Cuba's Internet Dictatorship

And you thought people in China suffer from the lack of free speech expression. Here's the cheap version of the great firewall of China, this time in Cuba :

"Cuba built an Internet search engine that allows users to trawl through speeches by Cuban leader Fidel Castro and other government sites, but does not browse Web pages outside the island. Cubans cannot buy computers and Internet access is limited to state employees, academics and foreigners. Cubans line up for hours to send e-mails on post office terminals that cannot surf the World Wide Web. Passwords are sold on the black market allowing shared Internet use for limited hours, usually at night."

With Fidel Castro now seriously ill, the speeches will sooner or later turn into historical ones, the question is, which think-tank across the world would come closer in its predictions of the situation in a post-Castro Cuba next to reality? On the other hand the U.S is starving Cuba's bandwidth hunger to death, and considering their inability to invest in alternative sources for connectivity, the extend of degrading the quality of their Internet connectivity is almost unbeliavable as :

"Cuba is forced to use a costly satellite channel with only 65 megabytes per second (mbps) for upload and 124 mbps for download, he said."

Even a France Telecom customer that has upgraded service to Fiber@Home will be able to ping-to-death Cuba's entire academic community. And while Cuba recently blamed the CIA for digital espionage, it would take them unnecessary amount of time to download sensitive material remotely given Cuba's bandwidth capacity. Several other interesting events in case you remember were when Kyrgyzstan got cut off from Internet by hacker attack, and when Zimbabwe's Internet was shut down because they forgot the pay their bill. Bandwidth matters, depending on the perspective of course.

The most recent report on Censorship in Cuba is also worth going through :

"To visit websites or check their e-mail, Cubans have to use public access points such as Internet cafes, universities and “Youth computing centers” where it is easier to monitor their activity. Then, the Cuban police has installed software on all computers in Internet cafes and big hotels that triggers an alert message when “subversive” key-words are noticed."

The only way to undermine censorship is to talk about it -- and mock it.