Navigating the Internet is Expensive, Slow and Risky for Cubans / Iván García

In the year 2000, in a long, narrow cubicle of the National Capitol, the present seat of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, an Internet service at 5 dollars per hour was authorized. At that time 5 dollars was a little more than half the minimum wage in Cuba. The service was agonizingly slow. Its main use was for email. If you were lucky, you could get some world news.

Sending photos was a real pain. Beginning in 2008, all Cuban citizens could log onto the Internet from Havana hotels for a fee ranging from 6 convertible pesos (CUC), about 8 dollars, to 10 CUC (12 dollars) for one hour of navigation.

The connection is still slow but better than that of the Capitol building. Now, with the arrival in February 2011 of the famous underwater cable linking Cuba with Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, in a bizarre digital entente that people in the street called Alba.net, the speed of data transmission has improved qualitatively.

But it’s nothing to write home about. In an hour you can transfer photos and some small video that does not exceed 40 megabytes. Anyway, before you upload photos and videos, you must compress them on your computer at home because you run the risk of using up your hour of connection time without being able to upload the material.

That is, by paying in hard currency you can get on the information highway. That’s the good news. Let’s look at the bad. Virtually speaking, Cuba is an island split in two. Outside Havana, Cubans are not allowed to connect to the Internet in tourist facilities that have that service.

You have to show your passport. Just ask the troop of hard-working independent journalists from the central and eastern provinces about the difficulties they have in posting their stories and articles. In Santiago de Cuba, you can get into the Hotel Santiago, although at times the hotel security makes it impossible. People who live in Havana are “privileged.”

The other major problem is the high cost, which makes it practically impossible for most reporters and bloggers without an office. Not all independent reporters earn money for their writings in Cuba. And those who do receive between 25 and 100 convertible pesos per month, barely enough to let them survive.

Most connect to the Internet once a week in one of the two places provided in the United States Interests Section (USIS), next to the Havana seawall. A service that not only is offered to dissidents: intellectuals sympathetic to the regime also connect from there. Other dissidents do so in western embassies like the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland or the Czech Republic, which offer two hours a week free.

Connecting to the Internet is the biggest problem with alternative reporting in Cuba. And from what I can see, it’s going to get worse. The picture doesn’t look good.

According to reliable information, a crippled Internet service is being designed, scheduled for commercialization in late 2011. A kind of Intranet, where users can access only local sites and others that the government considers not harmful to its interests. This one would have access to international mail like Yahoo or Gmail.

There is talk that the installation of a DSL line by ETECSA would cost 150 convertible pesos (170 dollars), and the transmission rate would be more than 120 kilobytes, nearly double the current one. The amount would be paid monthly, according to the number of hours. It’s a feasibility study.

We’ll see what the leaders decide. The tide of events in north Africa keeps them on tenterhooks. The Castros recognize the mobilizing force of the Internet and the social networks. And they fear it. It would not be unrealistic to think that when the Internet – or the Intranet – is commercialized on the island, the virtual police will come later, in the style of China. The same or worse.

The other issue of concern, big concern, is an information law that the ideological Talibans have kept in the drawer. If implemented, it would be an appendix to Law 88, the gag law, the same that led to the imprisonment of 75 dissidents in the spring of 2003. It has been leaked that said law will regulate and penalize the use of the Internet. Tools like Facebook or Twitter, or any use that the Castro government does not consider appropriate, could lead to a criminal penalty. Let’s hope they won’t lower the boom.

The fears of the regime and the restrictions, in addition to restricting a handful of civil and political liberties, are dynamiting the future of a generation that also was born in Cuba under the domination of the @.

Some hotels and prices

In the Hotel Saratoga an hour costs 10 CUC (12 dollars). For two hours you pay 15 CUC, more advantageous. You have Wi-Fi for 24 hours. Three PCs offer service from 8 am to 5 pm. If you go with your laptop and a card previously purchased from the hotel, you can connect at any time.

In the Central Park Hotel one hour costs 8 CUC (10 dollars). Five hours cost 35 CU (40 dollars), which comes out to 7 CUC an hour. The connection is between 60 and 80 kilobytes.

The fastest connection is in the Melia Cohiba. The speed can reach 120 kilobytes. One hour costs 10 CUC if you use the terminal in the hotel. If you want Wi-Fi, you have to pay 12 CUC (15 dollars).

In almost all the hotels in Havana the price fluctuates between 8 and 10 CUC per hour for the Internet. The speed has improved. But not enough to upload large files or videos.

In Old Havana there are hotels where cards cost 6 CUC an hour, but the connection is very bad. They also use a software called Avila, which is rumored to be a spyware program that copies your email account or the password for your blog.

