When you want to watch a movie or a TV show, you know what to do.
You tap your fingers and within a few seconds you are watching whatever you want.
It's frictionless. It's easy.
But in some places, it's not so easy.
"There's no other way we don't have foreign TV, it's national TV."
Officially, there is one source of permitted media in Cuba. And it's the state.
"It's because I don't know what to tell you tell you brother. I just know that's the way it is."
But Cubans found a way to work around this media blockade
to distribute the latest in global entertainment to the entire country,
coordinated entirely by an informal market of underground data traffickers,
based both in Havana and in the United States.
It's the fruits of the internet, without any of the guts.
"One guy will gather TV shows. The other Movies. Music etc. and that's how they go about collecting
media until they have 1 terabyte."
Once all the latest media from around the world is gathered onto one hard drive, the top dealers
in Havana will prepare it for distribution.
This extensive collection of digital media is affectionately called 'El Paquete Semanal' -- The Weekly Package.
"Someone brings it to me. It's from someone who gets it from someone else who gets it
from someone else.
In the end it's a chain. It costs about $2 and what most people do is fill their flashdrive
with the content they want."
A quick look into the Paquete, and you realize just how massive the system must be to gather
so much content in such a short of time
especially in a country that has 5% internet penetration and agonizingly slow connection
speeds.
Who's behind all this?
I found a couple of 20 year olds who make their living hustling Havana's streets, participating
in the thriving industry of shadowy odd jobs .
Between driving taxi bikes without a license and giving unofficial city tours to European
tourists, these guys move The Paqeute between distributors from time to time.
They led me behind the scenes in Havana where I saw how the Paquete makes its rounds every
week.
The distribution centers are usually in the back of a cell phone repair shop or a DVD
store.
Hardware flowing in and out of these places doesn't attract unwanted attention.
Distributors were not keen on appearing on camera, but they showed me their operation
and explained how clients come to their shop with a weekly order of content.
American TV shows are some of the most demanded content, but some people show up with an empty
drive every week to transfer the whole thing
everything from the iPhone app updates to the indie film section.
After poking around, I finally worked my way up the chain to discover who is coordinating
this massive enterprise.
They call him Dany Paquete, and he agreed to meet with me.
Dany was with a client so I waited for an hour in his impromptu lobby.
I didn't know what to expect Dany Paquete to be like. But i definitely did not expect
this.
He's a 26 year old who was wearing board shorts and not shirt when I arrived.
He looked a lot more like an lazy college sophomore than the king pin of a national
black market of pirated media.
But after five minutes sitting in his office with a client in the room, I quickly gained
a respect for Dany and the media machine he is running.
As Dany's 40 year old assistant helped load the hard drive of a local distributor, I watched
a live feed of Telemundo digitizing on the screen.
Dany must have an illegal satellite hidden in a fake water tower on his roof, a fairly
common Cuban practice.
Dany's girl friend wandered in and began watching a discovery channel documentary about a farmer
who almost died in a tractor accident in Iowa.