My Paper on Internet Access in Cuba

Access Denied: Internet Connectivity Control in Cuba

I. Introduction: Control of the Internet in Authoritarian Societies

With one hundred percent of its population able to read and write, Cuba boasts one of the highest literacy rates in the world (ONI 2006:2). The nation’s workforce is educated, with an average schooling of 8.9 years. High rankings in human capital variables such as these may lead one to expect high levels of internet adoption in the country, but Cuba has one of the world’s lowest internet connectivity rates (Corrales and Westhoff 2006:926). In 2005, only 3.3 of every 100 Cubans owned a computer (ONI 2006:1). In 2006, approximately 190,000 Cubans (two percent of the population) were regular internet users, a usage rate that is roughly one-thirteenth of that of Costa Rica and that ranks the nation alongside Uganda and Sri Lanka (Miami Herald 2006).

Other authoritarian governments in similar economic situations, such as those of North Korea and Laos, have attempted to regulate the internet in their countries by detaching their citizens from the global cyber community (Corrales and Westhoff 2006:925). Laos has one of the slowest rates of internet Ministry’s proclamation gives the impression that Cuba’s internet technology would rapidly advance and bring “social, political, economic, scientific, and sports information” to all Cubans. In reality, Cuba’s technology has developed very slowly. Despite the government’s optimistic attitude towards the nation’s connection to the internet, by 1998 Cuba had only one 64-kbps satellite internet connection (ONI 2006:1). By 2006, Cuba still had not made drastic advances in its connectivity—one satellite connection with a 65 Mb/s upload bandwidth and a 124 Mb/s download bandwidth served the entire country of 11 million people (2006:1). With only two percent of the population using the internet regularly, the Cuban people’s access to the web had also not advanced significantly.

The Cuban government blames its use of a single satellite, the resulting slow connection speed, and the limited internet access of the Cuban people on the United States trade embargo. According to the regime, the trade sanctions in place between the United States and Cuba prevent Cuba from connecting to underwater fiber-optic cables installed just twelve miles off the country’s coastline. Instead of connecting to this “highway of broadband communication,” Cuba must rely on expensive satellite uplinks to establish internet connections via countries such as Chile, Brazil and Canada. The high cost of those satellite uplinks is reflected in the prohibitively high prices Cubans pay to access the internet legally (Israel 2007). According to Dr. Julio Garcia Luis, the director of the Communications department at the University of Havana, Cuba’s island location would make an internet connection expensive without the embargo, but the U.S. trade sanctions have exacerbated the financial problem. Additionally, the embargo has prevented Cubans from easily acquiring American computers, modems, and software, which would facilitate less-complicated connection to the internet (Lecture 9/24/07). According to the Castro regime, the U.S. embargo has complicated internet connectivity in Cuba, making the web more expensive and therefore less accessible to the Cuban people.

III. Legal Internet Access

Despite its assertions that the U.S. embargo is keeping the Cuban people off the web, the Cuban government itself severely restricts the venues in which Cubans can access the internet. The regime has essentially banned private internet connections. The few Cubans who do enjoy internet access in their homes must pay the government internet service provider (ISP) in Convertible Pesos and have the formal support of a government, economic, cultural, political, or social institution (Valdes 1999:152). Predictably, most Cubans lack the Convertible Pesos and official support necessary to obtain their own internet connections.

To access e-mail accounts or the web, the majority of legal Cuban internet users must go to public access points like the Correos de Cuba internet cafes (Reporters Without Borders 2006:1). At the few Correos de Cuba web access points throughout Havana, Cubans may spend hours in line waiting to use the internet or check their e-mail accounts. Access to the World Wide Web costs approximately 6.00 USD per hour, about half of the average monthly salary (Israel 2007). Because the internet is so expensive, most Cubans opt to use the national intranet or only their e-mail accounts, which cost about 2.00 USD per hour (Reporters Without Borders 2006:1). When compared to the average Cuban’s monthly salary, prices for internet and e-mail access are astronomical. More often than not, they are prohibitively high, and most Cubans cannot afford to use the Correos de Cuba internet cafes.

