The Internet in Cuba

Conference papers online

2012-02-19T11:06:00.000-08:00

Papers and proceedings from the 21st annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) are now available online. The papers cover a wide range of social, political and economic topics.

Two of special interest to this group are Ted Henken's A Bloggers' Polemic: Debating Independent Cuban Blogger Projects in a Polarized Political Context and my paper The Past, Present and Future of the Internet in Cuba.

This is an interesting, rigorous conference. The theme of next year's conference is "Where is Cuba Going?" and the call for papers is available on the ASCE Web site.

A letter to my state security officer (if I have one)

2011-12-22T13:46:00.000-08:00

Someone commenting on a previous post suggested that because of this blog, he is sure that I "already have a Security State Official."

If that is the case, let me start by saying "hello" to my security official.

The comment implied that you are watching me because you oppose what I post. If that is the case, you are in good company, because the older Cuban expatriates in the United States also oppose what I post.

A colleague from Radio Marti once told me that he knew he was doing his job well if both sides were angry with him. I guess I am doing my job well.

I hope you will take the time to read what I have posted on this blog and written elsewhere carefully. I trust that you will find much that you agree with and much that you disagree with. The world is grey, not black and white. There is good and bad on both sides.

One thing should be clear -- I watched and was moved by the founding of the Cuban Internet, and my motivation is for the Cuban people and the ways in which the Internet can benefit them.

Well, if you are reading this, it is good to know you. Please feel free to comment on anything you read here or on Google Plus or my other blogs.

If you are ever in Los Angeles, please visit me!

Larry Press

Ecured is not open like Wikipedia

2011-12-21T08:43:00.000-08:00

Ecured is a Cuban encyclopedia that is sometimes compared to Wikipedia. Ecured uses the same software as Wikipedia, so they look similar, but there are key differences.

Wikipedia has millions of articles in dozens of languages while the much newer Ecured has 78,438 articles. This is partially explained by the fact that Ecured is only one year old and partially due restrictions on accounts.

Anyone can read Ecured entries, but only those with accounts can create, discuss or edit entries. I tried to create accounts using two different domains, csudh.edu and gmail.com. Both were rejected. (Does anyone know whether accounts are limited to people in the .cu domain? More restricted than that?)

More striking differences emerge when one looks at articles. Wikipedia articles evolve through open collaboration, while Ecured articles appear to be written by single authors. What follows is my anecdotal experience.

I began with a topic I am interested in: "Submarine cable Cuba-Venezuela". The article summarizes the facts about the cable that we have read in the press and covered in this blog. It goes off on a political tangent that might have been questioned on Wikipedia, but it superficially resembles a Wikipedia article.

But, wikis have discussion and edit history pages associated with each article, and there we see differences.

The discussion page of the Ecured article is empty – there has been no discussion.

The edit history page is more surprising. The original article was entered in a little over an hour by Arian Perez on January 27, 2011. It was around 10,000 bytes long, so must have been composed before he entered it. On February 3, he added another 1,000 bytes.

The only changes since that time were a minor adjustment on February 5, 2011 and the addition of an image and four technical paragraphs on July 30. Perez made wording adjustments after each of these contributions.

The most recent edit was August 1, 2011 – there is no mention of the subsequent landing of the cable, its use, or reports of corruption surrounding it. The article began almost fully formed, and has been only marginally revised by two people over nearly a year.

This is not the sort of collaboration we see on Wikipedia. For example, this presentation on the evolution of a wiki shows a wiki being transformed from a single sentence to a 1,600 word article organized into six major and three minor sections. Over 1,000 authors made over 1,600 changes to the article.

Digging a bit deeper, I checked Perez's profile and learned that he has initiated 139 new pages and made improvements to 19 others. Since Ecured is only a year old, it seems he is writing full time for the site. (His profile lists his affiliation as the Youth Computer Clubs).