Translated by Regina Anavy

May 9 2011

My Grandfather Joseph / Rebeca Monzo

My Grandfather in the dark suit.

He left his native Gijón on an unspecified date, because he never liked to specify this detail. His eyes showed his sadness whenever it was mentioned, because after all these years, the wounds never closed. He could still smell the maternal arms when he boarded the boat that would bring him to America.

When he stepped on Cuban soil, squeezed his eyes shut against the intense flash of sun that blinded him. Soon a gentle sea breeze will plant a smile on his face. He was excited, he told us when he saw the tops of the, trees whose leaves looked like clusters of emeralds, bow before the wind. At that moment he began to love this other mother who welcomed him. He became a man, being practically a kid, bringing messages to the Titan who, according to what he told us, was stationed in neighboring lands back in his now beloved land.

There he met a young girl’s winning smile, a daughter of Spaniards born in Cuba. I came in the belly of my mother and she came in the boat, my grandmother always told us.

Grandfather Joseph never cared much for paperwork, and much less for formalities. Therefore, he was never nationalized as a Cuban, because according to him, he carried to Spain in his mind and Cuba in his heart and to prove it was not necessary to fill out forms.

It is precisely because of this is that I, his granddaughter, am now in a quagmire trying to get the damn piece of paper showing his arrival in this, his second homeland.

“My grandfather was married here in the capital, look at the document. He personally signed it when my mother was born, here’s the certificate that proves it. He also died and was buried in his beloved Havana, you can see here the official papers. Do you think,” I asked the officer who assisted me at the Spanish embassy, “that in 1911 my grandfather met my grandmother and married her on the Internet? Or maybe my mother was conceived by artificial insemination in 1912? How is it possible that we need a record of his entry into Cuba, to demonstrate his passage through these lands?”

Our archives are damaged: After fifty-nine years many are in a total state of disrepair, losing countless documents. Nor are they digitized and this greatly complicates the search for data, not to mention that none of the people who work in these places, are interested in making the least effort, looking at such old and dilapidated books.

My grandfather was a freethinker, a bohemian, self-employed (free lance) and above all, a Spanish man who, despite loving Cuba, became a man on this earth, creating a family and dying here, he never bothered to leave papers. He left a beautiful family, great memories and stories and was the painter-sign painter par excellence in Old Havana. Sometimes when I wander through those streets I see him with his modest clothing and brushes, he liked to take them from his pockets, going with them to the barbershops, bars and taverns where he was so well known.

With my mom.

My grandmother said that when Caruso was in Havana, my grandfather did not miss a single event. She also told me that he went, very elegant, to see the first performance of the great singer. He went out all decked out with his straw hat. And when he returned the suit was all smeared with paint. My grandmother asked what happened, and he answered, “What do you want Maria, when I went by the Café La Marina, the owner came to meet me, and asked me to paint the sign of the restaurant that would open the next day, and even though I explained that I was going to the theater, he said that first we were the friends, and that second I could go to the second performance, and so I did it. I left a glowing sign.”

“But Joseph, did you then go all smeared with paint to the theater?”

“Maria, I went to the theater to see them, not for them to see me.”

That was my grandfather Joseph.

April 11 2011

The Fold / Rebeca Monzo

Since returning to my planet, after a brief stay in the civilized world, I feel the excitement that characterizes me has diminished somewhat.

I arrived just in time to see how, over and over on television, they showed the images of the May Day parade. Cool! Those same people marched who, day after day, you run into in the street, criticizing, complaining, and even verbally attacking, who have no direct responsibility for the situation, they go like sheep to the fold (at the Plaza), marching and waving little paper flags with the national emblem, which afterwards they throw on the ground and trample shamelessly.

Yesterday afternoon, I stand at the terrace of my apartment to say goodbye to a friend, and I see my neighbors like moving like automatons to attend an accountability meeting (isn’t that the way it goes?). Those same people who spend their time with you one-on-one criticizing, complaining and wishing for the end of the regime.

Wouldn’t it be better and healthier, to take of the mask once and for all and shed the fears and decide to adopt a more civic posture?

Not doing anything against it, but doing nothing for it, would be a good start against which no law can punish you.

May 14 2011

The Country That Travels to the Cemetery / Henry Constantín

Whoever travels to Cuba and doesn’t go to its cemeteries forgets the place where, inevitably, all journeys end. In them lie the tears of the entire island.

The infinite Colon cemetery and its mausoleums of millionaires and politicians, La Milagrosa, half the country’s history buried in niches, the tunnels and two-story buildings, the tomb of Cecilian Valdes and that of the capital general, of the soldiers who died in Angola and the desolate of the ABC, the workers and employees close to president Menocal and the minister Carlos Miguel de Cespedes, the Masonic lodges with the monks and Cardinal Arteaga: men great and humble, friends and enemies, men of God and atheists, all placed, mourned, buried, remembered there side-by-side, with no great differences than that the miners guard the rest. There everyone goes, even those who kills, with the difference that the latter have their niches, and flowers from family and friends, and the others drier that they shower with hate.

