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Monday, January 28, 2008

Notes on the Cuban Internet

I was poking around O'Reilly's Radar blog, and found the following post: O'Reilly Books and the Cuban Internet. It's about the role that O'Reilly books had in the early development of Cuban Internets. Naturally, it mentions the current state of the Internet in Cuba (short version: heavily censored). I decided to chime in with what was supposed to be a short reply, but turned into a slightly longer blurb than I'd intended. It seemed like the sort of thing that people who know me might be interested in, so I thought I'd re-post it here. Enjoy!




I was actually in Cuba a year ago for the medical track of an IT conference, and while there I tried to learn as much as I could about the state of the Cuban Internet experience.


First, a caveat: I had the opportunity to meet many tech-savvy Cubans from many different sectors of Cuban society, all of whom were friendly and knowledgeable, and none of whom *seemed* to be pulling any wool over my eyes.... however, in Cuba, as an outsider, it is very difficult to know what's true and what isn't. Conversations between locals and foreigners are generally assumed to be under surveillance, and the locals know it and tend to choose their words carefully. There wasn't any reason for anybody to be BSing me- it's not like we were directly talking politics, or anything like that- and people were generally quite open about certain negative aspects to Internet use in Cuba... but I certainly take what I learned with a very large grain of salt, and suggest that you do the same.


From what I was able to find out, one's ability to use the Internet depends heavily on one's position in Cuban society. The nicer tourist hotels in Havana have (very, very expensive) Internet facilities for their guests to use, but I never saw any actual Cubans using them- not sure if that's because of the price, or because most Cubans aren't really allowed in the tourist hotels in downtown Havana.


Everybody I talked to was quite open about the impossibility of average Cubans having computers and Internet access in their homes-- I don't know one way or the other if that impossibility is "de jure" or "de facto", but either way, most people have no legitimate way to get online and this was common knowledge among Cuban digerati. Nearly everybody attributed this impossibility to "El Bloquero" (the Embargo). This is not surprising: in Cuba, *everything* is blamed on the embargo... and, to be completely fair, the embargo does indeed affect Cuban society in many ways (some obvious, some not). Without getting into what is an enormously complex subject, I'll just say that it seems plausible to me that some the limits on Cuban Internet access might indeed be caused by the embargo; however, that simply can't be the whole story. It suits two goals of the regime to limit the Internet's penetration in Cuban society: first it allows them to control the potentially disruptive effects of the Internet; second, it gives the government one more thing to blame on the embargo.


However, many of the doctors and medical researchers I talked to reported having at least some dial-up Internet access in their homes and offices, theoretically for professional use- Cuba has done some really impressive things in terms of using computer networks for medical communication and training, and the dedication on the part of the (ludicrously underpaid and undersupplied) doctors towards their patients was impressive. Being a doctor in Cuba really isn't a 9-to-5 at all, and having access to the national medical intranet (called Infomed) from home is crucial. People being people, however, it is almost a guaranteed thing that many Cubans with legitimate Internet access in their homes are finding ways to share that access with their neighbors in some fashion.


Another way that the Cubans I met were using the Internet was via their schools. Medical students have Internet access through their universities, but only (from what I was told) via public computer labs. I was able to meet on several occasions with students from the local university's IT/CS departments. They all reported having unfettered internet access, though they said it was slow and flaky at times. They all had gmail accounts, and I saw them using various instant messaging clients just as obsessively as college students here in the US do- I don't think they were "Potemkin Email Accounts". Most of them used Linux in some form or another, and reported being able to access message boards without issue. I asked specifically about news sources such as the BBC-- from the conference center and from various hotels, I had been able to access it without issue. The students I talked to reported being able to access it without restriction from their school labs, but who knows if that was really the case or not- furthermore, even if it was the case, who knows what sort of logging or monitoring was being carried out by their schools!