Mr. Perez has written on many political and technical topics, but the one that caught my eye was on Yoani Sánchez.

The article begins "Yoani Sánchez. Cybermercinary and Cuban blogger," and proceeds to discredit her as a counter revolutionary who has received support from dubious organizations.

Perez first post on Sánchez was 21,041 bytes long on April 5, 2011. Since then there have been 11 small changes by Perez and four other people bringing the article to 21,221 bytes.

Contrast that with the Wikipedia article on Sánchez. It began in May 6, 2008 with a 702 byte post of three sentences, one reference and a link to her blog. Since then, 117 people have made 304 marginal and 540 major edits and the article has grown to 44,475 bytes, organized into seven major and seven minor sections.

The bottom line – Ecured seems more like a closed, multi-author blog than an open wiki like Wikipedia.

ALBA-1 environmental impact assessment

2011-12-19T12:35:00.000-08:00

A comment on an earlier post points to an environmental impact study of the Cuba-Jamaica segment of the ALBA-1 undersea cable:

Executive Summary
Project Description
Analysis of Alternatives
Policy, Legislative & Regulatory Framework
Description of Bio-Physical Environment
Socio-Cultural & Socio-Economic Environment
Determination of Potential Impacts
Outline Environmental Management & Monitoring Plans
References

The report is surprisingly (to me) detailed.

Since the report was commissioned by the National Environment and Planning Agency of Jamaica, it focuses on Jamaica and and the Jamaican landing point.

Is there a similar document from Cuba?

Also, if you are a cable geek (even a little bit of one) and you have not seen them, check out Telegeography's interactive submarine cable map Neal Stephenson's description of the FLAG cable and the book by Arthur C. Clarke, which are described here.

Redsocial is not a "Facebook clone"

2011-12-15T10:21:00.000-08:00

There was a recent announcement of a Cuban "Facebook clone" called Redsocial. But, Redsocial is not a Cuban Facebook for the following reasons.

1. Access is limited: A URL was published, then quickly went dead. According to a comment by Irving Leonard, access to Redsocial is confined users on a "/8" (up to 16,777,216 hosts) local network that connects Cuban universities. In this Redsocial is a clone of Facebook when it was first launched -- restricted to a few univerity students.

2. Size is limited: Redsocial claimed 7,000 users had registered up in one week. One tenth of the world population uses Facebook.

3. Facebook is a platform: I did not get a chance to see Redsocial before they cut access, but I would be amazed if it provided anything like the open development environment, which allows one to create applications that are used inside Facebook.

4. Anonymity: One can create a Facebook account without divulging their real identitiy, but if one must access Redsocial through a university account, their identity is discoverable.

If Redsocial is a Facebook clone, it is a clone of Facebook in 2004, not of today's Facebook.

NPR: In Cuba, Dial-Up Internet Is A Luxury

2011-12-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

NPR aired a five minute segment by correspondent Nick Miroff on the state of the Cuban Internet.

Miroff portrays Internet access as expensive and limited, as illustrated by this photo of Cubans waiting to get online at a Havana cybercafe. He also points out the irony of Cubans carrying smart phones that can only be used for texting and voice calls and a Cuban TV presentation on Facebook and Twitter, which are unavailable to all but a tiny portion of the population.

Miroff also mentions Cuban's disappointment that the ALBA cable has had no discernible effect, citing swirling rumors of technical problems, bad business deals, or political fear flamed by the role of social media in the Arab Spring -- the dictator's dilemma again.

You can listen to the segment or read a transcript on the NRP Web site.

A Cuban Facebook?

2011-12-11T18:13:00.001-08:00

The blog La Chriinga de Cuba reported that Cuba had launched a Facebook clone called Redsocial.

La Chiringa later reported that the Redsocial URL had changed from http://facebook.ismm.edu.cu to http://neko.uclv.edu.cu/index.php/, but both were broken when I tried to follow them.