A small percentage of Cubans can access the internet from their workplaces. The government provides internet access to state, government, party, and administrative institutions (Valdes 1999:152). For example, Cuba’s health and educational ministries are connected to the internet. The government also grants access to state-owned enterprises and mixed and foreign-owned enterprises as well as social institutions, such as religious and non-governmental organizations that support the revolution. Additionally, youth clubs throughout the country offer a growing number of children computer training and access to the internet (1999:152). However, the majority of Cubans does not have access to these approved access points, and they have thus not contributed significantly to the connectivity of the masses.

The internet is much more accessible to foreign tourists than to Cubans. Unlike Cubans, tourists have access to internet cafes in hotels, and are much more likely to be able to pay the five or six Convertible Pesos it costs to use the internet at these exclusive access points. Additionally, some tourist hotels offer access in private hotel rooms at a discounted rate. For example, the Hotel Palco in Havana offers twenty-four hours of internet access in private rooms for ten Convertible Pesos, a much better rate than at the Correos de Cuba internet cafes. However, as Cubans are not allowed to enter tourist hotel rooms, this discounted rate is restricted to tourists renting rooms at the Palco.

IV. Illegal Internet Access

Those Cubans who lack the means to access the internet legally can access it illegally, though doing so can be more technologically complicated and dangerous. Black market internet access is sold by Cubans with approved internet accounts to those without approval and/or enough money to use the Correos de Cuba internet cafes. Also, technologically-savvy Cubans can hack into the approved servers of other users, though the risk of being detected is great (Valdes 1999:152). Cubans can also attain surreptitious internet accounts, or accounts set up for non-paying users by technicians or other ISP employees. These accounts are provided to the non-paying users as if they were paying customers, and are more likely to go undetected than accounts that are illegally used by hackers (1999:152).

Account sharing is a means of attaining unapproved e-mail access. Shared e-mail accounts are not kept on the server that is used to enter the internet, but rather on foreign, web-based servers like Hotmail or Yahoo. One person may be legally approved to use the e-mail account, but he or she illegally shares it with others (1999:152). This method of accessing e-mail is comparatively easy, as long as those sharing the account can obtain the internet access necessary to log onto the websites hosting their messages. For example, Gerardo Rodriguez Rios, a student at the Instituto Superior del Arte in Havana, recently began sharing his sister’s Yahoo.com e-mail account. Gerardo studies in Havana but his sister lives in Camagüey, a city five hours away from the capitol. His only internet access point is his sister’s house, and thus he has access to his e-mail messages only from Camagüey, where he resides only when classes are not in session. Although account sharing is certainly less expensive and bureaucratic than legally accessing e-mail from Correos de Cuba internet cafes or other approved access points, it is not necessarily more convenient and has not added allowed a significant number of Cubans access to cyberspace.

V. Official Regulations Regarding Internet Access

Despite its initial assertion that internet access is a “fundamental right” of all Cubans, the Castro regime has restricted the internet since before access became public in October of 1996. In June of 1996, the Executive Committee of the Cuban Council of Ministers passed Decree-Law 209, which regulates the use and development of the internet in Cuba. Decree-Law 209 stresses the importance of “policies and a strategy” for networking that will be aligned with the country’s culture, its developmental needs, and the “interests of national defense and security” (Decree-Law 209 as cited by Valdes 1999:148). Article 13 of Decree-Law 209 reads, “To ensure that the principles set forth in this decree are carried out, access to the services of the World Wide Web will be selective” (Decreto No. 209/1996 Sobre el acceso de la Repúlica de Cuba a Redes de Alcance Global). In order to ensure that the internet is used only to further the goals of the Revolution, the Cuban government has selectively granted and denied access to the web since the day the country established a link with cyberspace.

Decree-Law 209 also discusses the prioritization of the “selective” internet access mentioned in Article 13. Article 12 reads:

The [internet] policy will be designed depending on national interests. Connection priority will be given to the legally recognized individuals and institutions considered most significant in the nation’s life and development (Decreto No. 209/1996 Sobre el acceso de la Repúlica de Cuba a Redes de Alcance Global).

