Cuba Getting Internet Upstream Via Venezuela

An anonymous reader writes "Seems like Cuba is working around the US internet embargo by teaming up with Venezuela: A confidential contract released yesterday on Wikileaks reveals Cuba's plan to receive internet upstream via an undersea cable to Venezuela, thus circumventing the enduring embargo of the US, denying Cuba access to nearby American undersea cables and overcoming the current limits of satellite-only connectivity. The connection, to be delivered by CVG Telecom of Venezuela, is to be completed by 2010 and will provide data, video as well as voice service for both the public and governmental services."

Comments

Surprised?

[chill]

I figured they arranged for something like this years ago.

Re:Surprised?

[DaedalusHKX]

What amazes me is WHY would the USA government have been involved in such socialistic crap such as embargoes, rather than letting the citizenry sample the good and bad of all and choose for themselves. Unless of course, one notes that a citizen is another term for a "loyal subject"... an "oath of citizenship" is the same thing as the "oath of fealty" once was.

Amusing, yes, very amusing. Too bad it takes all of us so long to learn all this.

Re:Surprised?

[baldass_newbie]

the USA government have been involved in such socialistic crap such as embargoes, rather than letting the citizenry sample the good and bad of all and choose for themselves

I don't think the USA gets a choice in what the good people of Cuba see or don't see. I think the Cuban government does and jails those who try to shine the light.

Re:Surprised?

[tomhudson]

Well, considering the Bay of Pigs, the attempts to assassinate Castro, and all the other plots, maybe it's time for the US to formally renounce such stupid behaviour.

Then again, I don't think pigs are going to fly any time soon, either ...

Re:Surprised?

[DaedalusHKX]

You probably haven't noticed all the restrictions in place to travel to Cuba, have you? USA nationals/citizens are denied a LOT of the freedom they are proclaimed to have. Technically if our government was OUR government then it wouldnt' distrust us to make up our own minds about "good" or "evil", would they?

Re:Surprised?

[gnick]

tomhudson

I think you misspelled Jimmy Carter.

But I agree - The embargo is idiotic. We (the U.S.) screwed up the same way in Iran. The people liked us shortly after the revolution and blue jeans and MTV could have really made for a good relationship, in my arm-chair general opinion. (Disclaimer - the notion that the general populace liked the U.S. comes from a single native Iranian who was teaching a Programming Patterns course that I attended, and I chose to believe him. Fell free to correct me.)

Cuba is similar - Give 'em YouTube, uncensored Google, porn, Wikipedia, streaming reality TV and show 'em the stuff that a lot of people in the world enjoy (for whatever reasons). It'll do a lot more good than what we've tried so far...

On a side note, if you're willing to drag a floaty toy to the beach and paddle your ass to Florida, I say we turn our heads and let you stay - You're obviously more dedicated to being an American than most of the folks that were born here.

Re:Surprised?

[Darkness404]

Hmmm... Lets see... Which is the better way to get rid of a dictatorship A) don't allow any material into the country that tells of a better life or B) Flood Cuba's shores with artists, with musicians, give them Google, and the Wikis, give them /., blogs, The Pirate Bay, give them an uncensored internet and things start working themselves out. Think of it this way, if after we nuked Japan, we didn't help rebuild, and still called it evil, Japan would have most likely rebuilt a dictator-style empire. But we didn't do that, we gave them animation which turned into Anime, we gave them our technology which was taken and now Japan is a leader in technology. We could have done the same with Cuba, but instead we preferred to call names and run and hide.

Re:Surprised?

[techno-vampire]

Cuba is similar - Give 'em YouTube, uncensored Google, porn, Wikipedia...

Exactly. give them what Jerry Pournelle calls "weapons of cultural mass destruction" and let those weapons do their job. Within a few years, either the Cuban government will lighten up, or the people will throw them out when they realize how much better their lives could be. People are only willing to put up with repressive regimes if they don't know there's anything better out there, which is why countries like Cuba, Iran and North Korea limit the amount of information about the rest of the world that their people can get their hands on.

Re:Surprised?

[compro01]

46 years ago. Just 20 years before that, you were in a little shooting & bombing war with a little place called Japan.

Fast-forward to today and how much of the tech sold in the US was developed in that country?

FFS, you're now friendlier with the country that was controlling those missiles than you are with Cuba!

Re:Surprised?

[Adult film producer]

You can't indict the u.s. health care system for lower life expectancy among americans. Its not the fault of the system that americans stuff their faces with double whoppers meals, super-sized coca-colas and serving sizes at restaurants that could feed a horse. No matter what medicine or treatment is available those people will die a lot sooner than a cuban.

