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| MIC Minisiter Maimir Mesa commenting on the ALBA-1 cable |
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 on Cuba Debate and BNAmericas (account required), say the $70 million came as loan from China to Venezuela.
Did the $70 million come 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.
As a social-media addict, I see with sadness how little causes over the world gain a lot of traction while important matters from my country go unnoticed. Important, dirty, corrupt, born on dictatorship topics. This is one example. $70 million funding and no one gets an answer. Eric Schmidt (Google's CEO) traveling to North Korea to talk about population internet access recently certainly rings a lot of bells. The stupidity about people sending flash drives published a few months back in order to get cubans access to information is a sad event realizing how much of fear do we have to rise and ask about something. Why is it than most people in social networks are advertising the goods of such a regime? Because they've been forced to. If I were you, I'd just drop it. There's just no use. I haven't seen a pressuring campaign in Twitter, #WhereIsTheCubanFiber or so, they will never be. Deal with it, as I've done. There's just no use about trying to uncover the uncoverable, the cable is not for us, Internet is not for us, at the moment you realize this you won't be happier, but you'll have one less doubt in your mind. And for the people out there, do something, something meaningful, otherwise just shut the fuck up because we're the ones who get to read and become more frustrated than we are while looking at this issues.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous I think the last few posts have been a great slap on your face. Does it hurt? :)
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