Caribbean & Central America - December 2015 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Almost a year after ‘17-D’, as Cubans dubbed the historic move to restore US-Cuba relations, expectations are growing on the island for faster change and for more engagement with the outside world. Many islanders, however, are disappointed with the pace of President Raúl Castro’s economic reform process, with the nascent new entrepreneurial sector still largely fenced-in by a tightly controlling state. Nowhere is people’s frustration more evident than in the continued lack of access to the Internet.

As it did on several occasions in the run up to 17-D, The New York Times (NYT) has taken a noticeably strong editorial stance advocating greater US government and corporate engagement with Cuba. The NYT has long also called for the removal of the half century-old US embargo on Cuba. In a 30 November article by the editorial board entitled ‘Time to bring Cuba online’, the daily argued that “the only thing keeping the island in the digital Dark Ages is a lack of political will”, noting that Cuban officials can no longer blame the embargo on the island’s obsolete telecoms infrastructure, following regulatory changes implemented by the US government led by President Barack Obama in January 2015 that provide Havana with “a number of options to expand Internet coverage quickly and sharply”.

“If the government took advantage of that, the island’s anemic economy could get a much-needed jolt, and young Cubans who are determined to emigrate, a powerful reason to reconsider”, it continues, suggesting that the US giant Google, which likewise has taken a strong stance in favour of engagement with Cuba - and whose CEO Eric Schmidt publically expressed on a trip to Havana last year an interest in helping to upgrade Cuba’s infrastructure - could help Cuba ‘plug in’. “Partnering with Google, which has enormous lobbying clout in Washington”, the NYT adds, “could advance Havana’s goal of building enough political support in Congress to repeal the embargo and would make it harder for a future president to dial back the restoration of diplomatic ties”.

Having pledged in December 2014 to expand Internet access “without haste, but without pause”, in July 35 hotspots were set up at locations around the island. Havana has five, costing a hefty US$$2.50 an hour to use. According to US media reports, Google already has offered the Havana government a detailed plan to provide faster Internet at very little cost to the government. The NYT points out that Google could connect Cuba up to additional submarine cables, “ which would vastly improve speeds, and develop a hybrid distribution network that would include fiber-optic cables, cellular data towers and Wi-Fi access points”.

“Cuba could also decide to do business with non-American technology companies, as Myanmar did after it began opening its political system in 2013”, it also posits. In fact, there are some indications that this is exactly what the Havana government is doing. According to reports that first circulated in June, the Havana government is working with its strategic partner China to bring broadband to the country.

A Cuban blogger, Carlos Alberto Pérez, who produces the blog,‘La Chiringa de Cuba’, on 23 June last posted online a purportedly leaked Cuban government document that appears to be a plan to provide broadband service to Cuban homes by 2020. “The service would be based on ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), which operates over copper telephone lines, and would rely on equipment from two Chinese telecoms firms, Huawei and ZTE. The cost to the Cuban consumer would be based on the speed of the connection, the amount of usage and the level of access (national or international)”, according to a translation by CNBC. Pérez told CNBC, “"They prefer to trust the Chinese, who are their friends”. By contrast, Google is viewed with suspicion in some official Cuban circles, not least because of Google’s amicable relations with the Obama government; the head of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, is a former state department official, for example. Other observers comment that a Chinese option would offer two advantages; it would allow the Cuban government to make money from the service and would also give it the ability to monitor what people are doing online.

However Cuba’s state telecoms company, Etecesa, responded to the leak with an official statement denying the veracity of the document, which it said was for internal planning use only and had been manipulated and was thus wrong. It added that it was looking at several investment scenarios and would duly inform Cuban consumers about the evolution of its plans. Carlos Alberto Pérez duly posted the response on his blog.

What is clear is that there is a genuine conversation taking place within the Cuban government, but the pace of talks is slow and very cautious. The NYT suggests that the government is split between hard-liners “who are worried that broader Internet access could fuel dissent” and more progressive officials “who see the embrace of technology as a matter of economic survival”.

General Juan Antonio Machado Ventura, one of the Cuban Revolution’s históricos, told Juventud Rebelde in July, in apparent reference to Google: “There exist people who want to give [the Internet] to us for free, but they aren't doing it with the goal of allowing the Cuban people to communicate, but rather with the purpose of penetrating us, and to do ideological work to achieve a new conquest…We must have the Internet, but our way, knowing that there is an imperialist intention to use it as one more way to destroy the Revolution…We have to do it, so that our young people aren't too distant from the world of today, but we have to explain to them why we aren't doing it more rapidly."

Cuba-US migration talks

Cuban and US officials held their regular biannual migrations talks on 1 December against the problematic context of the Cuban migrant crisis in Central America, which is creating diplomatic tensions in the sub-region (see page 13). As always, Cuban officials repeated the Havana government’s opposition to the longstanding Cuban Adjustment Act (1966), which allows Cuban migrants that arrive in the US (with or without visas) to become permanent residents a year and a day after their arrival, which Cuba argues encourage irregular and often dangerous migration. The latest crisis in Central America stems from the fear in Cuba that the Act will be withdrawn as part of the normalisation of bilateral relations.

Following the talks the US State Department issued a statement noting that while the two sides had discussed the crisis in Central America, and had agreed to “expert-level meetings on how both governments will contribute to combating the smuggling organizations that take advantage of Cuban migrants”, the US “has no plans to alter current migration policy regarding Cuba”.

Meanwhile, there were unusually large protests outside the Ecuadorean embassy in Havana after Ecuador announced that it would reinstate a visa requirement for Cubans coming to the country as of 1 December. Ecuador has been the main ‘jump-off’ point for Cuban migrants starting the journey north up through Central America and Mexico to the US border. After Cuba liberalised its migration rules in December 2012, President Rafael Correa imposed requirements in January 2013 before removing them again in April 2014. Ecuador said the latest move was an effort to protect Cubans from “unscrupulous people traffickers” and that it corresponded to broader efforts by Latin American governments to prevent migration without authorisation". The change “does not close the gates to our brother Cubans”, the foreign ministry stressed.

As we went to press, Cuba announced an important change to its migration regulations (liberalised in 2012) to oblige certain medical professionals to get a travel permit from the health ministry to leave the country. According to state media, this is an effort to stem a massive brain-drain out the country, in part encouraged by the US migratory authorities’ ‘exceptionalism’ for Cubans.

• “There exist people who want to give [the Internet] to us for free, but they aren't doing it with the goal of allowing the Cuban people to communicate, but rather with the purpose of penetrating us, and to do ideological work to achieve a new conquest…”

• “As we went to press, Cuba announced an important change to its migration regulations (liberalised in 2012) to oblige certain medical professionals to get a travel permit from the health ministry to leave the country. According to state media, this is an effort to stem a massive brain-drain out the country, in part encouraged by the US migratory authorities’ ‘exceptionalism’ for Cubans.”