A group of girls attend a Shonglap session in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. The peer leader (left) is discussing adolescent legal rights. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Mahfuzur Rahman
DHAKA, Dec 24 2016 (IPS)

Pumping money into development projects and rolling them out without having a good communications policy in place makes it unlikely the programmes will achieve their desired goals, as communications is vital to connect with stakeholders.

Development projects will thrive if the messages are effectively shared as it helps build an enabling atmosphere, communications experts said while addressing a multi-stakeholder knowledge-sharing meeting titled ‘Communicating for Development: Rural Transformation’ in Dhaka on Dec. 20.

They said one needs to be clear about project goals and messages while communicating in any form. Connecting people across the board with communication helps identify vital issues, build a sense of belonging and pave the way to move ahead.

Emphasising the need for collectivism, Bangladesh’s noted economist Prof. Abul Barkat told the event that project officials often fail to make their key messages clear.

Referring to the weakness in coordination and communication, the economist noted that only four percent of rural land in Bangladesh is ‘effectively’ owned by women, while a whopping 72 percent of urban land is owned by women as the property is often transferred to women by their male family members in a bid to evade taxes. “Where’s this message? No one knows,” he said.

The multistakeholder event held under the auspices of the Inter Press Service (IPS) and entities of the Government of Bangladesh.

S.M. Shameem Reza, Associate Professor of Mass Communication and the Journalism department at Dhaka University, said, “Most development projects, particularly those are related to rural transformation, have the lack of a strong communication approach. Communication doesn’t get much importance in project implementation. In many cases, communication is considered as a project subcomponent.”

For better outputs, there needs to be a very effective and sustainable communication strategy so that the project implementers can identify appropriate channels of communication, the mode of communication, core messages, and can establish communication and feedback mechanisms.

“If so, the system loss can be minimised,” Reza said.

There should be a communication strategy for development, rural transformation and agricultural projects, he said.

According to Adam Smith International, a UK-based award-winning professional services business, effective development communication is the result of a logical series of steps that demands a consistent approach. The steps are defining goals, identifying, stakeholders, developing messages and selecting media, testing and reviewing, launching, defending and responding, and assessing and evaluating.

At the event, separate presentations were made to share communication approaches of the six projects of IFAD. The projects are Participatory Small-Scale Water Resources Sector Project, Char Development and Settlement Project IV, Haor Infrastructure and Livelihood Improvement Project/Climate Adaptation and Livelihood Protection (HIILIP/CALIP), Coastal Climate Resilient Infrastructure Project (CCRIP), Promoting Agricultural Commercialisation and Enterprise Project (PACE) and National Agriculture Technology Programme II (NATP-II).

Dr. Barkat told the event that the total beneficiaries of these projects would be around 10 million households, and this vital message needs to be spread.

Barkat said Bangladesh needs to accelerate the process of humane development rather than concentrating exclusively on GDP growth. It is essential to ensure just rights and distributive justice, he added.

However, he added that humanising development within the framework of a free market economy is a very difficult task. “If somebody comes up with a formula how to humanise development within the free market economy, he or she will get the Nobel Prize,” he noted wryly.

Taking part in discussions, representatives of the projects said their aim is to make communication for development an integral part of rural development policies and programmes.

By bringing the media along with other stakeholders onboard, they stressed the importance of raising awareness, acknowledging the cultural dimensions of rural development and valuing local knowledge, experiential learning, and information sharing.

They also talked about giving priority to the active participation of smallholder farmers and other stakeholders in the decision-making process with the ultimate objective of building a Bangladesh that will have food security.

Communication is no longer an issue that can be ignored as it is the key to success for development programmes.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 22 2015 (IPS)

Every day we receive striking data on major issues which should create tumult and action, but life goes on as if those data had nothing to do with people’s lives.

A good example concerns climate change. We know well that we are running out of time. It is nothing less than our planet that is at stake … but a few large energy companies are able to get away with their practices surrounded by the deafening silence of humankind.

