Get On The Stick! ... With Cuba’s IT Underground :: Symblogogy

Necessity is the mother of invention – or in this case adaptation. Information technology in Cuba, with its heavy-handed oversight of human activity, is in a process of breaking out of the grip of the government sanctions against the freedom of information sharing and publishing.

News, information, and entertainment media in Cuba, is hard to come by unless one is able to afford the time to log on to a computer in one of the few “Cyber Cafés”, have access to a tourist hotel internet portal, is a student, or has access to a smuggled dish and secretly grab the information for later viewing and sharing - OFFLINE!

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OFFLINE in Cuba is an
intranet (an in-country internet) patched together through a “postal service”
email communication connection that the government is having trouble shutting
down. The “Whack-A-Mole” process the government is left with can not stop the
viral sharing aided with the use of USB memory sticks.



This excerpted from The New
York Times -

Cyber-Rebels in Cuba Defy
State’s Limits
By JAMES
C. McKINLEY Jr. - New York Times, HAVANA - March 6, 2008

A growing
underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital
cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to
the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state
media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer
science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo
Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.

Mr. Alarcón seemed
flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at
hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread
like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously
damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles.
----
“It passes from
flash drive to flash drive,” said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like
almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not
be used for fear of political persecution. “This is going to get out of the
government’s hands because the technology is moving so rapidly.”

Cuban
officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digital
videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number
of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet cafe remains open in Old
Havana, down from three a few years ago.

Hidden in a small room in the
depths of the Capitol building, the state-owned cafe charges a third of the
average Cuban’s monthly salary — about $5 — to use a computer for an hour. The
other two former Internet cafes in central Havana have been converted into
“postal services” that let Cubans send e-mail messages over a closed network on
the island with no links to the Internet.
----
Young people here say there
is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection
to the world outside the Communist country.

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People who have smuggled in satellite
dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies
to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign
businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to
the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in
the middle of the night.

Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet
services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.

Even the
country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences,
set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of
cyber-rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television
shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly
around the island.
----
The video of Mr. Alarcón’s clash with students was
leaked to the BBC and CNN, giving the world a rare glimpse of the discontent
among the young with the system.
----
Another event many people witnessed
through the digital underground was the arrival in the United States of Carlos
Otero, a popular television personality and humorist in Cuba who defected in
December while on a trip to Toronto.

Illegal antennas caught signals from
Miami television stations, which youths turned into digital videos and shared.
Though the event smacked more of celebrity news than politics, it would never
have been shown on the official media.

Some young journalists have also
started blogs and Internet news sites, using servers in other countries, and
their reports are reaching people through the digital underground.

Yoani
Sánchez, 32, and her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, 60, established Consenso desde
Cuba , a Web site based in Germany. Ms. Sánchez has attracted a considerable
following with her blog, Generación Y, in which she has artfully written gentle
critiques of the government by describing her daily life in Cuba. Ms. Sánchez
and her husband said they believed strongly in using their names with articles
despite the possible political repercussions.

Shortly before Raúl Castro
was elected president last week to replace his ailing brother, Fidel, Ms.
Sánchez wrote a piece describing what sort of president she wanted. She said the
country did not need a soldier, a charismatic leader or a great speaker, but “a
pragmatic housewife” who favored freedom of speech and open
elections.

Writing later about Raúl Castro’s first speech as president,
she criticized his vague promises of change, saying they were as clear as the
Rosetta Stone was when it was first found. Both essays would be impossible to
publish in Cuba.
----
Because Ms. Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get
online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays
beforehand, then goes to the one Internet cafe, signs on, updates her Web site,
copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a
memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand.
“It’s a solid underground,” she said. “The government cannot control the
information.”

It is spread by readers like Ricardo, 28, a philosophy
student at the University of Havana who sells memory sticks to other
students.
----
Like many young Cubans, Ricardo plays a game of cat and
mouse with the authorities. He doubts that the government will ever let ordinary
citizens have access to the Internet in their homes. “That’s far too dangerous,”
he said. “Daddy State doesn’t want you to get informed, so it preventively keeps
you from surfing.”

Pedro, a midlevel official with a government agency,
said he often surfed Web sites like the BBC and The Miami Herald at work,
searching for another view of the news besides the ones presented in the
state-controlled media. He predicted that the 10,000 students studying the
Internet and programming at the University of Information Sciences would
transform the country over time, opening up more and more avenues of
information.

“We are training an army of information specialists,” he
said.
Reference
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