The site tag line is "A virtual meeting place for Cuban universities," which sounds more like Facebook 1.0 than today's Facebook. ISMM is a school of mining, geology and metalurgy and UCLV the Central University of Las Villas, indicating that this is a university oriented site.

I tried pinging ISMM and UCLV. ISMM is not pingable, but, from my computer, UCLV has an average ping time of just over 1.8 seconds, so it is clearly not connected to the ALBA cable.

Has anyone seen Redsocial?

(The Huffington Post also covered the story).

Google Plus circle on the Internet in Cuba

2011-11-03T10:51:00.000-07:00

I have a Cuban Internet circle on Google Plus. If you are a Google Plus member, let me know and I will add you to it.

Cuban backbone, November 2003

2011-10-28T09:22:00.000-07:00

When the undersea cable is lit, Cuban connectivity to the outside world will improve dramatically, but we know nothing about plans for complementary improvements in the domestic infrastructure -- equipment or people -- needed to take advantage of the added external capacity.

In a comment on an earlier post asking about such plans, "Muchas Gracias" points us to a November 2003 presentation on Cuban telecommunications by the executive president of ETECSA, José Antonio Fernández Martínez.

The presentation reviews ETECSA investment, telephony, and the Internet. For me, the highlight of the presentation were two slides showing the fiber and microwave backbones. These are eight years old, and, except for Havana, say nothing about local fiber, but they are the best we have at present.

Draft of paper on the past, present and future of the Cuban Internet

2011-10-26T05:57:00.000-07:00

I have drafted a paper on the Past, Present and Future of the Internet in Cuba. Your comments and suggestions would help me improve it.

The paper is based on a talk I gave at the conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy last August. You can see video of that presentation and download the PowerPoint slides here.

What's happening with the cable?

2011-10-25T08:10:00.001-07:00

The last news I heard of the ALBA-1 cable was in August, when it was announced that it would begin operation in September or October.

I was waiting till the end of the month to ask about the cable, but the Havana Times recently published an editorial asking "who ate the cable?" They imply that the cable has been delayed or perhaps even stopped by graft and allude to Ramiro Valdés' statement comparing the Internet to “a wild horse yet to be tamed.”

Can anyone supply us with an update on the cable?

Missing report on the cost of the embargo

2011-10-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

Next week the United Nations General Assembly will debate the "necessity of ending" the US embargo of Cuba. It is difficult to refrain from expressing an opinion on this topic, but I vowed to keep politics off this blog, so will not.

But, there is an Internet tie in. I have read news of of a Cuban report to the United Nations, which states that the US trade embargo is crippling their telecommunications and costing millions of dollars in lost revenue each year.

I tried to follow up on this, but could not find the report or reference to it on the UN Web site. Has anyone seen it or the data supporting it?

CENIAI staff photo taken in 1990

2011-08-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

CENIAI -- The Center for Automatic Interchange of Information -- was Cuba's networking link to the Soviet bloc during the pre-Internet days. The CENIAI staff understood the potential importance of networking for Cuba and were enthusiastic members of the international networking community.

This photo, showing many members of the CENIAI staff, was taken on the malecón in Havana in 1990 by Oscar Visiedo who was director of CENIAI at the time. You can see Oscar's proud comments and the names of the people by following this link to Oscar Visiedo's Facebook page. (Jesus Martinez, who was CENIAI Director four years later when Cuba connected to the Internet, is second from the left in the back row).

This was taken four years before CENIAI got their first IP connection to the Internet.

These were the Cuban Internet pioneers.

US Army jeep at the Bay of Pigs and networking pioneers in Cuba

2011-08-16T09:49:00.000-07:00

I have done several studies of the Cuban Internet over the years, and my colleague Joel Snyder just found a bunch of pictures he took during a 1992 trip. Here are two -- more later.

We took a couple days off from interviews and presentations and went to the Bay of Pigs. Some folks were driving around in a jeep that had been abandoned by the US invaders. That is me standing in the back.

