| 摘要 | Don’t get too excited about Google’s announcement this week that it has reached a deal bringing faster internet access to Cuba.
In the words of a Google press release, the agreement, signed in Havana on Monday by the company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, allows Cuba’s state telecom monopoly Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A. (ETECSA) “to use our technology to reduce latency by caching some of our most popular high-bandwidth content like YouTube videos at a local level. This in turn means Cubans who already have access to the Internet and want to use our services can expect to see an improvement in terms of quality of service.” The key, of course, is that phrase “Cubans who already have access.” The US opening to Cuba at the end of 2014 has not produced much of an internet opening. Who really can use the internet in Cuba? Not many.
In its Freedom on the Net report for 2016, released last month, Freedom House awarded Cuba an internet freedom rating of 79, a slight improvement from the previous year’s 81 (lower is better), but the country is still in the “Not Free” category. Cuba has a better score than only four of the 65 countries ranked, edging out China, Ethiopia, Iran, and Syria.
In 2015, ETECSA opened about 40 public Wi-Fi hotspots, but, at $2 an hour, they are expensive for average Cubans, who earn an estimated $25 a week, to use. “Even for those who might be able to afford the new access points,” says the Freedom House report, “the supply of Internet access, mostly concentrated in the capital, is grossly out of proportion with the needs of a country of more than 11 million people.” Crowds of people can be seen around the hotspots, and access is slow.
The International Telecommunication Union places the proportion of Cubans “using the Internet” at 31 percent for 2015, up from 29 percent in 2014, 28 percent in 2013, and 21percent in 2012. Growth has been excruciatingly slow, and those figures ignore the fact that only a handful of Cubans have access at home — an estimated 5 percent, according to a BBC article titled “Cuba internet access still severely restricted.” A Cuban law prevents internet service providers (there are only two, both owned by the government) from giving home access to individuals who are not approved by the government.
Still, the Google agreement is a step in the right direction. There is still no direct data link between the US and Cuba, and the closest Google server is in Venezuela. Once Cubans can start accessing YouTube and search applications without long delays, they will be demanding more.
Of course, internet freedom is more than access. Freedom House notes that the Cuban government commonly blocks “SMS containing specific words, such as references to ‘democracia’ (democracy) or ‘derechos humanos’ (human rights).” While the foreign news purveyors’ websites such as BBC and Financial Times are accessible, many other sites, including hubs and organizations promoting dissent, are blocked. In addition, a 20-year-old law that prevents internet use “in violation of Cuban society’s moral principles” has been used for persecutions and imprisonments, and the state closely monitors internet traffic.
In the end, however, it is the internet — not cruise ships, American hotel chains, or Wal-Marts — that will open up Cuba. And it has been a long haul. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan launched Radio Marti as a way to get news and public affairs information into Cuba, with a TV station added later. Jamming by the Havana government has been effective, and Cubans have taken to using an anonymously produced “Paquete Semanal,” a terabyte of data delivered physically to subscribers at $2 to $3 a week through a network similar to newspaper routes.
The content, which is downloaded onto personal computers, includes “international movies, newspapers, the latest Afro-Cuban hip-hop tracks, Korean and Australian soap operas, mobile apps, Wikipedia pages, PDFs of National Geographic magazine, the entire run of Netflix’s House of Cards, even classified ads from Revolico, Cuba’s take on Craigslist.”
Cubans are resourceful, but this is a clunky means of getting access to a world of information. The Trump administration should demand that any further US opening to Cuba be predicated on Cuba opening the internet to its citizens. The road to freedom runs through cyberspace. |