Roberto Savio

Another example comes from the world of finance. Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2009, banks have paid the staggering amount of 178 billion dollars in fines – U.S. banks have paid 115 billion, while European banks 63 billion. But, as analyst Sital Patel of Market Watch writes, these fines are now seen as a cost of doing business. In fact, no banker has yet been incriminated in a personal capacity.

Now we have other astonishing data from Oxfam – if nothing is done, in two years’ time the richest one percent of the world´s population will have a greater share of its wealth than the remaining 99 percent.

The richest are becoming richer at an unprecedented rate, and the poorest poorer. In just one year, the one percent went from possessing 44 percent of the world´s wealth to 48 percent last year. In 2016, therefore, it is estimated that this one percent will possess more than all the other 99 percent combined.

The top 89 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by 600 billion dollars in the last four years – a rise of five percent and equal to the combined budgets of 11 countries of the world with a population of 2.3 billion people.

In 2010, that figure was owned by 388 billionaires, and this striking and rapid concentration of wealth has, of course, a global impact. The so-called middle class is shrinking fast and in a number of countries youth unemployment stands at 40 percent, meaning that the destiny of today’s young people is clearly much worse than that of their parents.“In a world where the value of solidarity has disappeared (Europe’s debate on austerity is a good example), apathy and atomisation have become the reality. We are going back to the times of Queen Victoria, substituting a rich aristocracy with money coming from trade and finance, not production”

It will probably take some time before those figures become part of general awareness but it is a safe bet that they will not lead to any action, as with climate change. U.S. President Barack Obama is the only leader who has announced a tax increase on the rich, although he stands little chance of succeeding with his Republican-dominated Congress.

In a world where the value of solidarity has disappeared (Europe’s debate on austerity is a good example), apathy and atomisation have become the reality. We are going back to the times of Queen Victoria, substituting a rich aristocracy with money coming from trade and finance, not production. But up to a point: 34 percent of today’s billionaires inherited all or part of their wealth, and – interestingly – “inheritance tax is the most avoidable of levies”, as James Moore noted Jan. 20 in The Independent.

The “father of modern times”, late U.S. President Ronald Reagan, saw it clearly when he said that the rich produce richness, the poor produce poverty. So let the rich pay less taxes.

Well, in a just-released report, the U.S. Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy notes that in 2015 the poorest one-fifth of Americans will pay on average 10.9 percent of their income in taxes, the middle one-fifth 9.4 percent, and the top one percent just 5.4 percent.

Now, 20 percent of the richest billionaires are linked to the financial sector and it is worth recalling that this sector has grown more than the real economy, and has regulations only at national level. At global level, finance is the only activity which has international body of some kind of governance, as do labour, trade and communications, to name just a few.

Finance is no longer at the service of the economy and citizens. It has its own life. Financial transactions are now worth 40 trillion dollars a day, compared with the world’s economic output of one trillion.

At national level, there are now attempts half-hearted attempts to regulate finance. But let us look what is happening in United States. The new bland regulation is the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly known as the Dodd-Frank, and it does not go as far as restoring the division between deposit banks, which was where citizens put their money and which could not be used for speculation, and investments banks, which speculate … and how!

This separation was abolished during the U.S. presidency of Bill Clinton, and is considered the end of banks at the service of the real economy. In any case, the lobbyists on Wall Street are intent on having the Dodd-Frank chipped away at, little by little.

There is some schizophrenia when we look at the relations between capital and politics. The U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated any limit to contributions from companies to political elections, declaring that the companies have the same rights as individuals. Of course, there are not many individuals who can shell out the same figures as a company, unless you’re one of the 89 billionaires!

Meanwhile, banks are not only responsible for the corruption of the political system, and for the illegal activities which have earned them billions of dollars, they are also responsible for funding only big investors, and leaving everybody else out from easy credit. The efforts of the Chairman of the European Central Bank,  Mario Draghi, to have banks give credit to small companies and individuals has gone largely nowhere.