On the western side of the bay of Santiago de Cuba below the cemetery, that of La Socapa and Cayo Granma, watered their graves on the steepest hillside, as if they were all sliding into eternity; in Bayamo the tombs of the once powerful cause panic, in their outrageous chapels of stairs under the level of the earth and skulls leaning out of the niches; on an intricate hill at the bottom of the land of Najasa, in Camaguey, there is one nearly invisible, of Spaniards who once went to try their luck in these parts; in Manati there still remains that made by the Marquis of San Miguel de Aguayo so his workers would not end up under some tree along the railroad tracks or in the middle of a cane field; in my Camaguey there are two special tombs, that of the cadaver of General Agramonte, burned by the hatred of the Spaniards over a century ago, and that of the Creole Dolores Rondon, famous for the poems that a lover of her youth redid every day on her grave, and also, there are the ghostly graves of those executed in the sixties, whom no one was allowed to inscribe in the books of the dead for fear that their names, noted there, would continue to conspire against the government that executed them.

But now, also, you have to visit the Santa Clara cemetery with gladioli and bitterness, because in this country they will continue to kill those who ask, with their voices alone, for a more just island. After the police beating almost on Mother’s Day, Juan Wifredo Soto, a humble man, one humble man more! has died. There is a mother in pain. There are many tense Cubans.

On the island there is the small of martyrdom, again.

May 8 2011

From Casino Player to Toilet Cleaner / Iván García

Night falls suddenly in Havana and Billy, 81, empties out the money he collected in a colourless plastic bowl in the public toilet where he works.

He counts the small change. With a nervous uncontrollable tic, his mouth shakes. His hands also tremble. It’s Alzheimer’s that is devouring him. He trys to hide it. Impossible. He should be in bed attended by his family. Or in some nursing home.

“I’ve been in three hospices and it is better to be dead. Bad food. No care. I preferred to go to the street to find me a few pesos. I was always a creditworthy guy. Now ruin has befallen me. My days are numbered. At any time the Lord may take me to him. So what I do is take care of this public toilet for ten hours. In the morning I also sell sweets and so get more money for hot meals”, says Billy, his voice worn.

He has no home and sleeps on the floor of the toilet itself. An extremely messy room with an unbearable stench of urine and ammonia. According to Billy, the administrator of the place gave him the keys and some cardboard to sleep on. Someone else gave him an old Russian portable radio. In the evening he listens to baseball and traditional music.

“I was a successful man. The best player of poker and pool that was in Havana in the 50’s. I earned much money. One cold January afternoon I was in the lobby of the Plaza hotel when a suited man, small and with glasses, approached me and invited me to a Ron Collins. It was the Jew, Meyer Lansky. He made me a proposal”, recalls Billy as he rolls a cigarette using butts collected in the street.

Lansky offered him a place in a course for dealers in the school that was running on the roof of the hotel, the first of its kind in the city. Around a year later he had become a ‘crack’ dealer. Whoever dealt cards also worked as a roulette croupier.

But in ’59 Castro arrived and he ordered the closure of the casinos. Lansky and Santo Trafficante had to pack up. He then worked in the casino of the Havana Riviera. And eventually became unemployed. He didn’t possess the revolutionary spirit. He was never militant nor cut sugar cane.

“I had my savings and a ’58 Chevrolet that was a gem. I threw away money on drink and prostitutes. I left the house to the mother of my two children. I sold the car and set up a ‘burle‘ (illegal gaming casino), but I was caught in a police raid in the 80’s. I spent five years in prison, for prohibited games”, he points out. Later on he slowly eats some cold pizza, bought hours ago. It is his dinner.

Having reached old age the neglect of his family is taking its toll. He knows nothing of his children. He tries changing the subject when asked about them. “Nothing matters now. I will be a better person in the next life. My gift was my hands. Alzheimer’s has robbed me of the ability to handle a pool stick or play tricks with a deck of cards”, he says, after cleaning the filthy sinks and toilets without detergent.

He switches off the single bulb. “I’m tired, and tomorrow is another day. The bad thing about being old and sick is that memories and nostalgia beset you without warning. I was young and handsome. Lansky’s friends nicknamed me ‘Billy the Kid’ for the speed of my hands in the game”, he says. And throws himself like a heavy bundle on the cardboard that serves as a bed.

He begins to cry and turns his back. He does not want pity. Nor does he allow photos. Old Billy still has his pride.

