When Cubans and Americans have cooperated

Sprint, a U.S. corporation with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, provided Cuba's first Internet link.

Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, praised Cuba for their contribution to the fight against ebola during a panel discussion at the ebola crisis at the Manhattan headquarters of Thomson Reuters.

She just returned from a fact finding trip to West Africa and said of Cuba

I think they announced that going on almost two months ago, And they are sending another 200 on top of that 265. That is a big gap and a big need.

She also said it gave her great pride

To see these Americans or Europeans or Cubans or whoever it is in their full protective gear, in the scorching heat, working two-hours shifts, because that’s all you can tolerate being in that suit.

When the moderator asked a leading question about US relations with Cuba, she answered

There’s no integrated effort, in part because the UN is doing the command and control. But we’re very grateful to them for doing this.

Below, you see two Cuban doctors at the largest of 17 ebola treatment units (ETUs) in Liberia, which will be mainly operated by Cuban doctors and nurses. It is noteworthy that the picture was posted on the Voice of America Web site and funding is from USAID.

I'm posting this in a blog on the Internet in Cuba because it reminds me of the collaboration and friendship of Cuban and American networking technicians during the pre and early-Internet days.

The day Cuba established its first IP connection to the Internet, Jesus Martinez, Director of Cuba's National Center of Automated Data Exchange (CENIAI), the organization responsible for networking at that time posted a statement saying

After so many days, years of sacrifice and vigilance, I have great satisfaction to announce that our beloved Cuba, our "caiman of the Indies," has been connected to the Internet as we had desired. We have a 64 Kbps link to Sprint in the U.S.

Sprint, a U.S. corporation, subsidized by funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, provided Cuba's first Internet link.

At that time, American networnkers were welcome visitors at CENIAI and at Cuba's Informatica conference and Cubans and Americans and others attended and taught in the Internet Society's annual Developing Country Workshops and conferences. There was no politics and no big money, just a common belief in the importance of the Internet.

Martinez and his colleagues were not politicians seeking power or representatives of corporations seeking monopoly profits, they were technicians and others who believed that computer networks were fascinating and held great potential for improving the world. They may have been naive, but one has to respect them and we owe the same to any medical professional coming to West Africa to treat ebola patients.

Cuban doctors and USAID in Liberia

Jesus Maritnez and Internet pioneer Vint Cerf

CENIAI staff, 1990

American visitors at CENIAI

Internet Society Developing Nations Workshop, 1993

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Update 11/12/2014

Wall Street columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady says Havana earns almost $8 billion a year off the backs of the health workers it sends to poor countries. She says Cuba is well paid for sending doctors abroad and the doctors themselves get very little. O'Grady calls this "slave trade," which sounds like click bait, and Listening to the interview, it seems that a lot of her conclusions are speculative. You can see the interview for yourself here:



If you are a Wall Street Journal subscriber, you can read her column here.

A reader of this blog, who is a Cuba-trained physician now living in the US, has told me Cuban doctors are eager to go abroad because there is nothing for them to do in Cuba. O'grady paints a different picture. I have no reliable way to form an opinion -- just passing these links along.

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Update 5/8/2015

Americans and Cubans collaborated in the early days of the Internet and during the Ebola epidemic. Ebola killed thousands and it (literally) decimated the tiny health-care workforces of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

In a Foreign Affairs article, Laurie Garrett proposes combining the resources of the US and Cuba's Latin American Medical School (ELAM) in training medical professionals.

Combining the money, logistics, and talent of the United States, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia to rapidly train a team of new doctors for the West African nations offers the most cost-effective, swift, and appropriate means to solve the health systems crisis faced in the Ebola-hit countries.

If you are not familiar with ELAM, watch this TED Talk by Gail Reed. (I have read charges that ELAM graduates do not pass exams at the same rate as those of US medical schools, but ELAM is devoted to training healthcare workers to deliver care that is appropriate to developing nations).

As the Ebola epidemic showed us, this is a global problem, not an African problem.

A modest connectivity pilot proposal

Would the Cuban government be willing to test a few low-speed satellite links that were not controlled by ETECSA?

I had an interesting exchange with a reader this week. He took exception to my assertion that the sorry state of the Internet in Cuba today has its roots in three factors -- the US embargo, Cuba's depressed economy during the "special period" after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Cuban government's fear of free information.

He agreed with the first two points, but asserted that the third was speculation on my part. I replied that during the early days of the Internet, government officials, including Raúl Castro, argued that freeing of information had contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I also asked him why, if they did not fear free information, wouldn't today's government allow private citizens to establish satellite connections?

In an earlier post, I said that, even if the government were willing, Cuba could not afford to cover the island with modern Internet infrastructure or attract foreign investment to do so. (Even if they could attract the foreign investment, I would hate to see Cuba's Internet future in the hands of companies like AT&T and Comcast).

In that post, I suggested that decentralized satellites could serve as an affordable first (interim) step on the way to a modern Internet. If the government is not afraid of free information, would they allow a small pilot study to see if satellites work, how people use them and what the costs and benefits are?

