By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 12 2001 (IPS)

Growing access to the Internet appears inevitable in Cuba, where until recently there was talk about limiting connectivity to avoid the risks posed by unlimited citizen access to the information available over the worldwide web.

But local authorities now recognise that Cuba cannot isolate itself from the information superhighway, just as they accepted the circulation of the dollar, which was legalised in 1993 to curb the growth of the parallel market in dollars.

Although firewalls are still in place against some web sites, there is a steadily growing number of people with e-mail accounts and access to the Net, whether through authorised or illegal mechanisms.

Cuba’s link to the worldwide web is in the exclusive hands of the state.

“We are under great pressure from companies and the citizenry to expand access to the Internet,” admitted Minister of Informatics and Communications Ignacio González Planas, who is in charge of the programme aimed at computerising Cuban society.

González Planas said that while the government is willing to allow widespread access, there are severe economic limitations that have forced authorities to put the priority on certain sectors of the population.

Among the privileged few figure foreign diplomats, the employees of foreign companies, a corps of around 200 journalists, the country’s nearly 40 universities, scientific institutions, the media, and state firms and agencies.

This year, the socialist government of Fidel Castro hopes to equip around 30 special post offices with public e-mail services and access to the web, as well as services for sending and receiving photos on-line.

Cuba “is ready for the Internet, for widespread computerisation, far beyond what our infrastructure allows,” said González Planas.

The official described Cuba’s situation in the field of communications technology as “critical.”

However, rumours have begun to circulate. “They are going to make residential Internet hook-ups available, but you’ll have to pay 150 dollars,” a local resident of Old Havana, who said she was repeating something she heard in her local post office, told IPS.

But the possibility of Cubans applying for a residential hook- up from any of the five existing state servers, and paying for the service in either Cuban pesos or dollars, is still remote.

Deputy Minister of Informatics and Communications Melchor Gil commented that “no one would be able to log on to the Internet or be able to place a phone call” if every home had a computer connected to the Internet – a reference to the chaos and saturation that would exist under such circumstances.

Roberto del Puerto, director of the ministry’s informatics programme, stressed that a society cannot be computerised “overnight”, and that it is necessary to start with the “expansion and modernisation of technologies.”

Cuba’s teledensity is considered “ridiculously low” by González Planas, who pointed out that just 4.37 percent of the population of more than 11.1 million people have phone lines, and 10.3 percent of the more than two million residents of Havana.

In the late 1990s, digital technology was brought in, and 80 percent of lines in the Cuban capital are now digital, compared to 50 percent countrywide. But most regions are still connected by ageing copper cables.

According to rough estimates, there are 10 computers per 1,000 inhabitants in Cuba, and more than 60,000 e-mail accounts, nearly double the 35,170 that existed last June. Of those, roughly half offered international e-mail. Meanwhile, there were just 3,625 computers with full access to the Internet, Del Puerto told IPS.

Gil said he could not specify the number of e-mail accounts offering international connectivity.

A writer who preferred to remain anonymous told IPS that the Ministry of Culture had assigned him an e-mail account, “but that does not give me access to the web, and I can only log on to download and send messages.”

An undetermined number of people find themselves in the same situation.

Nor is it possible to calculate the number of people who surf the web in Cuba, where there is an underground market for passwords, said an economist consulted by IPS.

Some people pay 25 dollars a month for a password, others find loopholes that allow them to gain access illegally, and many use their friends’ on-line computers.

Indeed, experts estimate that for every computer linked to the state e-mail and Internet servers, an average of 10 people surf the web or use e-mail.

The economic losses could amount to millions of dollars, given that CENIAI, the first server set up in Cuba after the island joined the Internet in October 1996, charges nearly 300 dollars for full access to the web and 120 dollars for 100 hours a month of connection.

Meanwhile, authorities seem to be coming to grips with the question. The worldwide web has become a means of circulating ideas and information about Cuba from an official perspective. By early April, there were 314 Cuban web sites and 16,000 pages, which report more than 50 million monthly hits.

That does not include the web pages posted by dissident groups or the illegal independent press, nor by private businesses marketing their restaurants and tours or advertising rooms to let over the Net.

An interesting development that seemed to indicate the government’s new openness to the Internet was a special stand set up at the Havana Book Fair last February, where anyone could freely surf the web for as long as they wanted.

However, the international watchdog organisation Reporters Without Borders listed Cuba last February with 44 other developing countries that were described as “enemies of freedom of access and expression on the Internet.”

Statistics from various international institutions indicate that less than 10 percent of the global population enjoys access to the Internet.

Moreover, 68 percent of web users are in the United States, Canada or Europe, while a mere 2.65 percent of the population of Latin America has access, 1.8 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, and just 0.45 percent in Africa.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reported that 62 percent of the world’s phone lines are found in 23 industrialised countries, which are also the beneficiaries of 97 percent of Internet services.

But the widespread use of mobile phones has brought a new outlook to Cuba. Minister González Planas said the projected replacement of a portion of the country’s fixed lines with mobile connections, whose users will pay their bills in Cuban pesos, will make resources available for investing in data transmission technology.

Cuba is also aiming at broad coverage with fibre optic technology, routing international communications via satellite through the cable system, and putting neutral access points into operation to cut costs by concentrating Internet flows through a single channel.

Expanding the service will also depend on obtaining new Internet Protocol addresses from U.S. companies, which require special licences due to the 40-year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba.

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