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Cuba Says the Internet Now a Priority
lpress writes Cuba first connected to the Internet in 1996 through a Sprint link funded by the US National Science Foundation. A year later the Cuban government decided to contain and control it. Now they say the Internet is a priority. If so, they need a long term plan, but they can get started with low cost interim measures. There is virtually no modern infrastructure on the island, but they could aggressively deploy satellite technology at little cost and, where phone lines could support it, install DSL equipment.
The difference is that the Internet the Cuban government wants (no doubt censored and highly regulated like in China, Russia etc) is totally different to the internet that the old guy was trying to set up (which wouldn't have had the censorship and regulations)
They already did release him. That's a big part of the recent thawing of relations between the US and Cuba...
After several years planning and deploying, they have fiber-to-the-shore, courtesy of their sugar daddies in Venezuela. It's public access that's lacking, and perhaps the showstopper here isn't lack of computers but scaling up their national firewall.
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I agree. I went to Cuba in 2009 and in Havana I went numerous times to an internet 'cafe' in the library near Parque Central. It wasn't the fastest thing in the world but there were around 20 machines in there and I didn't have any issues (although they all seemed to run their own operating system or front end or something). I saw internet cafes in Santa Clara and Trinidad too, and when I returned to Havana I stayed in a Casa Particulare just off Prado and the guy had his own computer with internet access.
In the cafes I even went onto the CIA, FBI and White House websites as well as looking up anti-communist blogs, all with no problems.
But yes, it's not quite up there yet but it does exist and the Cubans want it.
Russia/Ukraine (Brides)
Cuba is already a good source of brides to Europeans. It's only the US that has had limited access, the rest of the world travels freely to Cuba.
All true, but there is more to the story. (I'm Cuban by the way and half my family is still there). In much of the country in areas outside of Havana people don't have much and the homes are run down to say the least. They don't even have phones, or much food for that matter. It will take a long time to change that.
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