e-Access Planned for Cuban Post Customers

In a cool room in a post office in Havana’s Vedado district, a row of seven young Cubans lean over computers that let them send e-mail, enter a single Cuban-run chat room and surf a small corner of the Internet. The center, which opened last month, is one of four such facilities in Havana, and the plan is for them to spread to post offices across the communist-ruled island. In a sense, they are like cyber-cafes without the coffee — or the full-fledged Internet. Their limitations typify Cuba’s slow entry into the cyber world. It is not that President Fidel Castro’s government has not seized on the Internet with enthusiasm as a tool to spread its political message and even sell its wares. The several hundred sites it has set up or approved in recent years range from details on the Communist Party and the single labor union through online state media, business, the arts and sports. But so far, Castro critics say, the government has kept a lid on widespread usage of the Internet. For many of the Caribbean island’s 11 million people, the Internet is hard to access, or a peek-hole if you get there. To such criticism, the government counters that Cuba is a developing country with more pressing economic needs than putting its people online, noting for example the low rate of telephones per inhabitant. Officials said earlier this year Cubans have 60,000 e-mail accounts, and just a quarter of those have Internet access. But the government’s critics at home and abroad say the reason is at least partly political. The Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a private think-tank that studied the impact of the Internet on China and Cuba, said in a report in July that the governments of both countries have managed to limit political discourse and contain subversive elements: China by monitoring what goes on online and Cuba by limiting access. But for Cubans with a few dollars to spare, the new post office system, however limited, is a leap forward.