The “legally recognized individuals and institutions considered most significant in the nation’s development” to which Decree-Law 209 gives connectivity priority include the institutions and ministries mentioned in Section III of this paper as well as non-dissident intellectuals and academics, government researchers and journalists, and senior staff of export-oriented cultural companies or computer technology companies (Reporters Without Borders 2006:3). Ordinary Cuban citizens are not given priority internet access, a fact that is reflected in the low percentage of the population that regularly uses the internet.

VI. Content Censorship and Filtering

Despite assertions that it does not censor the internet, the Cuban government does concede that some sites are blocked. Those Cubans who can afford to access the web legally cannot enter websites the government has deemed “terroristic, xenophobic, or pornographic” (BBC 2006). From the Hotel Palco internet connection, it is impossible to access www.hermanos.org, the website of Brothers to the Rescue, an anti-Castro, U.S.-based organization that claims to do humanitarian work but has also been linked by the Cuban government to terrorist activity. It is also generally impossible to access U.S.-based webpages that publish articles by dissidents within Cuba (BBC 2006). For example, the Hotel Palco internet connection does not allow access to www.democracia.org, a website petitioning for the release of Oscar Elias Biscet, a Cuban dissident physician serving twenty-five years in prison for allegedly working with the U.S. government to subvert the regime (BBC 2003).

In addition to blocking potentially counter-revolutionary websites, the Cuban government also monitors e-mails sent from government-approved access points. At the Correos de Cuba internet cafes, users must provide their names and addresses at the door (Reporters Without Borders 2006:4). All legal Cuban e-mail traffic passes through state-run ISPs, which use software to detect potentially politically dissident information by filtering messages for specific keywords, such as the names of known dissidents (ONI 2006:3). If a user on a government-approved connection sends or receives a message containing one or more of these “trigger” words, a pop-up message appears, saying the document has been blocked for reasons of national security. Then, the application used to write the message (be it a word processor or e-mail client) is automatically closed (Reporters Without Borders 2006:4). In an effort to impede oppositional organization, the Cuban government filters e-mail messages, another means of controlling the populace’s access to and use of the internet.

To keep dissident information from reaching foreign publishers, the regime ensures that no political opponents or independent journalists can access the internet legally. As previously mentioned, people who wish to access their e-mail from Correos de Cuba internet cafes must provide their names and addresses or passport numbers. Known political opponents or independent journalists are prohibited from entering the internet cafes. For example, none of the seventeen journalists who work for Cubanac N press agency (the most prominent organization of independent journalists in Cuba) are permitted to use legal internet access points to send their work to overseas publishers. Instead, they must dictate their stories over the public phones with high international calling rates (Reporters Without Borders 2006:5). Though time-consuming and expensive, this method of communicating stories is much safer than attempting to send dispatches via the internet. In 2006, there were twenty-four independent journalists incarcerated in Cuba, serving sentences of up to twenty-seven years. During their trials, the Cuban prosecution focused on their internet activity, concentrating on the fact that they wrote dissident articles for websites based in the United States (2006:5). By keeping independent journalists off the internet, the regime attempts to inhibit their communication with foreign news publishers.

The regime also relies heavily on self-censorship. Harsh penalties make illegal or dissident internet use very dangerous, and most internet users avoid providing or accessing information that could be viewed as counter-revolutionary (ONI 2006:3). In February of 2006, the website La Nueva Cuba reported that five university students had been expelled from their school for hacking into its servers and creating chat forums on websites based in the United States, even though their internet activity was completely non-political. The website also published a video of the university authorities addressing an audience regarding the action being taken against the offending students. In the video, one of the officials says that illegal internet use is punishable by five years in prison, and that, “the war against the enemies of the Revolution is being played out on several fronts, including the internet” (Reporters Without Borders 2006:4). Prison sentences and sanctions such as those placed on the university students dissuade many Cubans from using the internet in potentially dissident manners.

