Nation contributing editor Marc Cooper reflects on my story on the Internet in Cuba. It's funny. This story seems to be a little bit of a Rorschach test -- you see in it what you look for. Marc sees in it another example of Castro's smothering of the island. I see it more as part of the ongoing fight over control of the Internet and whether the global network will survive.

I love hearing from a guy who's actually had boots on the ground in Cuba. Me, I sit with my passport waiting for the first legal flight from JFK to Havana. As he tells it, it's a dull place after dark:

I find the Cuban situation particularly pathetic. Anyone who has been to Cuba -- as I have many, many times -- knows that finding "something to do" can be quite the existential problem. Few families have any spending cash and those who do find a rather anemic offer of entertainment and distraction, especially from the overbearing presence of Senor You-Know-Who. I remember starkly the nights I have been in Havana when, all of a sudden, the streets went empty as a ghost town as the 10:00 o'clock hour rolled around. The entire nation would sit transfixed before their TV screens, squeezing what free pleasure they could out of a trash Brazilian soap-opera. Forty years of "socialism" and the mass culture it fosters is the Spanish-sub titled equivalent of Dynasty?