Translated by: Araby

May 12 2011

A Manual or a Sonnet? / Yoani Sánchez

If you have something to say you are already a blogger. Yoani, with her knowledge and experience, guides you in creating your own blog on the web.

Long ago I read that the acid test of a poet was to write a sonnet. The straitjacket of meter and cadence of its composition drew out the worst and best of whomever had already tried their hand in battle with assonant rhymes. I confess that with my irreverent seventeen years it seemed that those hendecasyllables, grouped in two quartets and two triplets, were only for those who had not been able to prove themselves in the freedom of modern poetry. Displays of novelty that I flaunted until I read Francisco de Quevodo, and the theory of rejecting the combination of “cuidado” and “enamorado” blew me away.

Well, I have to tell you that, like a sonnet, there is nothing harder to write than a technical manual. I know, you’ll laugh, and say that anyone can manage to produce a leaflet for a medication or explain how to use a washing machine. Try it and see if you can, experiment and you’ll see how difficult it is to create an instruction booklet that isn’t full of the same boring and graceless prose of so many others. You’ll realize, then, how hard it is to avoid sounding dully didactic or petulantly professorial, to avoid boring your readers to death.

I am telling you this because I just finished a manual about WordPress with the title, “A Blog to Speak to the World.” When reviewing the more than four hundred pages I composed, I wondered how I found–in this unstable Cuba–the time, the peace and the skill to finish this book. Some friends tell me I’ve been sidetracked into a minor genre… and that makes me laugh. I fact–I reveal to them–I have just composed my own delicate sonnet, with twenty chapters that are like fourteen lines and some technical advice instead of declarations of love. My book, in one of life’s coincidences, will be presented in Madrid this coming May 21, the birthday of the poet with the round pince-nez and the aquiline nose. The same insolent who wrote, “my flame can swim frigid water and will flaunt so cruel a law,” as if instead of eternal romance he was relating the act of managing a blog from a country drowning in censorship.

In Havana the Illegal Taxis are Booming / Iván García

Photo: Ioooquito, Panoramio. Stopping taxis on Calzada 10 de Octubre, in Havana.

“God knows what it costs me to keep the car rolling,” says José, a former diplomat retired since 1994 and owner of a Lada 2105, made in Russia in the late 80’s.

He receives a pension of about 350 pesos that evaporates to buy tomatoes, rice and tropical fruit. To find the necessary extra money, he rents his car for $25 a day to trusted people, mostly foreign tourists passing through Havana.

Rosario, his wife, is also dedicated to the ‘invento’ (business). She sells ​​coconut filled tarts. Nevertheless, at the end of the month they have their heads in a noose. “We have no relatives in Miami. We have to play it tough”, she says.

When not renting the car, José himself acts as an illegal taxi driver. That is ‘on the side’, evading taxes. He usually hires it to the creditworthy people of the neighbourhood for going out at night to clubs or restaurants for hard currency.

When his car is out of action, he helps his wife to prepare the tarts. Neither his wife nor he pays taxes. “If I take out a license I would have to work every day. I’d rather be an illegal taxi driver. Everything goes into my pocket.”

Also Alicia, a surgeon working for 15 years, evades the taxes. At weekends she rents her car to families with money who decide to go to the beach and other leisure centres.

“I charge less than state taxis”, she says. Also, leaving consultations or ward duty, and returning back home, Alicia hires to people who put out their hand and are heading in the same direction.

“It’s not much money, but at least I cover the gasoline”, said the surgeon, who prays every night to her orishas to send her on a medical mission in South Africa.

According to Alicia, the Cuban doctors in South Africa manage to collect a good sum of dollars. “If they grant me the trip, I can buy a new car and thoroughly repair the house.”

Although the procedure for obtaining licenses is fast and without many obstacles, car owners prefer to rent on the side. The low tax culture of Cubans might be one argument. José has another: “Taxes are too high. If for ten years I have rented the car without paying a license, I do not see why I have to do it now.”

The surgeon Alicia argues that she does not have time to practice as a legal taxi driver. “I make the most of my spare time. Anyway, the government doesn’t pay doctors a fair wage.”

Although there are no figures, the number of people who maintain a business under the table without paying a penny of tax is considerable. They risk being caught by a state inspector but on the island ‘an eye for an eye’ is often practiced: “If the state steals from me, I steal from the state.”

Translated by: Araby

The Hackneyed Expression / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

Yes to Love, No to Terror

It has cost the historic circles of power in Cuba a great deal of work to maintain a balanced discourse with regards to their sensitivity and solidarity with the terrorist attacks on the United States, or any country with which they have marked differences. It’s part of a rhetorical double standard to both accuse the U.S. administrations, and to do the same thing here.

