History
Cuba's first connection to the Internet, a 64kbit/s link to Sprint in the United States, was established in September 1996. Since its introduction in the 1990s it has stagnated for three major reasons:
- the U.S. embargo, which delayed an undersea cable and made computers, routers, and other equipment expensive and difficult to obtain.
- lack of funding due to the poor state of the Cuban economy after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Cuban government's hostility to foreign investment; and
- the government's fear of information freedom and its unwillingness to risk political instability in order to achieve the benefits of the Internet.
According to Boris Moreno Cordoves, Deputy Minister of Informatics and Communications, the Torricelli Act (part of the United States embargo against Cuba) identified the telecommunications sector as a tool for subversion of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and the necessary technology has been conditioned by counter-revolutionaries, but is also seen as essential for Cuba’s economic development.
The political situation in both Cuba and the United States is slowly changing as the Cuban revolution fades further into the past and leaders grow old and die. U.S. regulations were recently modified to encourage communication links with Cuba. In 2009 President Obama announced that the US would allow American companies to provide Internet service to Cuba, however, the Cuban government rejected the offer and is instead working with the Venezuelan government.
Read more about this topic: Internet In Cuba
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)