How does Cuba surf the net?

One of the Ortega government’s constitutional changes that sparked the most controversy, suspicion and fear referred to giving the Army “control” of telecommunications. Although big capital negotiated less abrasive and explicit language, both the new Constitution and the Military Code, also reformed by Ortega, now put the protection” of telecommunications in the Army’s hands arguing reasons of “national security and defense.” In the debate, businesspeople, analysts and youths in the social networks often mentioned the precarious situation of Cuba’s telecommunications and the Cuban government’s political-ideological control over them. While the contexts are very different in the two countries, is an involution anything like Cuba’s possible in Nicaragua? To enrich the reflection, we offer this description of the strict digital blockade suffered by Cuban society. How can one access Internet in Cuba and who is able to do so?

Isbel Díaz Torres

Cuban citizens’ very limited access to today’s information technologies is a result of the complex interactions of a society going through a peculiar inflection point. The Cuban government, with its well-known top-down, statist, authoritarian design, is now seeking insertion into a deregulated global system in the hands of the market, but it doesn’t know how to do that without letting go of the reins.

Starting with an impoverished, obsolete system

Cuba has had Internet since 1996 via a satellite link, but with a band width that permitted it barely 393 megabytes per second for downloading and 209 for uploading. Cuba also has the lowest connectivity rates in the hemisphere. According to official statistics, 1.6 million users accessed the Internet in 2009, but that figure includes a large majority without full access, i.e. people who use limited email service, sometimes even without international paths, or the slow, out-of-date national Internet (called Intranet) with its very limited resources. It even includes people may even use a computer with one of those services as infrequently as once a year. The bulk of the connections made that year was through modems and telephones. Broadband was even more restricted.

Specialists interviewed by BBC Mundo’s Havana correspondent referred to technological difficulties related to the island’s networks and internal systems, which were beginning to crash. This suggests that the Cuban equipment is so obsolete there aren’t even spare parts for it, resulting in a reduction of its capacity. Some specialists felt that the breaks were so serious that the only solution would be to totally modernize the internal infrastructure, involving an enormous investment of time and money, plus new annoyances for users.

The system’s impoverished state had been known for some years. In a scientific workshop held in the Juan Marinello Center in late 2008, an official from the Information Technology and Communications Ministry said “we don’t have the infrastructure for [Internet].” In the same workshop, however, Carlos Oporto, from the Office for Computerization, declared that Cuba already had fiber optics and that the entities in charge had presumably prepared the necessary infrastructure over the years.

Because Internet is an indispensable element for insertion into the globalized world, the island’s government has done a lot of work to set up massive real access to it. After many delays, it now has an undersea double fiber optic cable (ALBA-1) from Venezuela.

Waiting for ALBA-1

In January 2012, the official press reported that this project was underway and would multiply the transmission speed of data, images and voice to the island by a factor of 3,000. It was forecasted to start up in July of that same year.

Boris Moreno Cordovés, a deputy information technology and communications minister, later declared that the service would begin in September or October, but its activation date was set back again and again. While the media offered no explanation to the nation’s expectant public, that’s nothing new to Cubans, accustomed to a press that typically just reproduces state reports without digging into reasons or questioning authorities. It was later learned that the ALBA-1 cable had been laid on the seabed in January-February 2011, and had gone on line late that same year, but was limited to communications between Cuba and Venezuela.

For years Cuba’s leadership has blamed the island’s technological limitations on the US blockade, but once ALBA-1 was installed, the only explanations left for the continuing limitations were internal problems. After it finally arrived we went through an excessively long “test period,” characterized by silence from the Communications Ministry and worsening connectivity, a situation that has yet to be completely put behind us. In that stage everything to do with the Internet was top secret, although there were rumors of new investments, of course with no details.