There is no point in sending messages of condolences on the one hand to antagonistic governments and the victims of terrorism in their societies, and to defend, in a veiled way, the perpetrators based on the old saying, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This behavior has become so common in Cuba, sadly, become the style as it is pervasive.

Perhaps that is one of its objectives. Every time they send a condolence message in the name of the Cuban people, they ride roughshod over and later question, as an automatic protocol requisite, what they say is the concert of democratic countries in the world.

At the same time we have witnessed the ambiguity with which they refer to the Taliban and Bin Laden on the TV Roundtable show–a program whose reason seems to be to constantly criticize Washington and the fierce and endless battle against their successors–of allegations that the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers was a deliberate internal action, and long snake of et ceteras, that hangs from Cuban fundamentalists like a long tale of falsehoods. I’m not saying I have a monopoly on the truth, but this conduct seems like media terrorism.

The Cuban government claims that the United States consistently applies, with respect to Cuba, a double standard of good and bad terrorism according to their interests. And they themselves don’t?

I would add that in our country we annually commemorate the death of the revolutionary martyr Sergio González, The Band-Aid. A man known for planting bombs before 1959, who established the record of a hundred in one Havana night.

The arrogant hypocrisy of “do as I say, not as I do” from the spokesmen of the single party echoes the speeches and propaganda like “plastic explosives,” and offers feedback and bombardments of hate and injustice, but what really worries me is that I am splashed with that rotten stew.

It seems that as a Cuban citizen I am not being represented fully by those in power for over five decades in my archipelago: leaving me no option but to save my anti-terrorism reputation by placing these little media firecrackers to draw attention.

May 9 2011

The Hackneyed Expression

Yes to Love, No to Terror

It has cost the historic circles of power in Cuba a great deal of work to maintain a balanced discourse with regards to their sensitivity and solidarity with the terrorist attacks on the United States, or any country with which they have marked differences. It’s part of a rhetorical double standard to both accuse the U.S. administrations, and to do the same thing here.

There is no point in sending messages of condolences on the one hand to antagonistic governments and the victims of terrorism in their societies, and to defend, in a veiled way, the perpetrators based on the old saying, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This behavior has become so common in Cuba, sadly, become the style as it is pervasive.

Perhaps that is one of its objectives. Every time they send a condolence message in the name of the Cuban people, they ride roughshod over and later question, as an automatic protocol requisite, what they say is the concert of democratic countries in the world.

At the same time we have witnessed the ambiguity with which they refer to the Taliban and Bin Laden on the TV Roundtable show–a program whose reason seems to be to constantly criticize Washington and the fierce and endless battle against their successors–of allegations that the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers was a deliberate internal action, and long snake of et ceteras, that hangs from Cuban fundamentalists like a long tale of falsehoods. I’m not saying I have a monopoly on the truth, but this conduct seems like media terrorism.

The Cuban government claims that the United States consistently applies, with respect to Cuba, a double standard of good and bad terrorism according to their interests. And they themselves don’t?

I would add that in our country we annually commemorate the death of the revolutionary martyr Sergio González, The Band-Aid. A man known for planting bombs before 1959, who established the record of a hundred in one Havana night.

The arrogant hypocrisy of “do as I say, not as I do” from the spokesmen of the single party echoes the speeches and propaganda like “plastic explosives,” and offers feedback and bombardments of hate and injustice, but what really worries me is that I am splashed with that rotten stew.

It seems that as a Cuban citizen I am not being represented fully by those in power for over five decades in my archipelago: leaving me no option but to save my anti-terrorism reputation by placing these little media firecrackers to draw attention.

May 9 2011

The Uncertain Future of the Internet / Laritza Diversent

The predictions for the development of internet in Cuba added to the darkness, after the coming of the fiber optic cable to Cuba collided with the political interests of the Communist government which, in the last decade, developed a legal and technological infrastructure, to control the flow of information to and from the island, via internet.

The majority of independent bloggers are expecting to see what will happen, this upcoming July, the structure of the web on the island, connect to the optical fiber cable, in the beginning of February, came to the island from Venezuela.

The anticipation will multiply by 3.000 speed of data transmission, but also serve for the government to confess its fear using individual virtual tools of information.

In 1996 Cuba officially connected to the internet, but the government left sitting, legally, its political respect to full access of the services that are offered. Ever Since the “internet of internets” is administrated centrally from the Telecommunications Company of Cuba S.A., ETECSA, and exploited by authorized state institutions expressed by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC).

At the end of January, the government announced the sale of foreign actions by ETECSA, and the purchase, in $706 million dollars, for part of RAFIN, another Cuban company. The possession of the major part of the actions, Cuba allows the primary provider of public service of “Transmission of Data”.

