Internet in Cuba c. 2016

After my first day in Havana doing an Internet Drug Deal, I realized it didn’t have to be quite that difficult. The next day Jason and I went to the same area to see if we could repeat our internet deal, however this time there was no one on the ledge. We did figure out, however, that the Internet we were using the day before was being stolen from the hotel next door.

Simply walking straight into the hotel Saratoga and asking for Internet brought us to an official business room where someone sold us a 15 minute Internet pass for 4 CUC that we could use while hanging out in the very comfortable bar/lobby. And to think we got this same thing on the street the day before! People have since told us that was expensive, but we never bought Internet again….and it was a pretty nice bar.

Days later, I ran into a friend randomly in Havana. My buddy Will, who I met in Israel, had been traveling in Cuba for a month already. He told us about the Etecsa/Nauta cards you can buy officially from certain stores. You buy them with various time durations, and they have obscenely long numeric only codes for the username and password. Really good if you want to practice your memorization skills. If you’re in a place with Etecsa wifi, which is in random places like parks and plazas, then you can access the Internet after frustratingly fixing all your typos.

I never bought an Etecsa card myself, but I was told it was quite official and you need your passport to purchase one.

After all of this, I’m not sure what the point is. They still block all the websites they don't want people visiting. From reading a little bit of recent Cuban History, it seems that after Raul became president in 2008 he started slowly making some reforms, one of those being that people can access the Internet in these very controlled ways. Before then it was supposedly more like the drug deal we first experienced.

My experience is just one snapshot of a continually changing Internet landscape that’s accelerating every moment. I doubt it will be like this in the near future, with widespread Internet to soon be common like it is in most other developing countries.