By Michael Brissenden
Updated Tue Mar 1, 2011 1:33pm AEDT
Cuba's ruling party would be keen to keep the focus on the textbook
teachings of dialectical materialism rather than allow access to the
anarchy of social media. (AFP: Rodrigo Arangua)
A strange thing happened to me the other week. While the so called
Facebook revolution was sweeping through Egypt I found myself in an
almost completely net free zone, a rare black hole on the Facebook
map: Cuba.
There might be some debate about whether Mubarak was toppled by the
net nerds of Cairo or not - after all he did shut the whole thing down
after a while - but what seems clear is that social media certainly
helped get the ball rolling. What's also clear is that the old
comrades in their battle fatigues in Havana have nothing to fear from
any like-minded, touch screen freedom fighters. For most people in
Cuba even the mobile phone is pretty much out of reach. Access to the
internet is reserved for the ruling elite, those in favour with the
regime or the relatively wealthy - which is usually the same group.
Here's how it works for most of the rest of the population.
The average wage is about $20 per month, so there's not a lot of room
for discretionary spending on communications. A mobile call casts 35
cents to make and 35 cents to receive. And the mobile phone in Cuba is
simply that: there's no mobile broadband or fancy broadband network,
internet access is restricted to a clunky old dial-up service that
most people can only access at certain times at certain post offices
for anywhere between $2 and $5 an hour.
This has its redeeming features of course. It's like stepping back
into the 1980s. On the Cuban streets people don't spend their entire
time walking around staring into their mobiles. You can still have a
conversation, indeed a whole meal, without your companion disengaging
to tweet or to check the latest update from their real friends on
Facebook.
Very few people here are in a position to afford an online presence
and those that are are wary of giving any would-be revolutionary free
rein in cyberspace. As we've seen, things can get out of hand pretty
quickly for autocratic regimes if they let that one loose. The ruling
party to be keen to keep the focus on the textbook teachings of
dialectical materialism rather than allow access to that sort of
unfettered digital anarchy.
That's not to say they don't appreciate its virtues. Mariella Castro,
the daughter of the Cuban leader Raul Castro, spent a good deal of
time in a interview I did with her for the ABC's Foreign Correspondent
telling me how much she admired Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. It was
hard to disagree with her assertion that "WikiLeaks has paved a new
path in the transparency of international diplomacy". The paradox of
the situation in her own country flashed by without comment.
Of course part of the reason why the digital age has passed Cuba by
has been the refusal of the US to allow to the fibre optic cables in
the Caribbean. In the next few months though, an underwater cable
rolled out all the way from Venezuela will finally bring broadband to
the island. But apart from giving those that already have access to
the net a faster service no-one expects anything much to change in the
short term.
According to the government-controlled daily newspaper Granma, Cuban
officials have already made it clear that while broadband may mean a
higher quality communication it will not necessarily bring "broader"
communication.
Viva la revolucion.
Michael Brissenden is the ABC's Washington correspondent.
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