🚀 go-pugleaf

From: torresD <torresD30@hotmail.com>
Subject: Havana Online In Cuba
Date: Sunday, October 14, 2001 8:19 AM

Havana online In Cuba, black market Internet access makes it
easier for prostitutes to get connected than doctors.

- - - - - - - - - - - - By David Lipschultz

Oct. 10, 2001 | HAVANA -- The apartment is an unlikely home for
Cuba's burgeoning Internet revolution, the last place in the
world that might encourage the use of words like "superhighway"
or "digital." The walls are coated with plaster ready to crumble
at a simple touch. A half-century-old mufflerless Chevy booms
out a loud groan with a belch of exhaust on the narrow street
two feet from the door. From appearances, you could be in any
normal Cuban home in Old Havana. Instead you're in the residence
of one of Cuba's few cyber criminals.

Rodrigo (who requested his name be changed for obvious reasons)
is a little nervous. He is dressed in knockoff Gap khakis and a
Polo button-down. He speaks some English, enough to show he's
not a simple Cuban peasant but not enough to speak his mind. He
circles the room a few times as if he is wondering how it is
that I got here and what exactly he is supposed to say. Hadn't
he made it very clear to my Cuban liaison that he was hesitant
to discuss his extracurricular work? Still, he has let me into
his house. He seems to feel some desire to self reveal.

Rodrigo is a classic example of modern Cuba's penchant for
glaring contradictions. He is a member and employee of the Young
Communist Association (YCA), an organization that espouses the
communist axioms of anti-individualism and group equality. Yet
he is also a totally self-motivated free marketer. As a systems
administrator for the YCA he helps manage its computer network
so that a very select group of academics and government
officials can access the Internet. But in the true spirit of
modern Cuba, he also steals all their logins and passwords and
resells them on a newly formed black market to wannabe Net
surfers.

In his day job he makes around $15 per month. His night job
brings in $50 a person per month, and already he has a roster of
dozens of customers.

He's a typical Cuban capitalist. He may be a member of the new
economy, but he's not so different from the thousands of cigar
factory workers who steal boxes of Cohibas with $150 price tags
and then resell them for $40 on the black market. Or the rum
peddlers who have been taking advantage of the fact that the end
of the Cold War, and the demise of Cuba's chief benefactor, the
Soviet Union, have forced Castro to open up Cuba to tourism and
the U.S. dollars that come with it.

"The people live here off stealing from the government," says
Alfonso, an ex-government security officer who won't divulge his
last name.

And for some reason, maybe because he already assumes everyone
knows this, or just out of simple entrepreneurial pride, Rodrigo
does eventually sit down in front of me and begin talking about
his illicit activities. "Even if the government tries to control
it, people here understand that information is everything and
they'll pay to get it," he says. "So I found a way to give it to
them."

So who are Rodrigo's customers? Oddly, they aren't the country's
elite but rather its counter-elite. $50 a month is a prohibitive
sum of money for even upper echelon professionals in a country
where the average wage is about $20 per month. But thanks to the
influx of greenbacks, the class of Cubans who live in the dollar
economy can get online.

That class is filled with people outside the normal state-run
workforce -- hotel workers, underground restaurant owners,
freelance tour guides, street scammers of all sorts and
prostitutes. A hotel worker gets a buck here and there. A
prostitute, at $20 a pop, can make exponentially more money. Put
that in perspective: A lawyer makes $20 per month in a Cuban
currency that's only accepted in state stores with limited
merchandise. A doctor makes a similar amount. The result: A
prostitute can surf the Web but a lawyer who doesn't have
special governmental privileges can't.

Rodrigo has a client who is a prostitute. Like all of Rodrigo's
clients, for her $50 she receives a password and login belonging
to someone else. She's allowed access to the Internet only when
the authorized owner of that login is certain to be offline --
from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. According to Rodrigo, she is desperately
trying to leave Cuba. She wants to go to the U.S., but she's
wary of the dangerous, 80-mile ocean stretch to Miami. The only
safe way out she can envision is via marriage, says Rodrigo. So
she uses Rodrigo, and the Internet, to post her picture and
other vital details on the Net in the hope that a Web-surfing,
Latin-loving (and surely desperate) American will take her hand
in marriage -- and take her body to the U.S.

"She's not unusual," says Rodrigo. Many of his clients want to
use the Internet as a tool to find a way out of Cuba. But
others, he says, just want to be part of the information
culture, to be on par with everyone else in the world. With a
world-renowned literacy rate -- some estimate that it's as high
as 90 percent -- Cubans are far from typical Third World
citizens, despite their poverty. Cubans are highly educated, and
produce world-recognized research in numerous fields.

"They want to be in the loop with other people around the
world," says Rodrigo, who is getting an engineering degree at
the University of Havana.

But that's exactly what the government hopes will not happen.
According to Luis Fernandez, a government spokesman, only 40,000
academics and government officials (out of 11 million people)
who can prove that they have special reasons for surfing are
allowed Net access. One of the reasons for this, says the
government, is that the country is so economically starved due
to the U.S. embargo that it simply can't afford to build the
infrastructure to supply Internet access.

But that's only partly true. Undoubtedly there are many
technical deficiencies. The satellites relaying data in and out
of the country are antiquated, and the local telephone loop, if
it's even accessible, is often ancient. Many Cubans can't afford
a telephone line, much less a computer.

But "they have fiber crisscrossing the country built out by the
Russians," says Albert Weintraub, a WorldCom board member who
used to be in charge of coordinating phone and data traffic from
Cuba to the U.S. for his company. "The technology is there in
many places."

Governmental fear of unfettered flows of information is likely
to be a much bigger obstacle to widespread Internet access than
any infrastructure issue. The government owns the TV stations,
the radio and the newspapers. The information that passes
through these mediums is censored. The government also owns and
manages all four of the country's ISPs through an agency called
the National Center for Automated Data Exchange (CENIAI). And
all Internet data passes a government-controlled Internet
gateway. Castro is on record as vehemently resisting any major
change that might lead to more openness.

Once connected to the Internet, a Cuban could, in theory, get
anything from anti-Castro propaganda to boating routes from Cuba
to Florida. But even for the lucky few with a connection, access
is still censored. Rodrigo says that e-mail is monitored by
software programs that flag any mention of words such as "anti"
or "Castro."

Such censorship is not without its loopholes, however. Cuban
surfers, for example, can get blocked Web pages sent to them as
text attachments, rather than HTML, and pass under the
government's radar. "There are lots of ways to jump the fence,"
says Anival Cuevedo, the country manager of Cubaweb, a joint
venture between a Canadian company and the Cuban government that
is the only Web development studio in the country. "The Chinese
tried to filter and it didn't work either."

The Cuban revolution promised economic equality, but if you have
the right connections you can go to the beach resort of Vedado
to play a $150 round of golf while others can't even get meat on
a regular basis. As George Orwell wrote in the novel "Animal
Farm," his satiric fable about communist revolution: "All
animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

Well before I start toward the door of his apartment and into
the cacophony of the street, it's clear that Rodrigo fully
understands that. That's probably why he doesn't show any overt
remorse for subverting the government to make money. Quite the
opposite: He believes his role as an access point for the black
market Net will force a beneficial political shift. "The
Internet is something that will not go away. It will only have
to grow here," he says. "Eventually the culture here of limited
information will have to change."





---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.282 / Virus Database: 150 - Release Date: 9/25/01