Five Cuban projects are among the nominees for WSIS Project Prizes

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) convened international meetings to work toward a global information society. The WSIS Project Prizes contest provides a platform to identify and showcase success stories and models that could be easily replicated; empower communities at the local level; give a chance to all stakeholders working on WSIS to participate in the contest, and particularly recognize the efforts of stakeholders for their added value to the society and commitment towards achieving WSIS goals.

You can learn cast your vote here.

Yoani Sánchez's first impression of nauta.cu email

Yoani has written a post on her experience in signing up for and using mobile email.

The Cubacel clerk warned her that the account was not configured for email, and, when Yoani said she could to it, the clerk asked for help. The clerk also told her the traffic was not routed over the ALBA-1 cable.

Yoani subscribed to a number of email lists, which worked well, and says emailing a photo to a service like Flickr is much cheaper than MMS was. She succeeded in exchanging email with folks in Santiago de Cuba, Holguín, Camagüey and Matanzas as well as Havana.

Of course, she is not naive -- "every word written, every name referenced, every opinion sent via Nauta, could end up in State Security’s archives."

The service she describes is far from what most of us take for granted, but it is a step in the right direction.

(Think what they could do if they would allow satellite connectivity).

Cuban home connectivity prices leaked (with a tidbit at the end of the post)

Diario de Cuba reported that Etecsa will begin selling home Internet connectivity in September. Prime time prices will be:

The night time price (8PM - 7AM) will be 20 CUC for 90 hours, with a charge of 20 convertible centavos per hour after the limit is exceeded.

Access to the Cuban intranet will cost less, but they did not give prices.

They reported that ADSL service will be available in some areas, but said nothing about where. My guess is that most users will be restricted to dial up connections. It also remains to be seen which, if any, Web sites will be blocked.

At these prices, there will be a lot of overhead slack for home owners to sign up for a plan then resell access to others.

Here is the interesting tidbit:

The post shifts topics near the end, with a brief undersea cable discussion, saying that an unnamed ETECSA official said that the US Government had approved an $18 million proposal for an undersea cable connection between Florida and Cuba in 2010. Cuba opted instead for the $70 million ALBA-1 cable.

Has the US approval been documented? If Cuba did in fact turn it down in favor of ALBA-1 (or both), one cannot help suspecting corruption.
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Update 3/9/2014

Etecsa has announced yet another expensive service, mobile intranet email for 1 CUC per megabyte sent or received.

Is the U. S. blocking Cuban Internet access?

In a recent post, I looked into the charge that Coursera had blocked access to their educational material at the request of the U. S. Government. Subsequently, Cartas Desde Cuba charged that the US Government had ordered satellite ISPs to block access to Cuban accounts.

I followed up on these and this is what I found:

The U. S. Treasury Department denies asking satellite ISPs to block access to customers in Cuba and Cartas Desde Cuba did not reply to my email asking for the source of their report. That leaves me with no reason to believe the charge that satellite ISPs were told to cut off Cuban accounts.

Coursera is one of three prominent U. S. sources of massive, online educational material. I followed up with the other two, edX and Uacity, to see if they had been told to block access to their material:

EdX: They applied for a Treasury Department license without being asked to and it was granted (after seven months).

Udacity: Google serves their material, and as far as they know, it is not blocked. I asked Google, but they did not reply. (Google never replies to me).

Coursera: They were asked by the Treasury Department to block access, but they are seeking a license to serve blocked nations.

Overall, the Treasury Department seems willing to grant these licenses (as with edX), but evidently wants to review each case (as with Coursera). Either way, the process takes a long time. Furthermore, how many organizations unilaterally censor themselves in order to avoid problems? This feels more like bureaucratic rust than an intentional policy, but blocking or delaying access to free educational material is a bad idea -- they should clarify the policy.

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Update 9/27/2014

Coursera has received permission to make their material available in Cuba and Sudan. The good news is that a Cuban can see the course material, the bad news is that getting this clearance took nine months and few Cubans have the bandwidth and connectivity to use the Coursera site. Perhaps Coursera material will be used in universities.

As I've suggested earlier, Cuba should be a provider of Spanish language, online education.