I've been writing about El Paquete for some time, but had never seen a copy. This week, someone who will remain annonymous, gave me a copy of the Paquete from the week of March 16, 2016 and I've had a chance to poke around it a bit.
As you see, it is not, as is usually claimed, a terabypte, but is only 760 gigabytes. Regardless, it took around three hours to copy from one USB hard drive to another -- I hope the professionals working with El Paquete in Cuba have devices for more rapid duplication than my laptop. While it is less than a terabyte, it is huge with nearly 13,000 files and 1,400 folders.
The copy I received did not have any sort of user interface software. Perhaps that is good enough for the El Paquete distributors, who are familiar with file structure and content, but end users deserve something better than a Windows Explorer view of the file system, as shown below. If it does not already exist, someone should write a user interface program that lets users search for and select, copy and view content.
As you see there is a variety of content -- in English and Spanish -- and I poked around a bit. The following are a few things I noticed.
I wonder who decides what to include and what criteria they use. For example, I found two old Hollywood cowboy movies, four US spring traing baseball games and an Australian formula 1 car race. Why those movies? Why those games? Why that race?
Someone at Netflix told me that I would find their content, but I did not find any. There was a House of Cards video subtitle (.srt) file, but no video episode. This is 100% speculation, but I wonder if the absence of Netflix content is tied to the possibility of their investing in infrastructure or producing content in Cuba.
There are directories of Android, IOS and Windows software. I wonder if the programs are free of malware.
The quality of a lot of the video I saw was poor, making me wonder how it is captured -- perhaps it is compressed and downloaded over slow connections. Another possibility is that it was not copied from a digital version, but recorded through the so called "analog hole" during playback. The commercials had been cut out of some of the foreign video, but others included the original commercials, again suggesting that they had been recorded during playback. There were also current Cuban ads like the one shown here.
There is a lot of text as well as audio and video material -- for example scanned copies of popular magazines. While the commercial magazines are sometimes out of date and difficult to read, government publications like Granma and official documents like the text of laws are perfect, legible PDFs. It would seem that the government is providing this content directly. Some have gone as far as asserting that the government actively supports El Paquete, and they surely do not discourage it.
Whether or not the government supports El Paquete, they allow it to exist, subject to an informal agreement to remove violent, pornographic or Cuban political content, but I found one delightful example of political content, an episode of Samantha Bee's "Full Frontal." As a cord cutter, I had never seen the program, but the episode was 100% political -- making fun of the U. S. right wing politicians. Evidently U. S. politics are not a taboo subject.
In the past, I have suggested that Cuba could use the Internet to export Spanish-language entertainment and educational content and I found quite a bit of Cuban video on El Paquete. I did not screen all of it, but every program I did look at was offered by a Cuban company, LAY Agencia Publicitaria, which has the slogan "Made in Cuba and for the world." I wonder if the folks who run El Paquete own that agency and see pivoting to Cuban content export as their "exit strategy" in a post-piracy Cuba. (A legitimized Paquete is another possiblity).
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Update 8/20/2016
I made a copy of the March 16 edition of El Paquete for John Graham-Cumming and he has taken a deeper dive into the contents of "The Cuban CDN" than I have. He summarizes what he sees in four categories:
+ The week's English and Spanish Magazines
+ Android Apps
+ TV, Films, Music and "Best Of"
+ Web Sites.
He also scanned for viruses and found a couple, but they would have been detected by the four-day old antivirus updates that were also in the distribution. I am surprised that the producers of El Paquete had not run the same scan, but am impressed by the currency of their updates.
One of the comments on his post also caught my eye. The commenter said each edition of El Paquete contains many files from the previous weeks and there is "only" about 200 GB of new material in each distribution. That's still a lot of work and bandwidth -- I wonder if they are able to do incremental updates when producing the master drives for each week.
The Hemingway movie was shot before the December 2014 US-Cuba rapprochement began and more productions will probably use Cuba as a location. Cuban production will continue as long as the government makes it attractive, but, to me, that is less interesting than the prospect of Cubans producing entertainment and educational content for Spanish-speaking audiences.
If I were running the show at Netflix, Google, Amazon, Hulu or "Hollywood" in general, I would be thinking about setting up a production center in Cuba. Cinema and other arts are alive and vibrant in Cuba and there are tons of overeducated, underemployed creative professionals.
Take Google for example. They currently have YouTube production spaces in Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, New York, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Mumbai and Toronto. Will the next one be in Havana?