The blockade and outside
limitations are very real

Prior to the agreement with Venezuela, the US blockade forced Cuba to use satellite linkage, which is slower and costs more than a physical connection. According to Granma, the official Communist Party newspaper, ”The blockade prevents Cuba from connecting to nearly a dozen of the international links that surround us. For example, one of these cables (Cancún-Miami) passes only 32 kilometers from Havana’s Malecón.” It must be admitted, however, that the US-Cuban owned TeleCuba company proposed laying a cable from Key West to the island, which would only be 175 kilometers long and thus much shorter and cheaper than ALBA-1, which was installed later and runs 1,602 kilometers from Camurí, Venezuela, to Siboney, Cuba, at a cost of more than US$70 million. The Cuban government didn’t even respond to the offer.

The extraterritorial nature of US laws—not only the endless blockade but also later the Helms-Burton law—has had negative impacts not only on the cost and speed of the island’s connectivity to Internet but also to access itself. The main stockholder of the Americas Region Caribbean Optical-ring System (ARCOS-1) fiber optic cable, the one referred to by Granma, is the US company New World Network Ltd, allowing the US government to give itself the right to prevent Cuba connecting to it. Cuba is also prohibited from acquiring technologies from US companies or their delegations, subsidiaries or franchises, which means having to acquire them through third countries, which of course adds costs to the transactions.

According to an article by Gustavo de la Torre Morales on the Rebelión website, Cuba has even been blocked from the Global Distribution System (GDS), which provides information services linked to tourism, such as AMADEUS. He adds that Cuba’s access is blocked to over 60% of the software produced in the world because it uses US technology.

Although much of the software he mentioned, such as Adobe or Symantec, is in fact used in Cuba today, it can’t be updated directly from the Web. Other services, such as Skype, are unknown to the majority of Cubans, although specialized users have managed to access it by masking their Internet Protocol (IP) with some virtual private network such as CyberGhost.

Google services, such as Google Earth, Google Analytics and others, are also unavailable through connections from national Cuban IPs, rendering it impossible for the island to exploit them to the full and thus participate in electronic commerce.

The US government has benefited from Cuba’s situation, allocating millions of dollars to introduce contraband satellite communication equipment for individuals or groups supporting its destabilization policies. Alan Gross, a US citizen, is still serving a 15-year prison sentence on the island for that offense.

The ALBA cable didn’t
bring what people hoped for

In January 2012, only after Renesys, a US Internet intelligence company that specializes in and monitors network traffic, detected a change in the Internet traffic patterns on the island, it was learned via foreign newspapers that Cuba had given Telefónica, a Spanish company, permission to direct Internet traffic to the Cuban state telephone company (ETECSA), which monopolizes ommunications on the island. Two days after that, the government declared that ALBA-1 was up and running. Without specifying what sectors of society would benefit from the cable, it denied that “it would automatically multiply the possibilities of access” to the network.

According to José Ignacio Quintero, chief troubleshooter for Telecomunicaciones Gran Caribe, a mixed Cuban-Venezuelan company in charge of implementing the undersea cable project, ALBA-1 has a capacity for some 80 million simultaneous telephone calls and part of that broadband will be at the service of Internet. It has a 640 gigabyte capacity for links abroad.

Neither Granma nor the rest of the official press provided any information related to the Internet during the rest of 2012. According to the blog of Yohandry Fontana, who works with State Security, Deputy Minister Moreno emphasized that Cuba’s responsible position in this context of financial limitations, blockade and aggression, was to “continue improving access in areas necessary for the country’s development.”

Carlos Oporto had already made clear that the Cuban strategy was related to “orderly, intensive social use of the media and connectivity.” Granma made it equally clear: ”The undersea cable will provide better quality info-communications, but will not necessarily mean an extension of them. The socialization of the service will depend more on seeking efficiency than on expanding the net.”

Moreno Cordovés commented that “the political will exists to expand the Internet services only insofar as the economic resources permit the development of the infrastructure it needs, since massive access to Internet requires significant progressive investments depending on the number of users to be served. Access will be offered to individuals in their homes as capabilities permit.”

