
Cuba: a nation gets connected - caio1982
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article38012694.html
======
dalke
The title is a bit of a misnomer. Cuba was already connected to the Internet
in the early 1990s. See
[http://som.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/devnat/nations/cuba/cuba2.ht...](http://som.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/devnat/nations/cuba/cuba2.htm)
:

> One of the authors (Snyder) was able to make a direct connection from the
> CENIAI Unix system to a VAX/VMS system in his apartment using a single X.121
> address at the Havana end. To get to the Login prompt, his connection ran
> from the PAD program on the CENIAI Unix microcomputer over the X.25
> satellite link to Moscow. VNIIPAS received the call and routed it to the
> international Sprint network. It was routed to Reston, Virginia where it
> entered the domestic US network. Sprint conveyed the call to Columbus, Ohio,
> and passed it to the CompuServe X.25 gateway. CompuServe carried it to
> University of Arizona's Telecommunications Group where it was translated
> from X.25 to DECnet format, and routed through Ethernet, fiber optics, a 56K
> line, and an asynch 9.6K DECnet line to Snyder's apartment. The gateway VAX
> in his apartment passed the call to his workstation VAX, which displayed
> ``Username:''!

~~~
jpatokal
North Korea has also been connected to the Internet for a good long time --
doesn't mean that 99.9% of its population has any access.

I do agree that this article is a bit hypey, a few dozen Wifi hotspots that
charge $2/hr isn't exactly a telecoms resolutions. Unlike NK, Cuba has had
public Internet for a long time, it has just been expensive and inconvenient,
and continues to be so.

~~~
dalke
What is your point of bringing North Korea into the thread? There are plenty
of countries which have worse internet penetration than Cuba, including Haiti,
the Solomon Islands, Cambodia, and Myanmar. Surely the last a better
comparison to Cuba than NK, no?

BTW, a quick check of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba)
says that more about 3% of the population had internet access already by 2002,
and about 25% now. Slow Internet? Certainly. Filtered? Yes. Expensive? Yes.
But why bring up an irrelevant 0.1% statistic?

~~~
hnal943
You can't think of any similarities between North Korea and Cuba?

~~~
cleaver
Cuba's isolation is only from the United States. The rest of the world comes
and goes as they please. It's a favourite tourist destination of many
Canadians and Europeans. I've seen Chinese construction and petroleum
interests there as well.

As for Internet, they had it, but prices are far beyond what an individual can
afford. It was also so slow it wasn't worth bothering. I gave up after 30
minutes having only downloaded a few emails.

I recently met a Web developer visiting Toronto from Cuba. I was impressed
that he could get any work done with such slow downloads.

------
sbuttgereit
What is not addressed in the article is how open the access is, or if there's
a Great Firewall of Cuba. I cannot help but suspecting that there is.

Connectivity to the outside word is not, by itself, a virtue unless you get
access to the outside world. If that perspective is so heavily edited that all
you get is the same stale thinking you had before the connectivity, can you
say you even are truly connected? I think not.

~~~
toomuchtodo
To anyone in Cuba: If you're a tech professional, can you run
[http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/cli.html](http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/cli.html)
and report the results back?

~~~
deproders
[http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=43ca253f-8683-9...](http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=43ca253f-8683-9854a58e-fb28-478b-94ed)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Replace this link with a screenshot excluding or obfuscating your IP.

------
bayesianhorse
There is an Open Source user group in Cuba called GUTL
([http://gutl.jovenclub.cu/](http://gutl.jovenclub.cu/)). I met one of their
members at the last Python Unconference in Hamburg.

They want to organize a tech conference in Cuba, the idea being that for the
exchange of knowledge it is easier to bring foreigners to Cuba than for Cubans
to go to international conferences. See
[http://www.cubaconf.org/](http://www.cubaconf.org/)

------
vegabook
maravilloso, and welcome to our brethren in Cuba! But there is still something
sad about the internet reaching _all_ of the planet. I kinda liked the idea of
a place, a mythical place, an unspoiled place....untouched by rent-seeking
Search, un-comment-streamed, un-immediate. A place where Adwords know no
purchase...a modern-day unwired Atlantis!