Re:Surprised?

[mjwx]

The US didn't give Japan animation, they've been able to draw pictures for centuries before the US even existed. Films and photography were made in Japan prior to world war 2. The US didn't give a lot of technology to Japan, Japan reversed engineered a lot of it and even recreated some technologies from observation. Saying that the US gave modern technology is an insult to Japanese engineers and scientists who laboured to create modern Japan, especially since the Japanese planes and warships fielded in WWII were technologically superior to those fielded by the United States (the US had superior numbers, resources and on occasion, training).

Re:Surprised?

[Gideon Fubar]

I'm sure you'll be welcome here in Australia, tho i hear that welfare and healthcare are even better in some EU countries.

I also think that a balance is probably a better approach.. taking the good aspects of Capitalism and Socialism and working them together.. So businesses are free to trade, medical care is catered for, and people who can't get work don't starve to death.

It's a pretty weak simile, but i see a country as roughly like a person. If they want to stay active they have to stay healthy.. expecting them to take care of it themselves is like expecting your cells to organize themselves so you have Olympic-level fitness on demand. Pretty much the same goes for education..

Re:Surprised?

[orzetto]

I'd love to find a country that's figured out how they should be balanced and needs a MSEE grad with PM experience that can look past a late-night semi-inebriated /. post...

Norway. It's also the most peaceful place in the world. I lived there until March, I moved since I got a one-of-a-kind job elsewhere. That's still a place I would recommend, though. The health care system is universal, tax levels are supposed to be the highest in the world, but that's not true: they are high for the rich bastards, I never paid more than 29.5% of my income and my last salary was about $7500 a month before taxes.

And, yes, they are desperate to find people there. With the current oil prices their economy is on the way up, but you cannot improvise engineers in a few months, so chances are you can find a job there fairly easily. They also have movies/TV in original language (mostly English) and most people speak decent English too, so you are not completely lost in a foreign country until you learn Norwegian. Norwegians are also efficient as Germans, but without the rudeness; pretty nice people to work with.

Re:Surprised?

[hey!]

Back in the late 60s, when I was a kid, I went with my friend to visit his uncle, who was a WW2 combat vet. He was dirt poor, living in a filthy one room apartment, because he couldn't hold down a job. He was a nice guy, but you could see why he couldn't keep a job. Underneath the niceness, there was this layer of craziness that was continually bubbling. It wasn't a scary kind of crazy, it was sad, and haunted. Employers tried to help him out, but he was unreliable.

It was like he had one eye focused in the present, and one twenty five years in the past. What he was looking at were war atrocities, which would have been bad enough, but they were atrocities committed by soldiers on our side. When they happened, he couldn't accept what his eyes were telling him, and he continued seeing and not accepting those things every day of his life. He was proud American, and nothing could ever shake that, which was what made the shame inescapable.

This is what history is made up of: Details that inevitably don't fit into the big picture, even if that were the truest possible big picture. It was the Germans who committed atrocities, so an atrocity committed by Americans doesn't fit. When we hear of something that doesn't fit, we set out to disprove it, or failing that justify it. If you can't disprove or justify it, you just have to accept it. If you can't accept it, you become a little crazy.

Still, that doesn't mean the big story about the greatest generation going to war to save civilization isn't true, or at the least the truest way of fitting everything together in a nutshell. There will alway be details that don't fit. Some of them will be horrific or tragic, some ironic, and some just inexplicably perverse.

It's hard to say which was the bigger 20th C story, the fight against fascism or the struggle to hold the line against Soviet style communist totalitarianism. But the cold war was a much longer, generational story and so is messier. I'd say that on the whole the saving the world from Communism story is true, but there are enough contradictory incidents to turn that view on its head if you want to. The radicalization of Iran by undermining its secular democracy, for example. Vietnam, for example. Cuba is a rich source of paradoxes.

A lot of what we did in the Cold War looks now like mistakes, although we'll never know for sure on all of them because there's alway those bits that don't fit. Certainly some of the things we did were at least grossly unfair to some of the people involved.

Accepting this doesn't make the big story untrue, it just means that we should learn from them and try to do things better next time. What's the point of history, otherwise?

Could someone tell my why we have the embargo?

[WhoIsThePumaman]

Are those sneaky Reds still trying to use their communism-infused cigars to persuade people to become socialists? Are we still angry over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion? Or do we just have a raging hard on for the nostalgic cold war?

Re:Could someone tell my why we have the embargo?

