and a leveraged response to Cuba's repression of its people. Knuckling under to evil without reciprocity is a moral hazard, only begetting more of the same.
So until we see progress in unshackling the Cuban people from the regime's chains, we should hold firm on the embargo. Otherwise, "Cuba Libre" will never become more than a rallying cry.
Sure, for humanitarian purposes, it's fine to allow separated families to see each other more regularly than once every couple of years - even though Cubanos aren't allowed to visit the United States.
And, allowing remittances to American relatives in Cuba can ease some suffering due to the regime's failed policies - even though at least 20 percent of the money sent to Cuba will be siphoned off by the government.
But in the end, it's still the brothers Castro, Fidel and his successor Raul, who will decide whether there is an opening to the United States - or not.
And in usual Cuban-regime style, in response to the White House announcement, Fidel Castro stood defiant, barely recognizing the change in long-standing U.S. policy.
Instead, and predictably, Fidel called for an end to el bloqueo (the blockade) on Cuba - without any offer of change from the regime holding 11 million people in its iron grip.
So much for Obama's magic spell on the world's bad actors.
The concern among many is that liberal criticism and a lack of a positive Cuban response will lead the White House to make even more concessions in an effort to create an opening.
Of course, the big empanada is the 1962 U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, which is unquestionably the thing Havana most wants ended.
Lifting the embargo on Cuba won't normalize relations, but instead will legitimize -- and concede defeat to - Fidel's 50-year struggle against the Yanquis.
It'll also pour plenty of cash into the Cuban national coffers, allowing Havana to repress more at home and hop-up its anti-American agenda abroad.
The last thing we need to do is line the pockets of the communist regime, which they'll use to control the Cuban people. Cuban human-rights are grim enough.
The totalitarian state manhandles all aspects of the Cuban people's lives -- not to mention the more than 200 political prisoners, languishing in rat-infested dungeons. Freedom of speech, press, assembly or association? Forget it.
Cuban security services closely monitor domestic and international journalists, restrict both Internet access and foreign news - and censor domestic media.
We also don't need a re-invigorated Cuba becoming a major menace to U.S. interests in this hemisphere. There'd be no joy in seeing Cuba team up with Venezuela in advancing their leftist, anti-American agenda down South.
Indeed, the embargo has kept Cuba in its box since the loss of Soviet sponsorship in the early 1990s. Anyone noticed the lack of trouble Cuba has caused since then? Contrast that with the 1980s.
Regrettably, 110 years after independence from Spain (courtesy of Uncle Sam), Cuba still isn't free. Instead it labors in the yoke of a Castro-imposed dystopia.
The U.S. embargo remains a matter of principle - and a leveraged response to Cuba's repression of its people. Knuckling under to evil without reciprocity is a moral hazard, only begetting more of the same.
So until we see progress in unshackling the Cuban people from the regime's chains, we should hold firm on the embargo. Otherwise, "Cuba Libre" will never become more than a rallying cry.


Peter Brookes is senior fellow for National Security Affairs in the Davis Institute at The Heritage Foundation.

 

Here’s why Cuba has painfully slow Internet – and what Google’s doing to fix it

by Matthew Hughes — 1 year ago in World
 

Yesterday, Google announced it’s teaming up with Cuba’s telecommunications monopoly, ETECSA, in order to bring faster Internet access to the island. The news is no doubt a relief for Cuba’s citizenry, who have to endure high Internet costs and excruciatingly slow speeds. These factors combine to give Cuba one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in the Western hemisphere.
But why is a middle-income country, situated within spitting distance of the United States, a digital dead-zone? The answer is actually fairly interesting and involves a number of factors.

Dude, where’s my cables?

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LET’S GO

There’s a massive network of undersea fiber optic cables in the ocean. These connect disparate locales, ferrying bits and bytes at the speed of light. Just to give you a sense of how important these are, according to a 2017 report published by the UK-based think tank Policy Exchange, submarine cables were responsible for carrying around 97 percent of the world’s communication traffic.
Most countries with a maritime border are connected to several undersea cables. The first reason for this is redundancy: if one breaks (which happens often), there’s a backup. More cables means you’re able to transmit more traffic, too, which is essential if you’ve got a data-hungry populace.

Cuba is connected to just one cable. In 2013, the country activated a $70 million, 1,600 kilometer (994 mile) pipeline to Venezuela. Prior to that, it relied on excruciatingly expensive satellite connections, which cost a small fortune to operate, and offered limited bandwidth. This all but kept the Internet out of the hands of everyone, except a handful of elites.
You know, government officials. Foreign diplomats. Tourists.
So, now you’re probably wondering why Cuba’s so behind the times. The answer, of course, involves politics.

Embargo Shmembargo

For a tiny country of just over 11 million in the Caribbean, Cuba played an oversized role in the Cold War. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? The clue is in the name.
The past 60 years of Cuba’s history has been centered around a deep-seated animosity with the nearest superpower – the US. In an attempt to stymie the only outpost of communism in North America, America placed Cuba under a crushing embargo that prevented it from doing business with the outside world.


For a really long time, American companies couldn’t sell telecommunications equipment to Cuba. It’s worth remembering that American firms dominate the tech world, and it’s almost impossible to have any sort of infrastructure without any US-origin parts (although is likely getting easier, thanks to the rise of China as a tech giant in its own right).
Thankfully, that restriction was lifted by President Obama in 2009, as tensions between the two countries thawed. It remains to be seen what changes Trump’s presidency will mean for the effort to connect Cuba to the Internet, however.

Don’t forget authoritarianism

It’s not just America. As an authoritarian regime with an abysmal human rights record, Cuba’s got an incentive to keep its citizens offline, and regularly harasses and arrests digital dissidents. Reporters Without Borders calls the nation an “Internet Enemy,” putting in the same list as North Korea, Syria, and Iran.
The censorship manifests itself in a really interesting way. While there’s not much actual site-level blocking, Cuba does surveil its citizens online. You could also make a convincing case that the country has deliberately rationed access in order to keep it out of the hands of the masses.

In December 2009, Cuba arrested a US citizen, Alan Gross, after he smuggled Internet equipment into the country, destined for the nation’s tiny Jewish community. Gross would spend six years incarcerated before eventually being released in 2014.

And here we are.

Let’s go back to Google. There’s currently no hard timeframe for when Cubans will get faster access to the likes of YouTube, Search, and Google Play. According to Reuters, engineers from Google and ETECSA will work together to find a solution. Overall, the details are thin on the ground, but it seems like Google’s advocating for a “peering agreement,” where ETECSA has a direct line to Google’s infrastructure.
This would lower costs, as Cubans wouldn’t have to pay in order to access Google via an intermediary network. It’ll also offer markedly faster access. However, it’ll undoubtedly require new submarine infrastructure. Cuba will either have to connect to one of Google’s “points of presence.” The nearest ones to Havana are in Florida, Mexico, and Colombia.
But make no mistake, solving Cuba’s Internet woes won’t just be solved by thicker pipelines and faster routers. This isn’t just a technical problem. A good deal of diplomacy is required, too.
Given the history of the country, you can be forgiven for wondering how we ended up in a position where a communist monopoly is teaming up with Google. The reality is that Cuba’s arrival on the Internet stage may have been severely delayed, but it’s certainly been rapid.
Internet cafés were followed by public Wi-Fi hotspots, and since December, Cuba’s had widespread mobile Internet. Around two million people, or about 18 percent of the country, now pays for 3G internet, which they access through their smartphones. And that’s before we get into the phenomenon of mesh networks and “el paquete semanal” – shared USB drives packed with clandestine content, like cached websites and telenovellas.
Ultimately, this story tells us that the Internet is a bell that cannot be un-rung. If you give people a sip, they’ll want to drink the whole glass.

25 Things to Know About WiFi Access in Cuba in 2020

Updated March 6, 2020 by Cassandra Brooklyn

“Is there WiFi in Cuba?” is one of the most frequent questions I receive. Short answer: Yes, there is WiFi in Cuba. Long answer: The Internet has existed in Cuba for well over a decade, just not in the form that most travelers are used to.

Your ability to connect to the WiFi in Cuba depends on a lot of factors and even if you can connect to the internet, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to access all your favorite websites and apps.

Since I lead tours to Cuba (my next trip is a November group trip to Cuba) and I help people plan their own travels to Cuba, I spend a lot of time in the country and have used the internet (including my laptop and several smartphones) in every single province and have encountered every single Internet-related challenge imaginable.

Read on to learn what to expect when connecting (or attempting to connect) to WiFi in Cuba.

1. Internet access in Cuba is rapidly improving

As of March 1st, 2020, there are 1038 WiFi hot spots across the country. Every year, new hot spots pop up, Internet speed improves, and the cost of connecting decreases. In 2017, Google servers went live in Cuba, making them the first foreign internet company to host content in Cuba. I still hear some travelers complain that they can’t jump on WiFi in every single cafe like in other countries, but know that Internet access has dramatically improved in recent years, we’ve all just been spoiled in other countries.

2. Connecting to WiFi in Cuba requires an Internet card

Unlike most countries, it’s not as simple as just connecting to an open network and entering the password. First, you need to buy a NAUTA scratch-off Internet card and then you can connect to the ETECSA WiFi network. ETECSA is Cuba’s telecommunications company.

Once you turn on WiFi, you’ll select the “ETECSA” network (there won’t be many to chose from) and a screen should pop up asking you to log in. This is where you’ll enter the usario (username) and contraseña (password) found on the back of the scratch-off Internet card. If your browser doesn’t pop up with the log-in screen, open the browser and type: “1.1.1.1”. If that doesn’t work, see #13 below.

3. There are four places to buy NAUTA Internet cards:

1. ETECSA office

   This is the official way to buy a Nauta Internet card. You’ll need to show your passport and you’re limited to purchasing 3 NAUTA cards at a time. Expect to wait in a long line. Internet cards cost CUC$1 (about USD$1.20) for every hour of internet. 1-hour and 5-hour cards are the most common and they’re valid for 30 days. Most ETECSA offices are open from 8:30am-7pm but may run out of WiFi cards far sooner.

2. Hotels

   All major hotels sell NAUTA cards that can connect to any ETECSA public WiFi hotspot (though the hotel may charge extra for the cards). You don’t necessarily have to be a guest at the hotel to buy an Internet card there. A handful of hotels, such as the Habana Libre, sell proprietary cards (about CUC$5/hour) that connect to the hotel’s own private WiFi.

3. At the park/square

   There’s almost always someone walking around the park/square asking “WiFi? Internet”. These people are re-selling NAUTA cards at a premium, usually an extra 50 cents to $2. These cards are safe and will save you from waiting in long lines, just be sure to check that the password hasn’t been scratched off yet.

4. Businesses near the square

   In some cities, like Baracoa, restaurants and shops surrounding the WiFi hotspot will sell NAUTA cards on the side. Some casa particular hosts also sell them. Ask around if the ETECSA office is closed.

4. Most Internet hotspots in Cuba are outside

The vast majority of Cubans and tourists connect to the internet at outdoor public WiFi hotspots. These are usually in popular public parks (parques), plazas, and busy promenades. Though hotel WiFi used to only be accessible from within the hotel, it’s now strong enough to catch from outside many large hotels.

It’s totally safe to connect to the Internet outside, just know it’s not a private connection so be careful when entering credit card info. Keep in mind that you may be standing in the hot sun (or in pouring rain, as I’ve had to do in order to make urgent trip arrangements for clients).

Schedule a call to plan your Cuba trip!

5. Know where to look for “wee-fee”

How can you find the nearest WiFi hotspot in Cuba? Some apps and websites (such as the ETECSA website) indicate where hotspots are but if you can’t access WiFi to begin with, how are you going to get to the online map? Ask your host (or any stranger on the street) where to find WiFi (pronounced “wee-fee” in Spanish) or stop wherever you see a large number of Cubans staring at their phones.

In Havana, most WiFi spots are in La Habana Vieja (Old Havana) and Vedado. In other cities, such as Viñales , Trinidad, Cienfuegos, Santiago, Holguin, Matanzas, Guantanamo, Varadero, and Baracoa, hotspots are usually scattered in a few central parks and plazas.

One of my Cuba group tours in 2016 in the Bay of Pigs, before WiFi was so available

6. Some casas particulares have WiFi

More and more casas particulares are getting WiFi that their guests can connect to in the house. This is definitely much more convenient than having to walk to a WiFi hot spot but know that the host is likely pulling the signal from the hotspot at the public park/plaza (several blocks away) so connection may be worse in the house.

Home-based WiFi is not the norm so don’t be disappointed if your casa doesn’t have Internet. Even if a host can afford it, it’s a hassle to get installed. Several casas I work with for my Cuba group tours have had WiFi in their home for a couple years while others still don’t have any.

Even if you connect from the casa, you still need to have a NAUTA Internet card. The only difference is that you’ll connect to whatever the home’s network is (which may have its own passcode) and not to the “ETECSA” network, as you would in the park.

PRO TIP: When you connect via a home account, three people can connect at the same time even though time is only deducted from the one card that logged in.

Cuban Home with an Internet Connection

Read More Here

Cubans left frustrated by slow and costly internet rollout

Issued on: 11/06/2019 - 03:23

Havana (AFP)

Six months on from the euphoria that greeted full internet access for mobile phones on the communist-run island, frustrated Cubans complain it is too expensive, too slow and crippled by government censorship.
Hundreds have joined a Twitter campaign to call for affordable rates.
"We are hungry, hungry for information, hungry for online surfing, hungry for knowledge and intellectual freedom," summed up one user.
"It's not possible that the internet is a luxury in the 21st Century," said another campaigner using the hashtag #BajenLosPreciosDeInternet -- "drop internet prices" in Spanish.
Another accused state-owned telecommunications company Etecsa of spying on the population.
Etecsa "is spying on us and censoring us with full impunity."
-Blocked sites-
"Cubans' purchasing power is one of the lowest in the American continent, so is the minimum wage and access to the internet is not among the cheapest," said Norges Rodriguez, who runs a technology blog, Yucabyte.org.
Mobile packages run from $7 for 600 megabytes to $30 for 4 gigabytes.
Those prices put it of reach for the vast majority of Cubans who subsist on a wage of around $30 a month paid by public sector jobs.
Uptake is poor for home internet. Only 79,000 homes have signed up to the service, -- out of a population of 11.2 million.
"If you want to connect to the internet at home 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you have to pay the equivalent of $800 a month.
"There is no flat rate on that service, as you have in the rest of the world," he said.
Rodriguez said the Havana government also banned any news sites critical of the government.
"The government has blocked all media websites with content they dislike."
The ongoing US embargo means sites like Google, Apple and Amazon cannot be accessed from Cuban IP addresses, said Rodriquez.
The government recently greenlighted the importation of routers to allow private wifi networks, albeit using state-monopoly Etecsa servers.
Critics say the dollar-an-hour cost makes it too expensive.
Before the roll-out of 3G technology in December -- opening up the online world to the country's 5.3 million smartphone users -- the internet was available to the general public only via wifi hotspots, payable by the hour.
- No turning back -
Last year, Abraham Jiminez discovered that his online magazine, El Estornudo, was blocked.
"Readers started to write to me saying they couldn't access it, and when I realized I couldn't either, I thought it was a server problem," he says.
Sixteen months later, the site -- which offers an independent view of the news -- remains inaccessible in Cuba. He never received an official explanation over why it was blocked.
He says the Havana government is scared about the reach of social networks, especially since the arrival of 3G.
"This has generated a different discourse from the official discourse, with real life effect," says Jiminez.
"Now, once they organize online, Cubans can demonstrate against animal abuse, for the rights of the LGBT community, protests like that would have been unthinkable in the past."
"That's what the government is afraid of."
Larry Press, professor of information systems at the University of Texas and author of a blog on the internet in Cuba, agrees.
"When the internet was first launched, Cuba was possibly one of the most advanced nations in Latin America and the Caribbean" because of connections built-up by the Soviet Union," said Press.
"In the pre-internet network they were doing quite well. Then they got an internet connection that was subsidized by the United States
"They decided not to follow the internet, to not let it in," fearing a large-scale rollout would lead to social unrest and a political shift similar to Moscow's Perestroika.
"Today, I think it is still in the back of their minds," said Press.
However, Jiminez says that with the rollout of 3G, however slow, "they cannot go back" now.

https://www.france24.com

Cuban Dissidents Harness Blogs, Social Media to Spread Cause Globally

by Curt Devine
 

Yoani Sanchez, a Cuban blogger for Generation Y, in Havana. Photo by by Andre Deak via Flickr, using a Creative Commons license.