The second picture shows some of the people at CENIAI, the Cuban organization that, at the time, was responsible for pre-Internet connectivity to other Soviet block nations. They were the networking pioneers in Cuba and, in 1996, established an IP link to the Internet. Oscar Visideo has provided the names of the people here.

If you are curious to read more about the history of the Internet in Cuba, click here.

Video of ASCE presentation

2011-08-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

I was traveling this week and could not attend the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, but we were able to arrange a remote presentation. You can see a video of the 21 minute presentation on the Past, Present and Future of the Internet in Cuba.

Jeremiah Woolsey also gave a version of the talk at the UCLA Business Information Technology Conference.

Round-table forum on the Cuban Internet and blogs

2011-08-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

Ted Henken, professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at Baruch College, CUNY, and I spoke on Cuba 1.5? The State of the Internet and Uses of Social Media in a Changing Cuba at the Inter-American Dialog in Washington DC. I talked about the past, present and future of the Cuban Internet and Ted reported on his recent interviews with Cuban bloggers. Robert Guerra, director of the Internet Freedom project at Freedom House, provided commentary.

You can read a summary of the round table here and see a video of the presentations and subsequent discussion here.

Alba-1 cable to begin service in September or October

2011-08-07T15:29:00.000-07:00

A blog post by Isbel Díaz Torres quotes Boris Moreno Cordoves, Vice Minister of Communications & Informatics, as saying that service improvement due to the ALBA-1 cable could begin in September or October of this year.

Díaz asks, what will begin to change at that time -- Internet access? prices? performance? telephony?

He mentions a 2008 workshop where Cuba's strategy was stated as "orderly and intensive social use of the media and connectivity." One would expect that since that time or earlier, Cuba had been planning and preparing for the arrival of the undersea cable. Installation of access and backbone network equipment must be well under way. Technicians must have been trained, service providers prepared, etc.

Díaz has looked for evidence of such planning and activity, and concludes that "It’s been almost three years and yet they still don't seem prepared." After researching the question, Díaz produces nothing but vague quotes by officials suggesting that he may be right -- that they are not prepared.

Can that be?

Yoani's iPhone and Jesus' vision

2011-07-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

Someone sent me a link to Can the Internet Bring Change to Cuba?, an article published in the New York Review of Books by Daniel Wilkinson.

Wilkinson posits that since the dissident blogs are seldom read in Cuba, their major impact is on the Cuban exile community, whose leaders have largely shaped US policy. He also credits them for being moderate -- not calling for the overthrow of the government, criticizing the US embargo, etc. Instead, he says, they tell stories of life in Cuba.

Wilkinson quotes several such stories told by bloggers, and the one that caught my eye and heart was posted by Yoani Sánchez, who, after seeing an iPhone surf the Web for the first time, wrote:

Between the walls of this house, that had heard dozens of Cubans talk of the Internet as if it were a mythical and difficult to reach place, this little technological gadget gave us a piece of cyberspace. We, who throughout the Blogger Academy, work on a local server that simulates the web, were suddenly able to feel the kilobytes run across the palms of our hands. I had the desperate desire to grab Rosa Díez’s iPhone and run off with it to hide in my room and surf all the sites blocked on the national networks. For a second, I wanted to keep it so I could enter my own blog, which is still censored in the hotels and cybercafés. But I returned it, a bit disconsolate I confess.

This quote immediately reminded me of the 1996 message Jesus Martinez sent to his colleagues in the then small global Internet community announcing Cuba's connection to the Net. Jesus felt the same power as Yoani, writing:

After so many days, years of sacrifice and vigilance, I have great satisfaction to announce that our beloved Cuba, our "caiman of the Indies," has been connected to the Internet as we had desired...A new era has just begun for us. We will soon announce our Web site and value-added services to do as much as we can to help develop our region and our culture.

