By Ana Gonzalez-Barrera and Jens Manuel Krogstad
There were 11.7 million immigrants from Mexico living in the U.S. in 2014, and about half of them were in...
It has been more than five decades since Ivan Acosta has lived in exile, but this year, his dream of returning to his birth land and finally filming a movie is closer than ever to coming true. He will be making history, as no other Cuban-American director has ever been able to film on the island.
In 1979, Ivan Acosta became a legend with his humorous, but tenaciously raw tale “El Súper” about the emotional tragedy of an immigrant family. Since then, he has not ceased to create wonderful, compelling stories like “Amigos”, “Rosa and The Executioner of The Fiend”, “Candido Hands of Fire”, and “How to Create Rumba”. He is a playwright, a composer, a musical producer, a film and a theater director and was the founder of The Cuban Cultural Center in New York, perpetually advocating for his roots and culture.
GJS:Tell us about your new project “Guantánamo”, which has been in the making for close to thirty years.
IA:“Guántanamo” is based on real events. Thirty years ago I met this man who told me his experience swimming across Guantánamo bay with his two children tied on his back. I decided I wanted to make a film inspired by that story. In 1984 we were going to produce the film in Dominican Republic, but the amazing event of Mariel exodus was all over the news, so producer Marcelino Miyares encouraged me to write about it and I decided to draft a different screenplay, “Amigos”, about a “marielito”, which is how they called Cuban refugees during that event. On April 1980, more than 10,000 Cubans in Havana broke into the Peruvian Embassy and asked for political asylum. Fidel Castro got very angry and declared that any Cuban who wanted to leave the island could do it if their family in Florida would go to the Port of Mariel to rescue them. About 130,000 Cubans left the island on the largest refugees exodus ever in this Continent; they all came to the United States. During the summer of 1984, we started filming, “Amigos” in Miami and New York. I put “Guantánamo” aside again, and waited all these years, till now.
GJS:When you compare old drafts vs. new drafts of this project, how has the story evolve?
IA: Well, the first draft took place during the 70s, when Cuba was going through a lot of international activities, including the war in Africa: Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Namibia, and Eritrea. The last version takes place during the “Special Period”, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and every body thought Cuban communist regime would also collapse, but it didn’t happen. It has been one of the worst periods of the 57 years of Castro’s revolutionary government. A lot of interesting stories happened during those hard years.
GJS: When and where are you planning to film in Cuba, and what is this process like?
IA: We are trying to start pre-production around December of this year. Ideally, we would like to film in the Guantánamo area, where the story takes place. The location includes the City of Guantánamo, the beautiful rural areas in Oriente, and some spots near the long fence that separates Cuban territory from the American Navy base at the entrance of Guantánamo bay. That area is covered with more than 50,000 personal explosive land mines.
In terms of the process, we are soliciting permits from the Cuban government through I.C.A.I.C. Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Industry and the Ministry of Culture. We have to be patient in dealing with Cuban bureaucracy, censorship and constant replacements of government officials. Assuming the Cuban government gives us green light to go ahead and film in the island, this would be the first time a Cuban-American film would be produced in Cuba with Cuban technicians and artists from outside Cuba and compatriots living the island.
GJS: Do you have a cast lined up yet and will local Cuban actors appear in the film?
IA: We do have a list with some actors and technicians living in Cuba and Cuban-Americans and Latinos living abroad. But nobody has been confirmed yet. We are also in contact with key personnel in Dominican Republic, in case we might have to do some filming there.
GJS: Most if not all your stories ruminate on the subject of Cuba. Can you express what it means to you to be able to go back to Cuba and film your movie?