Contradicting Waldo Reboredo, vice president of Telecomunicaciones Gran Caribe, who declared that the cable “will lower current operating costs by 25%,” Moreno Cordovés told Parliament in 2012 that “the investment won’t mean a reduction in the costs Cuba pays for access to Internet.”

The cable is functioning, but the users still face the same precarious technology. Blogger Roberto González of La Joven Cuba (Young Cuba) told BBC Mundo that “before, Cuba was connected via satellite and I knew why it was so slow, but six months after we connected to an undersea cable, the connection is still the same.”

In May 2013, ETECSA began to receive international service through Cable & Wireless Jamaica. According to Renesys, the undersea cable that connects both islands had been activated, providing greater band width.

The options are slightly expanded

In June of last year, new connection offers started appearing around the country. ETECSA opened 118 new public Internet access points or surfing rooms, with a connection speed of a minimum of 512 kilobits and up to 2 megabits, which was a significant change given that up to then the island was functioning with a maximum of 56 kilobits. The connection price is 4.50 Convertible Cuban Pesos (CUC), a little over US$5 per hour, in a country in which the average monthly salary is under 20 CUC.

“We’re aware that the initial rate for this service is high,” admitted Wilfredo González Vidal, another deputy communications minister, assuring that it is expected to drop “as ETECSA becomes able to start recovering the investments made.” He also announced that the number of access points would “gradually” increase. In a note published in Granma, he said that ”the only limitations are technological and financial,” adding that “the undersea fiber optic cable is now providing both voice traffic and data services” and “the plan is that Cubans will be able to have connection in their homes.”

However, Jorge Luis Legrá, ETECSA’s strategic programs director, reported on national television that “voice traffic is
not permitted” for the collective Internet access points. He said this decision was made “in compliance with the Information Technology and Communications Ministry’s resolution 120 of 2003" and warned that “browsing will be free with respect to downloading and uploading files, chat services and other network protocols such as the FTP [File Transfer Protocol] as long as they don’t violate the use conditions.” Access to wireless services such as WiFi and mobile connection weren’t incorporated but it was rumored that they would begin to function as of this January.

Expensive services and
precarious infrastructure

Although hotels and tourist centers for foreigners already had access points, the fact that only 118 surfing rooms were created with a total of 334 computers on the whole island indicated a serious precariousness. Telefónica later opened more points in various provinces for a total of 133, according to information provided directly by an ETECSA executive.

These connections still don’t allow for truly efficient performance given how slow the computers are. And the connection itself is slower than the more expensive WiFi connection in some important hotels. Gmail, for example, must be checked in the HTML version, since it otherwise takes too long to download.

The hotels in the capital with WiFi connection charge exorbitant rates. The cheapest is about US$9 for an hour of rapid connection. The experience is much better in those points, however, where it is even possible to see short videos, although in a very choppy presentation, which is almost impossible on Cuban Internet.

Despite everything, insufficiency
and slowness still reign

In 2011, while Cubans were waiting for the Venezuelan fiber optic cable to go on line, Jorge Luis Perdomo, another deputy communications minister, assured the public that “the government very much wants to develop the telecommunications sector in favor of the country’s social and economic development, including institutions, the population and all actors of society.”

Despite the government’s stated intention to socialize Internet access, as far as the island’s inhabitants are concerned the services provided in the State’s educational, recreational, health, research and cultural centers as well as its professional associations are insufficient and slow.

Acording to official statistis, 1,351 domains are now registered with .cu and the 600 Youth Computer Clubs, a sort of state cybercafe, have more than 724,000 computers. Of the estimated 1.7 million Internet users, the 454,000 with full browsing capacity are in most cases conditioned by strong regulations that prohibit personalized and creative use of the available media. It goes without saying that Cuba’s official statistics aren’t exactly diaphanous, so any researcher must use them with caution.

Doth the government
protest too much?