[jonwil]

The embargo exists because if the embargo was lifted, there are a lot of Cuban ex pats in Florida and elsewhere that would vote the other way as a result. And because the system in the US is so screwed, those votes are enough to change the outcome of elections.

Re:Could someone tell my why we have the embargo?

[dbIII]

There's also the sugar situation. Lift the embargo and there will be pressure to buy cheap sugar from Cuba instead of using expensive corn syrup - so it would upset the sugar and corn lobbies.

The whole continuing embargo thing is childish spite that hurts both countries and still doesn't stop some imports. A Cuban cigar even turned up in an unexpected place in the White House a few years ago.

Uphold the Embargo!!!

[germansausage]

We must uphold the embargo. Its the only way small impoverished Communist nations like Cuba can be brought to heel. We must never allow trade with communist countries, or buy their goods. Except China.

Re:Uphold the Embargo!!!

[servognome]

We (the US) have some grand proclamation (I forget the name) that states "There will be no communists in our hemisphere. Stupid yuppies, get of our lawn and take your damn governmental ideas with you." That's a direct quote, I think.

No they (the Cuban exile population) is rabidly against Castro and the communist government of Cuba.
We (the rest of the US) think, "Meh."

Who do you think the politicians will listen to?

Re:Cold War left-overs

[longacre]

Let me get this straight: an embargo that was begun by a Democratic White House and continued through several more Democrats presidents, and even expanded by yet another Democrat less than a decade ago (Clinton closed some loopholes in 1999) is a Republican conspiracy?

Can you smell what the rock is cooking?

[gandhi_2]

I'm sure there will be some accidental ship-anchor-cable-cutting to be completed in 2011.

This whole situation with Cuba is tiresome

[93 Escort Wagon]

If Florida weren't such a politically important state and the Floridians that held positions of privilege under Batista weren't so vocal, the US would have normalized its relations with Cuba long ago (and don't blame Bush for this one - both parties are equally to blame). Castro was a tin-pot dictator; but you can't convincingly argue that the situation for the average Cuban is somehow worse now than it was under Batista.

I realize there was concern about the Soviet Union using Cuba as a springboard to threaten the mainland US (and yeah, I know about the Cuban Missile Crisis); but that connection died about 20 years ago. The world has changed. Fidel is gone, and Raul has even undertaken some small reforms.

If we (the US) really want to rid the world of this small, tiny bastion of communism, we should engage them rather than embargo the island. Stop giving the Cuban rulers an enemy to unite the people against, and let the free market show them why they should dump their tired old system.

Re:You know...

[belmolis]

Exactly. It's not like the US embargoes other countries that are just as undemocratic or worse. How about Saudi Arabia: no religious freedom, no democracy whatever, nothing resembling a real legal system, no freedom of speech, and no rights for women at all, not to mention the massive export of bigotry and funding for terrorism? How about Equatorial Guinea, whose dictatorship would be funny if it weren't so pathetic? Funny how the US didn't boycott Chile under Pinochet, or Greece under the colonels or Haiti under Duvalier. Of all the countries with undemocratic political systems, can anybody seriously believe that Cuba is in the same league as North Korea?

Applies to ALL embargoes

[mi]

Technically if our government was OUR government then it wouldnt' distrust us to make up our own minds about "good" or "evil", would they?

This is an argument against all embargoes and other economic sanctions. There is no difference — in principle — between banning you from going there yourself (propping up the regime with your tourism money), banning you from selling them shoes, and banning you from selling them advanced military technology. A free citizen — it can be argued along your lines — ought to be free to make their own decision. And free shareholders of a bank ought to decide, whether or not freeze a particular account. Etcaetera.

So, are you against all embargoes?

Or only against those, which target regimes you sympathize with (admit it, you own a Che Guevarra T-shirt)?

Wanted to Launch? No.

[Chrisq]

I am sure that nobody actually wanted to launch them. The fact that the USSR had submarine-launched nukes slightly after that and never gave any indication that it wanted to unilaterally strike the USA proves that.

In fact for a long time the USSR had a "no first nuclear strike" policy when NATO did not.

I think it was the psychological bargaining power of having missiles so close to the USA that they wanted.

Re:Wanted to Launch? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget the US had it's own missiles in Turkey, right on the border with the USSR. Cuba wanted some security after Bay of Pigs and the USSR saw a way to get parity with the US by having missiles located equally as close. I can't blame them for that, can you?

It's no secret now that the US dismantled it's missiles in Turkey as part of the agreement to end the crisis, so the USSR at least got something they wanted.