IA: I left Cuba in 1961. I was very young then. Cuba has always been present in my life and in my creative endeavors in film, in theater, in music and in literature. To me it is a double dream. First, to be able to visit my own country after living in my beloved United States for more than 50 years now would be a dream come true and a personal realization. Second, to be able to film a movie about a real human drama based on a true story in my own land would be great for both, the Cuban government, whose message to the world now is about change and opening censorship, but also for Cubans living outside the island. It would mean for us to be able to go back and embrace our family, our friends, and our land without any fear of “reprisal” from the militant hard liners. “Guantánamo”, aside from having the potential to be a superb film, it would also mark a historical event.
GJS: Sounds like you would like to crate bridges to unite Cubans living in the island and outside. Given you are granted the green light to film in Cuba, what is next?
IA: Definitively. The real changes will come when the people of Cuba are able to walk, talk, dance and love, without any obstacle. And of course, when the two millions of Cubans living in the U.S. and several other countries, are able to return to the island without any political restrictions or fears. I firmly believe, the film “Guantánamo” will help to create the bridge of love, respect, and freedom for all.
Your Editor Asks: Why won´t the Cuban government allow the free return of its expatriate citizens? Whether to visit family, do tourism or make a movie? What are they afraid of in the era of Obama?
HAVANA, So far, despite the tremendous media impact created by the reestablishment of relations, except for brief references in the platforms approved by each party, and an occasional comment by a presidential candidate, Cuba has not been a relevant issue in the current U.S. elections.
Although it is too soon to come to definitive conclusions and we cannot discount that the issue will become manifest in certain contexts, we see at least two reasons to predict that the situation will remain the same for the rest of the campaign.
On one hand, because it is not a determinant factor in the voters’ decision on a national level, and on the other hand because the process of reestablishing relations with Cuba has had such bipartisan support that a sharp clash between Democrats and Republicans is unlikely, especially in the case of the presidential candidates.
In reality, although it has not been generally perceived thus in Cuba, due to its domestic implications, the Cuban issue was not a priority in the agenda of U.S. politicians in previous elections either.
Therefore, what’s relevant in the current situation is not its relative importance but the brusque change that occurred in the approach to the issue.
Until now, the topic of Cuba appeared as an excuse to project the most intransigent positions on both sides, serving to label as “hardliners” even the most moderate candidates on other issues of foreign policy.
The equation was very simple. Advocating a different policy toward Cuba was an unjustifiable risk despite the electoral advantages it might entail. That explains both the similarity of the candidates’ discourse and the effectiveness of the Cuban-American far-right lobby, which acted without any counterweights on the U.S. political arena.
Sufficient it was to show up in Miami and proclaim a commitment to the overthrow of the Cuban regime to harvest the Cuban-American vote and, for minimal investment, to project an image of firmness in the confrontation with “the enemies of the United States.”
Generally, the Republican candidates won in these surroundings, because the so-called “historic exile” saw them as the most intent on applying the most hostile policies toward Cuba — even military intervention.
In 2008, Barack Obama broke with tradition and announced he would relax the restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba imposed by the George W. Bush administration, adding that he would be willing to negotiate with the Cuban government. That served him well within the Cuban-American electorate, translating in 2012 into a margin of support that reached about 50 percent of the voters.
The reestablishment of relations with Cuba completed this process and at present the polls show that most Cuban-Americans, and the rest of the American voters, support that policy. This explains the convenience of amending the discourse and the fact that no great differences on the issue exist between the presidential candidates, although for reasons that are completely different from the past.
The Democratic platform and Hillary Clinton’s speech emphasized the continuity of this policy, and, although the Republican platform adopted a language that was contrary to it, it doesn’t seem that that is Donald Trump’s position. Trump has even been accused of exploring possibilities for doing business in Cuba, taking advantage of the new juncture.
Therefore, it is possible to predict that, at most, the Cuban issue will be raised by Clinton to underscore the Democrats’ success, to which Trump might respond that he could have done it much better, as he has said so far, without questioning the strategy.
In the case of the Congressional elections, we should hope that, in general, the Republicans will try to avoid the issue so as not to support Washington’s policy, inasmuch as in many agricultural districts (where Republicans enjoy a majority) the possibility of doing business with Cuba is of interest to large sectors of the GOP’s own electorate.