“Increasing the sovereignty technology in the development of the infrastructure of telecommunications” one of previous strategies in the Alignment of the Political Economic and Social that adopted in the event entry of the next quarter.

In late March, the daily Granma said, according to statements by Justice Minister Maria Esther Reus, that “Cuba will adjust the existing legal rules to the decisions that are adopted as a result of the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba.”

Motivated by the arrival of fiber optic cable to Cuba, the deputy minister of MIC, Jorge Luis Perdomo, referred to the development of the first Telecommunications Act to regulate the sector and to “promote in an orderly way” the services it encompasses.

Since 2000 the Cuban government implemented, legally and technologically, an infrastructure that allows it to control access by Cubans to the Internet, through a hierarchical network of state agencies, identified as providers of “public Internet access.”

That same year, it legally established an international common access point to the network (NAP), ensuring that all international outgoing Internet goes through this connection. Thus it assure that the interconnections between domestic internet users are routed through national means of transmission.

Providers of Public Service Internet Access can not accept requests for installation for a person who is not authorized by the MIC. However, the regulations governing the activity requires them to accept as users “all natural or legal persons who want it.”

However, the laws themselves have the reservation. Suppliers offer their services “… with no other limitations than those imposed by the laws in force in the country. ”

Since 1996 the government declared that “… access to the services of the worldwide information networks will be selective” and “will have to be approved by the Interministerial Commission, composed of five ministers and chaired by the head of the MIC.”

The strategy was “… full access to the internet … but in a regulated manner.” The line was drawn “according to national interests, focusing on the connection of legal persons and institutions of greatest relevance to the life and development of the country. ”

Among other legal commitments, these Providers “are required to define the authorization to persons and entities who need to use services to access national or international Internet,” including “… remote access … from the home or anywhere in the country … and from the exterior.”

They also have a duty to report the number of users with full access to the Internet, those who have email accounts and IP addresses. They also demand the number of computers that access the network from places of residence and access for the public. A provider who fails to comply with the regulations of the MIC, loses its operating license.

In 2004 the government named an “Internet Zone”, with spaces in hotels, Internet cafes, etc., which provide navigation services of the Internet and e-mail to the public, at prices between 1.50 and 10.00 convertible pesos (CUC) for one hour of access to the web.

and in 2008, they fully regulated service these centers, after president Raúl Castro announced that the Islanders could receive services in hotels, and were authorized to buy computers on the retail market in hard currency.

From that time the alternative Cuban blogosphere began to develop, currently composed of 40 blogs of government critics, belonging to a group of citizens, especially young people, who update their sites from the hotels, embassies and with the help of friends abroad.

Providers must also block “access to sites whose contents are contrary to social interests, ethics and morals as well as the use of applications that affect the integrity or security of the state.”

One of the jobs of the Interministerial Commission created by the government in 1996 was to ensure that information disseminated “… is accurate, and that it is obtained is in line with ethical principles, and does not affect the interests or security of the country.”

On the eve of XIV Informatics Convention and Trade Fair 2011, held in Havana in early February, the government opened access to the Cuban Voices Portal and to the blog of Yoani Sánchez, Generación Y, on Cuba servers.

The government is mainly concerned that the new generation of dissidents is using Twitter, Facebook and other online social networks. These websites were used to organize protests that led to several revolutions in the Middle East and Africa, earlier this year.

The possibility that the government, at the upcoming party congress, would adopt measures restricting the use of new information technologies and full access to the network, added to the concerns of those who use it as a means to exercise freedom of expression.

The advance in technology development, represented by the arrival of the fiber optic cable from Venezuela to the island, has been overshadowed by State Security’s consideration of the “Network of Networks” as the new “battlefield” and the official media’s demonizing the use communication equipment. Faced with these developments there is no doubt that the future of the Internet in Cuba is uncertain.

April 26 2011

Local Version of the Revolts / Regina Coyula

Internet Photo

Since the Arab world’s popular uprisings began, the average Cuban citizen walks about very confused by the disparity of the accounts of the press and the ones from people who claim they “saw it all through the antenna” or from people who were told of it by someone who saw it all through the antenna, which is why with the internet in mini-doses I will devote some of this volatile time to the search for the other side of the war omitted by the zealous journalists of my Cubita the Beautiful.

Our government’s affinities to the Gadhafi and Al Assad regimes span decades, which explains their support to both of them. But it is one thing is to support a government, regardless of how questionable it is (as is the case) and a very different one to hide the fact that those same governments have attacked their own people with landmines, with ammunition of raw uranium, with a mercenary army —the term CAN be used there— and other, equally reproachable methods.

