A revolution’s brewing in Cuba—a digital one, that is.
Cuba’s internet is struggling to get up modern standards after years of economic isolation, but residents of the Caribbean nation are creatively finding ways to re-create the web-based services of the connected world.
The internet in Cuba is plagued by strict censorship and pervasive surveillance. Outside of government inference, users have to overcome glacial connection speeds and spotty service that make navigating the web more of a chore than the convenience it is in more developed nations.
Many start-ups, like Knales, have created clever workarounds. Knales skips the Internet entirely and beams news, sports, and weather updates to its customer’s mobile phones via text messages.
Instead of streaming movies of TV shows, Wired reports 3 million Cubans get their content through the Paquete, a service delivering a week’s worth of fresh videos on a USB. A network of couriers move the hard drives around the city to be copied and sold.
According to Wired, the content’s downloaded via public Wi-Fi hotspots. It’s more likely someone with a high-speed connection, a government administrator or foreign hotel worker, downloads large chunks of the Paquete. Polygon reports content’s frequently pirated via satellite TV.
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