Has the ALBA-1 undersea cable changed anything?

In January, I posted a note about a blog post by Renesys analyst Doug Madory showing that Cuba had begun testing the ALBA-1 undersea cable. Madory's data shows the round trip "ping" times for packets traveling between Cuba and four other cities.

The slow speed data points (A) are using the old satellite links.  The medium speed links (B) are asymmetric -- outbound via satellite and return through the cable.  The high speed links (C) imply two way cable traffic.

A number of people commented on Madory's post, some indicating that they had indeed noticed faster speed in accessing Cuban servers, but, consistent with the Renesys data, others did not.

Madory updated the data in March. As we see here, the majority, though not 100 percent, of Telefonica traffic is being carried over the cable.

Regardless, if Cuba lacks the political will and domestic infrastructure to connect users to the cable, it will have little practical effect.  The Cuban government has said the first applications of the cable would be those that benefit society.  It seems to me that university and medical connectivity would fill that bill and be low-hanging fruit.

It has been three months since Madory first detected traffic.  Has anyone noted any improvement in their service?

Informática 2013

The fifteenth Cuban international trade show and conference, Informática 2013, took place this week. Below, you see a photo of the opening session and a picture taken on the exhibit floor.

I looked around the Informática Web site and found a couple of interesting things. Below, you see the logos of the "diamond" sponsors. Note that four are Chinese and six Cuban. This reminded me of a recent post on Chinese tech companies in Cuba.

Informática is a collection of technical conferences on various topics as well as a trade show. (We have already described the health conference) The technical presentations were categorized as follows:

• XV Congreso Internacional de Informática en la Educación “INFOREDU 2013”
• 1er Foro Internacional de TV Digital
• XI Simposio Internacional de Automatización
• VI Congreso Internacional de Tecnologías, Contenidos Multimedia y Realidad Virtual
• I Congreso Integracionista de las Ciencias y las Tecnologías Informáticas, Santiago de Cuba 
• IV Simposio Internacional de Electrónica: diseño, aplicaciones, técnicas avanzadas y retos actuales
• VIII Congreso Internacional de Geomática
• IX Congreso Internacional de Informática en Salud
• VI Simposio de Telecomunicaciones
• II Conferencia Internacional de Ciencias Computacionales e Informáticas
• Energía y Medio Ambiente
• IV Simposio Informática y Comunidad
• VI Taller de Calidad en las Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones
• XI Seminario Iberoamericano de Seguridad en las Tecnologías de la Información
• III Taller internacional “Las TIC en la Gestión de las Organizaciones”

The papers are not online, but abstracts, comments and the email addresses of the authors are.

I could not help noticing that the Web site was a bit amateurish. For example, author's photos were sometime distorted -- re-sized without maintaining the original aspect ratio and HTML tags were visible in many of the abstracts. These are minor quibbles, but they are jarring in 2013.

As Muchas Gracias points out in a comment on a recent post, Cubans were required to pay registration fees in CUC this year rather than Cuban pesos. (In the US, conferences often admit people to the exhibit hall only free or at a reduced price -- perhaps that was also the case at Informática).

Muchas Gracias' comment also reminded me of my visits to Informática 1992 and 1994. Cuba did not yet have IP connectivity at that time, and the Internet was not well known outside of the technical community. The Internet community was open and friendly to a professor from the US, and I presented papers and met many people. Since I've begun reminiscing, here are some photos that my colleague Joel Snyder took at Informática 1992:

Pabexpo -- the site of Informática 

Attendees coming for the opening speeches

The stage for the opening

Two rows of dignitaries

Looking down on the exhibit hall

On the exhibit floor

On the exhibit floor

An East German computer

Cuban hardware running Russian software

Russian chips

The Youth Computer Club booth

Ceniai booth

In the Ceniai booth

Relaxing afterward at the Bay of Pigs

Cuban conference on Health Informatics

The theme of the International Congress on Health Informatics in Havana is "health information and communication technology, a reality today, an opportunity for the future."

The program is divided into the following topic areas: computing, society and health; knowledge management, education and health information; new information technologies and clinical practice; Internet, networks and telemedicine; and Information and nursing procedures.

The papers are all on line (bravo), and I did searches of the titles looking for the words Internet, red, and Alba. Four papers have the word red in the title, two have the word Internet and none have the word Alba.