An exception will be found in some districts in South Florida, where the topic of Cuba is inevitable and significantly influences the behavior of Cuban-American voters.
Everything indicates that, despite the changes that have occurred in the Cuban-American electorate, the far-right’s local political machine, linked basically to the Republicans, has enough strength to reelect its representatives, who constitute the hard core of the opposition to Obama’s Cuba policy in the U.S. Congress.
Nevertheless, the simple fact that so far in these elections we see conflicting positions regarding relations with Cuba constitutes a significant change if we compare them with the monolithic bloc that existed in the past. It will be interesting to measure the margins that will emerge in these contests, with a view to evaluating the future behavior of the electorate.
In any case, there has been a change in the cost-benefit relationship that rules U.S. elections, and the more hostile positions against Cuba now must face very powerful counterweights, radically altering the balance of forces regarding the Cuban issue.
To Cuba, that constitutes the fundamental difference between these elections and past elections. It justifies us when we affirm that we are in the presence of an unprecedented scenario in the history of the two countries.
Your Editor Opines: Excepting those few Cuban-American votes in the House, there is no resistance to lifting the embargo. It seems most negative votes in a Republican-controlled Congress respond to the negation of an “Obama legacy.”
On a steamy summer day one year ago, standing on a dusty Havana back-road, Carlos Gutierrez was somehow able to find the childhood home he’d last seen more than a half century earlier, before he and his family fled Fidel Castro’s communist revolution.
It’s a blood bank now, but he walked down the street, rounded a curve and recognized it right away: No. 26, a simple one-story house.
More remarkable still was Gutierrez’s presence there at all, helping to lead a high-level American delegation to mark the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Havana.
For Gutierrez, the most fascinating journey of all has been an internal one, an intellectual and emotional excursion that has carried him from his role as an anti-Castro hardliner in Republican George W. Bush’s Cabinet to his new role as a champion of American business investment in his homeland.
Gutierrez gives numerous reasons for his policy shift, ranging from having left Miami as a child to his family’s time in Mexico and his later work in China.
By themselves, none of those things had been enough to change his mind. But they culminated in a long talk with President Barack Obama that he found persuasive.
Obama’s talk was like the last drop in a chemistry experiment that makes a liquid solution turn solid in an instant: Each drop that came before it contributed to the change, but only the last one made it happen.
“That sort of opened the door,” Gutierrez told McClatchy . “It forced me to think even more realistically.”
Some one-time friends of the former commerce secretary don’t buy his evolutionary depiction of the shift. They see a financial motive tied to his position as co-director of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a high-powered Washington consulting firm that helps open doors for American companies seeking to do business abroad.
“When it’s an outright case of just literally doing it for the money on an issue that he was a big believer in, I’m sorry – I have zero respect for that,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American Republican from Miami, told McClatchy.
Gutierrez, 62, rejects that kind of judgment.
“I don’t need the money, but I do want to help the country of my birth,” he told McClatchy.
Only three of his nine trips to Cuba in the past year, Gutierrez said, have been for Albright Stonebridge clients. Four have been unpaid excursions as head of the U.S.-Cuba Business Council, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce affiliate that he’s headed without compensation since February 2015.
His initial journey in August last year was as part of the official U.S. delegation for the embassy opening in Havana, while his other trip came at the invitation of the Meridian International Center, a Washington-based nonprofit that asked him to join a cultural exchange.
That first morning back in Cuba, filled with wonder, Gutierrez had pulled open the curtain in his room at the Hotel Nacional and looked out at Havana.
“I felt joy,” Gutierrez recalled in an interview at Albright Stonebridge, which he heads along with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. His office is just a few blocks north of the U.S Commerce Department, the mammoth federal agency he led less than a decade ago.
“I felt just happy to be in the place that I was born – the place I’d thought so much about and read so much about. It was just a very special feeling. And, then, the people are great.”
