Cuba Comes Online(ish)
Part One, an Introduction
I’ve had a chance to visit Cuba twice now (it’s easier than you’d think as a US citizen — even easier for us than many foreign nationals because of US sanctions policy, as we discussed on our podcast a few months back.) It turns out Cuba inexplicably joined the US “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list in 2021, alongside “peers” North Korea, Syria, Iran, and… that’s it, that’s the four. Which of these doesn’t seem to belong?
Anyway, I first visited in 2016, right after Trump won the US presidential election — and boy, what a time to spend a week without internet! For real, it was great.
I wrote a great deal about that visit on my old blog, including a long, final post about the state of the internet in Cuba at the time. If you’d like a long-read version of this post (and to read more about what it’s like to visit Cuba in general), those posts are a lot more juicy. But if you’d like the tl;dr, stay right here.
A good deal has changed in Cuba since my first visit — big changes in the internet, politics, and the economy, all of which I’ll discuss at greater length next week. This post aims to serve as something of a baseline introduction for that one, to catch us up to the state of Cuban internet pre-2019, when government policies and then the pandemic began changing a great deal of… seemingly everything.
So step on into the time machine, and let’s begin!
The tl;dr: Cuban Internet Until 2019
Why 2019? That’s the first time Cubans could (relatively) easily and affordably get mobile data — at all. And truthfully, the first time most could easily, affordably get any kind of internet.
ETECSA, Cuba’s telecom monopoly, announced in October 2019 that Cubans could request 4G data access. 4G is a wonky internet term (marketing and marketing parodies, aside), but as a reference it’s more or less the minimum quality and speed you’d want to reliably use the internet on your phone today — YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, music streaming, and so on.
It’s worth clarifying, it’s not like Cubans had some jankier 2G/3G connection before this — as far as I can tell, Cubans on the island had virtually no mobile data until 2019.
For perspective, 4G data came to other places much, much earlier (source):
2009: Stockholm and Oslo (of course it was the Scandinavians)
2010: Germany, Japan, US
2011: South Korea
2012: Brazil, Russia South Africa
2014: Argentina, Indonesia, Kenya
2016: Turkey and India (widespread)
2018: Bangladesh
2019: Cuba
So it took a while.
What was it like to access the internet in Cuba before mobile data became widely accessible? The internet was incredibly slow for one, and expensive, for another.
Internet in the Park
Unless someone had a lot of money to pay for home internet, most who really wanted to get online were stuck purchasing $2 scratch-off wifi access cards for a mere one hour of wifi. And that was wifi accessed via a public wifi hotspot, often in a public park or square. You’d think these hotspots would be hard to spot, except I saw throngs of people on their phones and laptops near them almost always, both day and night.
Even that “one hour” of internet boiled down to about 40 minutes when I tried it, because the wifi login page was finicky as hell. Remember struggling to sign into airport wifi ten years ago, and then finally giving up to go get a Cinnabon, and then realizing how much time had passed and desperately running back to your gate before they closed the doors, hot frosting streaming down your greedy chin as you shouted, “Wait, no, no! Please, wait, please”? It was like that but much, much worse.
Even for those committed to buying the $2-an-hour wifi, there could be up to a 30 minute wait in line just to buy the access card — so long as the ETECSA shop wasn’t closed, which was before 9am or after 5pm, and again at midday for lunch.
One of the fun things about Cuba is seeing all the blackmarket economics working their way around the official way of doing things. Several times when I waited in line for a wifi card, and sometimes even when just passing near an ETECSA store, an enterprising young man would approach with a cool stack of ETECSA cards, asking if I’d like to buy one from him for $3. For an extra dollar, I could skip the line, and he’d gain a 50% markup — not a bad business!
Home Internet — Rare, Fancy, the Dream
Despite the cost, some Cubans did find ways to access the internet from home. I only encountered home wifi once, in fact: in the casa particular of a man named Jose and his family, who hosted me and a friend for a few days in Trinidad.
(Casa Particulares are a distinct feature of Cuban tourism — offline Airbnb-like homestays before Airbnb came to the island, you could say. And as a mediator-less system for tourist accommodation they function, in my experience, amazingly well; well enough to make you really wonder how much value Airbnb adds to many of the transactions it processes. See my old post if you’re interested in learning more about casa particulares and the Cuban economy.)
Jose was ambitiously expanding their home to accommodate more guests, and planned to take in visitors via Airbnb soon — Airbnb launched in Cuba in 2015, one year before my visit. For Jose, home wifi was a costly, but worthwhile, expense for his burgeoning homestay business.
But first, he told me how he’d needed to obtain and then find someone to install a wifi antenna — all off the blackmarket. And then, the wifi antenna on Jose’s roof didn’t even connect directly to ETECSA, the government internet provider. Instead, it picked up the signal from the public wifi hotspot in a nearby park. Which meant that even he and his family, at home, would have to pay $2 per hour to go online — and sign-in every hour through the same disaster of a login process I’d already attempted.
So Jose and his family had access to the same slow, expensive internet as everyone else — they just didn’t have to put on pants to use it. Obviously worth the cost and risk of a blackmarket antenna install, but still, a lot.
“El Paquete Semanal”
“El Paquete Semanal” translates to “the weekly packet” — a collection of movies, shows, music, PDFs and whatever else might be worth sharing at a certain time, passed around the island via files copied between laptops and phones via USB drives. (Remember USB drives?? It’s been a while for most of us.)
“El Paquete” might be analogous to something like an old mixtape, or burned CD, passed among a group of friends to make copies of and save for themselves — except it encompasses much more than just music, and is seemingly shared among… just about anyone who wants it.
I haven’t actually talked with many people about “El Paquete” on my visits to Cuba, I’ll admit — which isn’t to say it isn’t actually a thing there. I just don’t think it’s something people I’ve met think of as remarkable, something worth discussing.
It is though, I think, a fascinating display of the clever ways in which cultures find ways to circumvent limitations around technology use and information sharing — especially when it comes to entertainment. We’ll return to this idea often in the newsletter.
“El Paquete” is perhaps the most famous aspect of Cuban internet — well “famous,” anyway, in the niche, nerdy Global South internet circles I inhabit. It’s been documented quite a bit, and I highly recommend taking a peek at those if you’re keen to learn more.
That’s it for the week! Come back soon for an update on how the internet has been rapidly changing Cuban society the past few years — it’s gonna get spicy 🔥🔥.
This week’s song: Orishas — “Represent, Cuba”
Interesting.
When I went there with Matthew in maybe ... 2014 about a week before the travel ban was formally lifted, we noticed people huddled around at night on their phones, faces all aglow at various (what I assumed to be then) hotspots. Struggling, no doubt, to eat up whatever data and connection with the world they could manage.
It's surreal to think of how things may change if the wide world can be known to them more fully .... but then, maybe it won't change THAT much. We tend, I think, to overestimate the way that systems can move and adjust and change .... and how much change can be affected.