VII. Maintaining Centralized Control in a Connected Society

The Castro regime’s policy of selective access to the internet helps the government maintain centralized control over the country. At the 1996 World Economic Forum, in his speech entitled “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” John Perry Barlow, the co-founder of the Electronic Fronteir Foundation, expressed the common sentiment that the internet is rendering national sovereignty obsolete by making it increasingly difficult to control citizens’ access to information (Boas 2006). In repressive regimes, the internet can allow citizens to become aware of the social, economic, and political realities of other countries, and can facilitate the realization that much can be improved (2006). By regulating access to the World Wide Web, the Cuban government has more control over its citizens’ exposure to the influential information available from the outside world on the internet.

The internet is considered by many to be an important tool in the development of democracy, as it can supply citizens with powerful means of broad communication. As the internet provides venues for free expression and the unregulated exchange of ideas, unrestricted access can strengthen democratic values and standards (Mohr 2007:151). Unlike other forms of telecommunication, such as telephones or televisions, the internet is a communication medium that permits each individual user to send and receive information from many recipients and sources. Therefore, the internet is not a means of communication supportive of centralized control (Boas 2000:57). In countries with unrestricted internet access, the web is an effective means of establishing interaction and discourse among members of civil society. Unregulated access to the internet would be a valuable tool for Cuban oppositional groups and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) supportive of reform. Potentially, the internet could be very useful for logistical organization and transnational networking, two elements of political organization that are indubitably more difficult without an unrestricted internet connection (Boas 2000:63). Also, the lack of accessible internet seriously impedes activists’ ability to spread information and educate the citizenry, activities that would ultimately encourage a widespread demand for reform (Mohr 2007:151). According to LaKindra Mohr, of Johns Hopkins University, restrictions on the web “can not only hinder, but also eliminate the role of the internet in stirring a social undercurrent for political change” (2007:151). The Castro regime’s control of internet access has hampered the development of a structured opposition by depriving NGOs and opponents of a valuable organizational tool.

VIII. Potential Benefits of the Internet for the Castro regime

Although the availability of information on the internet can be viewed as a threat to the Castro regime, the web also offers numerous potential benefits to the Cuban government and people. The Cuban government has long recognized the benefits of incorporating information technology in its traditional areas of development, such as education and medical care (Boas 2000:62). Additionally, the internet is a potentially valuable resource for the regime itself, which could use the web to counter criticism abroad and improve its international image without radically changing its system (2000:62). For Cuba as a whole, the greatest advantages of the internet may be economic. The rapid development of the tourist industry in Cuba has been aided by the web, which has facilitated easier advertising, the booking of reservations and flights, and supported credit card authorization (2000:62). Websites of money transfer companies allow Cubans living abroad to send money to their relatives on the island, another key source of foreign currency for the Cuban economy (2000:62). The Castro regime regulates access to the internet because it is a gateway of potentially threatening information, but the World Wide Web could also facilitate the achievement of the Revolutions goals in education, health care, and economic development, among other areas.

IX. The Dilemma of the Digital Age in a Dictatorship

With regard to the web, the Castro regime faces a significant dilemma, as it is caught between taking advantage of the opportunities for economic advancement offered by the web and relinquishing some of its centralized control. According to Anthony Boadle, a Routers journalist working in Cuba, the Cuban government’s policy of controlled internet access is logical for an autocratic regime trying to stay in power. The spread of information is dangerous for a regime that depends on centralized control. Boadle insists that the internet could be the downfall of Cuba, just as the fax machine was the downfall of the Soviet Union (Lecture 10/01/07). Currently, the Cuban government prefers to control citizens’ access to the internet, considering unregulated connectivity to be a threat to the Revolution. Despite its initial assertions that each Cuban is entitled to internet access and that Cuba’s internet connection would facilitate the arrival and exchange of information, the Castro regime has not made the internet accessible to ordinary Cubans.

X. Conclusion

The regulations and monitoring mechanisms described in this paper demonstrate that the Castro regime has no interest in or intention of relinquishing its power over the internet. To allow the Cuban people open access to the internet would be to allow them access to information and organizational tools that could be very threatening to the centralized control of the authoritarian government. In the interest of retaining power, the Cuban government has allowed connectivity only where it directly benefits the Revolution. For this reason, ninety-eight percent of the Cuban population remains without access to the internet and the powerful information and networking tools it provides.

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