While Deputy Communications Minister Perdomo assured the press that there is no political obstacle that could detain the process” of socializing Internet access, blogger and Observatorio Crítico network activist Yasmín S. Portales sees connection access in the state institutions as related to the user’s “professional/educational/political affiliation” as well as “the criteria of those centers’ directors about their terminals’ social objective.” With these conditions, she comments, “those who have access will be alienated from browsing freedom a priori, limited by the network administrators’ criterion of political/moral correctness and even without the nominal right to choose the best in the mythical free market. “As a result,” notes Portales, who is also a contributor to the Havana Times website, “the commitment to the citizenry’s free and horizontal participation in the social debate via digital resources is going down the tube.”

Generally speaking, the information technology security regulations are applied discretionally, varying from ministry to ministry. Not even the censorship patterns that violate the rights and privacy of these services’ users are uniform.

One source who wished not to be identified assured Havana Times that the Youth Computer Club he belongs to in an eastern province offers very limited connection time and no possibility of accessing Facebook. But if the user declares that his/her purpose in going into a web site, including Facebook, is to “speak well of the Revolution and the five heroes” (five Cuban agents accused of being spies who are in prison in the United States), he/she is granted unlimited time.

At the outset, the cultural institutions seemed to be the ones providing a service to a larger number of people, either free of charge or at very low rates. The Cubarte network gives room to a large number of national institutions and creators with diverse methods of payment. Among the functions of several of these institutions is to offer their users browsing services, albeit with the typical limitations.

Another national server with broad reach is Infomed, used free by health professionals. But since they can’t access a large part of the information published on Internet, the exercise isn’t very useful in practice. Among the scarce resources of this digital platform, email is the one most users demand, even given how slow it is: sending a single message can take up to 15 minutes.

As this is often the only possibility for communication between people, the State has made it an instrument of ideological pressure. People involved in political activism have lost their Infomed accounts, often with very dicey administrative arguments. One Observatorio Crítico network activist was actually told: “Your account has been eliminated because you published your email on a housing swaps classified ads web site.” Others have been forced to unsubscribe from distribution lists with political contents after being pressured by the network administrators at their workplaces.

Strict “use conditions”
for Internet surfers

We can find other examples of these ideological limitations in the use conditions various Cuban web sites design for their users. The very recent Cuban public blog platform Reflejos http://cubava.cu/ prohibits “transferring, transmitting or publishing content that is illegal, counterrevolutionary, damaging, threatening, abusive, harassing, harsh, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, phobic, racially and ethically questionable or any other form that invades the privacy of others.” Cubans’ experience has demonstrated that qualifiers such as “counterrevolutionary,” “vulgar,” “obscene,” “defamatory” or “libelous” are usually fronts to encroach upon individuals’ political and civil freedoms and rights.

Web sites critical of Cuba’s political system, such as Cubaencuentro and Cubanet, are blocked from all servers on the island, although that situation has been changing in recent years. Other frankly oppositional sites, such as Diario de Cuba or Café Fuerte, can be opened on the computers, but at the risk of triggering reprisals.

The strategies for applying censorship on the government sites are diverse and at the total discretion of those administrating these spaces. Some government newspaper sites have gradually been opening up to public participation, with various degrees of freedom of expression. Nonetheless, Trabajadores, the newspaper of the Cuban Workers’ Central, prohibits access to the commentary section of its web page via Cuba’s Intranet, opening it up only to those who have connection to Internet.

The new connection points, called Nauta, reproduce the same freedom-limiting mechanisms. It is made explicit in the news services’ “conditions of use” that the authorities will close the account of anyone who uses the networks to implement actions “prejudicial to public security, integrity, the economy, independence and national sovereignty” and “will deny use of the service immediately upon detecting that over the course of the session the user has incurred any violation of the norms of ethical behavior the Cuban State promotes.”

In the surfing rooms Nauta registers the name and ID card of each individual who buys a card to log on. There’s absolutely no privacy when browsing, as a monitor is constantly inspecting the users’ screens.