But a new and imaginative initiative comes from the very stern Dutch bankers. All 90,000 bankers in the Netherlands are now required to take an oath: “I swear that I will endeavour to maintain and promote confidence in the financial sector. So help me God”.

This is not so much oriented towards the customer, and it is very self-serving; and it brings God in as the regulator of the Dutch banking system. Perhaps the Dutch bankers have been paying heed to the words of Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein who said at the time of the financial crisis in 2009 that bankers were “doing God’s work”.

Well God will have to be actively involved. All the three biggest Dutch banks – Rabobank, ABN Amro and ING Groep – have been involved in scandals that have hurt consumers, or were nationalised during the financial crisis, costing taxpayers more than 140 billion dollars. In one case, Rabobank was fined one billion dollars.

New York’s Wall Street and London’s City are said to be open to the idea of introducing a similar oath.

It is probably only that kind of Higher Power which could turn the tide in this world of growing inequality and lack of ethics. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

The author can be contacted at utopie@ips.org

Excerpt:

A young black street vendor selling "acarajé", a traditional type of fritter, in Salvador, Bahia in Brazil’s Northeast. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Walter García and Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 21 2013 (IPS)

Carla Vilas Boas is of mixed-race descent – African, European and indigenous – like a majority of the population of Brazil. But she spends hours straightening her hair, trying to look more like the blond, blue-eyed women she sees in the mirror of television.

The 32-year-old domestic worker acknowledges that Brazil’s popular telenovelas have started to include characters like her – people from the country’s favelas or shantytowns, who work long workdays for low wages.

But among the actors and the models shown in ads, “there are only a few darker-skinned people among all the blue-eyed blonds. And you wonder: if I buy that shampoo and go to the hairdresser, can I look like that?” she remarked to IPS.

But her hair “never looks that way,” even with the new shampoo or the visit to the hairstylist, and Vilas Boas said that makes her feel “really bad.”

More than half of the women in this country of 200 million people – where over 50 percent of the population identified themselves as black or “mulatto” in the last census – do not identify with the images they see on TV.

Experts say that because of the prejudices reflected in the choice of actors and models, advertisers potentially lose a large segment of consumers.

A survey by the Data Popular polling firm and the Patrícia Galvão Institute (IPG), a women’s rights organisation, interviewed 1,501 women and men over the age of 18 in 100 towns and cities spread across every region of the country.

In the study “Representations of women in TV advertising”, 56 percent of those surveyed said ads did not show “real” Brazilian women.

For 65 percent of the respondents, the model of beauty in TV ads has little to do with the way Brazilian women really look, and 60 percent said they think women get frustrated when they do not feel reflected on TV.

Most ads show “young, white, thin, blond, straight-haired upper-class women,” the study says.

At the age of 17, Karina Lopes feels insecure as a woman. Her body has changed, but not into the shape she sees in the ads offering her clothes, make-up and low-cal yogurt.

“Even if I eat that yogurt every day, I’ll never be thin like that woman selling it,” she told IPS. “You feel bad because that image is so different from the way you look. Normal women aren’t shown on TV.”

Mara Vidal, assistant director of IPG, said “women come in all colours and shapes. We aren’t stereotypes. That’s what the public is saying – it’s not something that women’s organisations or academic studies came up with.

“It’s the public who are saying ‘we want to be better represented in society, not just by one single, universal type’,” Vidal told IPS.

She said she also suffered in the past. As a girl, she didn’t want to go to school because other kids called her “black girl with broom-bristle hair” because of her brown skin and red hair.

“I didn’t start liking my hair till I got to university, when I stopped straightening it,” she said. “My generation wasn’t as aware as people are today. The concept of someone who was ‘good-looking’ didn’t include people with our hair and colouring.”

