By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Aug 28 1998 (IPS)

Cubans are accustomed to living glued to their telephone receivers, but they may have to curb their passion for telecommunications when new phone rates come into effect in September.

For the first time in the socialist country, each minute logged on the telephone after the first 300 minutes will accrue additional charges on top of the basic service rate.

While Cubans have benefitted for decades from low telephone rates, they also have had to accept an unreliable service, which the authorities now promise to improve. Granma, the official organ of the ruling Communist Party, announced this week that the new system will be initiated on Sep. 1 and will affect only 19 percent of the telephone lines in the country.

“Put this way, 300 minutes seems like a lot of time, but when you take into account that it comes up to roughly ten minutes on the phone a day, it’s really nothing,” said Aurelio Buendia, a 42 year-old Havana teacher. “For me, it’s equivalent to one call.”

“My neighbors will suffer the most. I hope they don’t come asking me to use my phone,” added Buendia, who lives in one of five apartments with a phone in a six-story building that houses 10 families.

Users in residential areas connected to digital centers will pay a basic rate of 6.25 Cuban pesos, three cents extra for each minute during working hours on weekdays, and two cents extra on holidays, on Sundays and after 6:00 p.m. on weekdays.

At the official rate, the peso is on par with the U.S. dollar, but exchange houses recently opened by the government sell the dollar at 21 pesos.

The average monthly salary on the island is 200 pesos, about five dollars.

In the public sector, the basic rate of 9.95 pesos will be maintained, but that will cover only the first 450 minutes, after which state and government departments and political and social organizations will be subject to charges. Businesses will begin to pay additional charges after the first 200 minutes.

The new tariffs are part of a programme of investments in the telephone, gas and water sectors presented to parliament in July by Cuban Vice-President Carlos Lage, the main strategist behind economic reforms begun in 1993. The new programme, aimed at improving these utilities, includes the investment of 900 million dollars in telecommunications: the funds will come from a loan provided by the Cuban-Italian company Etecsa.

How fast the new system will be implemented will depend on the success of a programme to modernize the island’s telephone service by replacing outdated analogue lines, some of them 60 years old, with digital ones.

Executives at Etecsa say the new rates will lead to more rational use of existing lines, which in turn will allow the company to install no fewer than 40,000 telephones with the resources that have already been invested. If phone traffic goes down and then remains at a volume that the digital lines can handle normally, 770,000 new telephones may be in use by the year 2004.

This year, Etecsa intends to install 101,906 digital lines, 80 percent of which will replace obsolete, deficient analogue lines.

“New digital lines are being installed primarily to replace old lines and not, for the moment, to put more telephones into use,” according to Granma, which also said a policy to increase the number of lines in residential areas is also under consideration.

The National Office of Statistics stated that the roughly 11 million Cubans shared 666,589 installed telephones at the end of last year, a density of 6.02 phones for every 1,000 persons.

Many people here have been waiting for years to get theirs

“I’ve been applying for a telephone for more than 20 years now,” says Aracely Garcia, a 47 year-old doctor. “They say that those who have been waiting so long will be considered priority cases.”

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