For the past half dozen years, dissidents such as Yoani Sanchez and her blog “Generation Y” have opened the political debate like no other time since the Castros came to power in Cuba.
But Cuba’s dissident movement has deep roots, with many working in relative obscurity for decades.

"It is clear that the government controls the TV and newspaper and radio and the way that we have to evade [that is] with the resources we have in new media.” -Antonio Rodiles

That’s all changing with modern technology.
With the global expansion of the Internet, dissidents have been able to step into the international limelight, using blogs and social media to generate vast networks of supporters.
Websites such as Voces Cubanas and The Havana Times allow dissidents to critique the government, offer alternative perspectives and connect with other civil society groups.
Although only 5 percent of Cubans have access to the Internet, dissidents have used innovative methods to spread their messages.

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“The Cuban who is writing the blog cannot easily or inexpensively access the Internet to update the blog,” said Ted Henken, professor of Latino Studies at Baruch College of New York, “so they have a partner abroad who voluntarily helps them do that … So for example Havana Times … the editor lives in Managua, Nicaragua, the webmaster lives in Japan and all of the writers live in Havana. They harness people around the world who translate, who administer.”

Creative ways to bypass the government

Because the Cuban government condemns all anti-communist speech as “enemy propaganda,” activists still must take extreme precautions.
They often download the blogs and secretly share them on flash drives to allow Cubans on the island to access these materials. This gives dissidents the power of the Internet even when they cannot get online.
Henken explains that the Internet has also enabled activists to form stronger connections with Cubans living in the diaspora. Now, when the government attempts to suppress dissidents, a global audience stands united to critique those actions.
“For example in 2008, the lead singer for the punk group … Porno Por Ricardo … he was arrested and was going to be charged with pre-criminal dangerousness,” Henken said. “There was a local outrage and very soon it became visible on the international scale through the Internet, and there was an international petition that was started. Before, if you were a dissident you tried to hide because you would be vulnerable, but now … visibility has become an asset.”
Henken said the growing unity within Cuba’s civil society and its connections to the diaspora could create significant political leverage in years to come.

Pitfalls of activism

The leverage will not fall into the hands of the Cuban people automatically, however.

Antonio Rodiles (right). Photo by Esther Dyson from Flickr, used here under a Creative Commons license

Cuban dissident Antonio Rodiles understands that democracy will only become possible when stronger ties exist between domestic and exile opposition forces.
Rodiles’s organization, “Estado de Sats,” strives to create public spaces where Cubans can discuss reform and build a wider network of support. The organization has filmed about 70 panel discussions and distributed them on DVD to generate conversation.
“The strategy is to try to create bridges between all different sectors of society, between the activists and artists and lawyers and all the actors,” Rodiles said. “We are trying to create a nexus of support and collaboration … If we do not have a civil society, we are not going to develop a democracy. We are going to develop an unpredictable system.”
Rodiles spearheads a campaign called “Por Otra Cuba,” or “For Another Cuba.” The initiative aims to pressure the Castro regime to ratify the two United Nations’ agreements for civil and political rights signed in 2008. Already, “Por Otra Cuba” has gathered more than 4,000 digital signatures.
But Rodiles said this work is more difficult than it sounds. Last year, the government detained him for 19 days on charges of resisting arrest.
He says the government uses these forms of intimidation to stifle the dissident movement.
“The Cuban Government is going to try to use violence to stop us — in fact they have been doing this to social actors for years to send a clear message to the rest of society,” Rodiles said.

Does social media really work?

Rodiles agrees that the Internet gives activists the opportunity to speak from a new platform, one that the government cannot easily suppress.
Although the Castro regime has begun to spread propaganda online, he says dissidents have widely used social media to their advantage.
“I think that social media need to be used to change the reality,” Rodiles said. “It is clear that the government controls the TV and newspaper and radio and the way that we have to evade with the resources we have in new media.”
Some scholars caution activists against overestimating the power of the Internet.
“Internet utopianism” refers to the idea that cyberspace and new media will bring unprecedented freedom to the world, particularly to societies governed by repressive regimes.
Mary Long of the University of Colorado says this line of thinking reduces new media into too narrow of a political reform.
“I see something different,” Long said. “I do see community being created and connections happening, but they are not going to fulfill the old political vision of creating a place where we are all equal and valued.”
She said blogs offer unprecedented opportunities for global discussions and that social media allow citizens to organize in new ways.
Despite these trends, she does not believe Cuba’s use of new media will translate directly into political reform apart from traditional forms of activism.
For now, the future impact of the Internet on Cuban society remains speculative.
But the way dissidents use it to circumvent the government and create international networks has become increasingly clear. As Cuban activists become increasingly connected on the island and throughout the world, they may achieve the political leverage necessary to create lasting reform.
As a freelance writer and human rights advocate, Curt Devine leverages media to give a voice to the voiceless. He is currently pursuing a master’s in international media at American University in Washington D.C.
This story was originally broadcast on Latin Pulse.

The Internet in Cuba: 5 Things You Need to Know

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A man holds a baby next to an image of Cuba's former leader Fidel Castro outside a post office that offers Internet service in Havana, on April 11, 2008.

Image: Javier Galeano/Associated Press

By Lorenzo Franceschi-BicchieraiApr 03, 2014

A misguided attempt by the U.S. government to create a Twitter-like social network in Cuba — which ended with $1.6 million spent and just 40,000 users to show for it — has put the state of the Internet on the communist island back on the spotlight.
Cuba has long been one of the least connected countries in the world. Indeed, the country rivals North Korea in the extent to which it has shut itself out from the Internet.
Here are five things you need to know about Internet freedom in Cuba, a country that blogger and Cuban dissident Yoani Sanchez calls "the Island of the disconnected."

See also: Is Venezuela's Government Tightening Its Grip on the Internet?

1. Internet access is the greatest obstacle ...

In 2011, roughly 25% of Cubans had Internet access, according to the country's National Statistics Office and the International Telecommunication Union. But that number is misleading — it includes people that can only log into a government-controlled Intranet of state-approved websites.
Only 5% of Cubans actually have access to the open Internet, according to Internet freedom watchdog Freedom House. Home connections are practically nonexistent, and only government officials, academics, doctors, engineers, or regime-approved journalists have Internet access at work, says Ellery Biddle, a researcher who has focused on Cuban Internet issues for the last six years.
For everyone else, there are expensive government-run Internet cafes where an hour of connection can cost between $6 and $10, a prohibitive amount of money in a country where the average weekly salary is around $20.
Where connection is possible, the speed is so slow there's very little they can do online but check email and sluggishly surf websites. "When they do access the Internet, they try to do really the bare minimum," Cynthia Romero, the Latin America Senior Program Officer at Freedom House, tells Mashable.
Even computers are hard to come by. Until 2008 Cubans were barred from buying their own, which explains why Cuba's National Statistics Office reported in 2011 that there were only 783,000 computers in the whole country.

People reflected in the window line up at a post office as they wait to use the Internet service in Havana, Cuba, on May 28, 2013.

Image: Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press

2. ... but there are creative workarounds

With such limited access, Cubans have employed more creative methods of surfing. One of the most popular is for people to download online articles onto thumb drives, then pass them around to friends and family.
This is sometimes called the "sneakernet," though Sanchez calls it the "Internet without Internet" — a callback to the 1990s, when Cubans used to cook the "meat picadillo without meat" because of food shortages.
"With one person connecting to the Internet, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred or a thousands are actually accessing information," Sanchez said during a talk (embedded below) at the 2013 Google Ideas Summit in New York City.
Some Cubans with Internet access sell it to others or share accounts. Others build their own antennas or use illegal dial-up connections. But the Cuban government clamps down on these efforts with technicians "sniffing" neighborhoods for ham radios and satellite dishes, according to Freedom House.
Activists also use alternative ways to tweet, like texting or even "speak-to-tweet" systems. Cubans can call a phone number in the U.S. and record an anonymous message that gets automatically converted to text and shared via Twitter or Facebook. These calls, however, can cost more than $1, making it an expensive workaround.

3. There's actually very little online censorship

When so few people have Internet access, you don't need to censor it that much. In terms of blocking content, Cuba is no China. News websites like The New York Times, or the Miami Herald are available, as are the sites of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International.
Facebook and Twitter are accessible. YouTube is not.
There is a certain degree of censorship, especially when it comes to blogs run by anti-government activists like Sanchez. Her blog, Generation Y, is inaccessible, and so are others like Bitácora Cubana and Cubanet, according to Freedom House.
The Cuban government has also been prosecuting and silencing dissident bloggers via arbitrary arrests, beatings and intimidation.

A customer, right, purchases Internet access at a branch office of the state-run telecommunications company, ETECSA, in Havana, Cuba, on June 4, 2013.

Image: Franklin Reyes/Associated Press

4. The Cuban government has a significant online presence

Despite limiting access, the Cuban government has a major footprint on the Internet. A 1,000-strong cyber militia, made up of students from the University of Computer Sciences (UCI) of la Havana, are part of a so-called propaganda initiative called Operation Truth. They are tasked with discrediting government critics and promoting the government's agenda.
"The Cuban government has always been very good with information and disseminating its version of accounts," says Romer. "So now they're starting to venture out more and more into the Internet and social media."
The regime even has its own versions of Wikipedia and Facebook. Cuba's online encyclopedia is called Ecured, but it only has 78,000 articles and a small number of hand-picked editors. Social Red was Cuba's short-lived response to Facebook.

 

5. Internet surveillance isn't sophisticated, but Cubans take it for granted

The government has a tight control on the country's telecommunications. There are only two Internet Service Providers; both are state-owned. Cubacel, a subsidiary of Cuba's telecom authority ETECSA, is the only cellular carrier.
With such control, Cuba doesn't need cutting-edge Internet surveillance tools, but it does have software like Avila Link, which collects private information from public computers and monitors Internet activity.
With real-world surveillance so widespread, Cubans "are paranoid that someone may be watching," says Romero.
At Internet cafes, Cubans have to provide an ID to use a computer, making anonymous use of the Internet nearly impossible. With all that comes self-censorship — and a sense of resignation.
"There's no expectation of privacy in most aspects of your life," says Biddle. "I think people people generally expect [online surveillance]."

The Impact for the Internet on the Politics of Cuba

By Andy Williamson

 
In this paper, I examine the dramatic growth of the Internet and look at how this new communication paradigm has presented the government of Cuba with an opportunity to overcome the hegemony of the Western media and promote its own views on the world stage. I will also look at how the Internet is being used to promote Cuba as an upmarket tourist destination, tourism now being Cuba's most valuable source of foreign currency and, therefore, critical to its ailing economy.
Cuba's telecommunications infrastructure is poor and outdated which, when combined with the severe restrictions placed on the Cuban population, makes Internet access beyond the reach of most Cuban citizens. Cuban opposition groups, based mostly in the United States, do not face these barriers and, in the second part of this paper, I will examine how a number of these organisations are using the Internet to promote their anti-Government agendas and counter the state 'propaganda' machine.

Contents

Introduction
Historical Perspective
Areas of Impact
Conclusion

Introduction

In this article I will explore at a macro level how the Internet is used by the Government of Cuba, blockaded and silenced by its powerful neighbour, the United States (La Asamblea Nacional, 1999), and the people of Cuba, who face restrictions on publication and free association (Amnesty International, 1999). I will also discuss the use of the Internet by those who have left Cuba in the years following the 1959 revolution (Szulc, 1986).
The Internet has become a major global tool for communication and information sharing (CERN, 1998). As of September 1999, 201 million people worldwide had access to the Internet and this is increasing dramatically (Nua, 1999). The volume of information published matches this growth in access, making it difficult to validate what is written. Also, maintaining control over what you do not want others to read becomes virtually impossible without resorting to draconian measures (Amnesty International, 1999). According to Ni hEilidhe (1998):

"The Internet is in danger of becoming yet another instrument of cultural and political hegemony ... It's not unfeasible that like its forebear, the newspaper, the Internet will metamorphose into a forum for maintaining the political status quo."

If Ni hEilidhe is correct, then the Internet will become another voice of the powerful; of governments and multi-national corporations. Mander (cited in Tuhiwai Smith, 1998) supports this stance, arguing that the unrelenting imperative of corporations and governments to promote technology as a solution to our lives results in the suppression and the destruction of an indigenous alternative. However, as Vidal (2000) observes, "the globalisation of business and governance is being matched by the globalisation of opposition." The Internet is becoming a battleground for this war, the stage for what Guevara (1986) described as "the practice of proletarian internationalism" and the struggle against poverty and neo-colonialism, whether by corporations or governments. The true potential of the Internet is that it becomes a place for dialogue, defined by Freire (1970, p.108) as "an encounter amongst men in order to name the world." Unfortunately, as Ni hEilidhe suggests, it risks becoming a place where the oppressed continue to be controlled through propaganda because, as Freire observed, the oppressor must divide the subjugated and maintain this division in order to survive.
Okri (1997, p.60) stated "writers are dangerous when they tell the truth. Writers are also dangerous when they tell lies." He adds that writing is always a form of resistance and, according to Reporters Sans Frontières (1999), at least forty-five states appear to agree with him by controlling access to the Internet, just as they do many other forms of media. Reporters Sans Frontières reports that twenty nations actively restrict access to the Internet for their citizens, including Cuba. As Ni hEilidhe (1998) points out, the Western model of capitalism epitomised by American society (and pervasive on the Internet) is not universal and is in fact an anathema to other societies. One such society is Cuba (Szulc, 1986), however, there is an interesting juxtaposition between the Cuban Government's use of the Internet for its own propaganda purposes and the restrictions it in turn places on its citizens accessing the propaganda of others, which is summarised well by Okri (1997, p.128):

"The oppressed always find themselves in paradoxical waters that both show up their presence and render them invisible."