Or how about Netflix? Netflix was among the first US companies to "open" to Cuba, but since there is virtually no Internet infrastructure capable of streaming their content, we have to wonder what that means. Cubans do not stream Netflix productions, but they do watch pirated versions thanks to El Paquete Semanal. Someday, they might see Cuban royalty revenue from a legitimatized Paquete Semanal or, in the far future, streaming, but, with the approval of the Cuban government, they could be producing content in Cuba today.
Crowds watch shooting of Fast and Furious
Shot in Cuba and now showing in the US
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Update 5/14/2016
I've been speculating about the opportunity Netflix (and others) have for creating Spanish language video content in Cuba. Netflix was one of the first US companies to offer service (that no one could afford or access) in Cuba and they held an executive off-site meeting in Havana last month.
Well, here is some related speculation.
Dave Temkin, Netflix VP of Network Strategy and Architecture, posted an upbeat article on Cuba after their off-site meeting and returned for the LACNIC conference last week in Havana. Might Netflix (or Google) be thinking of building a data center in Cuba?
Locations of deploying organizations and installations of the offline Khan Academy.
The Khan Academy is arguably the most important source of online learning on the Internet. Over 39 million teachers and learners have used their collection of 57 innovative, highly modular courses for students from grade school to university.
The Open Courseware site of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosts teaching material that has been used in over 2,300 classes during the last 15 years. The material has been provided by professors in 31 departments (not all technical) and is viewed by over 1.5 million unique visitors per month.
Online access to these sites is impossible for the vast majority of Cubans, but there are offline versions of both.
These could be used by individuals for self-study or installed on local area networks in schools, universities, Youth Computer Clubs, etc. and accessed offline. The site software and teaching content could be distributed on portable drives. An Internet connection would be needed for periodic updates -- MIT recommends a connection speed of at least 1 Mbit/second. Updates could be distributed on portable drives to users without connectivity.
I've summarized this proposal in a few sentences, but regular, nationwide distribution would require organization and support. Could a Cuban University, the Youth Clubs or the Ministry of Education create El Paquete Educativo?
Cuba could become more than a consumer of educational material. For a start, El Paquete Educativo could be distributed to Spanish-speaking people in other nations. More important, Cuba could be a source of Spanish-language educational content. This is a time of global innovation in online education and the institutions surrounding it. Exposure to software like MIT's Open Courseware or the Khan Academy would inspire Cuban developers and educators.
Teaching material or other content can also be bundled with low-cost server hardware. In this example, a handheld $30 server creates a WiFi LAN and serves medical information in South Asia. The same hardware could be used to deliver other content, like Wikipedia in Spanish.
In earlier posts, I have described Cuba's community mesh network, Street Net (SNET), and its relationship to the government. Cachivache Media has just published a post (in Spanish) on SNET, adding to my earlier description and suggesting that the government may legitimatize it.
More on that later, but first a description of SNET.
SNET is over 8 years old and, while it is well known to the government, they have turned a blind eye toward it (while cracking down on others). SNET has grown during those eight years -- it now extends from Cotorro to Bauta, a distance of over 30 kilometers.
SNET provides more services than I had realized. It has social networking (similar to Facebook), FTP (file transfer) for content sharing, live music streaming, software for download, forums for developers and engineers, poetry, literature, comics, sports and much more.
I have suggested (hoped) that Cuba might be a source of innovation, that they might evolve a uniquely Cuban Internet, reflecting Cuban culture and politics. SNET reflects Cuban values in that it is cooperative, free, non-commercial and self-sufficient. Users buy, install and maintain the equipment and administer the network. (It is reminiscent of the Internet culture when Cuba first connected to the Internet in 1996).
SNET has a strict code of behavior -- there is no talk of politics or religion, vulgar language, sexualized avatars or pornography and no connecting to the Internet. As such, it has been tolerated by the government. SNET, like El Paquete Semanal, satisfies the people without posing a threat to the government.
Speaking of El Paquete, a legitimatized SNET would compliment a legitimatized Paquete Semanal. A robust SNET could be used for the distribution of Paquete content to local distributors and end users.
The article suggests that the Ministry of Communication is working on a new regulation that would legitimatize SNET. A legitimate SNET could expand into areas like e-commerce and online education, while providing employment. (There is speculation that El Paquete Semanal is Cuba's largest private employer).
It sounds like they see SNET evolving into a government service, operated by government employees, rather than a private enterprise, but I may be wrong about that and doing so would be a mistake.
While I would not want to see SNET operated by the government, government could provide support. For example, in facilitating communication and standardization among local people building and operating SNETs and in making large quantity equipment purchases. (I've suggested a similar approach to installing local area networks in schools).