I hope Yoani gets a 4G iPhone and Jesus' vision is realized soon.

PS Yoani wrote that her blog was blocked in Cuba, but some time later, Reuters announced that it had been un-blocked -- does anyone have a sense of how widely the blogs of Yoani and other dissidents are read and known in Cuba?

ICT statistics for 2010 -- more Internet users but fewer Internet computers and domain names

2011-07-10T00:17:00.000-07:00

The Cuban National Statistics Office has issued their 2011 Annual Statistical Report, which includes data on information and communication technology.

The table shown here (click it to enlarge) presents physical ICT indicators. As you see, there are now over a million mobile phone subscribers. Note that Cuban subscribers do not have "smart" phones used for mobile Internet access -- their phones are limited to calls, text messages, taking pictures, etc.

The number of (often restricted) Internet users increased a little between 2009 and 2010. We always expect Internet growth, but it is surprising that the number of computers on the Net and the number of .cu domain names actually decreased slightly.

Click here to download a spreadsheet with the table.

Reuters summarized the statistics along with a cool photo here.

Committee to Protect Journalists report on Cuba

2011-07-09T14:07:00.000-07:00

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has just released a special report called After the Black Spring, Cuba's New Repression by Karen Phillips. The title refers to the recent release of the last of 29 journalists who were jailed in 2003.

The CPJ examined government activities in March and April 2011, two months with sensitive political milestones, and found that critical journalists were targeted in more than 50 instances of repression -- arbitrary arrests, short-term detentions, beatings, smear campaigns, surveillance, and social sanctions. The government strategy seems to have shifted from long jail sentences to frequent, low-profile harassment.

Much of the focus is on bloggers and Twitter users. According to the CPJ, there are about 40 critical bloggers and "the struggle for free expression is being waged almost exclusively in digital media." They go on to state that "the government proudly announced in February that it had enlisted roughly 1,000 bloggers to denounce critical journalists," but did not offer a reference to that announcement.

They predict that the ALBA undersea cable will disadvantage the critical bloggers who have to scramble for Internet access illegally, visibly at embassies and Internet cafes or at expensive hotels. Journalists outside of Havana, with few hotels and no embassies, are at an even greater disadvantage. The cable will improve the already free access enjoyed by the official government bloggers.

The report concludes with lists of specific recommendations for the Cuban government, international community, U.N. Human Rights Council, European Union, Organization of American States, technology and blogging community and U.S. government.

The CPJ states that they have reports of 50 sanctions during a two month period and presents a number of annecdotes to support the claim. It would be interesting to conduct a survey of the independent Cuban bloggers to ascertain the frequency and types of harassment they have experienced.

Finally, this report may seem one-sided to some who feel that Cuba has no choice but to engage in such practices because of US attempts to influence Cuban public opinion, so called "cyberwar." There is no doubt that many reports and committees on Cuba are blindly one-sided, seeing the situation in stark black/white terms. But, this report is lent credibility by the fact that the CPJ is not a Cuban interest group -- they are interested in protecting journalists globally. They are an equal opportunity critic of repression wherever they encounter it.

Twitter user meetups in Havana and Holguín -- non events?

2011-07-03T09:34:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Leunam Rodriguez put out a call for a meetup of Cuban Twitter users. As shown here, the word was spread using Twitter, and there were over 2,000 tweets on the day of the meetup. If you are interested in more detail, search for #twitthab on Twitter.

In spite of the publicity, Reuters reported that only about 50 people attended the meeting in Havana.

The fact that, according to Reuters, Rodriguez is a reporter at the state-run Radio Cubana, suggests a pro-government slant, but calls for widespread Internet access reportedly met with unanimous applause. The sparse attendance might also have been explained by the high cost of posting a tweet -- perhaps there are not many Twitter users in Havana.

Dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez evidently arrived early and saw computers, but no people, and she later tweeted that what she found at the pavilion felt more like a prison than the free environment of Twitter. I guess she wasn't impressed :-).