Historical Perspective

In this section, I will briefly document the recent history of Cuba and then look at the history and phenomenal growth of the Internet as a mass-media tool. I will then connect the two by looking at the history of the Internet in Cuba.

Cuba

Cuba is an island in the Caribbean Sea, situated some ninety miles south of Florida (Symmes, 1998). Originally colonised by the Spanish and under U.S. military control from 1898, Cuba gained independence in 1902, retaining close economic and military ties with the United States from that time until the revolution of 1959 (Szulc, 1986). In 1953 the rebel army of Fidel Castro challenged the leadership of President Batista with an attack on the Moncada Barracks. Although, as Szulc reports, this attack was unsuccessful, the incident is held in the same high regard and is still celebrated today. Castro seized control of Cuba in January 1959, turning the country into a Communist state and has ruled the country since (Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1999). From the 1960's, Cuba openly courted support from the former Soviet Union and was an active supporter of revolutionary movements across Africa, Latin America and Asia, sending troops to Angola, Ethiopia and Afghanistan (Duncan and Grunwald, 1980).
Cuba's post-revolutionary relationship with the United States has been turbulent (Szulc, 1986). Szulc catalogues incidents ranging from CIA assassination plots, the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The U.S. still places restrictions on Cuba, including trade curbs and other economic limits.
The U.S. has legislated to economically blockade and destabilise Cuba, including the 1992 Torricelli Act and the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Society Act (known as the Helms-Burton Act) (La Asamblea Nacional, 1999). The latter was introduced in response to the shooting down of two civilian planes by Cuban fighters but was effectively an entrenchment of the United States' attitude of the last forty years (Richardson and Weiss, 1997).
The American obsession with its Communist neighbour is revealed in a search of the Library of Congress, which shows fifty pieces of legislation referring to Cuba in the last (106th) session alone (Library of Congress, 2000).

The Internet

The Internet is a network of networks (Choi, Stahl and Whinston, 1997), where computers are connected together using a standard protocol that allows them to communicate. The primary difference between the public Internet and a private network is that the Internet is not owned or managed by a single entity, although its component networks are (Choi, et al., 1997). The Internet has become a dominant infrastructure not because it is unique but because it offers distributed computing and openness.
According to Sterling (1993), the Internet originated at UCLA in early 1969, where the project became known as ARPANET. By December 1969, there were four nodes operating and this had increased to 37 nodes by 1972. Sterling notes that by ARPANET's second year of operation its power had started to become used as:

"A dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post-office. The main traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing. Instead, it was news and personal messages."

Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1990 while working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva (CERN, 1998). Berners-Lee and Cailliau created the first Web server, editor and browser and defined the protocols used today, such as the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
It was the development of usable browser software to take advantage of the WWW that has led to the Internet explosion today (CERN, 1998). By July 1999, there were over 56 million registered Internet hosts (Zakon, 2000) and by September 1999 the Internet had 201 million users, accounting for 4.78 percent of the world's population (Nua, 1999). However, access to the Internet is unevenly biased in favour of developed countries: A recent International Data Corporation (IDC) survey (IDC, 2000) reports regular Internet usage in New Zealand is 34 percent of the population and in Singapore is 32 percent. This compares with six percent of the population of Columbia (Nua, 2000) and, according to research by The China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC, 2000), 3.5 million out of China's population of over one billion who have access to the Internet at present.
Barriers to access for many developing countries include cost, particularly the cost of the associated telephone call (Arnum, 1999), the quality of the telephone network (Symmes, 1998; Broersma, 1998a) and restrictions placed by governments, stating concerns about protecting citizens from "subversive ideas" and "dangerous" sites or defending "national security and unity" (Reporters San Frontières, 1999). Language can also been seen as a barrier to access, given that Arnum (1999) reports that 77 percent of published content is in English. Cuba suffers all of these barriers.

GO TO PAGE # 29

 

Here Are the 41 Websites You Can't Access in Cuba

A new report looks at how the internet is censored on the island nation.

by Louise Matsakis

Aug 30 2017, 3:34pm

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Image: Shutterstock / Composition: Louise Matsakis

Want to access Skype in Cuba? Without a VPN, you're out of luck. The service is blocked in the country, along with dozens of other websites, according to new report from the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), which works under the Tor Project. The study, published this week, shows just how censored Cuba's internet still is.
Researchers from OONI monitored eight different internet access points in three different Cuban cities (Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and Santa Clara) between May 29 and and June 10 of this year. Their findings show that 41 different websites are blocked in the country, including the Cuban Free Press Project and Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that advocates for greater civil liberties around the world. In total, OONI tested nearly 1,500 different websites in order to see which were restricted.

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Most of the sites blocked have criticized the Cuban Castro regime (either directly or indirectly) according to the report. News sites that have published articles critical of the Cuban government made up the bulk of restricted sites.
"Prior to traveling to Cuba, we had heard that sites expressing political criticism had been reported to be blocked," Simone Basso, Maria Xynou, and Arturo Filastò, the researchers behind the study, told me in an email. "However, it was interesting to collect data showing the scale of sites—expressing criticism and defending human rights—actually blocked."

Image: OONI

Only the HTTP versions of the sites, and not the more secure HTTPS versions, were restricted, "potentially enabling users to circumvent the censorship by merely accessing them over HTTPS," according to the report.
Skype was the only popular communication platform that was censored; alternatives like Facebook and WhatsApp are used widely throughout the country. OONI also found that a number of tools used for surfing the internet anonymously were blocked, like web proxy Anonymouse.
The government is not the only source of censorship in Cuba. Google, for example, blocks access to its App Engine, a platform for building web and mobile apps, within the country, according to the OONI report. Google likely restricted access because of the United States' economic embargo on Cuba. "There are a number of restrictions on Google's ability to offer our full range of platforms and services in every region," a spokesperson for the company said. "For example, in compliance with US law, a number of services aren't available within certain countries including Cuba."

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The report also found that Huawei supported the internet infrastructure in Cuba. "The server headers of blocked sites, for example, pointed to Huawei equipment," the researchers explained. "It remains unclear though whether and to what extent Huawei is actually implementing internet censorship in Cuba." The company did not respond to a request to clarify its business relationship with the Cuban government in time for publication.
One of the limitations of the OONI study is that it only tested 1,500 URLs, and may have missed some blocked sites. "It's hard to be truly representative and therefore this methodology likely includes some bias in terms of what is tested," the researchers said. "In practice what this means is that we might have missed some sites that are blocked."
Overall, the OONI researchers found that censorship of Cuba's internet wasn't very sophisticated. "Given the high cost of accessing the internet, rendering it inaccessible to most Cubans, perhaps the Cuban government doesn't even need to invest in sophisticated internet censorship (yet)," they explained. "Furthermore, the political climate of the country appears to foster self-censorship, which arguably is the most effective form of censorship."
Accessing the internet in Cuba has been difficult since the country first connected in 1996. Though it loosened restrictions in 2008, the government still maintains tight control over the sale and distribution of internet hardware. Only around 37 percent of the country's 11 million people get online, according to the World Bank. One reason internet adoption in the country has been slow is because one hour of internet use costs around 1 CUC ($1).

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That might seem affordable, but 61 percent of the population earns less than $100 a month, according to a 2016 survey. Cubans are also forced to rely on a single telecom, ETECSA, which is state-owned. Independent mesh networks set up by tech-savvy Cubans exist, though they're technically illegal.
More Cubans are steadily gaining access to the internet, however: In 2015, the government opened its first public Wi-Fi hotspot, and now there are hundreds (most Cubans still don't have internet in their homes). Earlier this year, Google became the first major foreign internet giant to bring its servers to the country. As Cubans access the internet in greater numbers, it's possible the government will censor the web more tightly.
"As Cuba's internet landscape evolves, so might internet censorship," the researchers behind the OONI study said.
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Under A Watchful Eye: Cyber Surveillance in Cuba

·         In Cuba the possibility of state surveillance is never far away. (Photo: IWPR)

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Álvaro felt like a spy during his four years working as a network administrator at the state news agency Prensa Latina (PL).

“Part of my work was maintaining computers,” he explained. “But sometimes my boss ordered me to monitor what a reporter or worker was Googling or looking at.”
Although this was not among the duties that he had signed up for when he joined the country’s most important news agency, Álvaro never questioned his superior’s orders.
“Then, I’d see the people that I’d been monitoring in the lunchroom or on the street and I felt terrible,” he said. “I tried to act naturally but I couldn’t stop thinking about the personal things I knew about them.”
In an office behind closed doors, Álvaro accessed other people’s computers, taking screenshots that he then filed. Sometimes he accessed private emails or instant messages during the screening process. The assignments even included monitoring the private communications of journalists about to travel outside Cuba as PL correspondents.
“It was a way of making sure that they wouldn’t abandon the ‘mission’ or make contact with inappropriate people abroad,” he said.
Ahead of trips abroad, reporters had to go through a verification process that included interviews with the heads of whatever political organisations they belonged to, references from the leaders of their Committee for the Defence of the Revolution, and a final verification from the Ministry of the Interior (MININT). Once deemed trustworthy, the reporters still had to go through the final filter of cyber surveillance at their place of work.
“In political and social organisations, people are being constantly evaluating others and it’s taken into account for anything, from getting a university position to deciding if you can be trusted for a job,” said Jesús Adonis Martínez, the agency’s correspondent in Caracas for nine months. “In a totalitarian country everyone’s tracks are filed away.”
“There is even more surveillance for journalists who have collaborated with foreign or independent media,” added Álvaro, who asked to remain anonymous even though he no longer works for the agency.
 “What they made me do was wrong,” he concluded.
In Cuba, although public access to the internet has increased in recent years, the possibility of state surveillance is never far away. As well as monitoring people’s private communication, activists and journalists alike say that they are often targeted by trolls online.
Henry Constantín, the editor of the La Hora de Cuba magazine who has also been the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) representative in Cuba since 2016, said that he was frequently harassed by unknown parties on Facebook.
“False accounts in the social network, the most used in the country, are used very often by State Security,” he said.
Pastor Yoandry Díaz, an activist for religious rights in Havana, agreed that hacking Facebook was a favoured tactic.
“State Security writes things on your wall to make it seem like you regret your activism,” he said. “Something else that’s very common is monitoring your email through the state service Nauta. There are emails that I’ve sent that have never arrived.
“And in the case of SMS, during civil society’s campaign #YoVotoNo [I vote no] against the new constitution, the same thing happened with messages that had that hashtag or words like freedom or strike.”

EVADING RESTRICTIONS

In 2017, the Computer Networks Security Office (OSRI) registered more than 600 cyber security incidents. OSRI general director Miguel Gutiérrez Rodríguez said that most involved so-called counterrevolutionary activities via email “disguised as spam and the use of unauthorised proxies”.
However, as student Reinier Gómez explained, proxies are a vital way of circumventing the government’s internet censorship.
“Thanks to the proxies I can read independent news pages that I couldn’t enter because the state censors them for Cuban users,” said Gómez, who uses proxies like Hide.me. “But I’m not the only one doing it. It’s as common in my school as the wifi spots that have been set up around the country.”
Since 2005, the Reporters Without Borders NGO has included the Cuban government on its list of Internet Enemies. Non-state news portals such as Cubanet, 14yMedio, Diario de Cuba,  Cibercuba, ADNCuba, El Estornudo and Tremenda Nota remain blocked.
“So that’s how Havana denies its citizens the right to be informed and intensifies a tradition of attacks against freedom of the press and expression,” said Armando García, a law student.
His classmate Gretel Valle said that the computer technicians managing the network were the ones who blocked the proxies.
“The other thing I’ve noticed is that network administrators know everything you’re doing,” she continued. “It’s a serious violation of privacy. I have heard that they do it through a program called Ávila Link.”
This programme, produced by Desoft, the national software company based in Ciego de Avila, can monitor several locations at once, all connected to a central server, regardless of distance or location.
Even ten years ago, when the internet was much less easily available, it was used to spy on people surfing the web at post offices and the Cuban telecommunications company’s (ETECSA) centres. It also monitored hotel networks, the country’s 600 Joven computing clubs and the internet portal at the Cuban Journalist Union in Havana.
In a 2009 interview with the official weekly paper Opciones, Desoft’s assistant manager of development Yanelis Orozco said that they could “take total control” with Ávila Link. ETECSA obtained the software the same year.
According to the department of tourism, more than four million foreign tourists visited Cuba last year. Many of them stayed in hotel chains where Ávila Link operates, which means that any customer in these places who obtains and activates a card to access the internet is registered by the software - along with their online activity.

