One of the crude reasons traditionally wielded by the totalitarians in power in Cuba and their spokespeople to society to prevent Cubans from navigating the Internet, was that they could not offer this service to everyone because of the American embargo, which prevented our connecting to one of their submarine fiber optic cables that pass near our coastline. This forced us to “plug in” to the net by way of satellite which is more expensive and slower. But now?
I remember it was in early February 2011 when the cable from Venezuela arrived in Cuba, that would increase by 3000 times the connectivity capabilities in our country. Since then, Chavez twice said the cable was ready and created the effective and multiplied possibility that all Cubans could surf the net; and he also with this maneuver put the ball in the transgressive Cuban court.
Now the authorities cook up pretexts and talk about “regulating access” in order – as is sadly common – to again tarnish the rights of Cubans. They also argue that we must avoid the hackers, the password thieves, terrorist sites, satanic cults, pornographers, etc. It all comes down to a simple formula that identifies their acts towards Cuban society: that they have the dark right to violate our rights with impunity.
I want to think that now there exists the real capacity for all of Cuban society to have the ability to access the Internet – not only a minority group of family members and privileged – that they will not delay one more minute in recognizing this right and allowing us to exercise it. That there will not be a single Cuban tired of having his rights trampled who will put his life at risk with a hunger strike to demand the possible, just and necessary access that already exists in the mega-web.
This coming February 2013 it will be two years since the coming of the fiber-optic electronic rope to our country. Are they waiting for this date to celebrate its birthday? I hope by then – I am a dreamer – we are all interconnected and we go online to schedule for ourselves a virtual fiesta in which we all join together in the great national chorus and sing “Happy Birthday” to the cable.
October 5 2012