As happy as it made him, the homecoming came at a steep personal price.
Gutierrez, a handsome man with a gray mustache on a trim face, had been a hero to Cubans in South Florida and beyond – only the second Cuban-American member of a White House Cabinet. The first, Mel Martinez, served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bush before Gutierrez joined his Cabinet. Martinez later represented Florida in the U.S. Senate.
Gutierrez’s embrace of the Castro regime made him an overnight pariah among his own.
“They see it as betrayal,” Gutierrez said.
Friends stopped talking to him, and not just Diaz-Balart. Miami Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo, whose election campaign Gutierrez supported in 2014, said he felt blindsided.
“I consider his change of position drastic, and it was unexpected,” Curbelo said.
Some of Gutierrez’s friends felt ambushed.
“It was sad to hear,” Orlando Gutierrez Boronat, head of the Cuban American Directorate in Miami, told McClatchy. “I regret that he’s taken that position.”
Asked whether he and Carlos Gutierrez remain close, Boronat responded, “We were friends. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken with him.”
Doubts about his true motivations anger the normally unflappable Gutierrez.
“Naysayers should have the courage to go to Cuba to see the damage this failed (embargo) policy has done to millions of people, instead of sitting behind a desk making misinformed statements about a country they’ve never visited,” he said.
The former Kellogg Co. CEO said a number of peers from his generation have expressed support privately.
“I’ve spoken with people in their 60s who have told me, ‘Look, I would like to go back to Cuba, but my parents are still alive. And I just can’t do it while they’re still alive,’ ” he said.
The United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations July 20, 2015, after a more than 54-year freeze.
Gutierrez left Cuba with his family on July 16, 1960, shortly after the Castro regime had confiscated the pineapple plantation his father co-owned in Majagua, a town in Ciego de Avila province in the center of the island, 250 miles southeast of Havana. He was 6 years old.
The family spent its first 2 1/2 years in the United States in Miami, starting with a three-month stay at the Richmond Hotel on Collins Avenue. They moved to New York and Mexico, where Gutierrez began what would become a three-decade career with Kellogg. In April 1999, he was named the cereal company’s chairman and CEO, becoming the only Latino head of a Fortune 500 company at that time.
While he tries to eat healthy breakfasts, Gutierrez admits an abiding weakness for Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes of Tony the Tiger fame.
“Frosted Flakes and whole milk – hard to beat,” he said.
Gutierrez still lives in Washington, though he often travels abroad and frequently visits friends in South Florida.
Gutierrez’s coming-out declaration on his Cuba conversion arrived in the form of a New York Times column on June 23, 2015, six months after Obama announced that the United States would be restoring diplomatic relations with Havana after a 54-year break grounded in the Cold War.
Under the headline “A Republican Case for Obama’s Cuba Policy,” Gutierrez wrote: “Today, I am cautiously optimistic for the first time in 56 years. I see a glimmer of hope that, with Cuba allowing even a small amount of entrepreneurship and many American companies excited about entering a new market, we can actually help the Cuban people.”
A month earlier, in a speech at Georgetown University, Gutierrez had hinted at his evolving views. He pointed to the increased depth and other improvements at Cuba’s Mariel port, in order to accommodate bigger cargo ships passing through the widened Panama Canal, as a key sign of the Castro government’s commitment to economic reform.
“There are ports on the East Coast of the United States that aren’t ready yet for Panama’s expanded canal, but the Port of Mariel is ready,” Gutierrez said. “So would you build that kind of port if you weren’t thinking about doing something to the economic system?”
In February of this year, Gutierrez introduced visiting Cuban Foreign Trade Minister Rodrigo Malmierca to a standing ovation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, on the same day the two governments signed a commercial aviation agreement in Havana.