DATA THEFT
Amalia Toledo, projects coordinator and researcher at the Karisma Foundation, a Colombian organisation promoting rights in the digital world, argued that the Cuban government was accessing foreigners’ data without any major legal consequences.
“The problem is that there is no transparency, people don’t know that Ávila Link collects a lot of data,” she said. “That means that people aren’t going to stop using a device because the program is installed on it.”
“Perhaps,” she continued, “it is a good time to think about the need of a data protection law in Cuba. It won’t solve all of the potential problems with the use and abuse of personal data, but at least it can give some guidance on what is or isn’t allowed.”
She noted that businesses’ actions were also dependent “on the legal systems in the countries where they operate” because many entities store user information. In Cuba, the lack of independence between the legal, legislative, and executive branches means that citizens have little control over their own data.
In Europe, the Data Protection Directive ensures that businesses that handle personal information communicate what they do with it. There is no equivalent in the United States.
“However, this does not stop consumers requesting transparency not only from our governments but also businesses about what they do with our information,” Toledo noted.
Leandro Ucciferri, lawyer and researcher at the Argentinian Association for Civil Rights (ADC) NGO, led a 2017 study “The Identity We Can’t Change” on the development of the Federal System of Biometric Identification for Security (SIBIOS).
This  ncorporates technology created by the company Datys, belonging to MININT, and was used during Cristina Fernández and later Mauricio Macri’s governments.
Ucciferri described SIBIOS as “a centralised database that mainly stores fingerprints and photographs of the faces of all the people who live in the country, including foreigners who visit”.
The main way that biometric data is entered into the system is when national identity document and passports are issued through the National Registry for People (RENAPER) and the National Migration Department (DNM).
In the same way, the Centinel program used at Cuban airports brings up the statement “monitored citizen” or “lost documents” when the state has decided to prevent an individual from leaving the country.
Fernández’ government signed an agreement with Datys. According to the contracts accessed by ADC, the company acted as an “official representative of the Cuban Department of the Interior” for purchasing the software and hardware system they use in RENAPER and DNM.
“SIBIOS has several questionable elements,” Ucciferri explained. “Its use is compulsory, and it uses a centralised database [which puts stored information at greater risk].  The state is not transparent about how it works or how they use the stored information.”
While in Argentina ADC’s investigation made an impact politically and publically, in Cuba neither the exportation of the mass surveillance software or the new strategies adopted by the government to collect personal data have been discussed.
In 2017, the United Nations asked governments to develop a cybersecurity treaty. Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba stated that they were in favour of the agreement and they criticised international surveillance efforts.

https://iwpr.net

https://chicagopolicyreview.org

Rights groups denounce Cuba's arrest of independent journalist, activists denounce harassment

Sarah Marsh

HAVANA (Reuters) - International rights groups this week denounced Communist-run Cuba’s arrest of dissident journalist Roberto Quinones after what they say was a sham trial, while local opposition activists complained of worsening harassment.
Quinones, who writes for the Florida-based website CubaNet, was sentenced to one year of “correctional labor” a month ago on charges of resisting and disobeying authorities during an incident in April.
In an eyewitness piece for CubaNet, Quinones, 61, wrote that police in the eastern Cuban region of Guantanamo had stopped him without legitimate reason while he was covering a trial in April, detained him for five days and beat him.
Cuban authorities charged him with resisting arrest and imposed a fine that he refused to pay.
He was taken to jail on Wednesday.
Cuban authorities do not comment on police activity such as the detention of dissidents, and dismisses them as a tiny minority of provocateurs financed by the United States to subvert the government.
CubaNet receives U.S. government financing as part of a broader American push to open up Communist-run Cuba.
The Trump administration has called for Quinones’ release on several occasions, most recently last month
“He is a prisoner of conscience and should be immediately and unconditionally released,” Amnesty International, a human rights group, said on Thursday, announcing a campaign for his release.
Amnesty International last month named five other prisoners of conscience in Cuba, saying their detention underscored how the presidential handover last year from Raul Castro had not changed the Communist-run country’s repressive tactics.
“The disproportionate and arbitrary use of the criminal law, and campaigns of state-sponsored discrimination against those who dare to speak out ... has created a profound climate of fear in Cuba,” the group said.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists earlier this week included Cuba on its list of 10 most censored countries worldwide.
“This injustice is a new low, even for a country with as longstanding a tradition of censorship as Cuba,” Natalie Southwick, CPJ Central and South American Program Coordinator, wrote on Twitter.
Many Cuban activists and independent journalists are complaining of growing harassment.
They say that is a sign the government is nervous because the launch of mobile internet last December has given them more of a public platform and ability to mobilize at a time of heightened political and economic tension.
“I cannot chew because of the blows three thugs of the tyranny gave me yesterday,” Jose Daniel Ferrer, the head of Cuba’s largest opposition group, the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), wrote on Thursday.
He and other UNPACU activists were detained last weekend for attempting to stage a nonviolent protest against the government. Ferrer was released after three days.
“We are in the presence of a new wave of repression,” Ferrer said.

https://www.reuters.com

Castro hates the internet, so Cubans created their own

The internet in Cuba is so bad that Cubans had to invent their own.

By Johnny Harris  

Updated 

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A few years ago, some computer gamers based in Havana strung a small web of ethernet cables from house to house so they could play video games together. The network continued to grow quietly, and today it's called StreetNet: a bootleg internet for Havana with more than 10,000 users. It was an innovation forged by necessity in a country where only 5 percent of citizens have access to the uncensored internet. Watch the video to learn why Cuba's internet is stuck in 1995.

Cuba has some of the worst internet access in the world, with just 5 percent of Cubans able to access the uncensored web.
Since the communist revolution of 1959, the Castro regime has enforced a strict ban on all forms of information flow that challenge official policy and history. Enforcing such censorship has been relatively easy for an island nation that has a monopoly over all media outlets. But when the internet arrived in the '90s, it complicated matters for the Castros.

State-run internet cafe in Havana. (Getty)

Pioneers

Cuba's first 64KB/s internet connection came to life in 1996, making it one of the first countries to connect in the Caribbean region. Cuban technicians were resourceful, educated, and motivated to connect the country, which led to a surge in initial infrastructure development.
That surge soon stalled as the government realized the ramifications of allowing such a decentralized and uncontrollable network into the lives of the Cuban people. "The wild colt of new technologies can and must be controlled," warned Communications Minister Ramiro Valdés in 2007, summing up the regime's policy toward technology over the previous decade.

Getting online in Cuba

Cubans stealing internet signal from tourist hotels in Havana. (Getty)

Connecting to the web in Cuba has historically been a matter of money and power. Some government insiders have dial-up internet in their homes. But for the rest of population, getting online has meant paying around $9 for one hour of internet access in state-run internet cafes. This in a place where an average salary is just over $20 per month.
Alternative methods include poaching wireless internet from hotels, which can be done if one person gets his hands on the wifi password and shares it. Many hotels in Havana now have security guards whose responsibility consists of shooing away these internet parasites from the sidewalks and benches surrounding the hotels.

Baby steps

"Cuba is like a pressure cooker. Frustration builds from all the lack of basic freedoms, and eventually the regime has to let out a little steam to keep everyone happy," says Jose Luis Martinez of Connect Cuba, an advocacy group based in Miami.

In July, the regime let out a little steam by installing 35 wifi hotspots throughout the island. Now, to connect, you can buy an access card for $2, which will give you one hour of access to the uncensored internet. These access cards are usually sold out, which has led to an informal street market where cards go for $3 or $4.Is this an improvement? Perhaps. But 35 expensive hotspots for 11 million people is certainly not a significant step toward a freer internet. "Imagine if you told the island of Manhattan that they could only access the internet with 35 wifi hotspots. There would be riots in the street," says Martinez. "This is not progress."

People gather at the public hotspots to connect with family.

The hotspots are located in tourist-dense downtown parks, not in places where typical Cubans spend their time. Martinez thinks the regime is creating the facade of progress to quell international criticism. "They are good at playing the international PR game, but this is still a very, very small step," he says. "I'm not hopeful."
The Cuban government has made efforts beyond the 35 hotspots. In April, the international telecoms office of the government announced a plan to connect all Cubans to the internet by 2020. How they will do this and what level of censorship the connection will have is not clear, but the announcement shows that the government recognizes the need for an expansion of internet access.

Reluctant to accept help

Last December's normalizing of relations between the US and Cuba brought with it new allowances for US telecoms companies to sell equipment to the island. Top Google executives have made several visits since the announcement, offering Google's infrastructure to help expand internet in Cuba.

But the regime is not likely to consider these offers. "Some want to give it to us for free, not so Cubans can communicate but to infiltrate us for ideological work. ... We have to possess the Internet our way, knowing the imperialists aim to use it to destroy the Revolution," said Vice President José Ramón Machado Ventura.With $30 million of US federal money allocated for the "promotion of democracy in Cuba," the regime remains suspicious of any American-led initiatives, especially in a sector as politically sensitive as information technology.

Chinese company Huawei provides the routers for Cuba's hotspots.

So Cuba has turned to China, a model in how to keep a tight grip on the internet faucet. The 35 wifi hotspots use Chinese hardware, and two Chinese telecoms firms, ZTE and Huawei, have proposed a plan to connect the island by 2020. Cuba is much more likely to entertain a deal with China, given the two countries' parallel ideologies toward open information.

Momentum is building

As Cubans get a taste for the wonder that is the internet, they want more. As internal pressure grows, the Castro regime will likely continue to find creative ways to offer the internet without losing control of the flow of information. The opening of Cuba to foreign investment and travel will only speed up the process.

In Cuba, gamers lament what they see as the end of the island's underground network

“I don’t understand why such a benign network that does not talk about politics, religion or pornography would disappear,” one SNet user lamented.

Hector Lopez, top, Christian Echevarria Sarmiento, middle, and Ernesto Echevarria Sarmiento, bottom, play games at home through Cuba's largest, private underground network called SNet, in Havana on Aug. 20, 2019.NBC News

 

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Cuban government cautiously expands Internet access

Yamil Lage, AFP | Young Cubans connect to the internet from their mobile phone in Havana, on June 6, 2019.

Text by: NEWS WIRES 
 

All Cubans can now have Wi-Fi in their homes, as the island’s government extends internet access even while trying to maintain control over its version of the “truth” and to defend its legitimacy, a top official tells AFP.

“Cubans support and defend the revolution in every domain, both in the real and the virtual worlds,” Ernesto Rodriguez Hernandez, vice minister of communications, said in an interview.
In his eyes, the internet and social media are tools to “position the truth of Cuba, not to manipulate things,” giving them a key role in the political and ideological battles being fought at a time of sharp diplomatic tensions with the United States.
The telecommunications sector in Cuba once one of the world’s least connected countries has doubtless changed more than any other in the past year.
Since December, when mobile phones gained 3G connectivity, an active online community has sprung up on social networks, often questioning the government about the challenges of daily life on the island.
Since July 22, Cubans have been able to import routers, register their equipment, and then create private Wi-Fi networks connected to signals from state-controlled operator ETECSA. No longer do Cubans have to go to centralized public sites to connect.
“The objective of the country is to provide wider and wider internet access to the entire populace,” the vice minister said.
Steep prices
But the technical requirements set out by new legislation would appear to put an end to the informal networks created in recent years by groups of residents. Such control is the “sovereign right” of the Cuban state, Hernandez says.
And connecting is not cheap -- $1 an hour, an exorbitant amount in a country where the average monthly salary is $50. The lowest 3G rate is $7 for 600 megabytes.
For weeks, hundreds of Cubans have been campaigning on social media under the hashtag #Bajenlospreciosdeinternet (#Lower the price of the internet).
Since Wi-Fi’s arrival in 2013, “the cost of internet access has dropped by a factor of four,” the vice minister says, adding that “it will continue to fall” as communications infrastructure improves.
In this country of 11.2 million, 1,400 Wi-Fi hotspots have been installed, 80,000 homes now have internet access and 2.5 million Cubans have 3G connectivity.
But the communist government is moving forward cautiously. “The technology is not apolitical, as some try to present it,” Hernandez said, but instead is “manipulated and used.”
Arguing for the need to “educate” the population, he added: “It does no good to provide internet service to those who do not know... how to distinguish between what is useful and what is harmful; not everything on the internet is good.”

‘To protect’ Cuba
A series of decrees and measures published in early July in the island’s official Journal call for “responsible use by citizens” as well as both “the political defense and cybersecurity in the face of threats, attacks and risks of all sorts.”
The message is clear: the internet must be an “instrument for the defense of the revolution,” under regulations to be enforced by the Communications Ministry with the help of the “revolutionary armed forces and the Interior Ministry.”
In short, the internet will continue to be closely monitored by the authorities, as it has been from the start.
Only a small percentage of the Cuban population can access the global internet, as opposed to the government-controlled national internet, according to the NGO Freedom House. Blogs and websites critical of the government are frequently blocked.
Hernandez defended that practice as normal.
“We don’t share those internet sites that can encourage discrimination or deal with subjects that go against morality, ethics and responsible behavior,” he said.
“It is a right of every state to protect its people and their society from practices of that sort and I believe that every country in the world does so.”
(AFP)

 Cuba’s Internet paradox: How controlled and censored Internet risks Cuba’s achievements in education

29 August 2017, 04:00 UTC
 

Maribel (not her real name) was the deputy principal in a state-run primary school in Cuba. She had worked there since graduating, and had been promoted fast.
Before she was ultimately pushed out of her job for her husband’s political activism, which is effectively banned in Cuba, her salary was reduced by half.
The excuse given? She asked her pupils to look up information on the internet for a history lesson. And one of them used Wikipedia.
“They (the government) say children can’t use Wikipedia, because everything in Wikipedia is a lie. (They say) that children have to learn what is in history books, and not look for other information,” she told us when we met her in Mexico’s border town of Tapachula earlier this year.
According to UNESCO, Cuba has one of the most educated populations in the hemisphere. Literacy campaigns have been central to Cuba’s policies since the revolution, and the country’s commendable education system continues to benefit from heavy investment. Yet decades of off-line censorship, and the apparent desire to continue restricting freedom of expression and access to information through a model of online censorship risks undermining Cuba’s historical advances in education.

 

Arturo Filastó

Cuba’s distinctive model of online censorshipWith a constitutional ban on independent private media, Cuba is unique in Latin America. While the independent media scene is transforming, according to a recent report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a new generation of independent reporters operate in a murky legal environment and under constant threat of arbitrary detentions. They also face major limitations in accessing the internet. A pioneer in this kind of investigative reporting and news commentary is 14ymedio, an online independent daily.14ymedio’s website is one of those found to be blocked in a report published on 28 August by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI). Using open source (publically available) software, OONI has collected network measures from more than 200 countries across the world. Their aim is to gather facts about how internet censorship is being performed and to assess how the internet works, or doesn’t work, in any given country. OONI’s goal is to increase transparency, and prompt public debates about the legality and ethics of information control, rather than to make political assessments about what they see.Between May and mid-June 2017, OONI tested 1,458 websites from eight locations across Havana, Santa Clara, and Santiago de Cuba. The list included websites under 30 broad categories. Of these, 1,109 were international sites, mostly from a standard list it uses all over the world for OONI-probe (its testing software for censorship.) They include major mainstream sites of general interest – including Facebook and Twitter. The remaining 349 sites were more specific to the Cuban context.Of the total number of sites tested, OONI found 41 sites blocked. (OONI tests only a small sample – so many more sites which they didn’t test are also likely blocked).All the sites blocked had one thing in common. They expressed criticism of the Cuban government, they covered human rights issues, or had to do with circumvention tools (techniques to get around censorship). Blocking internet sites solely to limit political criticism and restrict access to information is - of course - contrary to international human rights law and a violation of the right to freedom of expression.
But this kind of blocking doesn’t only happen on the web in Cuba. According to 14ymedio, Cubacel – the national cellphone network - has been censoring SMS text messages containing the terms “democracy” and “hunger strike”. When graffiti artist and former prisoner of conscience, Danilo Maldonado, was in jail in January this year for painting “Se fue” (He’s gone) on a wall after Fidel Castro’s death, it seems text messages containing “El Sexto” (his artistic name) were also blocked.
According to OONI, the way the webpage blocking is done is “covert”. When users try to access a blocked site, they are redirected to a block page, without an explanation of why the content can’t be accessed. This makes it hard for a user to identify that they are experiencing internet censorship and not some transient network failure or error in loading the page.
Skype is also blocked in Cuba, but using a different kind of technology. For OONI it was something “quite interesting” and not commonly seen, though they have seen something similar in China. Either the government has bought some sophisticated technology they say, or they have some skilled people doing the blocking.
For the technically curious – it has something to do with a re-set package which you can read about more in OONI’s full report. For non-techies, and users, the perceived effect is that Skype works very badly. Most of the time you can’t log in or send messages or see your contact list. But according to OONI, this is “definitely intentional”. And the blocking is being done not by Skype, but from servers probably present in the country.
It has long been reported in the media that Chinese company Huawei is providing the infrastructure services which create the back-bone of the internet and Wi-Fi-hotspots in Cuba. From what they detected inside Cuba, OONI says that it is pretty clear that Chinese contractors developed the software and frontends used for the WIFI hotspot portals. They found Chinese code left behind by them.
Although it makes sense that the government would get the censorship equipment from the same supplier as that rolling out the infrastructure of the internet in Cuba, Amnesty International has not seen any evidence to suggest this is the case.
Despite this, many widely used websites and applications are not blocked – WhatsApp is not. Nor is Facebook. Nor, of course, is Wikipedia.
The big question is why not?
Well, for now, it seems the government doesn’t need to employ sophisticated blocking and filtering.