It is a pity that Cuban medical professionals do not have easy access to colleagues and information around the world and vice versa. As I've stated earlier, health care, education and research should be high-priority candidates for high speed connectivity to the undersea cable. The opportunity for the future is great; today's reality is not.

Chinese technology companies in Cuba -- what are they doing?

Jennifer Hernandez of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami has posted a note on her research on Chinese Technology Companies in Cuba.

She notes that "through bilateral trade agreements, China has been expanding its sphere of influence," and looks at the activities of two large Chinese telecommunication equipment companies, Huawei and ZTE. Much of her emphasis is on surveillance and she concludes that "China’s transfer of technology to Cuba does not necessarily benefit Cubans. Instead China seems to be equipping the island’s information technology infrastructure with systems that can potentially spy on Cubans."

Internet surveilance is pretty well taken for granted in Cuba and China, and it is deplorable, but I wonder about the up side. Are Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese companies also building Internet infrastructure in Cuba?

China was instrumental in installing the ALBA-1 undersea cable between Cuba and Venezuela, but what about infrastructure on the Island? We have spoken earlier of the mismatch between the speed of the undersea cable and the obsolete domestic Internet infrastructure -- the cable is strong link in a weak chain.

That fact had to be understood before work began on the cable, but it went forward regardless. It may be wishful thinking, but I hope Cuba will use the resources and expertise of Huawei and ZTE to strengthen that weak chain by, say, building a Cuban backbone or working to connect key sectors like education and healthcare -- even if they keep an eye on the users.

Alan Gross files an affidavit

Last November, Alan Gross and his wife filed a law suit against Development Alternatives, Inc. (the company that he contracted with for his ill-fated work in Cuba) and the United States of America for "damages arising from tortious conduct committed against them."

His attorneys have filed an affidavit based on three sets of in-person interviews (December 2012, February 2013, and March 2013) and reviewed by Gross. Tracey Eaton has posted that statement on his blog Along the Malecón. It is detailed and revealing -- I advise you to read it in its entirety. I did, and here are a couple of the quotes that I noticed.

His physical condition

I currently weigh 144 pounds. I am 5 feet, 11 inches tall. When I was arrested, my weight was approximately 254 pounds.

He was experienced

For the last ten years before my arrest, my projects through JBDC (his company) focused primarily on facilitating the use of information and communications technology ("ICT") to aid citizens in other countries with limited access to ICT. Over this period, I set up and managed approximately 150 fixed-earth stations to increase Internet access.
...
Before the project that led to my arrest, I had worked on numerous USAID sponsored projects throughout the world.

What he brought in

To do this work, I usually would purchase the required components and assemble what I call a "teleo in a bag." These kits would contain "BGANS," which are commercially-available modems that permit connectivity from anywhere in the world by accessing satellites. (For more on the equipment, see this post)

Work in Jewish communities

Further, as part of my international development career, I also had worked on several development projects with numerous Jewish communities around the world, including Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Israel, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

His motivation

I was excited when I received DAl's RFP. The potential project provided me with an opportunity to combine my professional interest in technology and international development with my personal passion for helping Jewish communities around the world.

DAI security

When I arrived for the meeting on November 6, 2008, I was escorted into a conference room in which approximately 20 DAI employees were present. This was different from subsequent meetings, which were held in a secure suite designated for DAI employees working on the Cuba Project.

His proposal to DAI

I developed a proposal, known as "ICT4Cuba," or its trade name, "Para La Isla," that addressed all of the requirements ofDAI's RFP, particularly the goal of facilitating media access for faith~based groups. Specifically, I chose to focus on Cuba's small Jewish community; I proposed loaning ICT devices such as cell phones, wireless technologies, personal computers, BGANS, and other computer network devices to local community members at each project site, testing the equipment, and then training citizens to use the equipment.

His naivette

After my arrest, I was informed by Cuban Government officials that it was illegal in Cuba to distribute anything funded in whole or in part by USAID. At no point before or during the ICT Project was I aware or warned that activities contemplated by this USAID and DAl-sponsored project were crimes in Cuba.

Applications

During my trips to Cuba, I had significant success in connecting members of the small Cuban Jewish community to the rest of the world.

For example, some of my Cuban contacts were able to have video conferences with friends and relatives in Israel and other parts of the world, using Skype.

Similarly, one of the synagogues that I worked with was able to download the weekly Torah readings from the Internet.

Other Cuban Jews used the equipment to access Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica in Spanish.

Still others were able to download anti-virus programs, to protect the computers that they already had.