As shown here, there was a similar meeting in Holguín, and you can see photos of the Havana meetup here.

Were you at either meetup? Were these non-events?

The Internet route from Cuba to Google

2011-06-27T21:29:00.000-07:00

The Internet is, as its name implies, a network of networks. A data packet is sent from a particular computer on one network across the Internet to the receiving computer on another network. As the packet moves from network to network, it goes through special purpose computers called routers.

Traceroute is a simple utility program that comes with every Mac or Windows computer. It shows the path a packet takes -- the list of routers that handle it -- as it hops from network to network.

A colleague in Cuba recently ran Traceroute to see the path between his computer, which was on a dial-up link, to Google in California. He saw that the packet hopped through 20 routers:

192.168.254.69
192.168.254.65
192.168.254.77
192.168.254.229
200.0.16.130
200.0.16.114
200.0.16.101
204.14.41.33
204.14.40.9
207.45.197.197
64.86.83.190
64.86.138.114
66.198.111.65
216.6.87.9
74.125.50.230
216.239.46.248
209.85.248.73
209.85.254.235
216.239.46.78
74.125.93.99

These four-number addresses, called Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, identify each router on the path between Cuba and Google, and they reveal something of the network structure.

The prefix of the first four hops (192.168) indicates that they are within the ISP's local area network. The next three are on the network of ETECSA, the Cuban telecommunication monopoly. I saw that by querying the "whois" database that shows that the IP addresses that begin "200.0" have been allocated to:

owner: CUBADATA
responsible: Rafael López Guerra
address: Ave. Independencia y 19 Mayo, s/n,
address: 10600 - La Habana - CH
country: CU
phone: +53 7 574242
e-mail: nap@ETECSA.CU

The eighth hop is over a satellite link from the router at the edge of the Cuban network to the network of Newcome International in Miami. I know it is a satellite link because Traceroute reported that the time to reach from Cuba to the 8th router was much longer than from Cuba to the 7th router. Newcome routes packets across their network from Miami to Newark New Jersey and eventually to Google.

No secrets are revealed here -- this sort of information is widely available -- but it would be interesting to see how routes and timing (which we looked at in a previous post) change when the undersea cable is operational. If you are in Cuba and would like to share this sort of route and timing data, let me know.

Ping time from Cuba to the US

2011-06-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

Ping is a simple utility program that comes with every Mac or Windows computer. Ping records the time it takes to send a data packet across the Internet and to receive an acknowledgement of receipt from the remote computer. A colleague in Cuba recently ran a ping test from his computer, which was on a dial-up link, to Google in California. The results were:

Pinging www.l.google.com [74.125.93.104] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 74.125.93.104: bytes=32 time=701ms
Reply from 74.125.93.104: bytes=32 time=751ms
Reply from 74.125.93.104: bytes=32 time=707ms
Reply from 74.125.93.104: bytes=32 time=683ms

His computer sent four 32-byte packets to the Google computer with the Internet protocol address 74.125.93.104. When the computer at Google received each packet, it sent back an acknowledgment, and the computer in Cuba recorded the time it took from sending the packet to receipt of the acknowledgement.

In this case, the first packet took 701 milliseconds, and the other three 751, 707, and 683 milliseconds respectively. The average of the four was 710 milliseconds.

Well, 710 milliseconds is only 7/10s of a second, which sounds pretty fast for a 5,100 mile round trip, but it is too slow to support many applications. For example, you would not be able to carry on a conversation using Skype. The length of the ping times and their variability (from 683 to 751 milliseconds) would make conversation impossible. Web surfing would also be very slow because modern Web pages do not come all at once -- they require many separate connections to get all the words, pictures, audio and video as well as behind-the-scenes links to computers that track your actions and insert ads.