I have to endure Gadhafi’s boy, so macho and threatening; I need to endure Hafez’s boy when he declares that the revolts have been provoked by infiltrated foreigners—even Syrians don’t buy that—but we Cubans take that with a grain of salt, and I can almost hear my neighbor Tomás protesting the horror those people are going through, those people who will not be overwhelmed by the national outcry enough to resign.

Every time I see images from Libya, those unmistakably green banners appear, pointing toward where the camera of the Telesur correspondent needs to aim. Incensed with such partiality, my husband, with sarcasm, brings me back to reality: “It’s the version meant for us. Don’t watch Walter Martínez. Don’t watch the newscast. Or don’t watch the war on the internet anymore.”

Translated by T

May 4 2011

MAIEUTICS OF MAY / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

MAY 666

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

In May I always remember the death of José Martí (I forgot it on a test in elementary school and, since then, I never forgot it).

I don’t sympathize with this character at all. Christs always terrified me. But at the same time fascinated me. They are ipso facto ethical sources (only the ethics is inexorably violence against others). Their destinies are tragic by definition. And it makes me imagine them with compassion (I know guys like that among my ex-friends). Then, to top it off, all gospels will be vulgarized to the point of ridicule by the surviving manipulators and the manipulators yet to come. This make some of the failures greater in the reach of their immortality. And in the Cuban case, Martí would be a kind of a superclimax in this respect.

Every time I dream about the missing pages of his campaign diary, perhaps his most sincere writing (not to say the only sincere, free at last of his brilliant demagoguery and of those lapidary sentences although tinged with the gift of despotic democracy).

At the same time and date that I am writing these lines, Marti would be writing other curses in the morning of May 6, 1895. Some lines and drawings or listed or testament of imminent suicide or mea culpa or who could guess what. Lines about the worst Maceo or Gomex or Marti. Intolerable lines that died out from the same cradle as the idyllic idea of the Revolution. Lines walking barefoot (without the Levite of laborious exile, and the most free, and also spiritual and fornicator), complaint of dead man walking.

That Marti, of course, would also be betrayed by the hypocritical men immediately around him. These leaves from the diary were plucked as soon as Martí died. It would seem that the same hand that slanted his most sacred intimacy, may well be the one that earlier pushed him into the bullets, perhaps it got off the first shot in the middle of the least important skirmish of all the so-called wars of liberation.

I’m not accusing anyone. I prefer the non-existent theory of an existential conspiracy. Let’s say that meteorological relations between the mulatazgo Cuban-in-chief were not the best with that big mouth white boy. History is based on myth, not truth. Martí was much more than that: a mystic and a spiritual counterfeiter. A poet greater than any mess of a fatherland. And it was unforgivable that in a fit of flat realism, our evangelist par excellence dotted the i and crossed the t in the word dictator, for example.

Any Cuban with half a brain (and only half a brain, like most of the generals who won the war: Martí had too much on the ball) he was acting like a thief, ripping and probably burning the unfortunate personal pages (the first not published of the Apostle). This mutilation was a foundational collective lynching against future emissions of national truth. This lie makes us better than any Article One. That lack made ​​us accomplices as collateral to generate a new social consensus, be it Republican or revolutionary.

From time to time I dream about those pages perpetrated by José Martí. The most startling is that in my dreams I can always read them, blurred by the effort to decipher the little letters. Then I swear to remember them even if in sections, because it’s already happened that when I wake up I don’t remember even one syllable. But it is an impossibility. I awake from thirsty and gasping.

That instant amnesia is a kind of curse that persuades me that I was actually reading cannibalized pages. My recurring dream is actually an original vision of Martí. And in each dream I am more convinced that if one of these mornings, if I have to sell my soul to the devil, I will overcome the amnesic curse and upon waking transcribe this writing from May 6, then in my hands will be the original disaster of the same concept of Revolution.

I suspect the deadly miracle will be in May, at dawn with the first rain of the month. Like right now in Havana.

May 6 2011

Cuban Baseball on the Edge of a Precipice / Iván García

For 20 years baseball on the island has been going backwards. Apart from the more than 300 ball players that have deserted to play as professionals in different circuits of the Caribbean and the Major Leagues, the sports authorities have caused a flagrant decline in the quality of Cuban baseball.

When in 1991 the right-handed pitcher from the town of Regla, René Arocha, abandoned the gathering of the national team that was training in the United States and for a little while played in the major league. It was the beginning of a constant drip of ballplayers that jumped the puddle with the illusion of earning six figure salaries.

In Cuba, a baseball player earns a worker’s salary for playing all year round as a professional would. The absence of many of the best talents has accentuated the crisis that exists in the national pastime.

