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Geopolitics

Cuba: Growing Internet Access Is About Money Not Freedom

People used social media to help organize the large, anti-government protests that took place on the island last July. And yet, unlike their counterparts in China, Cuban authorities are loath to prohibit access to such sites. Do the math.

Cuba: Growing Internet Access Is About Money Not Freedom

Internet access is finally available in Cuba, albeit with some limitations

Guillermo Nova/DPA/ZUMA Press
Farid Kahhat

-Analysis-

Mobile phones, as the former Facebook executive Antonio García Martínez writes in his blog The Pull Request, were illegal in Cuba until 2008. Even after that, it took another decade before people were allowed to connect those phones to the internet. And more recently, on July 11 — when people held large protests (organized in large part online) — Cuban authorities blocked the internet for several hours.

Overall, however, internet access is finally available in Cuba, albeit with some limitations — for two reasons. The first is the expensive. An Amnesty International report titled Cuba's Internet Paradoxreveals that the connection cost, as of 2017, was $1.50 per hour, a tremendous amount for people where the average monthly wage is roughly $25.


The other reason is censorship. The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) reports that in Cuba, web pages that criticize the government, discuss human rights or share techniques for evading censorship are blocked. The state telecommunications firm likewise censors text messages containing the words "democracy" or "hunger strike."

In Cuba, disrupting the internet comes at a steep price


The answer may come down to money, as shown by open-source database Yugabyte, which found that by cutting off the internet in July, even for just a few hours, the Cuban government lost some $13 million.

The reason is that internet access in Cuba is controlled by a state monopoly, the Cuba Telecommunications Company (ETECSA). And as shown by the hourly access rate, the company abuses its monopoly. A good part of ETECSA's revenue comes from cellphones and internet accounts paid by Cubans abroad to keep in touch with relatives on the island, and when the connection is cut, so is the revenue stream.

Emilio Morales, the head of Havana Consulting, which provides market information on Cuba, says the Cuban government's monthly earnings from Wi-Fi and mobile data are some $80 million. The internet is also used for remittances to the island, which are an important source of hard currency used to pay for food and medicine.

Cuban government's relative tolerance of the internet and social media, when compared with China, should not therefore be construed as a liberalizing step. Instead, it's yet another, and particularly blatant, sign of the shortcomings that have characterized Cuba's economy for decades.

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Geopolitics

Why The Latin American Far Left Can't Stop Cozying Up To Iran's Regime

Among the Islamic Republic of Iran's very few diplomatic friends are too many from Latin America's left, who are always happy to milk their cash-rich allies for all they are worth.

Image of Bolivia's ambassador in Tehran, Romina Pérez Ramos.

Bolivia's ambassador in Tehran, Romina Pérez Ramos.

Bolivia's embassy in Tehran/Facebook
Bahram Farrokhi

-OpEd-

The Latin American Left has an incurable anti-Yankee fever. It is a sickness seen in the baffling support given by the socialist regimes of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela or Bolivia to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which to many exemplifies clerical fascism. And all for a single, crass reason: together they hate the United States.

The Islamic Republic has so many of the traits the Left used to hate and fight in the 20th century: a religious (Islamic) vocation, medieval obscurantism, misogyny... Its kleptocratic economy has turned bog-standard class divisions into chasmic inequalities reminiscent of colonial times.

This support is, of course, cynical and in line with the mandates of realpolitik. The regional master in this regard is communist Cuba, which has peddled its anti-imperialist discourse for 60 years, even as it awaits another chance at détente with its ever wealthy neighbor.

I reflected on this on the back of recent remarks by Bolivia's ambassador in Tehran, the 64-year-old Romina Pérez Ramos. She must be the busiest diplomat in Tehran right now, and not a day goes by without her going, appearing or speaking somewhere, with all the publicity she can expect from the regime's media.

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