|
HAVANA (AP) — It was all sunshine, smiles and celebratoryspeeches as officials marked the arrival of an undersea fiber-opticcable they promised would end Cuba ‘s Internet isolation and boost web capacity 3,000-fold. Evena retired Fidel Castro had hailed the dawn of a new cyber-age on the island. More than a year after the February 2011 ceremony on Siboney Beachin eastern Cuba, and 10 months after the system was supposed tohave gone online, the government never mentions the cable anymore,and Internet here remains the slowest in the hemisphere. Peopletalk quietly about embezzlement torpedoing the project and thearrest of more than a half-dozen senior telecom officials. Perhaps most maddening, nobody has explained what happened to themuch-ballyhooed $70 million project. ( MORE: View the Magical Undersea World of Internet Cables ) "They did some photo-op … and then that scandal cameout, and then it just disappeared from human consciousness,"said Larry Press, a professor of information systems at CaliforniaState University, Dominguez Hills, who studies Cuba, referring toforeign media reports and whispers by diplomats that severalexecutives at state phone company Etecsa and the two seniorofficials in the Telecommunications Ministry were arrested lastyear. The cable was strung from Venezuela with the help of key ally Hugo Chavez . Government officials said from the start that the bandwidth boonwould be prioritized for hospitals, universities and other usagedeemed in service of the common good; the legions of Cubans withlittle or no access to the Internet from their homes would have towait. But a dozen employees of public institutions interviewed by TheAssociated Press said they have seen no noticeable improvement intheir work connections. If anything, they say, download speeds haveeven gotten a little slower. Going online in Cuba will try the patience of anyone who'sever had a taste of high-speed DSL connections. The problem is that connection speeds here are still Web 1.0, whilethe world has moved on to fancier, bandwidth-hogging platforms likeFlash. YouTube is irrelevant on Cuban dial-up, and barely useableon the rare broadband connections. Want to watch the latest episodeof "Mad Men?" At 3-5 kilobytes-per-second dial-uptransfer speeds, a 500-megabyte video file would theoretically takesomewhere between 28 and 46 hours to download from iTunes. Artists and photographers say it's nearly impossible to viewothers' work online. People swap digital pictures in personon memory sticks rather than simply sending them as emailattachments. Students have difficulty accessing research databases. One doctor in Havana said she only has access to Cuba'sdomestic intranet, a bare-bones internal network of island-hostedsites that also lets users get email. Moreover, her institutionrecently began cracking down on the few who do have full Internetaccess, ordering them not to use sites like Facebook under threatof punishment. "I had high hopes, great expectations for the cable. …For me, doing a postgraduate degree, (the intranet) is no good.It's too basic and poor for our needs," she said."They haven't given us any explanation." She and the others spoke on condition of anonymity for fear ofgetting into trouble with their state employers. Multiple attempts to get Cuban and Venezuelan government officialsto comment were unsuccessful. The Venezuela branch of Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent, which wascontracted to lay the cable, referred questions to theCuban-Venezuelan joint venture Telecomunicaciones Gran Caribe,where an official said he would need approval fromVenezuela's science and technology ministry to talk about theproject. The ministry did not respond to requests to interviewofficials. Diplomats in Havana privately tell consistent stories of reportedcorner-cutting on the project that let corrupt officials skimmillions of dollars from its budget. A senior French official told AP that Alcatel had upheld its partof the contract and whatever problems exist must be on land withthe network it was meant to be attached to. "The cable must be connected to something or it won'twork," said the official, who also spoke on condition ofanonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the politicallysensitive project. The lack of transparency is not unusual for Cuba, where all mediais state-run and tightly controlled. But it flies in the face ofFidel Castro's own enthusiastic words about the cable and thetransformational power of the Internet. "Secrets are over. … We are facing the most powerfulweapon that has ever existed, which is communication," Castrotold Mexican daily La Jornada in an August 2010 interview in whichhe hailed the coming cable. While some hold out hope that faster Internet has merely beendelayed, others interpret the government's long silence as asign Cuba's broadband dreams will be the latest grandpronouncement to end in disappointment. "I have no expectations for the cable," said MarleneBlanco, a 25-year-old independent worker. "Nothing is goingto change for ordinary Cubans. So why talk about it?" According to government statistics, 16 percent of islanders wereonline in some capacity in 2011, mostly through work or school, andoften just to the intranet. The National Statistics Office saidlast year that just 2.9 percent reported having direct Internetaccess, though outside experts estimate the real figure is likely 5to 10 percent accounting for black market sales of dial-up minutes.For a variety of reasons including the 50-year-old U.S. economicembargo, Cuba is the last country in the Western Hemisphere to geta fiber-optic connection to the outside world, and has reliedinstead on costly and slow satellite linkups. Some speculate that the Internet-fueled Arab Spring revolts, whichbegan months before the cable's arrival in Cuba, could havealtered the government's plan or at least made officialsrethink the wisdom of making it widely available. "They're afraid of it. They don't want a `CubanSpring,' so to speak," Press said. President Raul Castro's administration has warned of asupposed plot by enemies in the United States to wage a"cyberwar" to destabilize the Communist-run government.In 2011, a Cuban court sentenced U.S. subcontractor Alan Gross to15 years after convicting him of crimes against the state forimporting restricted communications equipment that he insists wasonly meant to help the island's Jewish community gain betterInternet access. The official silence over the fiber-optic cable has given rise toother rumors: that the cable is operational but being usedselectively. A pro-government blogger known as Yohandry Fontanawrote at the end of 2011 that people who attended a closed forum onsocial networks reported it was working fine. "Here's a brief summary: 1. The cable has no problem,it is working. 2. Public Internet spaces will open on the island.3. Costs for public connection will go down. Note: I am seekingmore information," Fontana said. Cuban-born economist Arturo Lopez-Levy said Havana has badlybungled the whole affair, and if it's true that corruptionkilled the cable, officials should "make heads roll over thescandal" and give an open accounting of what went wrong. "The Cuban government failure to achieve this goal is one ofthe worst-managed situations," said Lopez-Levy, a lecturer atthe University of Denver, "aggravated by an even worse publicrelations fiasco to address it." ( PHOTOS: Church and State: The Role of Religion in Cuba ). The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as China Auto Air Conditioning Evaporator , Toyota AC Condenser, and more. For more , please visit Auto Air Conditioning Evaporator today!
Related Articles -
China Auto Air Conditioning Evaporator, Toyota AC Condenser,
|
