Young Cubans look forward to greater openness to technology
HAVANA, Cuba--Young people in Cuba are anxiously awaiting an acceleration of the informatisation of society, which is apparently moving ahead at the same pace as the current reform process, “without haste, but without pause,†according to the authorities.
“Where I would really like to have Internet is at home,†Beatriz Seijas told IPS, sitting in the entrance to a building on Avenida 23, a street in downtown Havana better known as La Rampa, where the state telecoms monopoly ETECSA opened one of the 35 new Wi-Fi access points around the country in July.
Seijas said she came to try the connection here for US $2 an hour.
“As a Cuban, I had never connected to the Internet by telephone or tablet,†said the 19-year-old university student.
“Connecting to the Internet is just a normal thing to do,†added the young woman who, despite the technological and connectivity problems in this Caribbean island nation, sees the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a natural part of life, like many of her peers around the world.
Today six out of seven people across the globe have a cell phone and more than three billion of the world’s 7.1 billion people use the Internet, according to the United Nations (UN), although there is a large gap in ICT access – another reflection of global poverty and inequality.
Digital natives is a term used to refer to people born after 1980, who had access to computers, video games, the Internet and mobile phones from a young age.
Young people, who represent 26 per cent of Cuba’s 11.2 million people, are the main voices calling for greater openness to ICTs.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) ranks Cuba 125th out of 166 countries in telecommunications development.
The UN agency estimated that only 3.4 per cent of Cuban households had private but state-regulated Internet connections in 2013, most of them via dial-up modems and a small proportion through DSL service, which is limited to certain professions, such as journalists and artists.
In June, ETECSA reported that there were more than three million cell phones in the country.
In 2013, Cuba’s national statistics office ONEI registered 2,923,000 users of the Internet and the country’s state-controlled Intranet, where a limited number of international and local sites can be accessed.
In a July 6 online forum in the local media, the Communist Youth Union stated that “more than 60 per cent of the people online in Cuba are young people,†without specifying whether they were referring to the Internet or the Intranet.
“The prices are not affordable, but people make the effort Read more
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