At the Computers, Freedom, & Privacy Conference at Yale tonight, a number of my dinner companions insisted that Raul Castro had lifted the restriction on ordinary Cubans accessing the Internet. I said that was not the case, but backed down out of sheer wussiness. I need to work on that. The new Cuban leader has indeed allowed Cubans to buy personal computers, but tis a far, far different thing than allowing unfettered access to the World Wide Web.

Cuba, global network, Internet access

September 28, 2007
Fracturing the Global Network: Burma Edition

From the OpenNet Initiative, here's how activists in Burma had been evaded Internet censors, before the ruling junta there went and shut down the whole network today.

The situation in Burma shares facts and themes with Cuba's restrictions on the way its people use the Internet. Most Cubans are cut off from the true Internet entirely, and their online lives limited to the Cuban National Internet. But like the Burmese government, Castro isn't opposed to shutting down access for the whole country just before elections, during protests, or around other big political events. From a piece I wrote for Personal Democracy Forum on the Internet and Cuba a while back, here's how the Cuban government sees what it's doing to the Internet:

The technology professionals and bureaucrats charged with running the Internet in Cuba contend that the dearth of access isn't Castro's plan, but a consequence of the long-running U.S. embargo, known as El bloqueo ("the blockade") in Cuba. (The United Nations holds an annual vote calling for an end to the embargo; last vote, the U.S. stood with Israel, the Marshall Islands, and the Pacific island nation of Palau in voting "no.") Without access to U.S. vendors, they contend, they simply lack the infrastructure to let more Cubans online. In a 2001 interview with CIO Magazine, Luis Mourelos, an IT Director with the Cuban Academy of Sciences, said that the island's Internet users shared just 10 megabytes-per-second of bandwidth. (That was five years ago, but in comparison, the cable connection in my apartment delivers about one-tenth of that access for my use alone.)

Perhaps the embargo has hobbled Cuba's efforts to build an IT infrastructure. But in that same interview, Mourelos seems to indicate that the Internet Cuba has is the Internet Cuba wants. "In one way or another every country decides to what degree you can access the Internet and what you can't do and where you can go and where you can't," says Mourelos. "Every country has a right to at least think about how to protect its culture, its society and its people from things that could be damaging to them."

That idea, this this interest or that interest has a right to choose what the Internet will be, is what the Burmese government embraced today. Here's why I think that's scary not only for the people of Burma (who are rightfully our main concern today) but for the rest of us as well:

What Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, AT&T, Verizon are doing is a challenge to the Internet itself. Early Internet developers created a new order based on an "end-to-end" architecture, where this new tool was a neutral conduit through which information was shipped back and forth. Power over the system was in the hand of the end users, the then tens and now many millions of folks who joined the wave. Today, it's as much a matter of norms -- a shared belief that that's just the way that the Internet is -- as it is of architecture. And it's a norm under assault.

...

The big fear, beyond China, beyond Cuba, is that we're moving down a road away from one global network and toward Internet fiefdoms presided over by different lords. We may well one day find ourselves in a world where with the Internet is made up a Cuban Internet designed by Fidel Castro; a Chinese Internet governed by Beijing, Google, and other willing partners; and, if American telecom companies have their way, a Verizon Internet and an AT&T Internet as well.

Cuba

July 12, 2006
Cuban Male of a Certain Age

Fidel Castro is getting up there in years, having turned 80 this past August. In 2003, President Bush created the Commission for Assisistance to a Free Cuba. The group's stated mission is to rid Cuba of Castro if at all possible, but also to prepare for the eventual post-Castro world. (Though it might not be that post-Castro -- Fidel's brother Raul is considered the leading contender to take power.) The head of the commission is Caleb McCarry, a former chief of staff to the House International Relations Committee under Henry Hyde.

In presenting the commission's second annual plan for Cuba, McCarry was asked by a reporter if it made sense to partner with Cubans moving forward, given their scant experience in having dominion over their own lives. Yup, it is, he said, adding:

Cubans are demanding their rights. Cubans are asking their government to give them freedoms that Americans take for granted in our own nation.

I'll give you a specific example. Guillermo Fariñas is an independent journalist. It also happens his background is that he's a wounded Angola war veteran. And he's been on a protracted hunger strike. What for? He's asking for uncensored internet access for ordinary Cubans. Cubans are making their demands known to the government and it is they who will define a democratic future for their country. And the Compact and the report are a very concrete expression of the support of the United States for their efforts. (emphasis mine)

I've been following what's been happening with Fariñas via Google News alerts since I wrote a story on it a while back, so it was great to see this mention of him. Good to hear, too, a somewhat-senior U.S. official raise the issue of an uncensored, unfragmented, Internet.

Reporters without Borders -- Reporters sans Frontières for the more French among us -- reported on July 4th that Fariñas is still being treated at the Villa Clara hospital in Cuba. He's back on an intravenous food drip, after having disconnected it several days earlier.

2, Cuba, the global Internet

May 10, 2006
Marc Cooper on Cuba

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?

It's one interesting way to think about the Internet. A robust connection changes an evening at home in Havana from a night of passively watching Brazilian soap reruns into one of downloading episodes of Lost, blogging about its mysteries, editing Lostpedia.

Cuba

April 25, 2006
Fuera de la Revolución (de la Internet)

Now appearing over at the Personal Democracy Forum -- a story I wrote about Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez, a journalist down in Cuba who recently ended a two month hunger strike in protest of Castro/the government's blocking of emails he was sending out to the U.S.:

Santa Clara, a town in the Villa Clara province just east of Havana, is a five-hour boat ride from Miami, but for Cuban Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez the U.S. mainland is just a mouse-click away. At least it was, until Fariñas, a psychologist-turned-citizen journalist, sat down in an Internet café in last January to email dispatches to his contacts in Florida. On this day, his emails bounced back.

The day before, Fariñas had been featured in a front-page Miami Herald story about a rise in violence against dissidents in Cuba. This is Castro's payback, he thought. Borrowing a page from the protest playbook of Mohandas Gandhi, he stopped eating. Fariñas later told the journalist-rights organization Reporters Without Borders that he was willing to die for the cause. "If I must be a martyr for Internet access," Fariñas said, "so be it."

It starts with Fariñas and online life in Castro's Cuba, but goes on to touch on the big questions of who really controls the Internet and its prospects for staying a truly global network(s) much longer. Hope you'll have a look.

Cuba

May 10, 2004
Next Up, Cuba
About 600 or so prisoners, mostly Taliban captured in Afghanistan, are being held in Guantanamo Bay. Reports suggest that the sort of thing that went on at Abu Ghraib may be a symptom of a pervasive disease.
Cuba

Hunger-striking journalist Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez rejects Cuban government's offer of partial Internet access.

Cuba scores 7th place in the Committee to Protect Journalists' 10 Most Censored Countries list, wedged between Eritrea and Uzbekistan. "Cuba remains one of the world's leading jailers of journalists, second only to China, with 24 independent reporters behind bars."