Cuba's internet is awful. Now its clever millennials can start a real revolution

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/19/cuba-internet-millennials-revolution

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This week, Barack Obama announced – among other dramatic, all-of-a-sudden, once-in-a-lifetime policy changes – sweeping new rules for American telecommunications companies and hardware and software exports to Cuba. According to Obama, increasing Cuba’s internet penetration – just 5% of its 11m citizens have regular access to the internet – would be a focus of thawed, modern US-Cuba relations.

Raúl Castro seemed to agree. In his coordinated speech back in Havana, he called upon the US government to “remove the obstacles hindering or restricting ties between peoples, families, and citizens of both countries, particularly restrictions on travelling, direct post services, and telecommunications”.

But young Cubans have long found creative ways to communicate with the outside world: I get regular emails from a friend’s mother-in-law’s work email and send messages to Spanish Yahoo accounts. My friend Raúl, when he was still on the island, kept a blog for five years, persistently finding ways to connect to the internet via friends and school – however slowly. Now young Cubans suddenly find themselves looking at an immediate future that includes increased visits from American relatives, more remittances and possibly more and better internet. Most importantly, that future includes the dismantling of an entire propaganda machine that blamed Uncle Sam for any and all of its ills – the same propaganda machine that insisted the US embargo was to blame for the poor state of Cuban connectivity in the first place.

As Raúl – blogger, not president – posted on Facebook just after Wednesday’s speeches, “Ahora descubriremos” – now we will discover – “that not having the internet was never the fault of the embargo”.

I met Raúl six years ago through mutual friends on G Street in Havana. When I lived in Cuba, researching a book on the last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro, G Street more or less was the Internet: email, Facebook and YouTube in one. In reality, it’s just a broad, majestic avenue that climbs up a low rolling hill from the sea in central downtown Vedado, studded with topiary trees and statues of national heroes. And the public space it offers – a lush, green median – is a main gathering spot for Cubans between 14 and 40 years of age, and never much older. It’s a place for party planning and public identity shaping, to find an audience for whatever you want to perform, or to trace the interlocking circles of friend groups.

Yet G Street was alive in a way the internet could never be. The punk rock fans in attendance didn’t have to talk to the preps on the opposite street corner for their joint presence to say, We are here, and there are so many of us. Even Communist Party cars slowed down around its major intersections on Friday nights because the streets were so swollen with people. But G Street was vulnerable to its physicality, too. Over the years I spent in and out of Cuba, the government would install floodlights on street corners and sharp rocks in the concrete retaining walls in order to discourage sitting.

Places like G Street are the skeletal civic structures that threaten single-party rule. Cubans have evolved tremendously sophisticated analogs to the internet. Collective taxis in Cuba’s cities are much more than mere transportation. A ride in an old car that sails down Havana’s potholed streets, often with a picturesquely patchwork paint job or mismatching hood ornament, is the first step to finding anything out or solving any logistical problem in Havana. Máquinas, as they’re called, are the locus of radio bemba, lip radio, the gossip newswire: who’s selling what on the black market, how to unblock an American cellphone, baseball statistics. And there’s fact-checking of the news in that morning’s issue of Granma – the eminently untrustworthy state newspaper – provided by a man whose sister lives in Miami or a woman who works in a hotel, and watches CNN during slow hours with the German tourist who doesn’t like sightseeing.

Americans often forget that the rest of the world has been visiting Cuba for quite some time now. After the economic crisis of the early 90s, when the USSR fell, Cuba opened up to tourists, mostly from Europe, Latin America and Canada. The isolation tactics of a repressive regime began to crack in that moment, when TVs were installed in Spanish joint-venture hotels. The internet began to push through Cuban society back then, though its pace has been slow.

Future change will likely come more quickly, now that the embargo has begun to crumble. But increased access to the internet alone won’t dramatically change Cubans’ daily lives all of a sudden, the way that being able to hail an Uber doesn’t change anything at all, really. A paycheck that can’t stretch to put food on tables will still be more of a priority than sending an email or browsing YouTube, and a lot of smartphones and personal laptops would be required for the internet to match the interconnectedness and efficacy of G Street or máquinas.

But the internet as an indication of bilateral cooperation, as a tool of self-sufficiency, as an identifiable symbol of a government’s concession of control over its citizens – that’s what will get the punks on G Street and the hotel employees in máquinas talking. That, as Raúl said, promises speedy change – because the “progress made in our exchanges proves that it is possible to find solutions.”

Raúl Castro said that, not Raúl the blogger.