Salons or Not, Cyberspace Is Still a Distant Place for Most Cubans

Salons or Not, Cyberspace Is Still a Distant Place for Most Cubans
By VICTORIA BURNETT
Published: July 9, 2013

HAVANA — By the standards of many Cubans, Lazaro Noa García is an adept
internaut. He e-mails his daughter in Mexico a couple of times a week at
a cybersalon in an upscale suburb, and checks soccer scores and news on
Yahoo.

Until last month, though, the closest Mr. García, 59, had been to
cyberspace was the painfully slow e-mail service at his local post
office. Then on June 4, Etecsa, the state telecom company, opened 118
Internet salons around the island, expanding public Web access — by a
fraction, at least — in what is regarded as the least wired country in
the Western Hemisphere. Mr. García, a retired military officer,
immediately signed up.

"This is like a Three Kings' Day gift," Mr. García said of his newfound
Internet access, referring to the Jan. 6 holiday when people dressed as
the Magi hand out goodies to children.

But as gifts go, it is extremely expensive, he said. At $4.50 an hour, a
session at one of the new cybersalons costs almost as much as the
average state worker earns in a week, prompting many Cubans to wonder
whether President Raúl Castro is serious about bringing the Internet to
the masses, or just playing for time.

"At this price, hardly anyone is going to be using it," said Mr. García,
who figured he could afford to buy an hour or two a week because his
daughter helped him out and he had just sold his house.

Cuba's limited Internet access is a source of festering resentment among
Cubans, millions of whom have never been online. Some people — medics,
for example, or journalists — qualify for a dial-up connection at home.
Others use pirated connections, rent time on a neighbor's line or log on
at a hotel, where they pay about $8 an hour. Many trade information on
memory sticks or rely on stodgy state-run periodicals for news.

"We are living in the back of a cave," said Walfrido López, a Cuban
blogger and information technology specialist. "People here are asleep,
because they don't have information."

He added, "Having information is what enables you to make decisions,
take positions."

Government figures indicate 26 percent of Cubans had Internet access
last year, but this includes millions who entered only an intranet
linked to their work. The International Telecommunication Union, a
United Nations agency for information and communications technology,
puts the number of broadband subscriptions in Cuba at 0.04 per 100
inhabitants, or about one in 2,500. That is lower than in Haiti and
Sudan, two places that are not considered the least bit tech-friendly.

Even Cuba's new cybersalons, which operate under the brand name Nauta,
amount to just one for every 95,000 Cubans.

The new service is "a gesture of openness within a context of the
ability to have monopoly control," said Ted Henken, a professor at City
University of New York who closely follows the Cuban blogosphere, noting
that Etecsa requires users to sign a contract warning that they will be
monitored for subversive activity. Still, he added, the government has
"created a conversation around access that didn't exist before."

Harold Cárdenas Lema, 27, a blogger and philosophy teacher at the
University of Matanzas, said the cybersalons represented a
"transcendental" shift because they put a relatively fast, fairly
uncensored Internet service at the disposal of individuals.

However, the government risks a deep digital divide if it does not cut
prices in line with most Cubans' salaries, Mr. Cárdenas said. And
despite an official pledge to prioritize "social" use of the Internet,
he and others using university or hospital connections complained they
were as slow as ever.

Wilfredo González Vidál, vice minister of communications, in an
interview with the official news media in May, assured that "the market
will not regulate access to knowledge in our country." But Rogelio
Moreno Díaz responded in his acerbic blog, Bubusópia, that this was "the
final insult to the public's intelligence."

To be sure, prices seem to be containing demand: The lines to use the
hushed salons at some Etecsa offices in the capital were far shorter
than those for adding money to prepaid cellphones and paying landline
bills. At each office — air-conditioned rooms with banks of three to
eight computers — some screens sat idle.

At one office, Carlos Antonio, 25, a physiotherapist who would not give
his surname, helped his uncle navigate the browser next to his, while he
sent a message for his girlfriend in Miami, which he had written
beforehand on a neighbor's computer to save connection time. Next to
them, Leonel Correa, a slight man in his 20s with a thick gold chain who
runs a small 3-D movie business, was connecting with friends in Spain on
Facebook.

Then there was the rest of Cuba. Ana Maria Hernández, a retired nurse
who was waiting to pay her landline bill in downtown Havana last week,
smiled weakly when asked if she might use the new service.

"For me, Internet doesn't exist," said Ms. Hernández, 51. "I've never
seen it. I don't really know what it does."

On her pension of $11 a month, she said, she can barely afford her phone
bill, which was 80 cents in June.

"So where would I get $4.50?" she asked.

The Cuban government pins some blame for Cuba's technological isolation
on the United States embargo. In 2009, President Obama loosened
restrictions to allow American telecom providers to enter agreements
with Cuban providers, but so far none have.

Some Cubans and experts, however, blame a combination of government
paranoia, inefficiency and incompetence.

Two years ago, the government announced the arrival of a $70 million
underwater fiber-optic cable from Venezuela, ALBA-1, that they said
would speed up connections by a factor of 3,000.

But then officials fell silent and the fate of the cable became an
object of dark speculation.Was the government unnerved by the Arab
Spring? Was the project bogged down by corruption? That ended in
January, when Renesys, an Internet measurement company based in
Manchester, N.H., detected that it had sprung to life.

Now, the government has shown signs that it may be bowing to the
inevitability of the digital age.

Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, first vice president of the Council of State
and the man expected to succeed Mr. Castro, told a teachers' seminar in
May that prohibiting information in a world of technology and social
networks was "an impossible fantasy."

"Today, news from all sides, good and bad, manipulated and true, or
half-true, circulates on networks, reaches people — people hear it," he
said, according to accounts in official media. "The worst thing, then,
is silence."

Etecsa officials have said the company aims to offer broadband access to
people's homes and cellphones by the end of next year and will gradually
reduce the price of connectivity.

That is not soon enough for some.

"They talk of late 2014 as if it were an instant away," said Mr. López,
who has Internet access at work but not at home. Speaking of the goal of
broadband by late next year, he added, "That's another year and a
quarter of my life." If the government has the technology to open
Internet salons, he said, it would take little to turn them into Wi-Fi
hot spots.

Some experts, meanwhile, say that building a fiber-optic network would
be slow and expensive, and may make little sense given alternatives like
the mobile Internet.

"It would be way easier to put up a couple of towers and establish a 4G
network," said Doug Madory, a senior analyst at Renesys who first
blogged about activity on the ALBA-1 line. "There are countries in
Africa that have jumped into the 21st century" using mobile technology,
he said.

But the government may not be ready to jump that far, Professor Henken said.

In the end, it may not be up to the government whether Cubans get the
Internet access they crave, Mr. Cárdenas said. He pointed to initiatives
to bring the Internet to remote places using special satellites or even
balloons, and the fact that Cuba is only 90 miles from the mainland
United States.

"Internet is coming, it's just a question of when and how," he added.
"Either the state will bring it, or someone else will."

Source: "Salons or Not, Cyberspace Is Still a Distant Place for Most
Cubans - NYTimes.com" -
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/americas/salons-or-not-cyberspace-is-still-a-distant-place-for-most-cubans.html?_r=0