His openess

During none of my trips to Cuba did I attempt to conceal the equipment in my possession. Each time I arrived at the airport in Havana, airport security and Cuban Customs officials inspected all of my bags, including those containing the equipment. I even told them that the equipment was for the purpose of using computer systems inside synagogues.

DAI wiped his laptop

... several days after my arrest in Cuba, Jack McCarthy (DAI project leader) contacted Judy, who naturally was completely distraught emotionally about my arrest, and told her that DAI needed to take my personal laptop from my home and "wipe" certain information from it, for my own "protection."

DAI came to my house, left with my laptop, and advised Judy to come to DAI to retrieve the laptop within the following week.

Yoani Sánchez arrives in Brazil

It is not exactly Internet technology news, but Yoani Sánchez has arrived in Brazil.

She is shown here arriving at Guararapes International airport in the north-eastern Brazilian city of Recife. She was greeted there by both supporters and people who see her as a pawn of the US. (As a colleague once told me, you are doing a good job when both sides are angry with you :-).

She plans to travel to Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic and the US.

Connectivity remains slow and variable

A colleague in Cuba ran traceroute from a computer on a dial up link in Havana to several destinations in Cuba, Venezuela and the US. The following table shows the round trip latency time for three tests to each destination:

As you see, the international connections are very slow. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to use a modern Web site at any of those locations. Only the third test on the last line (to the US) seems to be using the ALBA-1 cable one-way.

Not only are the times slow, the variance to the same location is very high. Consider again the last line -- three tests resulted in three very different times. Even the variance within Cuba is high.

I cannot explain this -- some may be due to problems with my colleague's computer or Internet connection -- but hopefully we will see improvement soon.

If others run tests from Cuba and get different results, let us know (in confidence).

Two videos say Internet access in Cuba is rare and difficult -- duh

Havana Times has a review of "Ojos que te miran: Entre redes" (Eyes That Look at You: Among the Networks), a 13 minute documentary on Internet access in Cuba.

The documentary points out the well known limitations on Cuban Internet access and questions the value of the computer training students receive in school for future application and employment if they cannot use the Internet after graduation. (We have discussed the cost of training on obsolete technology in an earlier post).

This is one in a series of twelve short documentaries called "Ojos que te miran" addressing social issues of concern to young Cubans. Cuban filmaker Rigoberto Senarega heads the project.

I tried to find the documentaries online or to get contact information for Senagega or the author of the Havana Times article, but failed. Has anyone seen this documentary?

TV Martí has produced a 3½ minute video featuring snippets of man-in-the-street interviews of Cubans in Guantanmo. The interviewees either do not know what the Internet is or find it generally out of their reach. While that is true, the impact of the video is reduced by the fact that it is from TV Martí.

Cuban Government acknowledges test of the ALBA-1 cable

Click to enlarge this timeline

A short Granma article confirms that the ALBA-1 cable is being tested.

The article says the cable was operational last August and has been used for traffic quality testing on the Internet since January 10.

The article concludes with a disclaimer saying that when testing is complete there will not be automatic improvement of access since they must make investments in the domestic telecommunications infrastructure, which will require increased foreign exchange resources. The plan is to gradually increase socially useful use of the link.

We have been tracking the progress of the cable for some time, and long ago pointed out that without major domestic infrastructure investment, the cable would be a strong link in a very weak chain. The Cuban, Venezuelan and Chinese policy makers and technicians working on this project had to be aware of this imbalance.

I have received informal reports of fiber being laid in certain parts of Havana, but tremendous investment would be needed to deliver anything like modern Internet connectivity to a broad segment of the population. It is hard to imagine that happening without major changes in government policy and institutions.

Renesys detects some two-way cable traffic

Click to enlarge

At exactly 14:01 UTC Tuesday (09:01 local time), Renesys saw a third mode in their latency tests. In this plot, you can see the original pure-satellite mode (A), the apparent one way satellite mode we mentioned in an earlier post (B), and a third, lower mode (C) that indicates two-way cable connectivity.

It seems there is a mix of satellite, one-way cable and bi-directional cable connectivity.

First traffic on the ALBA-1 cable

Doug Madory, who has been keeping us up to date on traffic (or the or lack of it) on the ALBA-1 submarine cable between Venezuela and Cuba pointed me to a new blog post this morning, in which he reports limited cable traffic.

