The Cuban approach to internet access
Over in Havana, they have taken the 'walled garden' approach to the internet further than AOL ever did, with the launch of Cuban search engine, or more correctly a Yahoo style directory that only 'finds' Cuban sites. More here.
A search for Free Cuba on google brings up the Free Cuba Foundation as its first hit, while Infosoc presents a lengthy anti-Yanqui tirade.
The 'Latin Paradise' has the lowest level of net access in Latin America - 1.7 users per hundred, and "accused of voluntarily restricting free access to the Internet..., the Cuban authorities claim that this is due to the US blockade which prevents any connection to the marine backbone".
If the photocopier and the fax machine helped to break the Soviet Union, then the net is my weapon of choice for finishing off Castro. Time for a derogation from the blockade to facilitate net access?
A search for Free Cuba on google brings up the Free Cuba Foundation as its first hit, while Infosoc presents a lengthy anti-Yanqui tirade.
The 'Latin Paradise' has the lowest level of net access in Latin America - 1.7 users per hundred, and "accused of voluntarily restricting free access to the Internet..., the Cuban authorities claim that this is due to the US blockade which prevents any connection to the marine backbone".
If the photocopier and the fax machine helped to break the Soviet Union, then the net is my weapon of choice for finishing off Castro. Time for a derogation from the blockade to facilitate net access?
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on Saturday, February 17, 2007 at 10:53 am.
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Cuba is indeed an attractive target-of-opportunity for the mighty www.weapon, but surely only as a warm-up act for China 2008.
One hopes that battalions of fearless 'sport correspondents' are even now being equipped with the full range of lightweight modern gadgetry with which to storm the Great Firewall.
China and Russian next
Another factoid , until the glorious revolution Cuba had higher per capita ownership of television sets than the whole of Europe
Viva Fidel!
All tuned in to those bizarre Spanish-language progs they show on US TV, no doubt.
I visited East Germany in the early 1980s: there was one small corner of the country - a hilly bit between Dresden and Poland - where they couldn't get reception on West German TV. They had to pay a wages supplement to get anyone to live there.
Hitch - I suspect much of Europe had no tv before 1959. This wd rather keep down the per cap figure.
Nick, a fine anecdote. I guess that would have been Saxony.
Yes indeed.
The locker is fairly full of anecdotes from that visit. Example: I went into a bookshop looking for something for my kid, then aged 3, so stopped at the relevant shelf and found Wann Soll Man Bäume Pflanzen , looked just the job, lovely cover, Ladybird Book style - and turned out to be an anti-NATO tract! for 4-yr olds! (I still have it).
I bought him a die-cast Russian APV instead.
Somewhere in the archives I have a tale of maths problems from a DDR tewtbook which involved lorries going to collective farms. Fond though I am of our Teutonic friends, German Communists were always going to be thorough, were they not?
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