Also, the complete nonsense coming from management. In the mid 90’s, they forced more than 100 great players with outstanding performance in the national season to opt for retirement.

This ‘voluntary’ retirement continued in the first decade of the 21st century. Supposedly, it was to clear the way for new recruits to baseball. In Cuba a player of 35 years is often seen as a useless eyesore.

The statistics in any league that is respected show that it’s precisely after 30 years that a baseball player matures and has a stable performance. Another phenomenon that has lowered the standard of local baseball is that in the ranks of juveniles and cadets, many prospects jump the fence and leave for the United States.

Right now, the worrying thing is not what we’re seeing in the current Cuban season. Which is awful. If not what awaits us in the near future. Look, if in the 80’s the national classic was categorized with a Triple A status, in this winter of 2011, the national campaign shows numberous ghosts to reveal a severe crisis.

Take note. In the so-called ‘Golden Series’, the 50th after Castro took power, the collective offense of the 16 participating teams is 293. Pitching exceeds 5 earned runs per game and with teams like Metropolitan and Las Tunas are around 7 points per game.

To this nefarious pitching, add in a defense of schoolyard level. The gloves are ripped. It is fielding for 972. In a decent league, is often hitting 260, the pitchers work for 4 runs per game and fielding to 980. These numbers confirm that baseball is played today in Cuba is jungle.

Jose Dariel Abreu, Cienfuegos team’s slugger, about 6 feet tall and 260 pounds, looking like a big leaguer, is averaging a homer every 5.75 at-bats. Joan Carlos Pedroso, a black first baseman in the ninth Las Tunas usually sends the ball regularly over 500 feet, and connects a home run every 7 times at bat.

Not even Babe Ruth hit with the frequency. But the worst part of Cuban baseball is the pitching. It’s laughable. You can count on the fingers of your hands–and you might have fingers left over–the high level pitchers.

On average, the current Cuban pitchers do not exceed 85 mph. Their repertoire is complete with a mediocre slider. And counting. To this add the alarming lack of control. In Cuban baseball, pitchers usually give 5 bases on balls per game.

Then, of course, that hitters are having a field day. With 22 games remaining to conclude the regular season of 90 games, 5 rookies are collectively batting over 300.

The usual markers of a baseball game is 10 runs for 7.15 for 11 and so on. It looks like water polo. The solution of the hierarchy governing island baseball is to bring in Japanese trainers to impart accelerated courses in the backyard techniques.

One more mistake. Japanese baseball, of undubitable quality, has little to do with the idiosyncrasies of Latino baseball. I can not imagine running a Cuban pitcher running 15 miles and throwing 100 balls every day in their preparation, as is common in Asian baseball.

In general, a pitcher of that part of the world has a sporting life of seven to eight years. The baseball that we should look is closer, 90 miles to the north. With scientific training methods, a vast technical literature and careful statistical headings that include all of the games.

But the Castro brothers don’t want to open the door for the young stars to compete in the Majors. While they continue in their mistaken policies, the local ballplayers will climb aboard anything that floats with the objective of being able to play in the best league on the planet.

And the local fans are quitting going to the stadiums. They would rather see a European soccer match. That’s what’s happening.

March 27 2011

Neighborhood Spokespeople Receive Answers to Citizen Demands / Silvio Benítez Márquez

Weeks ago the Neighborhood Spokespeople sent a group of citizen demands to headquarters of the People’s Power National Assembly regarding public opinion about the measures of December 2010. These were gathered over months by the different bodies and no response has been received.

This disinterest shown by the different channels of the People’s Power with regards to the Neighborhood Spokespeople petitions led the activists to decide on a legal remedy, faced with the exhaustion of the channels established in the law.

The idea of filing a formal complaint against the People’s Power mechanism is motivated by the immediate signs and fears among officials and agents, recalling the bitter case of Vallin and the Law Society to remain silent as in the previous response.

But to repeat the dose with the spokespeople’s petitions would make no sense, to run the experiment again could be fatal to the aspirations of the General. He knows the urgency of institutional credibility and also the needs of the unicameral assembly, where abstentions and no votes could be points of departure for new processes.

So the logic is not to err again but to gain time feigning that the institutionality is a sacred act of this mechanism. Of course, that this is not the highest authority who is accountable to the spokespeople of the District, but the establishment of the base which is responsible for offering a rhetoric of little death to these people and ending the problems for the time being.

The trite ritual this Saturday was revealed when the President of the Popular Council of Punta Brava after months in limbo and without the slightest importance to the issues raised called on one of the spokesmen of the District to give an accounting of significant advances in the areas of high demand. Demands now being followed in the same path but disguised with a different political hue.

Silvio Benítez Márquez
Promoter of the Neighborhood Spokespeople Project

April 10 2011