For the past six years, three satellite providers, Tata, NewCom and Intelsat have served Cuba. But, as you see in the above graph (click to enlarge), Telefonica traffic (dark grey) began last week.

Madory also monitored the round trip time to send data packets from Guadalajara, Mexico, Dallas, Texas and Sao Paulo and Joao Pessoa, Brazil to Cuba. He noted a significant speed up on all four routes at the same time on January 14th, indicating that some Telefonica traffic is being carried over the cable. But, since the average time remains quite high, Madory concludes that

Telefonica's service to ETECSA is, either by design or misconfiguration, using its new cable asymmetrically (i.e., for traffic in only one direction), similar to the situation we observed in Lebanon in 2011. In such a configuration, ETECSA enjoys greater bandwidth and lower latencies (along the submarine cable) when receiving Internet traffic but continues to use satellite services for sending traffic.

He goes on to speculate that the first evidence of ALBA-1 traffic and the elimination of exit visas might be part of a greater trend towards a freer and more open Cuba.

Details on Alan Gross's "telco in a bag"

Tracy Eaton has written a terrific blog post on the project that landed Alan Gross in prison. Eaton has discovered and published documents that finally answer the question "what did Alan Gross actually do?"

The documents show that Gross smuggled in three backpack-sized "Telco's in a Bag," as shown above. He was paid $258,274 for that and had requested more money to continue the project, but was apprehended on his fifth trip to Cuba, before the project could be expanded. (On first reading, I did not see the total cost of the project to the US taxpayer).

The term "Telco in a Bag" is misleading. A better description would have been "a small local area network with a slow satellite connection to the Internet in a backpack."

"Telco in a Bag" no doubt sounded good to the people funding the project, but, as I have written earlier, it grossly overstates the power of the equipment Gross brought to Cuba. Had Gross succeeded, it would not have made a huge difference and, in failing, it provided the Cuban government with a propaganda "threat" that it has blown out of proportion.

Read the post and documents over and let us know what you think.

What's up with the ALBA-1 cable? Time to follow the money.

MIC Minisiter Maimir Mesa
commenting on the ALBA-1 cable

Last week I received an email from Doug Madory of Renesys Corporation, the Internet monitoring company. Doug is the analyst who, last May, provided us with smoking-gun evidence that the ALBA-1 undersea cable was not carrying Internet traffic.

Doug says there has been "no change on connectivity in Cuba. Still all satellite." He promises to keep an eye on the situation and let us know if it changes.

He also provided a link to a post entitled "What Happened to the Cable? Cubans Discuss Internet Access" on Global Voices, a portal for blogs and citizen media.

The post links to a number of Cuban blogs with posts about the cable and notes that, after much interest and hype, the news has gone silent. Consider, for example, this post from the blog From Inside Cuba. The post chronicles the coverage of the cable in the blog Cubadebate starting in 2007 and suddenly stopping in 2011. It concludes with a long list of pointed questions.

This post is consistent with what we have observed earlier and the fact that Minisiter of Informatics and Communication Maimir Mesa said nothing about the cable in his recent report to Parliament.

On the surface it seems that $70 million was spent on a cable that was installed with no thought of how it would be used or what sort of domestic infrastructure would be needed to exploit it, and then, it was abandoned.

One has to ask what is going on. I am not a journalist, but, if I were, I would follow the money. Posts in PSLWeb, The Cable Directory and BNAmericas (account required), make it sound like the funding was provided in a $70 million loan from China to Venezuela.

Did the $70 million came from the Chinese taxpayer? If not, where did it come from? How much of it went to Alcatel Lucent for their work? How much to people in China, Cuba and Venezuela and who got it? It seems there may be invisible hands in socialist economies as well as capitalist.

Cuba to promote social use of the Internet and cut mobile cost

In his annual report to Parliament, Cuban Minister of Informatics and Communications, Maimir Mesa, spoke of the decision to "expand the Internet gradually" with projects to enhance social applications. He also said security would be improved and the cost of mobile service reduced.

As far as I know, he said nothing about the ALBA-1 undersea cable.

Does anyone have any detail on the projects he did refer to?

Here is a short video clip from the talk:

Internet services at the US Interest Section

I've been away on a trip, and came back to find a few notes from readers.

USINT sent a link to a description of the offerings at their two Interactive Resource Centers. They include free Internet access for those with basic computer skills and classes on basic computer skills and advanced classes on social media like blogs, Twitter and Facebook. They also do database searches and offer other information and photocopying.