Incidentally, I got the distinct impression that Cuban Internet users I talked to were well aware of the fact that their online activities were almost certainly being monitored and logged, at least to some extent. Nobody came out and said it, but after a week or two in Cuba I began to be able to pick up on certain hints and cues- the Cuban people are far from stupid, and know perfectly well when they're being watched in real life... it's hard to explain, but they seemed to know the score regarding their online activities. Alternatively, I could have imagined all of it- after a little while, I began to absorb some of the the paranoia that comes naturally from being in what is fundamentally a police state. A very warm and welcoming police state, with many wonderful people and many fine attributes- but a police state nonetheless. One of my traveling companions grew up in an Eastern Bloc country in the 1940s and 1950s, and said that in many ways being in Cuba felt like "being back home," so to speak, and that, in some ways, the Cubans we met had many of the same mannerisms that he remembered from his youth- always looking over their shoulder, being aware of who was around them while they were talking, etc.


I talked to several people involved in the design and operation of Infomed, and according to what they told me, there is plenty of network bandwidth *within* Cuba. There is, however, a severe bottleneck on traffic *leaving* Cuba- partially due to the sketchy nature of their connection (a couple of fiber lines to Venezuela, according to one engineer I talked to) and, presumably, partially due to whatever traffic monitoring system the Cuban government has put in place. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the Cuban telecom authorities were using some sort of traffic shaping to prioritize tourism-related network traffic (e.g., from hotels and resorts) over Cuban traffic.


Interestingly, several engineers told me that one problem facing Cuban Internet access was that the American government was actively trying to interfere with their traffic, and that every couple of months the telecom engineers who maintained the external connection had to make some sort of routing change to get around whatever blocks the Americans had put in place. I have *absolutely* no way of knowing if this is true or not- I wouldn't be surprised either way. On the one hand, it sounds pretty far-fetched, and as near as I can tell Cuba's national pastime is to find a way to blame everything, up to and including the weather, on the embargo. On the other hand, that's *exactly* the sort of crazy and time-wasting stunt that our government would try and pull. The history of US-Cuban relations is littered with dozens of crazier and further-fetched attempts by both governments to get on each other's nerves, so who knows?


In spite of the embargo, I saw a fair amount of American tech being used- Cisco routers, HP servers, a couple of Epson scanners, and so on. According to one person I talked to, there are various Latin American resellers who sell Cuba American electronics at a significant markup. I also saw several Chinese telecom companies exhibiting their wares- apparently, much of the Cuban telecom infrastructure is built on Chinese equipment. Interestingly, I saw a surprising number of Apple machines in use, mostly by the team developing Cuba's homebrew radiology imaging system. I hadn't been expecting to see *any* Macs besides my own, so seeing five or six set up demoing a PACS application was a pleasant surprise.


Wow, this really ended up being a lot longer than I'd intended it to be. There's all kinds of stuff that I'm probably leaving out, so shoot me an email if you want to hear more. Basically, the bottom line is that Internet use in Cuba is growing, but in a very controlled and directed fashion. At some point, the floodgates will *have* to open, just as they have everywhere else in the world, and I think the government knows it... but they're delaying for as long as possible. Their reasons presumably have less to do with keeping Cubans from getting information from the outside world- there is plenty of foreign media available in Cuba, especially to people who are connected in some way to the tourism industry (which is an awful lot of people these days...). I suspect that the government's reasons for not wanting the general population to have Internet access have more to do with restricting the sorts of communications Cubans can have with one another- I don't imagine that they'd want Cubans to be able to set up Google Groups to complain about the government, or for underground groups to be able to communicate securely. To my mind, this is probably why they have restricted Internet access to individuals with at least some stake in the status quo.


However, I think the history of the Internet has taught us that betting against the free flow of information is generally a losing bet. People have a way of getting around whatever barriers are put in their way when it comes to accessing and using the Internet, and the sooner governments everywhere learn this and adapt accordingly, the happier we'll all be.

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