 

Arturo Filastó

Dual Internet system 

Like its dual currency, Cuba also has a dual internet system. The global internet – unaffordable for most Cubans. And its own intranet - cheaper and highly censored.The Cuban government controls all the communications infrastructure in the country. (Until 2008, it banned ownership of computer equipment and DVDs). The Internet has long been viewed by the authorities as a “Trojan Horse” for US infiltration, and the US embargo is constantly blamed for Cuba’s poor connectivity. Since the normalization of relations promoted by the Obama administration, and policy changes which have opened possibilities for US telecommunications companies to work in Cuba, this has become a harder argument to sell. And while President Trump’s U-turn in political rhetoric allows the Cuban authorities to revive this excuse, US policy related to the Internet remains largely unchanged.
Instead, in recent years, the Cuban government has prioritized the “digitalization of society.” But that digitalization, it argues, has to “guarantee the invulnerability of the Revolution, the defense of our culture, and the sustainable socialism our people are constructing.”
The government has also set ambitious objectives. In a 2015 strategy, among other things, it said it would connect 50% of homes by 2020. It said that by 2018, entities of the Communist party, organs of the state, banks, and some companies would be 100% connected. By 2020 it said it would have 95% broadband connectivity in educational and health centres and scientific and cultural institutions.
Nevertheless, progress has been slow. In 2014, the national cellphone provider launched Nauta – a mobile e-mail service allowing users to send emails through the government-provided company. In March 2015, the government approved the first public Wi-Fi in Havana and has since opened hundreds of hotspots across the island. Home internet connections were legalized in a pilot program launched only in December 2016. Google Global Cache also placed servers on the island to speed up access to its content in December last year.
But as Cuban authorities continue with the digitalization strategy, the government remains reluctant to put an end to censorship programs. Instead, the government has developed a national internet - a kind of intranet – like the one you might get in a workplace or school in a connected country. Meanwhile, at 1.5 USD an hour, the cost of accessing the World Wide Web remains prohibitive for most Cubans with an average monthly salary of 25 USD, and most only use it to speak with family and friends in the diaspora. Estimates of internet penetration figures vary from 5-40% (depending on the source), but of this percentage many are only likely to be accessing the government-controlled intranet, not the global internet. And interestingly, rates for the intranet have been falling.
What does that mean in practice?
Those that access the national internet experience highly censored, government-curated information. EcuRed, Cuba’s sort-of own version of Wikipedia – an online Cuban encyclopedia – for example, defames human rights defenders. Search for Laritza Diversent Cambara, a human rights lawyer, recently granted asylum in the US along with 12 other members of CUBALEX, Centro de Información Legal, and the site describes her as an “anti-Cuban mercenary” and her organization as “subversive.”

Search for Yoani Sanchez, founder of 14yMedio, and EcuRed describes her a “cyber mercenary”.Ted Henken, Associate Professor of Sociology at Baruch College, a specialist on Cuba who has published extensively on the media landscape and internet, says “For most Cubans the intranet is a joke, because it’s just a version of (the propaganda) they’ve been getting for 50-60 years but on the internet. It’s out of date, the links are broken.”And yet this is where it seems the Cuban government wants to invest.

Just days ago, in an apparently leaked video, First Vice President Miguel Díaz Canel, widely expected to be the next President, indicated that the government would shut down OnCuba´s website, calling the site “very aggressive against the revolution.” “Let the scandal ensure. Let them say we censure, it’ fine. Everyone censors,” he said.In other speeches, has reportedly talked about the need to “perfect our platform” – the national network - and develop work against “subversive projects.” He has also promoted the need to increase access for scientific and educational purposes, and economic reasons. In the same breath he has spoken about the need to generate production of Cuba’s own content, to put “the content of the revolution” online.Despite the government’s ambitious plans for internet expansion, many Cubans like Maribel say the internet is only available in a limited way in educational settings. She, like other Cubans, says she knows of people who have been expelled from university for accessing “unapproved” information.
Working around “big brother”

Cuban journalists, bloggers and activists have not simply accepted these restrictions. Dozens of emerging digital media projects developed by independent bloggers and journalists (often blocked in Cuba) have found creative workarounds for getting their information published on the global net. Just days ago, 14ymedio published an article called “Recipes for circumventing online censorship.”
Much has also been written about savvy young Cubans who are working around challenges to access and censorship through creative ways of sharing information. Perhaps the most famous innovation is “El Paquete” – pirated Netflix series, videos, music – shared on pen-drives through an island-wide distribution system. Then there’s Streetnet (or SNET), an underground or “bootleg” Internet system built by gamers.
But while these grassroots and spontaneous innovations are exciting, the content in El Paquete or SNET is vanilla. It’s not political in any way.

In order to survive, it (El Paquete) behaves.... They stay out of politics that would get them shut down… You might be discussing Game of Thrones much more than you are discussing the new electoral law

Professor Henken

“In order to survive, it (El Paquete) behaves.... They stay out of politics that would get them shut down… You might be discussing Game of Thrones much more than you are discussing the new electoral law,” says Professor Henken.
Cubans pretty much all believe they are monitored and tracked online and that their private communications are intercepted. ‘That’s normal, everyone knows that,’ is the standard response. After decades of physical surveillance by Committees of the Defense of the Revolution (local members of the communist party who collaborate with state officials and law enforcement agencies), it’s a logical assumption.
Whether it’s the case or not it’s hard to say. Surveillance is notoriously hard to prove. But OONI explains something that is perhaps not immediately obvious. Censorship is an outcome, a sub-set of surveillance.
“When you do internet censorship, what you are effectively doing is implementing surveillence. In order to implement censorship you first need to surveil. You need to know what people are accessing so you can then block it. As we do see internet censorship happening (in Cuba) there must also be surveillance,” OONI told Amnesty International.
And if you think you’re being monitored online you’re even more likely to self-censor.

 

Arturo Filastó

Cuba’s paradox: Censored education

The Internet is a vital educational tool in the modern world. By acting as a catalyst to free expression, it facilitates other human rights, such as the right to education. It also provides unprecedented access to sources of knowledge, improves traditional forms of schooling, and makes sharing of academic research widely available.
UNESCO and UNICEF have commended Cuba’s educational achievements. Students from across the Caribbean, particularly medical students, graduate from its universities yearly. And yet decades of off-line censorship and this apparent desire to create a Cuban version of reality laden with political ideology through controlled access to the internet undermines this.
Professor Henken describes this simply as “a tragedy.”
Many observers predict Cuba is going to repeat a Chinese model of censorship. OONI’s findings – in a way a “historical archive” of what a network looks like at any moment in time - certainly hint at the potential for more sophisticated blocking and filtering in the future.
But there is another way.
With President Raul Castro expected to step down in 2018, Cuba’s new President will have an opportunity to shape what role the internet plays in Cuba’s future and in its education system.
After being pushed out her job, Maribel was eventually offered a job cleaning floors in a kindergarten. Instead she, like tens of thousands of other Cubans last year alone, decided to leave Cuba. And she took the education that made her question the system she lived in with her. She told Amnesty International, “Education is a constant revolution, a constant change. Things have to evolve.”
The government would be wise to listen.
29 August 2017, 04:00 UTC
https://www.amnesty.org

The internet, but not as we know it: life online in China, Cuba, India and Russia

Fri 11 Jan 2019 11.00 GMT

More than half of the world's population is now online, but that does not mean we all see the same thing. From being filtered by the government to being delivered by post, the internet can vary enormously depending on where you live. Here are four illustrated examples

Read More Click Here 

Cuba's Internet Is F*cking Insane. And the Ways Cubans Use It Are Genius.

By Wil Fulton

Thrillist/Shutterstock

When you order a beer in Cuba, you’ll likely be presented with two options: Cristal (a watery, government-owned light lager) or Bucanero (a watery, government-owned dark lager). As a group of young Cubans and I littered a restaurant table in Havana with dead soldiers of both varieties, an argument broke out as to the etymology of the latter brand.

“Buccaneers were pirates, amigo, who specialized in stealing ham,” said Sergio Leon, 25, bearded and bearing a respectable resemblance to actor Gael García Bernal.

“That can’t be true,” I said, referring to the ham part.

“Sí, I promise you,” he said. “I know this for sure. We read about them.”

Well, read about this, I thought, and reached into my pocket to settle this dispute the way men do -- with Google. But all it did was make everybody laugh.

“Lo siento,” Sergio said, glancing at my iPhone. “Remember, you are in Cuba. Our country is stuck on airplane mode.”

Kamira / Shutterstock.com

As an American visiting Havana, the blank Wi-Fi/data signal in the top left-hand corner of my phone’s screen became as central to my impression of the city as the antiquated “Yank Tanks” prowling the streets, or the thick, sweet smell of Montecristos hanging in the air. The Cuban government claims that approximately a quarter of its 11.3 million residents have access to Internet. The US government puts that number closer to 5%, calling Cuban Internet one of the “most limited in the entire world.” If the White House is right, that means just over half a million Cubans can regularly update their relationship status. Or upload photos. Or post incoherent political rants on their profiles. Or make a website for their business. Or email their abuela.

Worst of all, it means gringo visitors can’t Google-bust a confident young Cuban’s suspiciously ham-centric recollection of maritime history. But that hasn’t dampened the young Cubans’ desire to be online -- which they will go to great lengths and exhibit tremendous ingenuity to satisfy. The Cuban government says it aims to connect half the country inside their own homes by 2020, but these kids aren’t the waiting type, clearly. On the chassis of the '55 Packard that is the Cuban infrastructure, in a country where most government employees make a measly $20 a month, they’re pushing ahead into the digital age on their own.

So I decided that the best way to understand what it means to be a young person in Havana is to try to understand how they use the Internet. I would shake off my first-world delirium tremens, and experience the Internet like a real Cuban. I’d play by their rules, and learn all I could about their situation.

I mean, shit, it’s not like I really had a choice, anyway.

  photography / Shutterstock.com

The early morning cyber-point orgy

The next morning, I ventured toward the first circle of batshit Cuban Internet access while nursing a Cristal-induced hangover (having sworn off Bucaneros, post-argument).

“How will we know when we get there?” I asked my cabbie as we bounced down the seaside Malecón . My question was answered by the sight of a crowd gathered along a vibrantly painted wall, clutching smartphones and tablets. We had arrived at one of the 35 public Wi-Fi “cyber-points” the government had installed over the past six months -- one of the standard connection points for your average Cuban.

But getting Wi-fi from these public access points is not like walking into a Starbucks, ordering a latte, and setting up your MacBook. It’s more like walking into Penn Station during rush hour, and sitting criss-cross-applesauce in front of the NJ Transit terminal and then maybe trying to suck a piece of gum through a straw. Approximately 30-45 people were gathered outdoors in the morning drizzle to dip into the puddle of connectivity, while sharply dressed young Cubans weaved through the crowd, advertising their product -- “Tarjeta... Internet card... tarjeta” -- like drug dealers prowling a Phish concert lawn.

Here’s how it works: you buy a prepaid card from government stores or from one of these (illegal but pretty much ignored by police) scalpers, and on the card is a login code that gives you an hour of access. I bought a card for $3. Surrounding me and my increasingly soggy access card was a mass of flickering screens, devices wavering in and out of connectivity -- relatives waving on video chat, Facebook pages being scrolled through, statuses being updated, photos being shared, and even movie trailers being watched (Star Wars!) with frequent buffering. Every now and then, a towel or shirt was pulled out to dry the rain water flecking the screens.

I connected my phone to the Internet and tried to upload a picture of me in Cuba to my various social networks (if people couldn’t see me Instagramming in Cuba, was I even there at all?). While I successfully connected, the speed of my Internet brought on flashbacks of MegaBus Wi-Fi, or sharing a remote cabin router with 10 of my friends in upstate New York. The much-maligned “wheel of loading” spun eternally on my screen, and in a fit of American impatience, I decided no selfie was worth literal minutes of upload times, especially in a steady rain and a pair of decidedly un-waterproof Clarks. I opted to cut my excursion short to pursue dry socks, and maybe a quick nap. I wasted three dollars. I am a really shitty Cuban.

My taxi driver hung around, fortunately. As I climbed back into the wide, shiny, red sedan, the cabbie gestured to the scrum. “Rains, wind, floods -- they will still be here,” he said. “It’s crazy what people will do to get on their phones, man.”

The root causes of crappy Cuban Internet

Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. College is free -- so is health care, meaning no student loan bills or medical debt. The United Nations ranks it at 44th out of 187 countries in its Human Development Index. The country’s art scene is highly regarded, just like its baseball players. Their rum and cigars are the envy of the world. Violent crime rates are staggeringly low, especially when compared to neighboring countries.

But their Internet? To put it in words I heard countless times during my trip, “It’s total shit.”

“There were sets of unique circumstances that played a part in delaying viable Internet in Cuba,” said Colin Laverty, President of Cuba Educational Travel, a group that works with the country on person-to-person exchange programs with the United States. “Number one, the US embargo didn’t help. In the past they had a chance to access some of the resources and basic infrastructures -- like using fiber optic cables -- other Caribbean countries use to connect, but couldn’t because of the embargo’s limitations.”

Not that that would have even been a priority. When the USSR disbanded and Cuba went through its “Special Period” in the 1990s, the nation was having enough trouble trying to provide food for its people, let alone work on creating/maintaining functional Internet. It has taken decades for Cuba to claw its way back to some level of stability, and steps like opening relations with the US and incorporating private businesses into its economy will hopefully make things better still in terms of the economy and the Internet.

“They are making great strides now,” Laverty said. “A lot of politicians in Cuba do believe that getting Cuba connected to the rest of the world and up to speed technology-wise is one of the highest priorities moving forward, and they are fighting for it.”