There is an acceptable use policy. For example, users must be over 17 and cannot be engaged in commerce. One must call for an appointment to use the machines.

I still do not know how many computers there are, how fast their Internet connections are, how long it takes to get an appointment to use them, whether people are afraid to be seen using them. etc. Does anyone have any experience using them?

Why now?

There has not been much Cuban Internet news lately, but on November 2, Granma published a statement by the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs targeting the U. S. Interests Section's Internet activity. (Spanish, English)

The statement accuses the Interests Section of doing illegal training and establishing illegal internet connections and networks.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters in Washington that "We are absolutely guilty of those charges. The U.S. Interests Section in Havana does regularly offer free courses in using the Internet to Cubans who want to sign up. We also have computers available for Cubans to use. Obviously this wouldn't be necessary if the Cuban government didn't restrict access to the Internet and prevent its own citizens from getting technology training."

This activity has been going on for some time -- my question is "why publish this statement now?" Does it signal a coming crackdown on the Interests Section? Is it an attempt to influence the U. S. election somehow?

Let us know if you have any knowledge of the Interests Section classes and Internet access. Are the classes political as Cuba claims? Do they only offer access to anti-government activists?

How will the new immigration law impact the Internet?

The big news from Cuba this week has to do with the opening of travel to anyone with a current Cuban passport and a visa from the destination country.

But, everyone cannot necessarily get (or afford) a passport.

The law says a passport can be denied in the interests of defense and national security, to preserve the skilled workforce for economic, social, and scientific-technical development and to protect official information. If that is not enough, the authorities can also deny a passport for "other reasons of public interest."

It is easy to imagine these caveats being used to deny passports to people like dissident bloggers, networking professionals, and computer science students and professors. One can also imagine freer flows of information and IT goods -- particularly between Cuba and the US.

Time will tell.

Freedom House report on Internet freedom in Cuba

Freedom House's annual report Freedom on the Net 2012 is out. The report ranks nations on Internet freedom, which they compute as a function of obstacles to access, limits on content and violations of user rights. The Cuban country report is on pages 152-163 and Cuba ranks 46th out of the 47 nations surveyed.

The following are the actions Freedom House looks for. Those marked with a (C) are practiced in Cuba.

• Web 2.0 blocked (C)
• Notable political blocking (C)
• Localized or nationwide ICT shut down
• Pro-government commentators manipulate online discussions (C)
• New law /regulation increasing censorship or punishment passed
• New law /regulation increasing surveillance or restricting anonymity
• Blogger/ICT user arrested for political or social writings (C)
• Blogger/ICT user physically attacked or killed (C)
• Technical attacks against government critics

The following figures establish some context. This world map shows the nations that Freedom House rates as not free, somewhat free and free.

Here we see all of the not free nations. Cuba is next to last, leading only Iran.

Part of the problem in Cuba is very low Internet penetration in homes, as shown below.

Bear in mind that the correlation we see here between Internet penetration and the index of freedom does not establish causality -- in fact the two variables reinforce each other.

Cuba's answer to bit torrent

Yoani Sanchez posted an anecdote about her 20-year old neighbor who exchanges and sells foreign television programs, music and films in a "dizzying variety and quantity" on flash drives.

Her post reminded me of the early days, when you could walk into a government storefront in Havana and get the latest software from the US copied onto floppy disks. You had to bring your own floppies and, if you wanted a copy of the manual, your own copier paper. I was surprised at how current the software was.

Do others have anecdotes or data on the traffic in flash-drive content -- cultural or political?

Cuban computer scientists can publish with ACM and IEEE

In a comment on an earlier post, Muchas Gracias wrote that publishers, including prominent computer science and technology professional societies ACM and IEEE, would not accept articles by Cuban authors for fear of Treasury Department fines. I checked with Deborah Cotton, who handles rights and permissions at ACM, and it turned out that that was their current policy.

But, unbeknownst to ACM, the ban has been lifted. A lawsuit challenging the ban was filed in 2004 and settled in 2007. It turns out that scientific and technical publication is now permitted. (More detail, including copies of correspondence with IEEE, is available here).

Well, it took a Federal law suit, but Cuban computer scientists and engineers and others can now be published in the US without the publisher obtaining a license.