If SNET is legitimatized, I hope they reach out to share information (both ways) with community networks in other nations -- particularly with the Guifi network in Spain. (I bet they already have). I also hope the restriction on Internet connections would be dropped and that ETECSA would provide high-speed backhaul.
This is all speculative, and a bit rosy. Even with government support and cooperation, there is a lot of overhead in a mesh network, It would be interesting to see some data on the network architecture, amount of traffic at different times, numbers of users, speed and reliability as experienced by the end user, etc. (How do they connect users in Bauta and what sort of performance to they see)? As an open network, I would expect SNET to provide that sort of data.
Copyright is another hurdle. Like El Paquete Semanal, a considerable amount of SNET content is pirated. If the government were to legitimatize and perhaps operate SNET, I think they would have to work out some sort of copyright agreement.
A legitimate SNET would have to be considered in the context of Cuba's overall short and long term networking strategy. I hope the experiment continues and evolves -- we can all learn from it.
This week, the Cuban government gave some dissidents one-time permission to travel abroad. I suspect that gesture was related to President Obama's upcoming visit and expect to learn of other agreements when he visits Cuba next month.
I asked a Cuban colleague what concessions he thought might be announced and he mentioned further easing of travel, increased incentives for US investment and a compromise on debt claimed by the US for nationalized property and by Cuba for the cost of the embargo. He did not think Guantánamo would come up, even though President Obama is trying to close the prison. (It seems he was right).
Might there be some Internet-related announcements?
How about an undersea cable from Havana to Florida? Daniel Sepulveda, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and US Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, led a high-level delegation to Cuba in January. Upon his return, he said there are at least a half-dozen proposals — from US and non-US companies — to construct a cable between the US and Cuba.
An undersea cable connecting Havana and Florida would provide backup for the current Cuba-Venezuela cable, add capacity and reduce latency. More important, it would reduce the load on Cuba's national backbone.
Nearly all of Cuba's international Internet traffic is carried over the undersea cable between Cuba and Venezuela. The cable landing is at the east end of the island but most of the traffic is from Havana and other cities to the west, so a cable from Havana to Florida would reduce the need for investment in backbone capacity. (There is also an undersea cable from Guantánamo to Florida, but that remains in US hands and also lands at the east end of the island).
The Cuban government says the Internet is a priority and the US is no longer standing in the way of Internet infrastructure investment. The ball is in Cuba's court and a cable from Havana to Florida would save Cuban investment. This is something ETECSA can and should do on behalf of the Cuba people, even if it requires foreign partnership (for which there is precedent) or subsidy to attract capital.
Copyright is another Internet-related issue. Cuba's "Weekly Package" of entertainment and software is viable because the content is pirated. The government has turned a blind eye toward the organization that compiles and distributes the material because the people want entertainment and need software and there is speculation that it may be Cuba's largest private employer.
Last summer, I asked a senior State Department spokesman whether copyright violation had come up during discussions with the Cubans and he said "no." Might some compromise on copyright have been reached since then?
Today, US content providers are getting nothing from the Cuban distribution of entertainment and software -- something would be better than nothing. The Cuban government likes the Weekly Package because it entertains the people, provides private employment and is a distribution channel for software. Perhaps an agreement could be reached in which Cuba pays small, affordable royalties today with a promise of increases over time in return for dropping prior copyright violation claims.
Another possibility -- an announcement involving Sprint or another wireless carrier. I've noted some of the things Sprint has going for them, but it may not be enough to overcome Cuban reluctance or Chinese competition.
This is all speculation and probably none of it will come to pass (on this trip). That being said, I expect some progress will be announced -- it will be interesting to see what it is.
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Update 2/28/2016
This post on Cuba, the US and cybersecurity (in Spanish), points out that the US and China have an agreement on cybersecurity and there have been cybersecurity discussions between the US and Cuba. Might there be a cybersecurity announcement during President Obama's trip to Cuba?
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Update 3/9/2016
Reuters reports that the administration will announce easing of restrictions on travel and trade before the President's trip to Havana later this month. The report says nothing of the Internet-oriented announcements that I speculated on. It also says about 20 members of Congress will accompany the President and pointes out that several legislators, including Democrats, have criticized the President for continuing to make unilateral concessions to Cuba.
A legitimatized "Paquete Semanal, S. A." could distribute Netflix content in Cuba today.
To the extent that we are allowed to see it, Cuba's plan for the Internet focuses on connectivity in homes and public places and support of areas that are considered socially important like education and health care. Even if Cuba is patient and leapfrogs current technology, a large investment will be required in service of those goals.