For example, would they give permission to install a few satellite dishes -- perhaps on a residential street or in a school, clinic or Joven Club in a rural area?

The cost would be small -- I would be willing to cover a year of satellite service out of my own pocket (or better through Kickstarter funding). It would be an interesting project and help settle the question raised by my reader.

Submissions to the Investigatory Powers Review

[Update 11 June 2015.  David Anderson's report 'A Question of Trust' has been published today and is available on his website, together with two volumes of submissions made to his review. My own submission is also available here (PDF).]

David Anderson QC (@terrorwatchdog) is the UK's Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. He is tasked under the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA) with conducting a review of investigatory powers. This includes interception of communications (e.g. by GCHQ and law enforcement) and powers to compel retention and production of communications data. His Call for Evidence closed on 3 October 2014.  Here are some of the submissions to the Review now being made public.

AccessNow

Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law

Centre for Democracy and Technology

Dr Andrew Defty and Professor Hugh Bochel (University of Lincoln)

Equality and Human Rights Commission

Global Network Initiative

Human Rights Watch

Interception of Communications Commissioner

ISPA

The Law Society of England and Wales

Liberty

The Newspaper Society

UCL LLM Students

Vodafone

And although not strictly speaking a submission to the Review, GCHQ Director Sir Iain Lobban's valedictory speech.

More to follow.

The Nieman Foundation says there are over 2,900 Cuban public interest blogs.

Yoani Sánchez launched her blog, Generation Y, in April 2007. (Her first post contrasted the freedom Cuban's had to display posters saying “Go Santiago!” during baseball playoffs with their inability to display a poster saying “Internet for all!"). In 2011, she told us that the free blogosphere had taken off. A recent post on the Nieman Foundation blog says there are now over 2,900 blogs dedicated to debate and discussion of issues related to the public interest in Cuba. (Is there a report underlying that statistic)?

The blogs are based in Cuba, Spain, the US and other nations with Cuban communities, and they are often in conflict with the Cuban state media. For example, a blogger disclosed math test fraud in Cuban college entrance exams the day after the exams were praised in the state media. Since Internet access is highly limited in Cuba, blog news is often distributed on the "street networks" which we have described in these earlier posts.

It takes a while, but it seems that even in Cuba information truly does want to be free -- at least in one sense of the word.

Meeting of the Cuban "blogger academy" in 2009

Cuba's sneaker net

Yaima Pardo, 34, in her home in Cuba as she describes her project PaSA
(Paquete Semanal Autnomo), an independent weekly digital-media package for Cuba

A recent article (English or Spanish) describes the black market distribution of music, soap operas, TV programs, movies, magazines, Web sites, etc. on flash drives.

There is a tiered distribution system. A terabyte drive arrives each week in Havana and is replicated for distributors and eventually sold to end users on the street or delivered to homes. While the material is generally sold to the end user, ads are starting to pop up on distributions. The article does not say whether there are competing distribution networks or how material is selected for inclusion. A detailed description of the process would be most interesting.

The distributions contain no political messages or pornography. The article quotes one person as speculating that Cuban authorities might tolerate the weekly “packages.” It is not clear to me whether the master packages are downloaded or brought in on portable drives, but the authorities turning a blind eye would facilitate either means.

The article also describes PaSA (Paquete Semanal Autonomo) a project of film maker Yaima Pardo. Pardo and her colleagues hope to produce an independent, weekly digital-media package that will be open to more controversial content and distributed for free.

Blog Bang Cuba: a Cuban blogging documentary

Claudio Peláez Sordo has made a documentary on Cuban blogging for his masters thesis at the University of Havana. It shows interview snippets of specialists and bloggers who access the Internet from school or work accounts controlled by the Cuban government.

The video was posted September 3, but has had only 458 views so far.

Whose domain space is it anyway?

Governments shouldn’t get in the way of the people who run the internet. Fine sentiments reported by the Guardian from UK Culture Minister Ed Vaizey at the Internet Governance Forum in Istanbul this week.  They echo his speech to the ICANN meeting in London in June: "What governments shouldn’t be doing is attempting to manage how the internet is run."

Fine sentiments, but does the UK government live up to them?

Regrettably the UK government has not been immune from the temptation to take powers over internet governance institutions.  Sections 19 to 21 of the Digital Economy Act 2010 gave it power to take direct control of the .uk domain by putting a manager into Nominet.  The sections have not been brought into force, let alone the powers exercised.  But the government hardly needs to once the potential exists.

In the current interstate tug-of-war over global internet governance every State accuses every other State of donning fig leaves to conceal self-interest.  Here is an opportunity for the UK government to plant a flag in the high ground, to say ‘We mean what we say.  We have backed off, how about you?’

So make the bold move, repeal Sections 19 to 21 and issue the challenge. 

Or would the government backpedal? We can hear it now. “Reserve powers, only to be deployed in the last resort in the interests of UK plc, the Secretary of State cannot use them unless there is a serious failure in limited circumstances…” (See here the reasons put forward at the time the powers were legislated). 

That won't wash.  If failings are for a national government, not the internet governance community to sort out then fine sentiments are just so much vapour.  Letting go of powers is more than desirable, it is a litmus test.