Ms. Cotton told me that the information on the law change was forwarded to the ACM Director of Publications and/or the Publication Review Board for a formal resolution. Bernard Rous, ACM's Director of Publications, followed up with a search of the ACM Digital Library, which turned up 13 articles with authors from Cuba. He pointed out that most seemed to be co-authored with authors in Brazil or Spain, which is also consistent with Muchas Gracias' claim.

I also checked with Fran Tardo, External Communications Manager at IEEE, about their policy. She told me IEEE had requested and been granted a general license for publishing in December 2004. Based on this ruling, IEEE developed its policy for the handling of manuscripts from authors in embargoed countries. As I read it, it seems to be saying that an author from an embargoed nation would be treated the same as any other author.

Guest post on learning about computers in Cuba

This 1991 note, in which Fidel Castro writes that he feels envy, hangs in a frame on the wall of the Youth Computer Club (YCC) headquarters in the one-time Sears building in Havana. Fidel dedicated the headquarters and supported the Youth Computer Clubs, where kids could play games, take classes and send domestic email. The YCCs are now in 611 locations around the island and have produced over 2.25 million course graduates (adults and kids).

Alberto, who was one of the kids at the YCC in Havana, recently left a comment on the About post for this blog. Since it gives us a picture of a young person's access to computing a decade ago, I asked if I could copy it as a post and he said "yes." Here it is:

"I lived in Old Havana until 2001 – at the time, I was starting High School and recall that during my last year there my school managed to get their hands on a handful of desktop computers. Of course, internet connectivity was unheard of, but people were highly fascinated with the prospects of technology.

Access to those computers was extremely restricted, even though one couldn’t do much with them (or knew what to do with them). The room they were in seemed more like a small fortress than a computer lab – doors were locked from the outside with heavy chains and windows blocked with metal bars (despite being on the third floor of the building). Fascinating times.

Through a family friend I managed to land a basic “computer science” class at a center in Old Havana – the name of the institution escapes me, but I clearly recall it was one of those rare buildings with blasting air conditioning. That aspect alone was worth the 15-blocks walk from my apartment to the center. The class tried to teach the very basic functionalities of Windows – right & left clicks, creating a new folder, word documents, etc. I can’t say I learned much.

I did have a friend whose father was a college professor who had some engagement with Etecsa. They somehow managed to get a personal computer into their house, with dialup internet access and everything. It was indeed a very well kept secret. Sadly, most of the time was spent trying to reconnect to the internet as the connection was extremely unreliable. He went on to study computer science in Havana and today works in the field there. From what he tells me, his job is now a large waste of resources. As he describes it, “they pretend to pay me and I pretend to do work.”

On my side, it wasn’t until I arrived to the states that I truly learned to use a computer. Two years after my arrival (while still learning English), I was doing web development and running a local site centered around education and social gatherings. Two years later, I went off to the University of Chicago for Economics and continued to work on web ventures while there. To date I’ve worked on many web projects, mostly in the entertainment space and other more serious ones: hello.webicator.com (current project, under development). This service may be of interest to readers of this blog, LP.

Today I work with a group of economists at a bank in New York, but follow the topic of internet penetration closely, not only in Cuba, but in Latin America as a whole. Data from the World Bank suggest that Latam is today where the US was at the end of the 1990s in terms of internet penetration. However, the pace of growth appears to be greater than it was in the US, which makes sense intuitively given that the technology already exists – now it only needs to become cheaper and for countries to obtain the infrastructure to sustain it.

Cuba is sadly a very different story since politics plays such a large role. I suspect that the spread of internet, when it comes, could potentially lead to a shift in mentality – with a greater sense of awareness about life outside of Cuba, will arguably emerge a greater desire for change. When the day comes, I am sure tighter content filters will be implemented, but individuals will always find ways to circumvent them, as they do in China. Indeed a very sensitive topic."

If you are or were a student in Cuba, was Alberto's experience similar to yours?

Updated Cuban ICT statistics

Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information (ONE) released their annual report on Information and Communication Technology in June, 2012. The Internet-related statistics shown here indicate relatively little change. let’s consider each of them.

	2010	2011	Increase
Number of computers (thousands)	724	783	8%
Number of networked computers (thousands)	434	470	8%
Number of Internet users (thousands)	1,790	2,610	46%
PCs/1,000 capita	64	70	9%
Internet users/1,000 capita	159	232	46%
Number of .cu domains	2,225	2,285	3%
Mobile telephone subscribers (thousands)	1,003	1,315	31%
% of population with mobile access	78	78

The report showed a 46% gain in Internet users in 2011, but only an 8% gain in the number of networked computers, indicating increased sharing of computers in public access points or homes and offices. We should also bear in mind that Cuban Internet access is not comparable to that in the developed world. Users are online relatively few hours per month and nearly all access is over dial-up connections, making access to modern Web sites and other applications unfeasible. Most accounts are restricted to domestic traffic.

