♪ Music ♪
The internet is incompatible with totalitarianism. Totalitarianism need to have control of information. Whoever controls information controls the minds of people.
There are 353 people playing.
[NARRATOR] This is Yuta. He's playing World of Warcraft with a few hundred others in Havana.
But, he's not connected to the Internet.
Instead, Yuta is using what's called StreetNet. It's one of the many bootlegged inventions
Cubans have come up with to bypass their government's resistance to
Internet access.
[JOSE] Five percent of the 11 million people in Cuba actually have access to the Internet.
[NARRATOR] A few years ago, some young tech-savvy gamers in Havana started connecting their computers
through long Ethernet cables, running them from rooftop to rooftop across the city.
And soon, they started using wireless routers to expand even further.
They created a giant mesh network, which has no central server.
Instead, each participant holds a piece of the network on their local computer,
creating nodes that connect the city to one giant network.
Today, there are over 10,000 users connected to StreetNet throughout Havana.
Using StreetNet is strangely similar to searching the real web.
There are blogs and forums, dating sites, and social media that looks like Facebook.
You have to remind yourself that you're actually looking at an illegal makeshift network invented by Cuban gamers.
[Fidel Castro speaking in Spanish]
[NARRATOR] In 1959, Fidel Castro led a socialist revolution that flipped cuban society upside down.
[Fidel Castro speaking in Spanish]
Castro established a regime that limited all unapproved expression, punishing anyone who spoke out against the government.
Decades later, the world started adopting the Internet.
"Hey! Why should I be on the Internet?"
"Why?"
But Cuba is the most censored country in the Western Hemisphere,
and the advent of the Internet in all of it's uncontrollable and decentralized glory
posed a unique challenge for a regime that really wants to keep control over information.
[OBAMA] The states of America is changing it's relationship with the people of Cuba.
[REPORTER] The United States will restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba.
[OBAMA] I believe that we can do more to support the Cuban people.
[REPORTER] to the thawing of diplomatic relations with Cuba--
[REPORTER 2] and to improve Cuba's internet--
[REPORTER 3] includes U.S. equipment to improve Cuba's internet.
connect Cuba to the internet
[REPORTER 4] a surge in Internet usage--
[REPORTER 5] One of the companies watching closely, Google.
[REPORTER] Google has gone to Cuba in a push for a free and open internet.
[REPORTER] It hasn't been easy for Google.
There's no Internet not when you land at the airport, but we are right now at one of these new
WiFi hotspots that the government has set up just in the last few weeks.
Now to get on the internet you have to buy a card like this.
Featuring a relaxed looking woman in Spandex meditating. It costs Two Dollars and
with it you can go to one of the 35 WiFi hotspots in the country and enter a code to get one hour of unadulterated
access to the uncensored internet
The government often runs out of these access cards so most people have to buy them off a black market dealer for three or four
dollars. Since these hotspots opened a couple months ago,
people have been flocking to the internet, mainly to connect with family members.
Many Cubans buy into the official state line that internet
deficiency is caused by a combination of the embargo from the United States and a lack of telecoms
infrastructure. A quick look into this and you start to realize that the infrastructure argument is completely bogus. In January 2013 a submarine
Fiber-Optic cable running from
Venezuela went live on the island. The cable is called Alba 1 and it was supposed to support a more widespread
and faster internet on the island. Experts say that with this cable, connecting the island should be easy.
When the network goes online this summer, Cuba's bandwidth will increase by
3000.The question is, will Cubans then have access to the web without restrictions and without excuses?
Even Google's gone, over the past year, year-and-a-half, they've made several trips to Cuba. They offered, "we'll help you create that infrastructure," and
and I believe that Cuban government politely declined. This is not an infrastructure issue.
This leaked video from a government training session shows a presenter talking about "the threat of new technologies."
Cuba now employs a Cyber Militia that has started harassing and discrediting dissident bloggers on the island, but that doesn't
seem to stop them. There are now
1,600 blogs run by Cubans.
Yoani Sanchez is among the most visible of these underground
bloggers. The idea is that, you know, Yoani or one of her journalists will write an article and
she'll get, you know, access to one of these WiFi points or the internet somewhere, and she'll email the article to her colleagues in
Spain or wherever and they'll publish It and download all that information onto a PDF, and then
send it back into the island. You know Remi is a visitor that's coming with a flash drive. Yoani
considers this the boomerang effect. And then that gets put on the flash drives and CDs and DVDS and literally gets passed hand to hand
♪ Music ♪