In the study, 51 percent of those surveyed said they would like to see more black women in ads, and 64 percent said they would like to see more women from lower-income sectors.

Brazilian TV and the country’s world-famous telenovelas have gradually started to overcome prejudice and today black or brown-skinned characters are less limited to the traditional discriminatory roles of domestics, family drivers, or criminals. Some have even cast darker-skinned women as central characters.

But advertising, unless it specifically targets that segment of the population, still does not represent blacks.

“In an ad for margarine we don’t see black women or happy black families. But in the area of cosmetics we’re starting to see a change,” Vidal said.

For example, there are now lines of products specifically designed for darker-skinned women and shampoos for “curly” or “dark-coloured” hair.

Meanwhile, advertising by the government and public enterprises has become increasingly “politically correct,” reflecting the country’s ethnic diversity.

But that is not happening yet “as much as we would like,” said Vidal. “Brazil, because of its tradition of excluding blacks, has not yet dared to fully show that reality.”

Renato Meirelles, director of Data Popular, said that exclusion is now hurting advertisers. According to the polling firm, women in Brazil represent 500 billion dollars a year in income and are the ones who decide on 85 percent of what families consume.

Women are not just a “niche market but the main consumer market, and advertisers don’t know how to reach out to them,” Meirelles told IPS.

The idea that “Brazilian women want to be like Europeans is old,” he said. “Now women are proud of their new identity.”

Factors that have helped boost this newfound self-esteem include laws aimed at fighting racial discrimination that have been adopted in recent years and the fact that some 30 million people have left poverty behind and have moved up into the middle class.

According to Meirelles, “the big problem of advertisers and advertising agencies is that they belong to the elite and their decisions emerge from an elite mind-set. That’s why they fail to understand that a new consumer market has emerged.

“Their fear is that white women won’t buy a product if the girl in the ad is black. Few of them worry that black women won’t buy products because the model in the ad is white,” he said.

“Aspiration has given way to inspiration, where the model represents successful black women. Companies should understand this process of achievement that we have experienced,” he said.

Today’s new world of digital communications presents public media outlets with a complex challenge: to conquer loyal and active audiences, with programming that is beholden neither to governments, their main funders, nor to market imperatives.

This was the conclusion reached on the first day of the 4th Latin American Forum on Public Media, held Thursday Aug. 29 and Friday Aug. 30 in Brasilia, organised by the World Bank and the Empresa Brasil de Comunicaçao (EBC) with the support of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and the secretariat for social communication of the presidency of Brazil.

“There is no single recipe, but the important thing is that public media outlets must have an audience,” Sergio Jellinek, the World Bank’s external affairs manager in Latin America and the Caribbean, told IPS. “The main challenge is to identify the audience you want to attract and offer a really interesting service.”

To make this happen, however, there is a longstanding problem to overcome: public media outlets need alternative means of financing themselves to avoid dependence on state resources.

For instance, EBC, a Brazilian government-owned corporation created in 2007 to manage the government’s radio and TV stations, controls two TV channels, eight radio stations and Agência Brasil, which publishes news and videos on the Internet. It has an annual budget of 211 million dollars, 90 percent of which comes from the state coffers.

“Our hands are tied, we are hostages to the availability of budget funds,” said Nelson Breve, EBC’s president. “No business model is sustainable with a single source of revenue, because if it dries up one day, there is nowhere else to turn.”

This year, for example, EBC has had to cut its budget by nearly 17 million dollars, and will not be investing in new technology, according to Breve.

This kind of constraint does not only operate in Brazil. Dependence on state funding also occurs in Mexico, where a recent constitutional reform allows public media outlets to sell advertising.

The head of public broadcaster Once TV, journalist Enriqueta Cabrera y Cuarón, said: “Up to now, Once TV had been considered an official corporation and was not allowed to air commercials. Only now when it is regarded as a concession, will it be able to do so.”

