In the last week or so I've seen a spate of articles (for example this one) pointing out that only a few, relatively rich Cubans can access the Internet and that the Cuban Internet is not free. This is not exactly news. (It may be news that Cuba was an early networking leader).
These articles were triggered by the publication of the 2014 editions of the Freedom House Freedom on the Net report and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Measuring information society report. I will highlight a few of the reported findings on Cuba and put them in context by looking at some Cuban data from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human development report.
Freedom on the Net, 2014
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| Net freedom and sub-component ranks out of 65 nations |
Freedom House puts Cuba in the context of all nations with the following plot:
| Internet freedom versus penetration -- purple indicates not free, green free |
(Too bad we cannot combine Iceland's Internet with Cuba's climate).
The report includes a well documented essay on the state of Cuban Internet freedom and you can see summaries of Cuba's rating in the 2012 and 2013 Freedom on the Net reports here.
Measuring information society, 2014
This report is a compilation of data and analysis of the state of information and communication technology (ICT) in 166 countries. The key summary statistic is the ICT development index (IDI), which is based upon three sub-indices as shown here:
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| The ITU framework and index structure |
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| IDI and sub-index ranks out of 166 nations |
Cuba ranks 125th on the IDI -- they are doing well on skills, but access pulls them down. The IDI and sub-indices are a function of many variables and they include telephone, mobile and Internet indicators -- so, for example, Cuban access is pulled up by low-cost fixed telephones and pulled down by fixed broadband prices.
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| Latin American fixed broadband price |
Composite indicators like these offer a very rough characterization of the Internet in a nation and there is much more Internet-related data on Cuba in the report. For example, broadband is limited to 2 mbps DSL and even that is not available in private homes; the Cuban household connectivity rate is only 3.4%; Cuban IDI is 32nd out of 32 ranked nations in Latin America and the Caribbean (Haitii was not included in the IDI rankings for some reason); in spite of the ALBA cable,Cuba has the lowest international bandwidth per user in the Americas; Cuba is one of four nations in the Americas without wireless broadband and ETECSA is one of the last state telecommunication-sector monopolies in the world.
Human development report, 2014
Like the others, the UNDP human development report compiles an overall index, the human development index (HDI). The HDI is computed for 187 countries and territories and is a composite of sub-indices for health, education and income (up to a cutoff point).
Cuban fares better on the HDI than the other indices -- it is ranked 44th in the world and second only to Chile in Latin America and the Caribbean:
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| Cuba is ranked 44th in the world on the HDI. |
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| The Cuban HDI is second to Chile in Latin America and the Caribbean. |
As we see below, Cuba has made steady progress with the exception of the "special period" after the fall of the Soviet Union and more recently, in education. (What's up with education)?
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| Cuban HDI and constituent indices over time |
The report includes profiles of the state of human progress in each nation -- you can see Cuba's here.
Cuba's HDI rank is laudable and it was achieved essentially without the Internet -- think of what they could have achieved with a robust Internet (even if it were controlled as in China). That is a sad opportunity loss. The Cuban government denies fear of the Internet, but they have restricted it since its inception.
The tip of the iceberg
The above is only a quick look at these three reports -- each is extensive, well researched and contains significant analysis. They also publish their data and provide interactive analysis tools so you can play with the data yourself. For example, the UNDP makes their data available in Google's Public Data Explorer (PDE), which makes dynamic plots of time series.
I used the PDE to plot the relationship between the number of users and the HDI in 2008, the year Cuban education began to drop off:
The graph changes dynamically as the year slider at the bottom is moved. Check it out for yourself, here -- you will like the dynamic presentation.
(This sort of analysis was introduced by Hans Rosling -- check out these great presentations if you are not familiar with his work).
The UNDP data is also available as a Stat Planet world map, which I used to create the two HDI charts shown above.
If, like me, you like the global perspective, you will want to look at these three reports and the accompanying data.
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Update 8/22/2016
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| 2014 UNDP HDI |
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Update 11/15/2017
The 2017 Freedom on the Net report, published by Freedom House, is out and, as you see below, Cuban Internet freedom is essentially the same this year as last. It appears that Internet penetration has increased, but that is because access to the local Cuban intranet has been counted along with access to the global Internet. (There is no published report on the latter as far as I know -- please let me know if there is).
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| Cuban Freedom on the Net summary, 2016 |
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| Cuban Freedom on the Net summary, 2017 |
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| No overall change since last year |
These figures are taken from the 2016 and 2017 Cuban country reports. The country reports cover much more than these summary figures -- they are interesting and well documented. Check them out!
