Helping Cubans get connected faster
ON A recent Sunday afternoon, entire families – grandparents, newborn babies, and teenage girls snapping selfies in their most fashionable clothes – were gathered on the steps, walls and kerbs of a plaza in the Playa neighbourhood of Havana.
But they weren’t there for a social event. What brought them together was the quest for connectivity.
In July, Cuba’s government began rolling out 35 new and improved wi-fi hotspots. In most cases, the Cubans at the Playa hotspot were paying more attention to their cellphones and other gadgets than each other.
To say Cubans have embraced connectivity doesn’t begin to describe their new love affair with Facebook, video call application imo, and phone connections robust enough to send photographs and selfies to friends and family abroad and around Cuba.
They perch on park benches tapping at laptops, lean against walls staring at tablets, or sit on kerbs with their cellphones as traffic whizzes past.
What’s interesting to Ted Henken, a Baruch College, New York professor who has studied the internet in Cuba, is that Cubans are living out some of their most personal moments – such as family reunions, and introductions to new babies and spouses – not in the intimacy of their own homes but in public plazas and parks.
Blogger Yoani Sanchez calls the 35 new hotspots a ‘‘social phenomenon’’.
Marlene Velarde, her husband and grandson recently visited the office of ETECSA – the state telecoms monopoly – in Playa, and plunked down 6 Cuban convertible pesos (around US$6) for three hours of internet service. They spent the first hour or so learning the imo application so they could make a video call to Miami.
The new wi-fi sites are proving popular across Cuba.
‘‘Thank goodness they brought the internet,’’ said Armando Aguilera, a 19-year-old college student at the main square in Holguin, a city in eastern Cuba, who was sending Facebook messages and trying to video chat with his mother in Angola.
‘‘Here, we’re a thousand light years away from other technology.’’
Imo, a video app Cubans use because Skype isn’t available, has opened up new opportunities for those who previously could only reach out to friends and family through phone calls or perhaps an occasional email.
Still, imo has its limitations, said 21-year-old Xiulee Ochoa, a medical student trying to reach her boyfriend in Canada from a sidewalk bordering the Park of Flowers, one of two new hotspots in the city of about 300,000. ‘‘It’s kind of obsolete. You also can’t download a movie or a music video.’’
The new service is open to anyone with an account that allows them to get email on their mobile phone, tablet or personal computer.
Rather than being an entirely new service, WIFI-ETECSA is a new path where connections are a bit speedier that those offered at most hotels or state-run cybercafes.
The connections allow 50 to 100 people to navigate at the same time, and the government says speeds could reach 1 megabit per user.
Although prices are still high for most Cubans, at a little more than US$2 per hour, they are about half what they used to be.
But with the scant number of new wi-fi sites, hotels – where Cubans buy internet access or try to piggyback on the signals bleeding outside – still do a brisk business.
Pirating signals can be a hitor-miss proposition. So many locals discovered the password to a free, special government connection for journalists during Pope Francis’ visit to Holguin last month, for example, that the telecommunications agency forced to change the code.
Back in Havana, patrons of the ETECSA office in Playa wait in line to buy scratch cards containing their internet access codes. Most tote their own cellphones, tablets and laptops.
Some of the users are very tech-savvy, but there are also a lot of first-timers learning to post selfies, connect on imo and set up Facebook accounts.
Some complain of dropped calls and the need to reconnect over and over with distant lands, or say they’d like to see faster wifi connections.
Estel ‘‘Merci’’ Rodriguez Ortiz is a video call novice. She has borrowed the cellphone of her exhusband’s wife to make a video call to her son Jorge Michel in Hungary. He’s been working in Herceghalom, a town outside Budapest, as a forklift driver and has been home only twice in 18 years.
‘‘It’s the first time I did it, and to see him is just tremendous for a mother. I’m almost without words,’’ she says as tears stream down her cheeks.
Communication between families must improve, she says, but the new wi-fi connections are ‘‘an enormous achievement’’.
‘‘Imagine it – we’re making a small step toward the development we haven’t had. To be able to see a little more toward the world outside is very important.’’
Although some United States companies, including Google, seem eager to help Cuba build up its internet capabilities, the government still hasn’t tipped its hand on how much help it wants.
‘‘Cuba should skip technology generations,’’ said Larry Press, a professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
But to do that, it needs money, and it needs to overcome its fear of losing control.
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