Cabrera y Cuarón advocates a mixed model of financing, limiting revenue from commercials to a maximum of 30 percent of the budget, and with the option of banning advertising of products harmful to health and the environment, or that incite violence.

Breve told IPS: “The problem is that when we talk about diversifying income sources, we end up competing with private companies for the advertising pie, and there is a lack of dialogue between public and private media outlets.”

More complex still is the case of Telemedellín, the local TV channel in the Colombian city of Medellín, which receives nearly its entire annual budget of 18 million dollars from the city government.

But there are strings attached. Fabián Berro, the programming director, said: “The Secretariat hand over the money, but they demand programming tailored to their wishes. With the little time that is left to spare, we try to do something different.”

But some innovative solutions have emerged. Early this year, Telemedellín suspended its programming for 24 hours. Its team held a meeting and decided to film a mega-documentary, from noon on Feb. 22 to noon the next day, in order to portray life in the city.

With images they filmed themselves, footage from surveillance cameras placed in different locations, and above all, home videos sent by the general public via internet, Telemedellín produced M24, Colombia’s first collaborative programme.

The initiative, recently awarded a prize by the Centro Internacional de la TV Abierta (International Open TV Centre), was presented at the Forum Thursday as an example of the use of new platforms to attract and interest the public, and engage it in direct participation.

Berrío said, “At first we thought 300 user-generated videos would be enough. In the end, we received 1,900 clips of people dancing, eating, celebrating birthdays. We changed the trend of Twitter use in Colombia, and because of the large number of responses, we aired those images during the whole of the following week.”

But this initiative is still an exception. “I searched worldwide for a similar experience, and could not find one,” Berrío told IPS.

In Brazil there are many hurdles. “We came late to public communications,” said Breve, referring to EBC’s six-year history. “”We still have to explain to society what we are and why we are important.”

In the view of Carlos Tibúrcio, a special adviser to the cabinet of the Brazilian presidency, the issue is that there is a lack of awareness of public television programmes.

“I recently met with a communications director for a foundation in São Paulo. She did not know what the TV Brasil programmes were, or even what the channel number was. We have to improve our information,” he said.

IPS Director General Mario Lubetkin highlighted the need for dialogue between media outlets to avoid wasting efforts. “We don’t need to reinvent everything. We need an alliance, an effort that is not just of one agency, but of media outlets in general, that includes civil society and the private sector,” he said.

Communications also need to be handled differently, Lubetkin said. “The Internet completely changed our scope as a news agency. We no longer have a monopoly on technology, nor on content. What we need is to know what the added value of our enterprises is. It’s no longer a technological problem, but one of knowing what we are writing, and for whom,” he concluded.

What’s less than two months old, has hit the headlines globally, and has more than 79,000 ‘likes’ and over 16,000 people talking about it?

No, it’s not Prince George Alexander Louis but the precocious SQUAR of Myanmar, the once isolated Southeast Asian nation’s own version of social networking site Facebook.

China has Weibo, the ‘Chinese Facebook’; Indonesia has Zuma; and now Myanmar has jumped on the bandwagon of Asian countries seeking a virtual place to meet, chat and do business, all with a truly local flavour.

What makes SQUAR unusual is that it is the initiative of two outsiders – 37-year-old Rita Nguyen and 28-year-old Quynh Anh Nguyen. Both are techies, born in Vietnam but brought up in the West, and quick to spot the business potential in Myanmar.

Myanmar has undergone a sea-change after the reforms in 2010. Elections have been held, a civilian government has replaced the military regime, the country’s most celebrated ‘prisoner’, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has been released from years of house arrest, and Western sanctions have been lifted.

The government has been opening up the country to foreign investment, and multinationals like General Electric and Coca Cola are rushing in to do business.

SQUAR’s time too had come. Rita, a Canadian citizen, has 15 years of experience in mobile gaming and social networking applications. Anh, her partner in the project, is a business administration graduate who till now had lived mostly in the U.S.

