Cuba has long been one of the least connected countries in the world. Indeed, the country rivals North Korea in the extent to which it has shut itself out from the Internet.
Here are five things you need to know about Internet freedom in Cuba, a country that blogger and Cuban dissident Yoani Sanchez calls "the Island of the disconnected."
1. Internet access is the greatest obstacle ...
In 2011, roughly 25% of Cubans had Internet access, according to the country's National Statistics Office and the International Telecommunication Union. But that number is misleading — it includes people that can only log into a government-controlled Intranet of state-approved websites.Only 5% of Cubans actually have access to the open Internet, according to Internet freedom watchdog Freedom House. Home connections are practically nonexistent, and only government officials, academics, doctors, engineers, or regime-approved journalists have Internet access at work, says Ellery Biddle, a researcher who has focused on Cuban Internet issues for the last six years.
For everyone else, there are expensive government-run Internet cafes where an hour of connection can cost between $6 and $10, a prohibitive amount of money in a country where the average weekly salary is around $20.
Where connection is possible, the speed is so slow there's very little they can do online but check email and sluggishly surf websites. "When they do access the Internet, they try to do really the bare minimum," Cynthia Romero, the Latin America Senior Program Officer at Freedom House, tells Mashable.
Even computers are hard to come by. Until 2008 Cubans were barred from buying their own, which explains why Cuba's National Statistics Office reported in 2011 that there were only 783,000 computers in the whole country.
Image: Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press
2. ... but there are creative workarounds
With such limited access, Cubans have employed more creative methods of surfing. One of the most popular is for people to download online articles onto thumb drives, then pass them around to friends and family.This is sometimes called the "sneakernet," though Sanchez calls it the "Internet without Internet" — a callback to the 1990s, when Cubans used to cook the "meat picadillo without meat" because of food shortages.
"With one person connecting to the Internet, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred or a thousands are actually accessing information," Sanchez said during a talk (embedded below) at the 2013 Google Ideas Summit in New York City.
Some Cubans with Internet access sell it to others or share accounts. Others build their own antennas or use illegal dial-up connections. But the Cuban government clamps down on these efforts with technicians "sniffing" neighborhoods for ham radios and satellite dishes, according to Freedom House.
Activists also use alternative ways to tweet, like texting or even "speak-to-tweet" systems. Cubans can call a phone number in the U.S. and record an anonymous message that gets automatically converted to text and shared via Twitter or Facebook. These calls, however, can cost more than $1, making it an expensive workaround.
3. There's actually very little online censorship
When so few people have Internet access, you don't need to censor it that much. In terms of blocking content, Cuba is no China. News websites like The New York Times, or the Miami Herald are available, as are the sites of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International.Facebook and Twitter are accessible. YouTube is not.
There is a certain degree of censorship, especially when it comes to blogs run by anti-government activists like Sanchez. Her blog, Generation Y, is inaccessible, and so are others like Bitácora Cubana and Cubanet, according to Freedom House.
The Cuban government has also been prosecuting and silencing dissident bloggers via arbitrary arrests, beatings and intimidation.
Image: Franklin Reyes/Associated Press
4. The Cuban government has a significant online presence
Despite limiting access, the Cuban government has a major footprint on the Internet. A 1,000-strong cyber militia, made up of students from the University of Computer Sciences (UCI) of la Havana, are part of a so-called propaganda initiative called Operation Truth. They are tasked with discrediting government critics and promoting the government's agenda."The Cuban government has always been very good with information and disseminating its version of accounts," says Romer. "So now they're starting to venture out more and more into the Internet and social media."
The regime even has its own versions of Wikipedia and Facebook. Cuba's online encyclopedia is called Ecured, but it only has 78,000 articles and a small number of hand-picked editors. Social Red was Cuba's short-lived response to Facebook.
Image: Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press
5. Internet surveillance isn't sophisticated, but Cubans take it for granted
The government has a tight control on the country's telecommunications. There are only two Internet Service Providers; both are state-owned. Cubacel, a subsidiary of Cuba's telecom authority ETECSA, is the only cellular carrier.With such control, Cuba doesn't need cutting-edge Internet surveillance tools, but it does have software like Avila Link, which collects private information from public computers and monitors Internet activity.
With real-world surveillance so widespread, Cubans "are paranoid that someone may be watching," says Romero.
At Internet cafes, Cubans have to provide an ID to use a computer, making anonymous use of the Internet nearly impossible. With all that comes self-censorship — and a sense of resignation.
"There's no expectation of privacy in most aspects of your life," says Biddle. "I think people people generally expect [online surveillance]."
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