14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt gathered up a team and went to Cuba to promote a notion that most of us take for granted – a free and open Internet.
Initial reports came from local blogs, but Schmidt has admitted to the trip through a Google+ post where he explains his efforts, especially since Cuba is, as he himself puts it, classified by the US government as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” alongside the likes of North Korea, Syria, Iran and North Sudan.
Traveling from the US to Cuba, in fact, is controlled to such an extent that Schmidt and his colleagues received a license that only permitted them to attend business meetings, while their hotel rooms had to be less than $100 per night and total daily expenses of $188.
“If Cuba is trapped in the 1950’s, the Internet of Cuba is trapped in the 1990s. About 20-25% of Cubans have phone lines but mostly subsidized land lines, and the cell phone infrastructure is very thin. Approximately 3-4% of Cubans have access to the Internet in internet cafes and in certain universities. The Internet is heavily censored and the infrastructure, which we toured, is made out of Chinese components,” Schmidt writes.
He goes on to explain that the blockade makes no sense to US interests because if you want the country to modernize, the best way to do this is to empower citizens with smartphones, encourage freedom of expression and give everyone the information tools necessary to make this possible.
This only results in making Asian infrastructure a more permanent tool in the country. The tech community there already uses unlicensed Windows versions because the US won’t allow them to purchase any, as well as GNU Debian Linux on Asian hardware and Firefox.
“We heard that Cuban youth are assembling informal mesh networks of wifi-routers, and thousands connect to these networks for file sharing and private messaging. USB sticks form a type of ‘sneakernet’, where people hand hard to get information to each other and keep everyone up to date without any real access to the Internet,” Schmidt points out in an effort to explain that the locals are indeed hungry for freedom and information.
The traveling ban from the US to Cuba has been in place since the 1960’s and while many things have changed since then, this has not, making for a rather baffling situation for the world’s largest Internet company, which is always looking for new areas to expand into.