“As a proud U.S. citizen born in Cuba, it became very evident to me that the love of the people, the love of the land of my birth – of my parents’ birth, of my grandparents’ birth, the land of my ancestors – that love was greater than any political differences that we could have between the two countries,” Gutierrez told American corporate leaders.
Gutierrez urged Congress to end the economic embargo first imposed on Cuba in October 1960 during President Dwight Eisenhower’s waning weeks in office.
These actions stunned the former commerce chief’s Cuban-American friends. To many, his 180-degree turn from hardliner to peacemaker came out of the blue.
A widely disseminated photograph of a smiling Gutierrez and Malmierca hit like an earthquake in the Cuban-American communities of South Florida, New York and Los Angeles.
“Somebody called me Judas,” Gutierrez said with a rueful smile.
Naysayers should have the courage to go to Cuba to see the damage this failed (embargo) policy has done to millions of people, instead of sitting behind a desk making misinformed statements about a country they’ve never visited.
Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez
Gutierrez had long been a committed hardliner about Cuba.
As commerce secretary, he co-chaired the Committee for Assistance to a Free Cuba, established by Bush with the express goal of overthrowing the Castro regime.
In September 2008, nearing the end of his tenure at commerce, he said in a speech at the Harvard School of Government: “What the embargo has accomplished, it has denied a sworn enemy of our country more resources that he could use against us.”
At first, he even pronounced himself opposed to Obama’s Cuba policy shift. “The U.S. has given so many concessions and not received anything in return,” he told Time Magazine.
Yet within six months Gutierrez would publish his bombshell column in The New York Times, and his life would undergo a seismic shift.
9 The number of trips Gutierrez has taken to Havana since the U.S. Embassy reopened last August
Gutierrez struggles to pinpoint one thing that caused his change. There was the private chat with Obama and his long experience in China, first with Kellogg and more recently in his current post.
“I’ve watched Chinese who left China go back to China, do business in China and sort of look to the future,” he said “And one question I always had is: Why can’t I do that about Cuba? And that’s where I’ve tried to go objectively.”
Leaving Miami as a youngster, Gutierrez said, also may have left him more open to change.
“I think it’s tougher for people who live in Miami to actually make the intellectual leap that 58 years have transpired – to be able to step back and see Cuba objectively, not emotionally.”
Living for 30 years mainly in Mexico and Battle Creek, Michigan, site of Kellogg headquarters, exposed Gutierrez to different points of view.
On a more personal level, Gutierrez said his father was less ideologically rigid than some other Cuban exiles of his generation. “My father was very realistic,” he said. “He didn’t want to hear about it. He never wanted to go back. From early on, he just said, ‘It’s over, and it will never be the same.’ ”
John Kavulich, the founder and head of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council in New York, which has promoted trade with Cuba long before the U.S. Chamber ever thought of doing so, believes that in the end, Gutierrez’s sudden public shift on Cuba must remain somewhat mysterious. Over the last year, Gutierrez has picked Kavulich’s brain during numerous meetings and phone talks before and after the former commerce secretary’s trips to Cuba.
“He has gravitas because he was CEO of Kellogg and he was secretary of commerce in a Republican administration,” Kavulich said. “Now he’s had this epiphany. Having an epiphany can be good. The question going forward is: What will he do with his epiphany beyond using it as just a marketing tool? It’s hard to get into someone’s head.”
Jaime Suchliki, director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuba and Cuban-American Studies, is one Gutierrez friend who hasn’t ended the relationship over Gutierrez’s extraordinary policy shift. Gutierrez is a non-resident scholar there and a member of its advisory board.
The two men went out to breakfast in Miami a few months ago and had a frank conversation. Suchliki asked him if he was out to make money or maneuvering to be ambassador to Cuba, and he said no to both questions.
“I was tough with him, but he kept on giving the line that we have to help the Cuban people, maybe this is going to bring some change,” Suchliki said.
When Gutierrez asked whether Suchliki wanted him to withdraw his ties to the institute, it was Suchliki’s turn to say no.