The new figures reveal a lack of investment. There was only a 3% gain in the number of domains registered in the .cu top level domain, indicating that few new enterprises or other organizations created Web sites or other network applications. The fact that no increase was reported in the percent of the population with access to mobile phones indicates little investment in infrastructure.

The most positive figure may be a 31% increase in mobile phone subscribers, but we should bear in mind that Cuba has second generation phones, used for conversation and text messages, not the smart phones that are increasingly used as pocket computers and Internet access devices in developing nations.

I understand that these figures are government supplied and definitions of indicators vary among agencies like ONE and the ITU, but presumably ONE's 2010 and 2011 methodology is the same. I'd welcome discussion of and alternative interpretations of these and other statistics.

The cost of obsolete technology

Yoani Sánchez recently posted a sad anecdote. She had just gotten away for a two day vacation, when she learned that the server at the Cuban blogger portal Desdecuba.com was down. That meant she had to return to Havana and get an English translator to contact her friend who, following instructions Yoani emailed to her, fixed the problem.

This story reminded me of a visit to Cuba in the mid 1990s -- before Cuba's IP link was established. I recall bounding up a staircase to a spare second floor office in Havana with an enthusiastic young man who proudly showed me the PC that handled international UUCP trafic and hosted some email accounts for Tinored. (It may have been Tinored system administrator Carlos Valdes, I'm not sure). At the time of that visit, we were not political, not Cubans and Americans, but confident, naive citizens of the network.

Yoani's post took me back to that day, because it sounds like the Desdecuba server is configured like that of Tinored in 1995, requiring hands-on management. It also reminded me of my school's first Web server, which ran on the desktop computer in my office. It was running Windows 3.0, and crashed a lot. I had to go to my office and reboot it whenever that happened.

Coinicidentally, I just posted a teaching note tracing the evolution of the ways we deploy applications on the Internet. It has gone from standalone PCs to server rooms, blade servers, datacenters, virtual servers and virtual servers in the cloud. I no longer worry about servers and my Web site and blogs have not been down for years.

Obsolete technology caused Yoani to miss her vacation, but, more important, it means that a generation of Cuban users and technicians are being trained on obsolete technology. The technicians are learning skills that have little application outside of Cuba today. The users do not know what the modern Internet is like so they cannot envision new applications, and trained, demanding users drive Internet innovation.

With the ALBA 1 undersea cable, Cuba has a chance to start bringing some users and technicians into the modern era. (See this earlier post). For the sake of Yoani and anyone who is still telnetting into a computer to read text email, I hope they do it soon.

What happened at the CLIC Festival?

I had understood that the CLIC Festival was to be a forum for proposals, not complaints, and that participants were welcome from all sectors -- civil society, the government, etc. As such, I wrote an article for a conference issue of Cuba Voices.

In keeping with the theme, I concluded with a specific, short-term proposal: that INFOMED be given immediate access to the ALBA-1 cable, allowing them to provide Spanish language medical and health care education online. (It was similar to the proposal in this post).

I was on vacation and disconnected from the Internet at the time of the conference, so missed the news while it was going on. I just returned, and, in searching online for news of the conference, find only the usual political discussion.

What about the conference content as opposed to the politics -- what actually went on? Were there other proposals? Was there any government participation? Will there be a published proceedings? Were any conclusions or recommendations reached?

New Cuban ICT statistics

New government statitics on information and communication technology are out.  I'm travelling now, but will check them out when I get back.

The CLIC Festival

Ted Henken alerted me to the CLIC Festival on new technologies and social networks, which will be held in Havana from June 21 to 23. It is to be a forum for proposals, not complaints, and participants are welcome from civil society, the government or elsewhere.

I will be travelling and unable to follow the event, but you can read about it here.

Online education -- an application for the ALBA-1 undersea cable

When the Internet was getting started in Cuba, there was a high level debate on whether to welcome or fear it. They faced the dictator's dilemma -- whether economic and cultural value of the Internet justified the political risk. Finance Minister Carlos Lage, said "yes" and Raúl Castro said "no." Raúl won.