Just to relax. Once in a while.

~~~
azinman2
For your own benefit... Cubans meanwhile probably aren't so crazy about forced
disconnection.

There's always North Korea!

------
captn3m0
imo, the chat application mentioned in the article is available here:
[https://imo.im/](https://imo.im/)

I was a heavy user of imo because it was a generic xmpp client, and used it
mainly for google chat, along with federated facebook chat etc. It was a
really good interface for handling multiple chats at the same time (This is
before slack). However, google's move to move away from federated xmpp cost
them a lot as they lost a lot of customers, iirc.

Nice to see that they are still doing good.

------
mrbig4545
I was there in may, Cuba was already connected. Its just another "look at how
good America is making Cuba" article.

[http://laredcubana.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/cuban-
infrastructu...](http://laredcubana.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/cuban-
infrastructure-investment-china.html?m=1)

~~~
caio1982
Really? Where/how exactly did you read that in the article? All I could find
that is slightly related to your comment is this:

"Although some U.S. companies, including Google, seem eager to help Cuba build
up its Internet capabilities, the government still hasn't tipped its hand on
how much help it wants from the United States."

I'm pretty sure Cubans don't care who's setting things up as long as they get
connected at last. To me the article seems to focus on the OMG-I-AM-ONLINE
aspect of things, reporting people trying to make video calls for the first
time and such. That's special and that's about technology enabling people, not
much about politics at this point IMHO.

~~~
caente
I agree, OMG-I-AM-ONLINE, is pretty much the only good thing about it. I'm
cuban, I haven't lived there for a few years now. My wife and her family have
been able to speak using video. I have also heard stories of people have been
able to _see_ they loved ones after many years. Other than that, cuban
internet is horrible. I have had all kinds. I worked in a 300 employees
company where our internet was 196kbs. After that I worked in another with 2
mbps, but this one had more than 4000 employees across the country, so after 5
pm the internet was awesome, not so much on office hours. I never had internet
at home until I quit my job to work as freelancer, then I had to pay 60 usd
for 80 hrs a month on a commuted connection, which never when above 40kbps.
All of that happened _after_ 2005\. And btw, that commuted connection, was
because my grandmother was born in Spain, so _she_ had the right to have
internet, I was lucky. Other cubans need to use more irregular methods. Today
it's not much better, yes, you can have internet on the park, but it is still
very hard to actually use it to get work done. For that, you still need to
leave the country.

------
curiousjorge
this is exciting! even more exciting would be when the regime collapses. what
sort of war crimesque stories would we hear? ex. who was sending the messages
on the number stations? imagine one day, north korea....the horrors that would
be unveiled while the world sat by looking the other way. it would be the
biggest embarassment of humanity. in our modern day and age, in this day of UN
and international bullshit, we allow a nationwide gulag to operate and
continue to attack south korea.

~~~
WaxProlix
Are you seriously comparing Cuba to NK?

A country whose internal economic structuring during McCarthyism netted them
an economic and political blackballing by their nearest trading neighbor (one
of the largest economic powerhouses in the world) and all their allies, but
which still managed to produce one of the world's best healthcare systems and
even send their surplus of doctors on numerous humanitarian missions... how is
this even remotely the same as a country that chose to cloister itself and
actively deny its citizens rights?

Or have I just been trolled, maybe...

~~~
marcoperaza
To use your words, Cuba actively denies its citizens rights. There is no
freedom of speech, press, or assembly. Internet access is closely monitored
and heavily restricted. For a long time it was illegal to even leave Cuba. My
family had to tell a web of lies to escape decades ago. Cuban doctors are
forced to work overseas for pittances and have minders to keep them from
defecting. The same goes for Cuban athletes, who routinely defect despite the
regime's efforts to stop them. The Castros funded communist horrors across
South America and even in Africa. Today they prop up their autocratic allies
in Venezuela. The idea that Cuba has "one of the world's best healthcare
systems" has been thoroughly debunked too.

Further, what you call "economic restructuring" most others would see as
illegal confiscation of property. It's little reported today, but one of the
original reasons for the US embargo against Cuba is the nationalization of
American-owned property without compensation. Communism produced only poverty
and hardship everywhere it has been implemented, what makes you think that
Cuba would have been any different save for the embargo?

Finally, as someone who's family witnessed the horrors of Castro's Cuba
firsthand, and decided to flee to America with little more than the clothes on
their backs, I'm saddened to see someone who's clearly intelligent and
articulate repeat such brazen lies.

The difference between Cuba and North Korea is just a matter of degree.

------
wahsd
aaaaand the NSA has tapped them in direct violation of all things democratic
and good.