You can see evidence of the jonesing for technology all over. One gets the sense that in Cuba, tech -- more than any other slice of American culture that slips in through the borders -- is sacred, a thing of reverence, of awe. Bootleg Apple stickers randomly line the windows of taxis. Having various social media accounts is a status symbol. Phones, laptops, and almost all kinds of electronics are rare delicacies, smuggled into the country by relatives or bought on the black market.

Still, even with the historic push, some residents, especially business owners who rely on their Internet for their livelihoods, have no time to wait for the government. So they do what so many Cubans do when they run into a dead end: they take what they have, and they innovate.

Thrillist/Ke Hay Pa' Hoy?

How to run an Internet business with no Internet

When the rain had cleared and the sun had set over the Gulf, I visited the home of Julia de la Rosa and Silvio Ortega -- a couple making their living with a privately owned business: a palatial Airbnb with a dozen rooms in the geographical center of Havana. We ate a late dinner on their poolside patio,  capped with Havana Club rum and cigars. The meal was Mexican, with some ingredients smuggled over by friends from Mexico; this is basically the only way to acquire exotic food. “It’s important to have friends in good places,” Julia told me, over my first-ever smuggled burrito.

The problem with running an Airbnb in Cuba, however, is that there are no credit cards, there’s no reliable way to process online payments, and the Internet is shit. “We have to rely on other people, because the Internet is really an essential part of our business,” said Julia. “We have to have it, to exist.” So Julia and Silvio created a workaround. They have a business partner in Spain who handles the server that hosts their listings and website, and another friend in Italy who processes the payments. It’s online work done via physical proxies, online living done through offline connections. Getting the actual money across Cuban borders can be done via simple money wiring -- Western Union even facilitates payments from the United States, or Airbnb hosts can opt for door-to-door delivery of payments. This couple owns a house that could pay host to The Bachelor, but they can’t even post on their Facebook page themselves. Despite the barriers, their house is swarmed year-round with European and South American tourists looking to bask in the glow of the Cuban suburbs and the bootleg burritos prepared by the property’s personal chef.

And take the guys I was drinking with earlier. They are upstart Cuban tech entrepreneurs who created an actual functioning nightlife app. They saw an opening in the market, and they employed Cuban ingenuity to serve it. “We live in a country where the young people have to plan where they are going to go out very meticulously, because [most have] financial problems,” one of them, Juan Alejandro Hernandez, told me between beers. “We also don’t have the freedom of being able to check social media 24/7. There are things going on here, in Havana, but the kids -- they just didn’t know about them. We wanted to change that.”

We were dining and drinking in the trendy Vedado neighborhood on the northern tip of Havana. Juan Alejandro and the three other Cubans at the table -- Sergio Fernandez, Juan Luis Santana Barrios, and Sergio Leon -- were detailing their start-up venture, a smartphone application “Ke Hay Pa' Hoy?” that straddles the line between a Cuban Yelp, and a site like Thrillist -- detailing the best nightlife, events, and dining destinations in Havana, geared toward a young crowd.

Through email, Ke Hay Pa' Hoy? sends a compressed download, an information update to their application every seven days. The week’s info (upcoming concerts, live events, etc.) is provided as a download directly to user’s smartphones, optimized to be made accessible without a connection. The app looks slick. It runs well. And, it was pieced together with extreme resourcefulness by four 24-year-olds with no formal training. Ke Hay Pa Hoy? is gaining nationwide attention as game-changing software, tailor-made to bypass Cuba’s connection problems and to introduce millennials to the world of on-the-go resources.

“We don’t want to go to the United States to develop an app, even though it would be easier for us over there,” Juan told me, “because we want to bring this kind of service to our people, to make our lives better.”

Shutterstock

Welcome to the Cuban iTunes store

After a few glasses of the rocket fuel that is Cuban coffee, we stopped talking business and rolled to a trendy, art-house nightclub in Vedado. The uncanny timbre of Robin Thicke’s voice coursed through the speakers, welcoming us.

“Wait, you have Robin Thicke songs here?” I yelled.

“Yes,” Juan yelled back. “We also have running water, and indoor toilets, and we even wear shoes!”

I hadn’t considered this much till then, but while I was visiting, so many of my Cuban conversations revolved around American media. Kids discussing intricate plot points of shows like Californication, debating how much they liked the newest Avengers film compared to the first. Analyzing tracks of Rihanna's latest album over plates of ropa vieja and black beans. Where were they getting this stuff?

The answer was given to me by all four of my friends at once, through unanimous smiles. El Paquete Semana. The weekly packet. A one-terabyte hard-drive loaded with a week’s worth of American movies, shows, music, magazines, and even smartphone apps. The original source of this smorgasbord of media is something of a mystery, but dealers pace the streets of Havana, selling full versions of El Paquete for around $8, or a smaller version with partial content for a few bucks. It’s passed around the Cuban population by street dealers for a cost, or by friends out of charity, like borrowing a Netflix password. My particular amigos were already looking forward to seeing the Latin Grammys and the Victoria Secret Fashion show in the upcoming months, both of which would make rounds on El Paquete about a week after airing on US television.

And yes, my friends assure me, “El Paquete and chill” is definitely a thing.

Shutterstock

How to get anything you want online while also risking jail

Outside the club, while I discovered firsthand the shocking potency of Cuban cigarettes, I struck up a conversation with a young photographer. He was cradling his Canon, a respectable, clearly expensive model, like a newborn puppy. As I coughed, he told me he bought it on the black market after months of saving and using a shitty hand-me-down film camera. I told him about my experience with Cuban Internet, and he told me of other ways to get online. Many government employees get limited onsite Internet access in order to do their jobs, like doctors, professors, and journalists, he said. Same deal for college students, who have some access on campus. Some of these people sell their access for about $8 an hour on Revolico, the Cuban equivalent of Craigslist. Foreign relatives can also clandestinely bring phones loaded with international SIM cards, with a limited supply of basic access to the web, when they visit. All this is totally prohibited. The only other option, beside the cyber-points, are government-owned Internet cafes, thinly scattered throughout the city, carrying a steep $9-per-hour rate.

“Well,” he clarified, “that is the only other legal option.”

He was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt. He referenced cult classics and indie films -- his current favorite is Blue Is the Warmest Color. He thought Kid A was Radiohead’s best album. He described himself as a Friki, a “free kid.” And he thinks most of the material in El Paquete is “mainstream bullshit.” Craving access, he decided to take these matters into his own hands. And he’s not alone.

Tech-savvy lawbreakers can connect to an existing underground network of users owning black market computers all over Cuba (like a dark-web Intranet). It gives people like the photographer a way to get an online experience at their own convenience. Their makeshift web of access is aptly called the “Streetnet.” It uses equipment that is still highly illegal (Cuba wants tight control over its burgeoning Internet), and is maintained by thousands of Cubans across the nation, giving them access to each other for online gaming, P2P media sharing, messaging, and basically everything else you would find on the full spectrum of the Interweb.

“I just figured out how to do it,” the photographer said. “Trial and error. It’s complicated, but I had a ton of time to practice connecting to outlets I’m not supposed to be connected to... I bet any tech guy in the US could do it in a heartbeat.” What about any potential legal problems that could stem from his illegal usage? “I’m not worried,” he said, before quickly changing the subject and trying to hard-sell me on the merits of his new favorite band, Muse.

unmillonedeelefantes / Shutterstock.com

Escape from no-Internet island

Less than 24 hours after I exited the club with my ears ringing and stomach bloated with Cuban lager, I was aboard a homebound charter flight, touching ground in Miami. Before the burnt rubber of the plane’s tires hit my nose, I was texting, emailing, and, of course, Instagramming my #Hemmingway #Mojito shots. It took me approximately 12 seconds to find out the word Buccaneer does indeed have its meaning rooted in pork product, as buccaneers were known for hunting feral pigs and smoking their meat (the word itself comes from the French boucane -- “to smoke meat”).

Well, if I ever make it back to Cuba, I guess I owe Sergio a watery government-owned dark lager.

When I reached the Facebook portion of my reintroduction to the online world, I noticed that I had five friend request notifications on my feed. Two Juans, two Sergios, and one photographer. The artist and the businessmen, bearing the torch of the new Cuba. I accept, thinking back on something Juan told me earlier. “We want to be able to be on Facebook here in Cuba, to be able to friend you, and like your photos and keep in touch with you,” he said. “To connect with people across the world."

“Just that makes all the difference,” he said. “We need that to happen. And it will.”

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Wil Fulton is a staff writer for Thrillist. He also found out Cuban sandwiches aren't really Cuban. Now he can't sleep at night. Seriously. Follow him @wilfulton.

You want to go to Cuba. Our editors have been to Cuba. And they'll tell you everything you need to know, right here in The Havana Club.

https://www.thrillist.com

What’s the real status of Internet access in Cuba?

Posted on August 18, 2017 by Alan Weissberger
 

by Matteo Ceurvels of  eMarketer (edited with Notes by Alan J Weissberger)Few people in Cuba have regular access to the Internet, and those who do encounter slow download speeds, according to an eMarketer study. Although Cuba’s state-run service provider (see details below) has built WiFi hotspots throughout the country, the relatively high rate of $1.50 an hour is too much for most Cubans to pay.  [Please see references below for additional information on the WiFi hotspots in Cuba- mostly in Havana]

eMarketer estimates that there will be 360.4 million internet users in Latin America in 2017. While the market research firm does not break out specific metrics for Cuba, the latest figures from the government’s National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) show that over 4.5 million people, or roughly 40.3% of the total population, accessed the Internet at least once during 2016.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Editor’s Note:  The actual ONEI ICT report (via Google Translate) states that for 2016 there were 403 people that accessed the Internet out of every 1,000 people living on the island. That compares with 348, 271, 261, 257 and 232 people for the years 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, respectively.
The same report (which I don’t trust) says the mobile population coverage (not usage) has been 85.3% of the population from 2012-2016, up from 83.7% in 2011.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The number of people with internet access in their homes was significantly lower: The BBC reported in March of last year that the at-home internet penetration rate was roughly 5%.

Web access in the country remains relegated to a few options. State-run telecom Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A. (ETECSA), which first began offering public Wi-Fi spots in 2015, claims to provide 391 such spots across the country. But at a cost of about $1.50 per hour, access remains too expensive for most Cubans, and internet speeds are reportedly excruciatingly slow.
ETECSA also began a pilot program in December of last year to provide some 2,000 users in Havana, Cuba’s capital, with fixed broadband internet access for a free two-month trial period. In March, ETECSA said 358 participants in the program signed up to pay for the service, which offered data speeds of between 128 kilobits per second (Kbps) and 2 megabits per second (Mbps).
And when residents of the country do manage to get online, they are subject to strict internet censorship overseen by the government. Some websites and services are blocked, and communications can easily be monitored by government figures.
During parliamentary sessions held in July, Vice President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged that Cuba has one of the lowest internet access rates, but rejected the notion that its society was “fully disconnected.”
He added that tech companies that had entered into agreements with the country’s government to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to expand internet access had been met with “fierce financial prosecution.”
Despite these claims, the government has sought out partnerships with some of the world’s leading tech companies. In April, Google brought servers in the country online for the first time, making it the first foreign tech firm to host its own content in Cuba.
At the parliamentary sessions, Díaz-Canel also claimed that the penetration of social media platforms had grown by 346% in 2016. (The government did not respond to eMarketer’s request to verify this figure.)
However, Martín Utreras, vice president of forecasting at eMarketer, noted that the majority of social media users in the country were most likely foreign tourists looking to stay connected while on vacation.
According to data from StatCounter, there are signs that Facebook is a leading social media platform in the country. Facebook was responsible for 83.3% of page views resulting from social network referrals in Cuba in July, more than either Pinterest (8.4%) or Twitter (4.3%). (StatCounter’s figures take into consideration website referral traffic from both locals and visitors in Cuba.)

Despite signs that internet access is increasing in the country, Cuba still has a long way to go before getting online is something residents consider normal. In fact, many in the country rely on “el paquete semanal,” or the weekly package—a hard drive that is loaded with contraband content such as news, music, TV shows and other videos and passed from person to person.
“Cuba’s journey resembles that of similar trends we’ve seen in the case of China or Vietnam,” Utreras said. “Although Cuba is still many years behind in terms of private telecom investment, infrastructure development and overall internet adoption, by comparison, the immediate future will most likely be driven by government interests rather than the market itself.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………..
References:
https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Cuba-on-Slow-Crawl-Toward-Increased-Internet-Access/1016352
http://www.one.cu/aec2016/17%20Tecnologias%20de%20la%20Informacion.pdf
http://www.businessinsider.com/is-there-internet-in-cuba-2017-1
https://insightcuba.com/blog/2017/03/05/havanas-wifi-hotspots-and-getting-online-cuba

Cubans get internet on cellphones, but how many can afford it?

By Patrick Oppmann

In Cuba, you can't use the Internet in private

CNN

Havana, Cuba (CNN)For years, when Cubans talked about 3G mobile internet arriving on the communist-run island, it was with the same sarcasm that people in other countries reserve for discussions of flying pigs and hell freezing over.

However, on Thursday, officials with the government telecom provider for the first time offered internet access on cell phones, a key step toward easing Cubans' technological isolation.

Approximately 5.3 million Cubans have cell phones, a little less than half the island's population, according to figures released by the government.

Until now, Cubans could only receive and send email on their phones using cell phone networks through government accounts. Offering mobile service could finally help meet the pent-up demand for video chatting, social media and even e-commerce.

All day Thursday, groups of people could be seen mingling outside in Havana looking at their phones and trying to access the new service.

Many were disappointed that they were unable to obtain the code that ETECSA, the Cuban government telecom provider, needed to text them in order to connect for the first time.

ETECA officials had warned that, at least initially, service would be patchy at best.

Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban whose custody case riveted the United States and Cuba nearly 20 years ago, announced Thursday he had joined Twitter.

In his first tweet, Gonzalez said he wanted to "follow and support" Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and "never let down" the Cuban people.

Public Wi-Fi spots, such as this one in 2016 outside the Santa Isabel Hotel in Havana, have become popular gathering places.

Only 60,000 Cubans have internet access through a limited program that allows people to connect through DSL lines in their homes, according to government statistics. Many more people pack the 1,200 plazas, parks and other public areas across the island that have been outfitted with wireless routers, beginning in July 2015.

Access at the public Wi-Fi hotspots costs the equivalent of $1 an hour and people complain of slow connection speeds and no privacy. The new mobile service was greeted with cautious optimism by many Cubans who have been told for years by their government that they would have 3G soon.

"I think it's great, I would like to use it to stay in touch with my daughters who live abroad but I don't know if I can afford it yet," said Nestor Rodriguez, who said he makes the equivalent of a few dollars a day selling fried pork rinds in Havana's winding colonial streets.

ETECSA said it would charge the equivalent of 10 cents a megabyte for the new service and released four plans Cubans can purchase. The cheapest plan costs about $7 for 600 megabytes of data, or more than one-tenth of what a highly paid doctor earns in a month.