“I said, ‘I think you’re wrong, but you can have your opinion,’ ” Suchliki recalled.
While Gutierrez feels some sadness about the ruptured friendships, he has made peace with his controversial position.
“I feel very comfortable with where I am,” he told a reporter. “And you can quote me on that.”
Your Editor Comments: I suffered attacks and ostracism among fellow Cubans in San Juan and Miami for advocating family and personal contacts with our brethren in Cuba as the best antidote to the Castro regime. And the worst came when I wrote for an end to the Embargo 30 years ago. So I can understand Gutierrez’s frustration today. But I also recognize his courage when I realize where he was coming from. Welcome to the club, Carlos.
The mass media in Cuba for decades was exclusively run by a rigid state monopoly, and even now, the government controls most of the news that makes its way to citizens. But significant cracks may be opening.
As I’ve learned during recent trips to Cuba, which I’ve been visiting regularly since the mid 1990s, a series of incremental changes is slowly but steadily broadening the media landscape.
In March and April—before, during and after President Obama’s landmark visit to the country—I talked to journalists, media researchers, and Cubans from various walks of life, scoured the newspapers, channel surfed national television stations, and road-tested new Wi-Fi access points. I was struck by how much even small changes can seem impactful after so many years of stuck-in-place media.
While it’s too soon to tell if a true sea change is in the works, here are seven relatively recent shifts in the Cuban mediasphere. Many of them would have seemed inconceivable just a few years ago and bear watching in the future.
1) Media criticism is mounting from within
Last year, a journalism student at the University of Havana discussed the quality of state-run news outlets with a small group of American visitors including myself.
“Our reality is not reflected in our mass media,” she said. “Older people are more accepting of it than the young, who want more problems to be addressed in a realistic way.”
Her remarks struck me as surprisingly frank and ran counter to what I’d heard in some prior trips from Cuban journalists and journalism students, who’d been mostly boosterish of the country’s new services.
I learned later that she was hardly speaking in isolation. In fact, no less than Cuban President Raul Castro had voiced a similar criticism, at a 2011 Communist Party Congress. Cuban news programs were too-often “boring, improvised and superficial,” he said, adding that “this habit of triumphalism, stridency and formalism [in the media] needs to be left behind.”
In 2013, Cuban Vice President Miguel Diaz Canal, who is viewed by many as a likely successor to Castro when the president steps down in 2018, chimed in that Cuba’s news media are too propagandistic. “We can’t lay the blame entirely on journalists or entirely on the media,” he told a meeting of the state-run Union of Cuban Journalists. “We must lay the blame on the [Communist] Party, in the first place, and we have to begin to criticize ourselves.”
Raul Garces, dean of the University of Havana’s school of communication and vice president of the Union of Cuban Journalists, offered an even more direct criticism at the same gathering. “We have often substituted reasoned argument with propaganda,” he said, declaring that Cuban journalism was at a crossroads: “Either we fix the problem once and for all, or the credibility and persuasive power of the Cuban media will simply collapse.”
In this climate, an increasing amount of Cuban journalism turns attention to the country’s problems, including missteps by government bureaucracies, if not particular officials.
And in something of a watershed moment, during President Obama’s visit to Havana this March, Cuban news programs and newspapers broadcast and published full renditions of his speeches and interviews while in Cuba.
Obama’s remarks included these admonitions, which rarely if ever surface in Cuban state media: “I believe citizens should be free to speak their mind without fear to organize, and to criticize their government, and to protest peacefully, and that the rule of law should not include arbitrary detentions of people who exercise those rights. … And yes, I believe voters should be able to choose their governments in free and democratic elections.”
Young Cubans using one of Havana’s recently created public Wi-Fi zones, where the equivalent of $2 buys an hour of internet access. The zones have opened a window to the web for thousands of Cubans who lacked other access before. Photo by: Jon Elliston
2) Internet access is finally on the uptick
In his Havana address, Obama also pointedly said that “the internet should be available across the island, so that Cubans can connect to the wider world and to one of the greatest engines of growth in human history.”
