The Cuban Memory Stick Underground

circletimessquare writes "The NyTimes has an aticle describing how students and others in Cuba have taken to passing around media on memory sticks, as this is the only way they can get around state-controlled media. Also driving this phenomenon is the fact that there are so few places to get on the Internet. In Old Havana there is only one Internet cafe; getting online there for an hour costs 1/3 of the average Cuban's monthly wages. Local entrepreneurs get the memory sticks from European friends, since they are scarce to find in Cuba through normal channels, and expensive."

Comments

Re:Must be evil capitalist counterrevolutionaries

[Scrameustache]

Yeah, the Castro brothers aren't exactly nice to those who disagree with them But they are still an improvement over the dictator they replaced.

Called UUCP

[Colin Smith]

With store and forward for email and Usenet.

Though we used to feed a couple of sites with 10Mb tapes...

If all you have is analog phones, or even tapes, you can still run email and get usenet.

Citations for above

[Solandri]

I was curious enough to do some quick googling on the above claim.

Wikipedia entry on disparities between way infant mortality is measured.
US News & World Report article on same (doesn't cite sources, though news magazines almost never do).
Slate article on impact of premature births on infant mortality rate.
Boston Globe article on rate of premature births in U.S.

It would appear there is something to the claim that better medical care can skew infant mortality rate upwards.