The average state worker's monthly salary is about $30, according to government statistics, making the new 3G unaffordable for those who don't have relatives who send them remittances from abroad or work in the island's small private sector.

Still, the Cuban government said the new service showed a desire to modernize and open ever so slightly a country with some of the most restricted internet in the world.

"We keep advancing in the informatization of the society," President Diaz-Canel said in a tweet Tuesday, the same day of the announcement.

Leonor Cuza Tamayo, 52, chats with a sister in Miami as her son, Jose Luis Rodriguez, 33, holds a light over her head, in 2016.

But other Cubans were more skeptical of the opening, saying tests this year of the new 3G service caused the network to grind to a halt and crash.

"They have been talking about this for a long time," said Elmer, who runs a small cafeteria from a window from his home and asked that his last name not be used. "You need to wait and see if it actually works before giving them your money."

For all its purported strides in health care and education, communist Cuba's level of internet connectivity was among the lowest in the world.

Critics have long complained that Cuban officials want to keep technology -- and the open flow of information -- out of their citizens' hands. The government blamed the US trade embargo for the internet drought.

Cuba made the internet more accessible as part of the December 2014 agreement to begin normalizing relations with the US after more than a half century of estrangement.

CNN's Ray Sanchez contributed to this report

The Path to Freedom for Cuba

A Conversation with Dr. Oscar Biscet 

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Independent Cuban journalists resist despite increased arbitrary detentions on the island and restrictions from traveling abroad

By Paola Nalvarte/TM

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**This story has been updated.

During 2019, there were more than three thousand arbitrary detentions in Cuba, several of these affecting dozens of independent journalists, activists and political opponents, according to a recent report by the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH).
"Last year was characterized by the increase in detentions on public streets without a court order, searches of houses, fines, confiscation of private property, beatings, threats and illegal detentions against human rights activists and independent journalists," the organization said, highlighting the increase in these measures compared to 2018.

Up until January 2013, any Cuban person who wanted to travel outside the country had to request an exit permit. However, even though Cuba relaxed its immigration policy seven years ago, its citizens, especially activists, opposition politicians and journalists face severe restrictions to travel abroad, 14ymedio journalist Luz Escobar told the Knight Center.
"There is no right to move freely within the country," Escobar said.
Escobar, who in the last few months has been affected several times by house arrests and prohibitions of leaving the country, said that these restrictive measures have been exacerbated in the last two years, becoming more arbitrary.
"What used to happen to me twice a year, in the last six months it has happened to me five or six times," Escobar said. “That is, I notice that they have put more focus on my work, and my opinion is that the goal is for me to stop doing what I do, because that is what they told me the last time I had in front of me an official in an interrogation, that the goal is for me to stop doing journalism.”
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), authorities prevented Escobar from leaving the country on May 22, Aug. 19 and Sept. 21, 2019, without any court order or prior notice. Likewise, via Twitter, the journalist has repeatedly denounced that State Security agents have prohibited her from leaving her home.
“It's 24 hours that you can't leave your house, after three days they come back again and they do that to you again but it will pass, and what there is is to have resistance. I think that in the end it is a race of resistance in which you have to have very clear priorities and it is also very clear how far they are able to go. I think that fear cannot defeat us in these cases because it is the objective. The goal is for us to be afraid,” Escobar said.
"It's a less violent way than other ways to exert pressure, to blackmail – to force journalists to talk to the authorities– to ultimately discourage the work of journalists, that's what it is about," Maykel González, co-founder and director of the independent site Tremenda Nota, told the Knight Center.
According to González, this standard of "regulation" of the government is aimed primarily at journalists, activists, politicians, dissidents, but is also reaching more and more people, such as doctors, specialists and even high-performance underage athletes. Another objective of these government regulations is to seek the exile of dissenting voices, the journalist said.
"Soon we will have to make the list of those who are now free to leave the country whenever they want, instead of those of us who are forcibly held in the country," Gonzalez said.
The journalist said that after returning from a trip of several months that began last May after covering a protest of the LGBTI community in the Cuban capital, he was interrogated by police officers at the José Martí International Airport in Havana, where he spent a few hours in custody before being released. Later, when he tried to travel on Dec. 2 to Spain, he learned at the airport that the Ministry of Interior had banned him from leaving.

"I have not only been the victim of a ban on leaving, which affects me a lot, but of a lot of harassment and persecution, of discomfort in everyday life that have really done me much more psychological damage than the exit ban," González said.
In December 2019, in addition to González, the YouTuber and Tremenda Nota collaborator Nelson Álvarez Mairata was also unable to leave the country, according to the Association for Freedom of the Press (APLP) of Cuba. According to the organization, another journalist, Yunior Berges, was interrogated when he returned from Trinidad and Tobago and threatened that he could not return to Cuba on an upcoming trip. Berges had traveled to the Central American country to attend a journalism workshop.
That month, three other journalists suffered house arrest, APLP documented: Camila Acosta Rodríguez of the Writers and Artists Club of Cuba, Iliana Hernández of CiberCuba and blogger Agustín López Canino.
“The State, through its Political Police, plays with this situation. At one point you are ‘regulated,’ but after a few months they suspend the measure, then they impose it again. At the same time, there are some who have never been ‘regulated,’ that can be a strategy to generate distrust,” José Antonio Fornaris Ramos, president of APLP, told the Knight Center.
On the issue of immigration regulations affecting independent journalists and opponents, Cuban Interior Minister Bruno Rodríguez told the Associated Press (AP) at a press conference in October 2019, that it would be necessary to analyze each on a case by case basis to know its justification, as published by CiberCuba.
Abraham Jiménez Enoa, the founder and director of El Estornudo, the Cuban magazine for narrative journalism, has never left Cuba. Jiménez told the Knight Center that he has had a government immigration regulation since 2016, effective until 2021.
“The government decides whether I leave or not. Obviously, I have asked for permission several times and they have said no to all of them, and on other occasions they have not even answered me,” he said. "In Cuba, you never know the express or explicit and clear fact by which decisions are made."
For Jiménez, there are many factors that explain the increase in restrictions against journalists, one of the main ones is the use of and access to the internet on the island. “I believe, one, that on the one hand, the internet is helping to show that other face of Cuba that was hidden for many years, and two, that exactly on the internet, the State has taken the step to increase its repression against opponents, against the dissidents, then, I think that’s how it goes, in those two ways,” he explained.
Jiménez said that in December, State Security agents held him at home. “It was the second time that they didn't let me leave the house in five months. Again we were in an interrogation; they harass and threaten my family, my relatives, the normal things of Cuba. Well, they are not normal, but well, I say, it is what happens in this country when you somehow look into the eyes of the regime. Just for being a journalist,” he said.
In a note that Jiménez wrote in The New York Times for International Human Rights Day, in December 2019, he said that in Cuba there were no differences between an independent journalist and a common criminal. "The detentions and harassment of my colleagues and me in recent months show a resurgence of Cuban policies against press freedom and access to information," he said.
Jiménez has no doubt that he will continue to practice journalism on the island, despite all the obstacles he faces. From there, he collaborates with The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Vice, Univisión, L'Internazionale of Italy, Le Courrier International of France, among others.
The digital sites of the magazine El Estornudo, 14ymedio, Tremenda Nota, among many other digital publications of independent journalism in Cuba, are blocked on the island. The only way for Cubans to access their content is through proxy servers, vpn connections, bots via Telegram or WhatsApp and weekly newsletters sent by email.
“I have all my right to do the journalism that I do, and it’s they who are doing something wrong, so that helps me a lot to understand that I have no fault,” Escobar said. “I'm going to keep doing my job, period. I think that keeps me there, quite safe from what is the madness, the stress, what is the insecurity that such situations can give,” he said.
González, meanwhile, said that since Cubans have had greater access to the internet (2014), there is a new air in independent journalism that is done on the island, “after so many decades of silence.” However, investigative journalism, due to the lack of access to official sources and government censorship of critical voices, remains one of the great challenges, he emphasized.
"It is already very, very difficult to give the smallest coverage, or tell the simplest stories. Imagine if we tried to tell the great stories, which, somehow, really compromise areas of power, we would be erased. Deleted," he said.
* The Knight Center tried unsuccessfully to contact the Cuban Ministry of Interior.
**This story has been updated to clarify the affiliation of journalist Yunior Berges.

Posted at 2020-01-08 18:18

Topics:

• arbitrary detentions
• Cuba
• travel restrictions

 

Cuba has notoriously bad internet — here's what it's like to use 

Harrison Jacobs

• Cuba has notoriously bad Internet. It's slow, expensive for the local population to use, and primarily provided through crowded government-approved Wi-Fi hotspots.
• I traveled to Cuba last year and found that, in order to get internet, you need to buy scratch-off cards that give you a pre-determined amount of time on the approved Wi-Fi hotspots.
• The government is trying to increase access to the internet for citizens and signed a deal in 2016 with Google to add local servers, but increased access may result in more censorship.

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It's not exactly a secret that Cuba has notoriously bad internet.
For those travelers heading to Cuba for vacation, the lack of internet is something to keep in mind — don't expect to be hailing Ubers or using Google Maps to navigate when you get lost.
All internet service in the long-stagnating island nation is controlled by the state-owned telecom company ETSECA and primarily provided through crowded, government-approved Wi-Fi hotspots around the country.

Here's what it's like to use:

Paid Wi-Fi hotspots are scattered through major cities. They are instantly recognizable by the crowds of young Cubans gathered with their eyes glued to an assortment of smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

The scene near a public Wi-Fi hotspot in Havana, Cuba, September 5, 2016.

REUTERS/Enrique de la Osa

Since 2014, the government has opened approximately 237 paid public Wi-Fi hotspots, according to Reuters, which cost $2 per hour to use.
That’s not a lot of internet access for a country of 11 million people.
The Cuban government blames the country's poor internet access on the US trade embargo, which they say has obstructed the introduction of new network technology and prevented them from accumulating funds to buy equipment from other nations, according to The Associated Press. Cuba estimates that the embargo has cost it $753.69 billion since the US implemented it in 1960.
Critics say Cuba has poor internet by design, to prevent most Cubans from accessing outside culture or information.

For tourists, getting online isn’t too difficult.

A Nauta card used to get on the internet in Cuba.

Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

Head to the nearest ETSECA office — there’s usually one right next to the Wi-Fi hotspot — and purchase one of the Nauta scratch-off internet cards for $2.
Like everything else in Cuba, be prepared to wait. I would recommend buying a few at a time. Whether the queue is long or short, the process is excruciatingly slow (minimum: 30 minutes to an hour).
Here's a list of ETSECA hot spots in Cuba.

Once you have the card, scratch off the login and password on the back and join the nearest Wi-Fi network.

Accessing a Wi-Fi hotspot in Cuba.

Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

Enter the login information. Your phone (or tablet, or laptop) will alert you that you are joining an unsecured network. The government monitors all users — it’s the price of admission.

Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

When you are done, make sure to turn off your Wi-Fi. And if you want to be extra safe, type in http://1.1.1.1/ to reach a log-out screen. Otherwise, get ready to buy another card.

Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

If you don’t want to wait on the painfully slow line, there are a few other options.

Lismai Aguilar (C), 18, uses a mobile phone to connect to the internet at a hotspot in downtown Havana, Cuba, December 12, 2016.

REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

1. Head to a hotel lobby, which will let you buy an official internet card without the wait. If you are not a hotel guest, they may require you to buy food or a drink in the hotel bar or restaurant.
2. Head directly to the Wi-Fi access point. There will inevitably locals whispering "tarjeta de internet" (Spanish for "internet card") and willing to sell you as many as you want for $3 each. A slight mark-up, but probably worth avoiding the ETSECA line.
3. The final option is to find a local at the Wi-Fi access point who has set up a personal Wi-Fi network. These internet purveyors buy internet cards, use the internet to set up a personal network, and then sell to as many people as possible for $1 each. The benefit: no wait and cheaper, but you pay in connection speed.

Welcome to Cuban internet!

Rafael Antonio Broche Moreno poses with his computer, modem and intranet network cabling at his home in Havana.

Ramon Espinosa/AP

For anyone coming from the US, the connection speed is brutally slow. Websites, email, and messaging load fine, but videos and multimedia take forever. Forget about live-blogging your Cuban adventure.
That said, despite the country’s repressive reputation, very few websites are actually blocked. I had no trouble accessing Facebook, Instagram, Google, Gmail, The New York Times, or Business Insider (😜).
In fact, I didn’t come across any websites that we’re blocked, though I didn’t try to access dissident Cuba websites like Cubanet, Diario de Cuba, Cubaencuentro, Hablemos Press, and 14ymedio, which Freedom House reports are restricted in the country.
The Cuban internet is relatively open because access is so limited that censorship is unnecessary, sociologist Ted Henken told The Verge in 2015. At even $2 per hour, the price of internet access is too high for most Cubans. About 75% of Cubans work for the government, earning a salary of $20 to $40 per month.
The International Telecommunications Union estimates that, as of 2013, only around 26% of Cubans have access.
Approximately 4.1% of Cubans —primarily professors, doctors, and intellectuals — receive home internet access, according to the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies.

The only other way to get on the internet in Cuba is at hotels, university campuses, state-run cybercafes, or the offices of ETSECA.

An Internet user surfs the net at a branch of the state-run telecommunications company, ETECSA, in Havana June 4, 2013.

REUTERS/Stringer

A government-controlled intranet is available in those locations as well, at a considerably lower price of $0.60 per hour, according to Freedom House.
The intranet is limited to “a national email system, a Cuban encyclopedia, a pool of educational materials and open-access journals, Cuban websites, and foreign websites that are supportive of the Cuban government,” the report said.

Whether the government’s goal is met is anyone’s guess.

Retired teacher Margarita Marquez, 67, uses the Internet after it was recently installed at her home in old Havana, Cuba, December 29, 2016.

REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

Last year, the government began a pilot program to bring internet access into the homes of 2,000 Havana residents. But that's a drop in a bucket compared with Cuba's population of 11 million people.
In mid-December 2016, Google and Cuba signed a deal to allow the company to speed internet access on the island by installing local servers that will store much of Google's content. The move could make accessing Google services like Gmail and YouTube 10 times faster, but will do little to expand internet access to more Cubans.

Increased access could come at a cost.

Amnesty International volunteers place cardboard bricks into a symbolic firewall before a protest in central Sydney July 30, 2008. They are demonstrating against what they claim is the Chinese government's censorship, monitoring and surveillance and punishment of internet users in China.

REUTERS/Will Burgess

Henken said that it is likely Cuba will follow the China model and enact its own version of "The Great Firewall" if it dramatically increases internet access.
"Cuba wants to go from a model that basically doesn’t need censorship on the internet because there practically is no internet" to using internet to control the population, Henken told The Verge.
It's not a difficult thing to imagine. A fiber-optic cable from Venezuela to Cuba was built by French-Chinese telecom provider Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell several years ago to improve internet access. And Chinese telecom giant Huawei has been charged with building out broadband infrastructure in Havana, according to BBC.

