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.
-----

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.

-----
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.

How does one post material on the Cuban "sneaker net?"

Warhol P has written a Havana Times post on the Cuban "sneaker net" -- the circulation of movies, TV shows, software, etc. on flash and hard disk drives.

He reports prices of 50 Cuban Pesos (around $2) for 80 to 500 gigabytes of material and 10 Cuban Pesos for 8 to 16 gigabytes. (These days one can get 64GB USB-2 flash drives for under $30 and 128 GB drives for under $50).

Warhol P says home delivery service is available and some consumers go to the home of the supplier to put together a package in accordance with their preferences. Other suppliers rent out hard drives for three to four days for a little over 4.00 Cuban Convertible Pesos (around $4).

But I have a question -- how does one gain access to the sneaker net? For example, I have developed some Spanish language tech teaching material for young people. It is under Creative Commons license and I'd be happy to see it distributed in Cuba. I'd also like to see the Khan Academy teaching material distributed in Cuba using KA Lite, a packaging of the Khan Academy content for use off line.

Are the sneaker net distributions put together in the US? Are they pretty much only entertainment and software or are they open to other types of material? Is there a way to submit material for inclusion?

-----
Update 12/16/2014

I have asked how one gets information into the weekly "paquetes" -- who compiles and organizes the material and gets it to Cuba for distribution. People have offered speculation, but no answers. Isbel Diaz Torres of Havana Times has published a comprehensive description of the weekly paquetes along with the theory that they are so well organized, regular and done without interference, that their distribution must be "a Cuban government project, possibly developed in one of those mysterious agencies in the Ministry of the Interior, hidden from the public."

There is precedent for this theory. Years ago, I visited a government storefront office in Havana where one could get copies of any current PC software. You had to bring your own floppy disks for the copies and printer paper if you wanted documentation.

This post was Part one of two. I'm looking forward to Part two.

-----
Update 2/8/2015

In part two, Torres restates his hypotheses that the weekly packages of digital material are delivered by or in cooperation with the Cuban government and speculates that they are doing so in order to placate the Cuban people by giving them entertainment, saying

It’s a question of keeping the “masses” entertained, docile, isolated from true consumption, in other words, the well-known social control strategy used by States to guarantee governability and that Cuba is setting in motion at a time when less and less can be justified on the basis of Cuba-US conflicts.

He speculates that the government is counting on this affordable entertainment plus access to a few second-rate services on the Cuban intranet to satisfy the Cuban people. If that is the case, they are surely wrong.

Cuban mobile Internet prices

Cuban authorities have announced that mobile Internet services will be available on the island soon at a maximum rate of 1 Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC) per megabyte of data transferred. (1 CUC = 1.14 USD).

As far as I know, they have said nothing about the technology (3G or 4G?) or the locations in which it will be available.

But, they did announce the cost, and in case you imagined Cubans streaming Netflix movies or Pandora songs to their mobile phones. let's look at the cost of doing so at the published rate:

These are Apple's conservative file size estimates.

(Lest you consider the Cuban costs outrageous, consider that, if Apple had charged the same rate for song downloads as your friendly US phone company was charging for text message bits a few years ago, a song would have cost you $5,486).

Mobile Internet access at these prices are well beyond the means of ordinary Cubans even if they only do a little Web browsing and email. In the past, the Cuban government has justified high Internet prices by saying they were needed to ration scarce international satellite bandwidth, but, now that the ALBA 1 undersea cable is operating, what is the justification for these prices?

Venezuela cracks down on the Internet

The tension between the benefits of the Internet and it's power as a political communication tool has been with us since the early days of the Internet. When the Internet came to Cuba, the government debated this Dictator's Dilemma and decided to limit and monitor access. The Venezuelan government took a more liberal stance and, today, the Internet is more advanced and ubiquitous there than in in Cuba.

The current political protests have led the Venezuelan government to crack down on the Internet -- see these posts from the Electronic Froteir Foundation, the Associated Press and Aljazeera America.

Perhaps President Maduro wishes Venezuela had adopted the Cuban policy. How, if at all, does this affect Cuba?