As can be seen, the technical and financial limitations used by Cuban authorities to explain the under-exploitation of the available technological resources aren’t the only factors in determining full use of the Internet’s potentialities. Political and ideological filters are also a fundamental part of the Cuban design.

Internet in the illegal market

Individuals have attempted to deal with the lack of Internet mainly by procuring access through any means, legal or illegal.

In the past, administrators or even the legal owners of the national servers, all of which are state-owned, have offered email accounts or Internet connections for sale in the black market, obviously at high prices although always far below ETECSA’s recent offers. For example, an account in the ENET servers, which have total access to Internet, could be rented for 2 to 2.5 CUC per hour. An Infomed account was being sold at 15-25 CUC per month. A very limited account, basically email only, with a server at the University of Havana, could cost 10 to 30 CUC a month. It was possible to buy an account “on the side” in any institution with an email server. A variety of offers could also be found on the Revolico.com site, also blocked on the island.

At the same time as putting the fiber optic cable into operation, the Cuban government has worked silently to dismantle this whole network of illegal services, and in fact it has become nearly impossible to rent any of these accounts. Almost all servers now require the connection to be anchored to a fixed telephone number, which means that an account’s legal owner can’t rent it to a third party. The government is thus guaranteeing itself a total monopoly on connectivity on the island.

Two documentaries and a proposal

Some audiovisual products have begun to investigate the national public’s needs and the appeal the Web holds for it. One example is the documentary “Ojos que te miran: Entre redes (Eyes that are looking at you: Between Networks), produced in 2012 by Rigoberto Sanarega.

In the documentary a young computer professor declares that she needs Internet to finish her degree course, but doesn’t have access. Another youth alleges that he has to pay 6 CUC per hour—half of many salaries in Cuba—to access the web and do his thesis. And one Youth Computer Club worker says he’s never been able to access Wikipedia in all the months he has worked there.

The documentary also refers to the fact that the majority of Cubans are unaware of the existence of EcuRed, the national on-line encyclopedia. Most EcuRed users don’t access it from Cuba, which is in 9th, 10th or even 11th place behind Spain, Mexico, Panama, Colombia and other countries, including the United States.

Offline, a documentary by Yaima Pardo that can be found on Havana Times, looks more deeply into Cuban society’s connection problems and limited access to communication and information technologies. It also investigates the negative implications they have for the technological, socioeconomic and cultural development of the nation and its population, while researchers, artists and activists expose some of the reasons behind the institutional censorship and the obscure design the Cuban State has established for individuals to relate to these tools.

Political activists of all stripes have insistently demanded that the government open up public and private access to the Internet. Even with all the restrictions, many have blindly set out to publish, blog and/or twitter to put their ideas into circulation, share testimonies about contemporary Cuban society and lay out their demands.

From the diaspora, Cuban artist Aldo Menéndez has promoted the petition titled Raúl Castro: free access to the Internet for all Cubans! from the Change.org platform and has collected a significant number of digital signatures, most of them from people off the island with access to the web. In December last year he visited Cuba to promote his campaign among the citizens and attract more signatures. The political police picked him up and seized some 500 copies of his civil proposal.

Impossible to predict changes

The population’s expectations have not yet peaked. The few privileged Cubans, with their slow work or study-center Internet connections, are anxiously awaiting a change. Those with still more privileges, who can buy a Nauta card or connect in a hotel, don’t feel secure in terms of privacy.

Will it become possible to contract Internet services at home? Will the connection price in the tourist sites get cheaper? Will velocity improve for all users? It’s impossible to predict.

Cuba has lagged well behind in this arena. It isn’t even possible to develop a serious critique of this technology in Cuba, of the kind produced in a good part of the planet’s think tanks that watch the impact of Internet on the development of social movements in the world. Cuba’s Internet consumption remains an unsatisfied desire, and there is a yearning to expand it, even though life on the island is still more analog than digital.

Isbel Díaz Torres is a contributor to the Havana Times website, www.havanatimes.org

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