Cuba is a complicated place.

A "coche americano" travels down a street in Havana, Cuba.

Courtesy of Harrison Jacobs 

  

How to Get Online Illegally in Cuba

Across the country, people have turned to a Philadelphia-based company to access the internet.

By Morgan Babbs

 

Oct 22, 20197:30 AM

There are two main ways to get online in Cuba. You can take the official route, forming lines behind 25 other individuals for more than an hour at an office of Etecsa, the Cuban government entity that oversees telecommunications and connectivity. There, you can buy top-up scratch cards to access the Etecsa Wi-Fi hot spots around Havana. It’s a relatively new development: Internet access in Cuba dramatically changed in 2015, when the government opened 35 public Wi-Fi hot spots in several cities across Cuba. Today, according to the Etecsa website, it operates more than 986 hot spots across the country that consumers can access via top-up scratch cards. Etecsa charges 1 CUC (about $1) per hour of internet consumption. In a country where the average income is 30 CUC per month, that’s expensive and inconvenient—which means consumers are open to more creative workaround solutions.
Instead, many Cubans consume internet the second way: via Havana’s network of informal, clandestine, and illegal Wi-Fi hot spots known as Conectifai, which piggyback off the public Etecsa network. Taking this approach saves users hours in line, headaches, and at least 20 CUC. Conectifai entrepreneurs set up their own private hot spots and, through a network of street “dealers,” sell access to their internet at a much cheaper price, providing a far more attractive solution for the average Cuban.
It’s all possible thanks to a single American company. The name “Conectifai” is the phonetic spelling of the Spanish pronunciation of Connectify, a Philadelphia-based software company whose primary product, Connectify Hotspot, allows users to turn a PC into a Wi-Fi hot spot to share internet with other devices. Connectify has no official presence in Cuba—in fact, its use is illegal. Still, Conectifai entrepreneurs connect to the Etecsa network with a computer and download the Connectify software to create private hot spots.
Connectify has been in Cuba since Etecsa set up those public hot spots in 2015. Although aware of the illegality, the company has embraced its product’s utility as a “popular tool for creating ‘do it yourself’ infrastructure using nothing more than a laptop” among these internet entrepreneurs and remains committed to their “ongoing efforts to get the people of Cuba online,” according to a blog post from April 2017.
Not only has the Connectify Hotspot software been available in Spanish since 2017, but the company also launched the ¡Viva Hotspot! campaign, which “provides Cuban citizens with free Connectify Hotspot MAX licenses.” Today, Connectify has made essentially all of its Premium features free to users in Cuba. The company also provides free Spanish-language versions of Speedify, its virtual private network, which allows users to browse the web with a private connection—particularly relevant considering Cuba’s strict censorship. (You could face jail time for Googling anything “anti-revolutionary.”)
There’s no government data on illegal connections to Etecsa hot spots, making it impossible to compare how many Cubans get online directly via Etecsa vs. Conectifai. But numbers from Connectify give us some hints. In 2018, the company says it saw 53,667 new users in Cuba, which is defined as a computer running the software and setting up at least one hot spot. From January–May of this year, 20,663 new users have hopped on. And each hot spot can host many users, whether it’s entrepreneurs offering it as a service for a fee or families setting up internet access at home. Compare that with the roughly 1,000 Etecsa hot spots nationwide.
Héctor, a Conectifai entrepreneur, runs two locations: a sleepy corner park in Old Havana, where he “deals” to locals, and one of several Conectifai hot spots outside of the famous Bar Floridita. (Héctor and other Conectifai entrepreneurs’ names have been changed to protect them.) Two young men working for him “deal” internet at his Floridita location. Being a Conectifai “dealer” consists of sitting out on the street all day, collecting cash, and entering the network password in the phones or PCs of customers who approach.
“We’re just doing what the government itself can’t do.” — Conectifai entrepreneur Héctor
Héctor began using the internet in 2011, at age 14, at the hotel where his mother worked. At the time, internet access was only available at government offices and tourist-centric hotels. After school and on weekends, he would go to the hotel and spend his time Googling toys and soccer, he recalled, until one day when he became interested in what the internet actually was.
“I’ve learned everything I know about connectivity by Googling it. I had the advantage of internet access at a time when no one else had it.” This “everything” included hot spot solutions such as Connectify’s.
Alex Gizis, founder and CEO of Connectify, comments that democratizing access to the internet has been a mission of the company’s since its early days—ever since the team realized that their product was unintentionally providing utility in markets where access is restricted.

Decoding the Digital Cold War

BY Ellery Roberts Biddle

 
Could newly rekindled U.S.-Cuba relations lead to more Internet access in Cuba?

U.S. efforts to overthrow the Cuban regime and increase Cubans’ tech access are incompatible.
Among the pressing issues raised by the historic thaw in U.S.–Cuba relations is the role the Internet might play as the two nations enter a new chapter in their shared history. Cuba has one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in the Western hemisphere. Government data suggests that over 25 percent of Cubans are using the Internet, and only 3.4 percent¹ of households have an Internet connection. But these figures include Cubans who use the global Internet, in addition to those who use local and national-level intranet networks on the island. The percentage of Cubans who use the global Internet is likely much lower. With just one state-run telecommunications company, ETECSA, that tightly regulates citizens’ access to the network, and a single fiber-optic cable connecting the island to global network infrastructure, Cuba seems to lack both the technical infrastructure and the political will to increase Internet access on the island.
But it didn’t always look this way.
In 1996, Cuba became one of the first countries in Latin America to connect to the global Internet.² At the time, the island’s Internet environment did not look much different from its forward-thinking counterparts in the global South.³ Cubans working in medicine and various academic research fields had slow but operative Internet connections at their workplaces, where they could access online research and communicate with colleagues in other parts of the world.⁴ Over the past decade, however, as the Internet has become a keystone component of global communications, trade, governance, and financial systems, Cuba has slipped to the back ranks.

Rationing Internet Access
It seems counterintuitive for a country that prides itself on its achievements in medicine and education to shy away from information and communications technology (ICT) development, but there is a clear trade-off between this type of development and the particular balance of political power and social control that the Cuban government has maintained for over 50 years.
In theory, Cuba’s commitment to egalitarianism would require the state to provide Internet access to all Cubans. Yet such a goal remains far out of reach. Cuba currently lacks the technical infrastructure and financial means to make telecommunications hardware and connectivity available to all Cubans. Until recently, U.S. law and trade regulations made it prohibitively expensive for Cuba to develop its telecommunications infrastructure in keeping with modern standards. In effect, the government “rations” the Internet to those who are deemed to need it most: individuals in research and other high-level professional sectors, which are almost exclusively state-operated.⁶ Internet cafés and hotels offer Internet use at exceedingly high prices for all others seeking access, though there is a substantial underground market for access cards that can be used at these venues.
Of course, the financial and infrastructural barriers to technological development on the island form only part of the picture.
Cuban authorities have openly raised concerns about the sociopolitical implications of the Internet and social media. They have declared that the government must protect Cubans from “damaging” and “imperialistic” content on the Web, which is often described as a “media weapon” of the United States.⁷ “We are facing the most powerful weapon that’s ever existed,” Fidel Castro said in a 2010 interview with the Mexico City-based daily newspaper La Jornada.⁸
More recently, the political rhetoric has sharpened to suggest Cuba is now vulnerable to “cyber warfare,” as authorities perceive the Internet to be a new theater of conflict in the half-century-long ideological battle with the United States.

The Island Under Cyber-Siege?
Indeed, there is some justification for the regime’s fear that communications technology has been deployed as a weapon to undermine the Cuban government. Since the 1980s, U.S. government agencies have lent support to Cuban groups promoting human rights, advocating for prisoners of conscience and pushing for democratic reforms. Rather than seeking to simply topple the government, as it did in earlier decades, U.S. policy toward Cuba began to focus on changing minds and altering the behavior of Cuban civil society.
Washington’s long history of attempting to influence Cuban politics in the pre-Internet era involved support for opposition media and the cultivation of dissidents. Such efforts were often successfully countered by Havana. Radio Martí and TV Martí, the U.S. government-funded news services broadcast out of Miami aimed at Havana (akin to Radio Free Europe), provide an example. While these services are consumed by many Cubans in Miami, few Cubans on the island have access to them, thanks to signal blocking by the Cuban government.
The Internet presented a new and different challenge. As the influence of social media became obvious in other areas of the world, such as during Iran’s 2009 Green Movement (informally dubbed the “Twitter revolution” by Western media) and the Arab uprisings in 2011, Cuban authorities, like authoritarian governments elsewhere, felt threatened by the emerging use of technology as an avenue for citizen empowerment and social change that could not be easily controlled.

And then there are the bloggers
The rise of a small but vociferous blogger community on the island brought those anxieties close to home. Despite the technical, economic and political barriers to Internet use in Cuba over the past 10 years, the Cuban blogosphere has become a diverse, unique and highly politicized space for online discussion. From Internet access to prisoners’ rights and same-sex marriage to hip-hop culture, the topics and perspectives in this space vary widely.
Perhaps the best-known example is the internationally recognized Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, who has described the range of voices and opinions in the blogosphere as having created a “virtual” public sphere—one that does not quite exist in physical public space in Cuba. Pointing to the various institutional and unwritten restrictions on free speech and association in Cuba, she described bloggers as “learning to be citizens in cyberspace.”⁹ The questions of citizenship and participatory democracy that she raises remain central to ongoing debates about the evolving relationship between the two countries, and the role of technology within it.
There is no question that both the Cuban and U.S. governments saw the emergence of Cuba’s blogging community as a telling sign of social currents that could take hold on the island if Internet access were to increase. Where Cuban officials may have seen a disturbing trend of anti-government speech in the blogging circles of figures like Sánchez, the U.S. saw an opportunity to support systemic change through a seemingly organic, pre-existing channel.
The experiences of Cuba’s bloggers speak volumes about both U.S. government priorities in Cuba and Cuban government priorities for the Internet and civil society at large.
Once largely absent from the media spotlight, these dissenting young men and women were suddenly being depicted as traitors and “mercenaries” of the U.S. government, regardless of whether or not they were receiving support from the United States. At the same time, Western media organizations began to pay attention to the Cuban blogosphere, occasionally featuring and typically applauding the work of some of the island’s more outspoken anti-government bloggers.

Tech Development: “Democracy Promotion” or the New Subversion?
Since at least 2012, the U.S. government has devoted substantial amounts of money to technology-based projects under the mantle of human rights and democracy promotion. While such projects have a unique and largely covert character in Cuba, they do occasionally end up in the public eye.
One especially searing example came last spring, when we learned of ZunZuneo, the USAID-funded project that sought to develop a Twitter-like phone-based communication network for basic feature phones (non-smartphones) with the intention of “promot[ing] human rights and universal freedoms.”¹⁰ Now popularly known as “Cuban Twitter,” ZunZuneo was conceived, deployed and promoted clandestinely by U.S. government workers and subcontractors. The story was made public thanks to the investigative work of the Associated Press, which also found that platform operators had been surveilling the content of subscriber messages, along with demographic information about its users, including gender, age and “political tendencies.”¹¹ The project was in clear violation of Cuban laws that prohibit U.S. government agencies from working on the island. But more importantly, the platform’s surveillance component violated the privacy rights of its Cuban users.
It is hard to believe that the concept of ZunZuneo was not inspired and informed, at least in part, by social movements in the Middle East, Turkey, Brazil and beyond. It is equally difficult to imagine that the Cuban government, known for its surveillance capabilities, has not interpreted these developments as thinly veiled attempts at subversion.
No case better illustrates this point than that of Alan Gross, the USAID subcontractor released in December 2014 after spending five years in a Cuban prison. Gross’ conviction and imprisonment took the tenuous state of the two countries’ relationship—and the role of technology within it—to a new level. When he first traveled to the island in 2008, Gross was not carrying food or medicine or school supplies—he was carrying satellite-based hotspot hardware and end-user equipment like computers and mobile phones.
The international aid worker, now 65 years old, brought these goods into the country without a permit and traveled to Cuba under a U.S. government agency grant, both of which are prohibited by Cuban law. Gross was convicted of “violating the integrity of the Cuban state”—in other words, attempted subversion—because he was trying to set up a digital communications system for ordinary Cubans.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton firmly denied that Gross’ work had anything to do with “subversion,” arguing that his intent was to help regular citizens get online. While this was a perfectly legitimate goal in and of itself, Gross’ actions and the intentions of his employers—namely, the U.S. government—cannot be extricated from the historical and political context in which they occurred.
Inevitably, any U.S. government move to widen technology access for Cuban citizens is complicated by the official U.S. efforts to overthrow the regime. Gross was tried and convicted in a Cuban court, and this gave the Cuban authorities the opportunity to prove their point, even if it largely fell on deaf ears. The amount of planning and funding that went into projects like ZunZuneo and the work of people like Alan Gross suggest that they were not isolated, but rather part of a broader political strategy to influence Cuban politics through information and communications technologies.
While these particular projects were based on newer forms of communication technology, they stem from a critical assumption about the power of communication to influence and instigate civic action. U.S. efforts to undermine the Cuban regime through technological tools are inevitably counter-productive. They add fuel to the ideological fire and can put program workers (like Gross) and recipients of aid at risk of political and legal repercussions.

A glance ahead

Cuba may continue to view the Internet as a highly contested political space, but greater cooperation with Washington could perhaps persuade it to exercise authority over this space in a different way. If the economic benefit of increased connectivity is great enough, Cuba may increase Internet access. Recent murmurings from the Ministry of Information and Communications suggest that while access may become more affordable, it won’t come without a price—it appears likely that surveillance and information control will be part of the package.¹²
It makes sense, therefore, to consider a shift in Washington’s approach to the use of technology in Cuba—if there’s a genuine willingness to pursue the promise of a new, open relationship in good faith.
This would mean not only talking openly with Cuban officials about partnering to build and improve technical infrastructure on the island, but also about working toward dismantling tech-focused programs carried out by U.S. government agencies. If the economic barriers to increasing connectivity do in fact dissolve on the U.S. side, the onus will be on the Cuban government to remove the barriers blocking its citizens’ access to technology.
Sánchez’ idea that Cubans can “learn” to be citizens in cyberspace underlines the potential. The Cuban blogosphere faces some hard questions: In what ways can a virtual space serve the interests of a citizen or community, and in what ways might it fail to do so? What is the value of a virtual public sphere if there is no physical public sphere to which that virtual space corresponds?
These questions should not only be brought before Cuban officials, but also put to U.S. policymakers and technology companies seeking to engage with Cuba on telecommunications. Ultimately, the rights and interests of the Cuban public must be the central drivers of technology policy on the island in the years to come.

https://www.americasquarterly.org 


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