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Cuba Lifts Ban on Home Computers

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hello-computer dept.

ianare writes "The first legalized home computers have gone on sale in Cuba, the latest in a series of restrictions on daily life which President Raul Castro has lifted in recent weeks. The desktop computers cost almost $800, in a country where the average wage is under $20 a month, but some Cubans do have access to extra income. Internet access remains restricted to certain workplaces, schools and universities on the island which the government claims is due to low bandwidth availability. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is laying a new cable under the Caribbean, but it remains unclear whether once the connection is completed, the authorities will allow unrestricted access to the internet."

3 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. This is not news... by isilrion · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I'm a Cuban. This happened more than a month ago. And we are very happy that someone finally came to his senses about it.

    What's new, though, is that [startin soon], they are going to be sold without operating systems... No more windows pre-installed. Or so I've heard. Now we only need tons of Ubuntu disks to give away at the sotre.

    1. Re:This is not news... by turgid · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You'd be surprised at how resourceful Cuban people are...I am amazed at how they make some of those old cars still work with no parts available...

      I'm Scottish. My grandfather had a lathe, a welding set, a bandsaw, a circular saw, various soldering irons, dies and taps etc. Parts for engines were made now and then, weights for fishing etc.

      My father has it all now.

      I dare say it'll be mine one day too, but I haven't a clue how to use any of it.

      --
      Stick Men
  2. Cuban here... Censorship? by isilrion · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I would say, both parts are true. Cuban bandwdith is severely limited, thus, it is obviuous that certain key areas are prioritized (oddly enough, universities aren't - we have a 1mbs for 10 thousand users at mine).

    On the other hand, that doesn't explain why don't we have conectivity even within our countries (it is faster to download Debian from the internet that it is to download it from the cuban mirrors). There is even one law to address this issue, that has been largely ignored except on the part of giving monopoly-like powers to our phone company. And it even seem they find cheaper to use satellite to connect two places within the city, than to lay a couple hundred metters of fiber to the nearest hub.

    With that, though, I'm willing to call (the ministry of informatics and communications, the phone company, whatever), ignorant rather than evil. I do accept that the reason for that is technical (that we are forbidden to hook to the fiber optics that go around my country). But, there is censorship. Over time, I've collected a set of domains that seem to be banned. No one never confirms it, and the banning works as if the remote server was not working, but routing the request through a proxy server, you find out that it is indeed working. And more recently, we got this other law, that was publicly mentioned by this guy, and forbids chats, formus and mailing lists.

    So, we have everything. We have serious technical difficulties caused by the US (internet access). We have serious technical difficulties caused by who-knows-who (intranet access). And, we have censorship. I have high hopes that if the first one is solved, the rest will follow. However, for the sake of my country and our socialism... I do wish that the last two are solved first.