The majority of the Ping time was due to the slow satellite connection between Cuba and the outside world. What about the time to reach another computer within Cuba? My Cuban colleague pinged a computer that was on the same ISP local area network as his:

Pinging ved-as-2.enet.cu [192.168.254.69] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.254.69: bytes=32 time=112ms
Reply from 192.168.254.69: bytes=32 time=126ms
Reply from 192.168.254.69: bytes=32 time=101ms
Reply from 192.168.254.69: bytes=32 time=103ms

The average time has been reduced to 110 milliseconds, but the variability remains high. This speed would support a Skype call and, since Cuban Web pages are on the average much simpler than elsewhere, Web surfing within Cuba would be much less frustrating than international surfing. However, the dial-up link to the ISP, coupled with relatively slow equipment in the ISP network, leaves speeds far short of those in many nations.

For example, I pinged Google from my home in Los Angeles:

Pinging www.l.google.com [74.125.224.84] with 32 data bytes:
Reply from 74.125.224.84: bytes=32 time=18ms
Reply from 74.125.224.84: bytes=32 time=17ms
Reply from 74.125.224.84: bytes=32 time=19ms
Reply from 74.125.224.84: bytes=32 time=17ms

The average time is 17 milliseconds and there is only 2 millisecond difference between the slowest and fastest transmission. This connection is fast enough for viewing complex Web pages and phone chats.

The bottom line is that since the Internet in Cuba is slower than the US, Cuban applications are less varied and sophisticated. (Don't let that go to your head if you are in the US because other nations have still higher speeds, enabling them to develop and deploy more sophisticated applications than we do. For more along those lines see these posts).

Will the situation change when the undersea cable between Cuba and Venezuela is operational? If your ISP or organization network is not connected to the cable nothing will change. Whether or not you can connect, is both a political and an economic question.

If you are allowed to connect through the cable, expect about 600 milliseconds to be cut out of that Ping time to Google. That will be good news, but, if you are connected using the current dial-up, ISDN or slow DSL infrastructure, you will still be significantly worse off than I am in Los Angeles.

What is CubaNews afraid of?

2011-06-08T05:19:00.000-07:00

Does the Internet broaden or narrow one's viewpoint? We obviously have potential access to more information than ever before, but do we actually see more varied opinions?

Some of us narrow our exposure to serendipitous and challenging information by focusing our attention on Web sites and online communities that agree with us -- Democrats following Obama and Tea Party members following Palin. Eli Pariser argues that, even if we want to see challenging opinions, search engines send us biased results -- things we and our friends like.

Then there is good old fashioned censorship as exemplified by the CubaNews group on Yahoo. The CubaNews tagline is "News and information about Cuba today." It was established in August 2000, has 1,787 members, and is moderated.

When I started this blog, the CubaNews moderator, Walter Lippman, read some early posts and attacked them. I responded and also suggested that he read a report I had written earlier in the year. I had fruitful exchanges with some of his readers -- on the CubaNews list and in comments to blog posts.

Then someone sent me an email saying Lippman had censored his post to CubaNews. When I asked Lippman about that, he did not answer, and now he rejects my posts to CubaNews as well. Critics of the Castro government accuse it of propagandizing and stifling free expression -- CubaNews' behavior lends support to that claim.

Will China be helping with domestic Internet infrastructure?

2011-06-07T21:22:00.000-07:00

As discussed in a previous post, China has played a major role in financing and installing the undersea cable between Venezuela and Cuba, but there has been little discussion of complementary domestic infrastructure needed to reach beyond the cable landing point.

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (shown here with Raul Castro) is leaving Cuba today after a three-day visit, where he announced a commitment to accelerate fast-growing economic relations between the two nations and committed to an estimated $6 billion investment in oil and natural gas.

The energy agreement was the big news, but, according to China Daily, there were also agreements on "cooperation" in other areas including digital television and telecommunications. There were no details, but perhaps these agreements will provide financing for the domestic infrastructure required to exploit the undersea cable.