The inspiration came when Rita, a former executive with U.S. gaming company Electronic Arts, moved to Vietnam three years ago to work with the co-founders of VNG, the country’s premier digital platform, and mig33, a popular social network in Asia with over 70 million users in developing markets like Nepal and Bangladesh.

In January, Myanmar capital Yangon hosted BarCamp, the open-house conference of techies from all over the world which was started in the U.S. in 2005 to discuss technology and the Internet.

Though Myanmar, with a population of nearly 60 million, has one of the lowest Internet penetration rates – about one percent – the Yangon meet is said to have been the largest in the world, attracting over 6,000 participants.

Rita attended the Yangon event, her first visit to Myanmar, and found the “perfect storm” for her.

“The timing was perfect as I have been living in Asia for a few years and was looking for a new challenge,” she told IPS.

“I’ve built and launched online communities internationally for almost a decade. Myanmar was an exceptionally cool challenge: how would I build a community in a place that was so disconnected, both from a geographic as well as technological perspective? So I convinced Anh to move back to Asia from Seattle and here we are.”

“Yangon has a lot of youth and they host the largest BarCamp in Asia,” Anh adds. “We thought it would be cool to create something to connect the users and provide them the ability to share information. Myanmar is quite cool right now. Everyone is interested in it.”

After a pre-launch in late June to test the waters, SQUAR is now up and running. What’s more, it has already managed to snag a major corporate sponsor.

In July, Coca Cola returned to Myanmar after a six-decade hiatus and began a promotional blitzkrieg. Along with Facebook, SQUAR too was involved in the online promotion of the ‘Coca Cola Happiness Journey’, accompanied by roadshows in Yangon and Mandalay.
During its pre-launch phase, SQUAR was available only on mobile phones. Now it can be accessed on PCs, Macs and tablets.

Besides being in the Myanmarese language, SQUAR’s unique selling point, according to Rita, is that it is built specifically for the Myanmar market as it is today.

“We are highly focused on an open, public experience that encourages [Myanmarese] nationals to discuss and share information with one another,” she said.

“Facebook specifically is much more of a closed loop community focused more on your personal relationships. In a country like Myanmar, where most of your friends and family are not online yet, Facebook can be a lonely experience. SQUAR is a place to find friends who are already connected.”

One of the most active users is someone by the name of Phyonaing. The new SQUAR user’s first post is a laborious instruction to fellow users on how to use the keyboard to type in the local language.

Besides creating a platform where community meets technology in Myanmar, Rita says SQUAR can be used to boost business.

“SQUAR offers a unique opportunity in Myanmar to connect directly with the youth of the nation,” she says. “This is why our partnership with Coca Cola was so successful. They had traditional media (coverage) but there was no real way to activate the youth directly with real-time contests and promotions.”

That’s something SQUAR was doing daily for Coca Cola, leading up to the Happiness Journey.

Getting funds for the project – 500,000 dollars – was a piece of cake.

“Though not substantial, we did need some start-up capital, specifically because Myanmar is so expensive to operate in,” Rita said. “Raising the funds was incredibly easy through my own established networks. Myanmar is a hot story and there is so much opportunity there; so it wasn’t difficult.”

The major challenge was connectivity. Internet access in Myanmar is limited and the speed slow, prompting Facebook pages like ‘I Hate Myanmar Internet Connection’.

However, with Myanmar due to host the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in 2014, the government is working to improve infrastructure, connectivity and telecom services.

In a landmark move in June, it awarded two new licences to Norway’s Telenor and Qatar’s Ooredoo companies to provide additional mobile phone lines.

These would be a blessing for initiatives like SQUAR.

Describing how they operate, Anh said they have an office in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, where all the developers sit. There is another office in Yangon with six staff members.

The plan now, she says, is to add new features that the community is asking for. “This means creating fun and unique experiences for the SQUAR community through contests, promotions and partnerships.”