In arguing for the Internet, Lage spoke of its economic value, comparing the cost of a telex to that of an email. He was correct, but the cost to the economy may not have been as important as the cost to the education system.

This point was brought home a year ago by Greg Sowa, a medical student from the US, who is studying in Cuba. Sowa described Cuban student access in a blog post:

Most students use their limited internet access at the school (forty minutes a week for each student, depending if you can talk your way in for some extra time) for communication. We furiously upload email attachments of letters home while copying and pasting messages from our inbox into microsoft word documents to read later, off the clock.

Compare that to a US medical student who has near-instant access to over 21 million citations for biomedical literature from PubMed, Web sites of professional societies, the National Institutes of Health, professional social networking, Google and Google Scholar, etc.

The ALBA-1 cable could help close this gap.

We have been discussing the cable lately, and it appears that it is not yet providing Internet connectivity to Cubans, but it is being tested and used used to operate the Venezuelan ID system. Writers like Yoani Sanchez attribute the lack of cable connectivity to political fear, and they may be correct, but, even if the government wanted wide-spread access, the domestic infrastructure to support it is not in place and Cuba cannot afford it. The cable may be operating, but there is little modern "middle mile" and "last mile" infrastructure.

Since Cuba cannot afford general high-speed connectivity, they must use the cable selectively, and higher education would be a good place to begin. Students like Greg Sowa would obviously benefit, but so would faculty. Furthermore, education could be a source of revenue.

INFOMED, 2006

The online education market is taking off, and universities, non-profits, private companies and venture capitalists are vying for a place in that new, global marketplace.

There is considerable diversity among the offerings and the student goals, but, the majority of current offerings are in English, leaving an opportunity for Spanish language material. Cuba could be in a good position to satisfy that need. For example, Cuba has considerable medical expertise. If they upgraded the Infomed network and connected it to the cable, they could offer medical education in Spanish and tailored to the needs of Latin America and the Caribbean.

My own university provides an example of the sort of thing that could be done. We offer a state-wide nursing program online. The program is successful and has been running for several years. Cuba could be in a postion to do something similar (perhaps even in collaboration with our nursing program).

Computer science is another promising area. The most visible and largest online classes to date have been in computer science. Elite schools like Stanford, MIT and the Indian Institutes of Technology are going online. Cuba has a specialized University of Informatics Science (UCI). Could UCI not do the same?

Cuba cannot afford to connect everyone on the island, and would not want to if they could. This sort of focus -- where Cuban expertise is applied toward a postive social goal that also generates revenue -- may be a way to bootstrap Cuba's entry into the Internet era.

Limited pilot testing of the ALBA-1 cable?

Muchas Gracias sent us a link to an article in which Jorge Arreaza, Venezuelan minister of Science and Technology says the cable is operational, but not saying what it was being used for (http://www.diariodecuba.com/cuba/11252-venezuela-asegura-que-el-cable-de-internet-esta-absolutamente-operativo).

I have also heard an unconfirmed report that the cable is operational and being used in some Venezuelan government offices to access databases they have stored in Cuba. That could be a pilot test for the ALBA-1 link.

That would be consistent with the Renesys data we just posted (http://laredcubana.blogspot.com/2012/05/hard-data-on-idle-alba-1-undersea-cable.html), but it would not be Internet connectivity.

Venezuela storing their data in Cuba reminds me of the International Center for Scientific and Technical Information in Moscow (http://www.icsti.su/portal/eng/index.php). During the pre-Internet days, they provided centralized database access for all of the communist nations. Today they are on the Internet, serving a different group of nations.

Hard data on the idle ALBA-1 undersea cable

I received an email today from Doug Madory of Renesys, a company that monitors the dynamic state of the global Internet.

Madory wrote that there is no evidence of a submarine cable in use in Cuba in 2012. He said that latencies to Cuba are very stable and clearly satellite (>480 ms).  He attached the following visualizations (click to enlarge):

The numbers in the figure legends indicate the connecting autonomous networks -- CubaData (11960) is the state telecom of Cuba, and they have three satellite providers Tata (6453), Intelsat (22351) and NewCom (32034).

Renesys is "The Internet Intelligence Authority" -- they constantly monitor the state of the global Internet. You may have seen their reports of network outages when nations went off line during the Arab Spring, for example, this Syrian episode. You can get a sense of what they do by following their blog and Internet events bulletin.