Can you hear me now?
On Friday, Cuba’s new President, Raul Castro, 76, lifted a ban on citizens owning cell phones.
Castro said the public can get prepaid cell phone contracts from the island nation’s single phone provider, Empresa de Telecommunicaciones de Cuba S.A., not yet known for its funny commercials.
Since he replaced his brother, Fidel, Raul has ushered in a mini electronics revolution. Earlier programs had allowed citizens to pay off subsidized color televisions, pressure cookers, air conditioners and refrigerators. But microwave ovens, computers and DVD players were off limits to everyone but foreigners and companies, until now.
The International Herald Tribune reported on a government pilot program in which 3,000 households in Las Guasimas received microwaves. For three months, officials visited families using the ovens and quizzed them about the appliances’ reliability while monitoring electricity consumption.
The ovens were such a hit, the paper reported, that the Council of State is considering offering microwaves to families across the island on long-term credit.
Long-term credit? Yes — Cubans have a $20 per month state salary.
Most can’t afford these new “freedoms,” never mind the charges for going over their Empresa de Telecommunicaciones de Cuba S.A., phone minutes.
(Castro is also trying to usher in a long overdue, no-tech revolution: Last week a ban on farmers buying their own supplies to improve production was lifted …)
As more Cubans get their hands on electronics, the long isolated Communist country has bumped up against a familiar conundrum: How to keep control of the text-messaging masses.
Just as the cell phone announcement was making news, access to one of Cuba’s most popular bloggers and her Web page were blocked. Her blog chronicles everyday life in Cuba and received 1.2 million hits in February.
“Who is the last in line for a toaster?” was the title of a recent post about the lifting of the electronics ban, according to a Redorbit.com article. (Toasters won’t be sold until 2010.)
According to the article, Cuba’s communications minister, Ramiro Valdes, a veteran of the 1958 revolution, said last year that the Internet was “the wild colt of new technologies,” adding that it “can and must be controlled.”
If Cuba has any trouble with that, it can simply attend a Chinese information-blocking clinic. Hey, on China’s Internet, Tiananmen Square is just a nice place for tourists.
We want to believe that phone and computer access really could be the start of something for Cuba. Would that the bloggers and farmers and everybody could ride that wild colt right through the country’s moldy system of restrictions and usher in a new era.
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