By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 5 2001 (IPS)

A lawsuit between Cuba and the United States that led to a cut-off of direct phone links late last year has spread to the Internet, with Havana setting up a firewall to several voice transmission sites.

Cuba’s Minister of Informatics and Communications, Ignacio González, confirmed Wednesday that access had been cut off in Cuba to “six or seven web sites” offering cheap international phone calls.

Those sites, according to González, were “the most active” of the more than 30 existing ones that are used as an on-line alternative to telephone calls between Cuba and the United States, which since Dec 15 have been redirected through third countries.

The official said using the Internet for voice transmission was fine, as long as it was not used to get around Cuban laws or evade taxes.

“There are many loopholes being used,” said González, who stated that the restrictions would be lifted once the United States authorised phone companies in that country to pay a tax imposed by Havana, and when the companies actually began to do so.

Among those most heavily affected by the new measure are employees of foreign companies who need to maintain close contact with the United States, such as correspondents of U.S. media.

A significant number of people with access to the Web in their places of work or study also used that route for speaking with relatives in the United States, since direct phone links were cut off in December.

Studies indicate that by the late 1990s, around 1.5 million Cubans and their descendants were living abroad, including 1.2 million in the United States.

Most Cuban exiles have maintained close ties with their families back home through visits, telephone calls, cash remittances and care packages of basic products like medicines.

“My mother visited Miami for seven months, and we talked over the Internet almost every day,” an employee of a Cuban state agency, who preferred not to be identified, told IPS.

Although I had to do it “in secret” and “it was hard to hear her…we had no option but to resort to that route, because since they cut off direct phone links, it’s been very difficult to communicate by telephone.”

Havana cut off direct phone links after the U.S. Treasury Department instructed U.S. phone companies not to pay a 10 percent tax on phone calls imposed by Cuba.

The tax on phone calls between the two countries would have meant additional revenues for Cuba of 24.5 cents of a U.S. dollar per minute.

The decision, which was based on Decree Law 213 passed on Oct 23, 2000, was the Cuban government’s response to the use of more than 90 million dollars in Cuban funds frozen by the United States to compensate “victims of terrorism.”

The Protection for Victims of Human Contraband act, signed into law in October by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, permitted part of the frozen funds owed to Cuba for telephone services provided between 1969 and 1992 to be used to compensate the families of Cuban-American anti-Castro activists killed in 1996.

The three pilots died when their small planes were shot down by the Cuban air force in 1996 for violating Cuban air space. The family of a fourth pilot was not entitled to compensation under the lawsuit because he was not a U.S. citizen.

The Minister of Informatics and Communications maintained at a briefing with the foreign press Wednesday that if the United States assumed the right to use Cuban funds, Cuba had the same right to demand payment of the 10 percent tax on phone calls.

Cuba’s decision to impose the 10 percent tax triggered controversy from the start, as the measure has an extra- territorial reach, and violates the contract on telephone rates in effect between the two countries.

The terms of the agreement, which was authorised by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Control of Foreign Assets, sets a rate of 1.20 cents per minute, of which Cuba receives 50 percent.

The United States prohibited companies from paying the 10 percent tax, but did allow seven U.S. firms to privately negotiate with companies in third countries in order to re-route phone communications with Cuba.

Cuba, meanwhile, said any volume increase on lines coming in from third countries would be considered to be of U.S. origin, and began to negotiate payment of the tax with several companies in third countries.

According to González, Cuba achieved partial coverage of the arrears as a result of those negotiations.

Telephone communications between the two countries amounts to some 14 million minutes a month, more than 80 percent of which runs from the United States to Cuba, according to the minister.

“People are having a hard time communicating,” acknowledged González, who warned that “the situation could become even more tense” if the United States “persists in its foolish” refusal to pay the 10 percent tax on phone rates.

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