Generating revenue is not a priority yet. “At the moment we are only focused on ensuring that we are building the best social experience for [Myanmarese] nationals,” Anh said.

Rita laughed off the question whether they are Myanmar’s Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. “Oh no, definitely NOT Zuckerberg,” she grinned. “Too hot to wear hoodies here.”

The international Informática 2013 Fair, held in Havana Mar. 19-22, 2013. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, May 28 2013 (IPS)

Cuba will continue to prioritise public Internet access over connectivity in private homes, as indicated by a government announcement Tuesday that 118 new public cyber salons would open nationwide as of early June.

The new Internet outlets were reportedly made possible by the “full functioning” of a fibre optic cable laid between Cuba and Venezuela.

The government-controlled press reported on a communications ministry resolution Tuesday that said one hour online in the new outlets would cost the equivalent of 4.50 dollars, payable in 4.50 CUCs or convertible pesos, to which only a small part of the Cuban population of 11.2 million has access.

That amount is equivalent to 108 Cuban pesos, the currency earned by most Cubans. “I cannot possibly afford that on my pension of 270 pesos a month,” retired journalist and university professor Enrique López Oliva told IPS.

Readers of the newspaper Juventud Rebelde, which expanded on the information, had similar complaints. “It looks like whoever set these prices lives in another country or earns a salary wholly in CUCs,” commented one reader who identified himself as J. Pérez.

But the price for surfing the domestic Intranet will be 0.60 CUCs (14.40 pesos) an hour. And access to the international email service will cost 1.50 CUCs (36 pesos) an hour.

Internet, Intranet and email services in Cuba are provided by the state-owned telecoms company ETECSA, which has a monopoly over the informatics and communications sector.

The official resolution specifies that clients cannot use Internet services to carry out actions harmful to “public security, the economy, independence and national sovereignty” – a warning apparently aimed at dissident groups, which the government considers “mercenaries in the pay” of a hostile foreign power, the United States.

Juventud Rebelde wrote that the expansion of connectivity was in line with the Cuban strategy of facilitating growing access to new technologies, depending on the availability of funds and resources, and based on an approach that puts a priority on the social good.

It added that the new cyber salons were made possible by the underwater fibre optic cable running from Guaira in northern Venezuela to Siboney in eastern Cuba, which permits the high-quality, high-speed and stable transmission of a large amount of information.

Authorities in Cuba blame the five-decade U.S. economic and technological embargo for the high local cost of Internet connections, and for the serious problems in web services in this Caribbean island nation.

The newspaper added that “the fibre optic cable, while it improves international communications (up to now carried mainly by satellite) is not a free service, which explains the initial cost of the expansion of the service of navigation on the Internet.”

The cable reached Cuban shores in 2011, and Venezuela’s authorities declared it operational in May 2012, although Cuba’s official media maintained a discreet silence.

Cuba has a minimum bandwidth of 323 megabits per second via satellite, but various sources say the fibre optic cable will increase the current transmission speed by a factor of 3,000 and will cut operating costs by 25 percent, although the satellite services will continue to function.

Cuban authorities have repeatedly made it clear that the country will continue to put a priority on the “social use” of the new technologies – in other words, on connectivity in schools, research and work centres, professional associations or recreational and community centres.

A tiny minority of Cubans have access to the Internet, the Intranet or email service in their homes, basically by dial-up. Another small minority can afford the steep prices of cybercafés, mainly in hotels, which charge around eight dollars an hour.

In its report this year to the Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Cuban delegation stated that the country had 783,000 personal computers as of the end of 2011. Of that total, an estimated 18 percent were in homes and more than 33 percent were in the health, education and culture sectors.

“In addition, 2,610,000 users employ Internet services, 622,000 with full navigation,” added the document, which did not differentiate between “social” and private access – the latter of which is limited, by means of payment in national currency, to intellectuals and professionals such as journalists, academics, artists or doctors.