The infrastructure investment needed to support digital entertainment is beyond Cuba's means, but, necessity being the mother of invention, Cuba has outsourced digital entertainment to El Paquete Semanal. The organization supporting El Paquete has grown organically and efficiently distributes content in a timely manner. There is demand for their product and El Paquete may be Cuba's largest private employer.
Ironically, El Paquete must also suffer from piracy by end users. I don't know if they worry about that today or just tolerate it and rely on fresh weekly material for their revenue. Regardless, if prices rise after the removal of the wholesale piracy subsidy, there would be a greater incentive for end-user piracy.
Normalization of relations between the US and Cuba will eventually require elimination of the piracy subsidy that makes El Paquete viable. When the negotiations on digital piracy take place, Cuba should consider the strategic role El Paquete plays and find a settlement that allows it to remain a part of the Cuban digital infrastructure.
(There might even be competing "paquetes semanales" -- with the government acting as a wholesaler that negotiates deals with content owners).
Netflix entered the Cuban market shortly after December 17, but that seemed to be a symbolic step, with no prospect of profit. It will be many years before Cuba is able to support the streaming of Netflix content, but a legitimatized "Paquete Semanal, S. A." could distribute Netflix content in Cuba today.
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Update 1/7/2016
In this post, I have focused on content distribution, but the Cuban film and creative communities could be a source of Spanish language content for Netflix and others to distribute in other nations, including the US. I had suggested earlier that Cuba could be a source of content for Google and it's been reported that Cuba is being considered as a location for "Fast and Furious 8" -- might we see Google, Amazon, Netflix and other production centers in Cuba one day?
Commercially, Cuba is small potatoes to Google -- a mere 11 million potential users. But what of potential creators? Google is recruiting in another small nation, Israel -- will they be recruiting in Cuba some day?
The other day, a journalist who was writing an article on Cuba contacted me to ask what Google might do there in the short run. I referred him to an earlier post in which I had listed some short term steps, but I will add some speculation on production and hosting of domestic content and infrastructure here.
YouTube has video production spaces in Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, New York, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Mumbai, and Toronto -- how about opening one in Havana?
I won't be surprised if I see Cuban content turning up on Netflix in the near future -- along with Cuban film and animation on YouTube.
Of course, Cuba is a largely untapped source of content beside cinematic video. For example, in an earlier post, I suggested that a free, well connected Cuba could be a rich source of online education and medical information.
Google has built a MOOC platform and offered MOOCS. In 2013, they announced a partnership called mooc.org with edX that promised an open platform for hosting courses, but, over a year later, the mooc.org Web site is unchanged. However, they have been contributors to open edX, the open source edX platform. Could Google host an open edX service for Spanish language courses developed by Cubans (and others)?
The same applies to medical information. Cuba has focused on medical research, training and practice since the time of the revolution and Infomed, their medical network, predates their connection to the Internet. Could Google provide hosting services or high speed connectivity to Infomed and Cuban universities or to Cuba's Latin American Medical School for remote training and course development?
On a recent trip to Cuba, Google executives told students at the University of Information Science that they could not sell applications they had developed in the Google Play store at this time.
There may be some problem with allowing Cubans to sell software through Google Play that I am not aware of, but, if that is not the case, this would seem like a quick, simple thing for Google to do -- it would create a relationship between them and Cuban software developers.
Infrastructure
That is fine for Cuban-produced content for export, but what about domestic consumption? The Cuban economy and infrastructure can not support video distribution today -- might Google contribute to Cuban infrastructure?
Google has data centers in many cities around the world, but it is hard to imagine them building one in today's Cuba, which has little power and very few Internet users. However, for the short term, they could invest to improve ETECSA's data center.
Could they help with Cuban backbone infrastructure? Satellite and terrestrial wireless might be used for interim connectivity in rural areas, but what about Havana? Could Havana become a Google Fiber city? Even if ETECSA were to allow it, it is hard to see Google becoming a retail ISP in Havana, but might they provide wholesale backbone infrastructure as they have with Project Link in Kampala, Uganda where they have installed over 800km of fiber.
Kampala is a smaller, more densely populated city than Havana, but the GDP per capita in Cuba is ten times that of Uganda and only about 5% of the Ugandan population lives in Kampala while around 20% of Cubans are in Havana. Considering these rough figures plus Havana's advantages in health and education, Havana seems as good a place to invest as Kampala.
Havana's demographics look good, but there is one large problem -- a lack of competition. In Kampala, Google is a wholesale service provider not a retail competitor. The Internet Society lists 13 retail ISPs in Uganda, while Cuba has one, ETECSA. If Cuba is unwilling to forego ETECSA's monopoly in the retail ISP market, neither Google nor anyone else will make the sorts of investments needed to build a modern Internet.
Early this month, a US delegation headed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy Daniel Sepulveda, will travel to Havana to work on greater Internet connectivity "to better support access to information for the Cuban people." While the ultimate goal is to better support the Cuban people (customers), the delegation will focus on finding out how and when the Cuban government/ETECSA wants to engage US companies interested in selling them equipment and services.
Charles Rivkin, assistant secretary of state says they have received comments from many US companies and the delegation's goal is to "see what is possible from the point of view of Cuba."
Josefina Vidal, who has been leading Cuban discussions with the US said they welcome US telecommunications companies to explore business opportunities, but there a lot questions. As I said in an earlier post, the ball is now in Cuba's court. Perhaps this delegation will learn what they plan to do with it.
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Update 3/8/2015
Last week, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai said they would be expanding Project Link, installing fiber backbones "many more" African cities this year.
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Update 3/16/2015
While Google has a vested interest in increasing the number of Internet users world wide, Cuba is not an easy place to do business -- The Heritage Foundation ranks their economy as one of the least free in the world, but they are taking steps to improve the business climate.
In March, 2014 the Cuban government formally acknowledged the importance of foreign investment to their economy and revised foreign investment regulations. Foreign investment is authorized in "all sectors except those dealing with the health and education of the population and the armed forces institutions, with the exception of their business systems."
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Update 5/19/2015
Cuba recently announced a plan to bring Internet connectivity to all schools at all levels within three years and I made several suggestions for doing so in an earlier post. (I am full of free advice for the government of Cuba :-). Google could contribute to this effort in several ways. One would be in helping with a backbone network to connect the schools. I also suggested that the Cubans take a decentralized approach to building LANs at the schools, and Google could help with that effort -- perhaps using the hi-frequency wireless equipment they have been testing. Finally, the Cubans are talking about tablets for students -- Chromebooks would be better. The One Laptop per Child project has distributed laptops to over 2.4 million children -- how about One Chromebook per Child in Cuba?
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Update 6/24/2015
Last week, representatives of companies in the food and beverage, infrastructure, vehicles, insurance and international corporate law sectors visited Cuba and met with government officials, private entrepreneurs, cooperatives, journalists, economists, artists and members of the diplomatic community.
Two of the visitors, Brett Perlmutter of Google Ideas and Brehanna Zwart of Google Access and Energy, were from Google, and they reportedly came with a proposal. I don't know what they proposed, but they indicated that it was for mobile infrastructure. I've been speculating about things Google might do in Cuba -- why stop now?
Brett Perlmutter and Brehanna Zwart at OnCuba Magazine
Google has experience with fiber installation, both in Google fiber cities in the US and in Kampala Uganda where they have installed a wholesale fiber ring. Might they do the same in Havana or elsewhere? Google's fiber could be used for mobile backhaul. (Cuba is already rolling out WiFi hot spots).
But what about linking that to the Internet? It will be some time before there is a fiber path between Havana and the undersea cable at the east end of the island, but they could use O3b Network's high speed satellites. (Some time ago, I suggested that ETECSA use home satellites to reach rural areas).
This is total speculation -- I have no idea what Google proposed or what ETECSA is willing to allow, but it is fun to speculate. Going further into the future, how about Google Fiber in Havana? And, when will we see those Google baloons over Cuba?
Google Fiber cities -- Havana someday?
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Update 6/7/2018
YouTube has video production spaces in Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, New York, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Mumbai, and Toronto -- how about opening one in Havana?
As I mentioned above, Cuba is well positioned to produce Spanish-language entertainment and education content and I suggested that Google open a YouTube production space in Havana.
The idea of opening a production space in Havana makes even more sense today than it did in 2015.
Google Global Cache (GGC) servers are now installed and operating on the Island. That means Google content can be viewed and uploaded faster than in 2015 and the result is that YouTube has made substantial gains since GCC went online last April:
There is also a growing, enthusiastic community of young Cuban YouTubers, several of whom are profiled in this YucaByte article and you can "meet" a few others in this short (5:36) video from Periodismo de Barrio:
(The YucaByte article also contains a short video sampler showing enthusiastic YouTubers).
Not exactly being a millennial myself, I am not likely to become a follower of these youthful YouTubers, but they are inheritors of a rich history of Cuban music, cinema and education.
Google executives and Senator Jeff Flake just met with Cuban president Diaz-Canel and former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt who said “We already have an agreement signed that allows easier access to data. We would like to do more.”
How about opening a YouTube video production space in Havana?