On that, at least officially, Cuba’s government can agree.
As Cuba and the US announced their historic normalization of relations in December 2014, the Communist Party’s (and Cuba’s only daily) newspaper, Granma, published a lengthy editorial on the county’s need to expand online access.
“Cuba has been, and is, intent upon being connected to the world, despite propaganda to the contrary,” the newspaper asserted. Months later, the government unveiled a plan to connect “all Cubans” to the Internet by 2020.
That would prove a remarkable feat, given that Cuba is one of the least-connected countries in the hemisphere. That said, its connections are on a steady rise, according to the World Bank and the International Telecommunications Union. Those two bodies estimate that about 30 percent of Cubans now have at least semi-regular access to the online world, nearly double the percentage of five years ago.
Most Cubans with internet access find it at their workplaces in government offices. But a growing number are accessing the web outside of work, at hundreds of recently opened “cyber cafes” and public Wi-Fi spots.
Such independent access comes at a price: The Wi-Fi costs the equivalent of $2 per hour, a formidable sum for Cubans working for the state, with wages averaging about $25 per month.
“I’m fortunate, in that I have some access at work,” a young Havana librarian told me in April. “But there’s no way I could often afford the Wi-Fi options, even if I had the right device to do so.”
Still, Wi-Fi hotspots in Havana and other cities are increasingly populated by thousands of Cubans, many of whom have some extra cash from either family abroad or the growing number of independent businesses, a testament to one of Cuba’s major and ever-expanding economic reforms.
The supply isn’t meeting the demand, though: In my conversations with Cuban Wi-Fi users, they spoke of connections that are less than ideal, however promising. The access card passwords are long, the bandwidth limitations drag down upload speeds, and certain sites and apps cut in and out of reach.
Complicating matters is that much of Cuba’s internet service comes via an undersea fiber optic cable from Venezuela, a country with an increasingly uncertain future that has been forced of late to diminish its economic support of the island nation.
If that online lifeline is diminished, don’t expect Cuba’s leadership to necessarily rush into telecommunications agreements with US companies eager to provide connections. Cuban leaders still often repeat their concerns about cybersecurity and “technological sovereignty,” citing schemes by the Agency for International Development and other US official agencies to breed dissention in Cuba via the Web.
At the same time, there’s a sense the internet genie is seeping out of the bottle in Cuba. The Wi-Fi is so in-demand that long lines plague offices of the state agency that sells the access cards. A black market in the cards has rapidly developed, with street salesmen now hawking them for the equivalent of $3, a 50-percent markup.
3) Social media, especially Facebook, loom increasingly large
The Wi-Fi spots have opened a substantial, if small, new window to the web. And perhaps it’s no surprise that many Cubans, especially the mostly young ones who flock to the street corners and parks that offer access, are relying on social media to connect. That much seems clear when you peek over the shoulders of those using these quite-public connection zones. And emerging academic research seems to confirm the primacy of social connections in Cuban internet use.
Michaelanne Dye, a Ph.D student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, co-authored a recent study of Cuba’s early adopters of the internet and social media. In her research, she found that among the active online users, Facebook reigns supreme.
“For us, the internet is Facebook, Facebook, Facebook,” one Cuban who’s active online told the researchers. Others backed that up, saying that Facebook, with its intuitive functionality and easy means to share pictures and posts, and engage in chats with friends and relatives, was a natural and in some ways only choice for Cubans seeking cyber connections.
The anecdotes gathered by Dye and her colleagues were backed up by a recent survey conducted by Ding, the Irish telecommunications firm, which suggested that 95 percent of Cubans using social media are focused foremost on Facebook.
Data about Facebook’s penetration of most countries is readily available, but it’s sparse when it comes to Cuba: Neither the company nor outside sources has revealed any hard numbers on Cubans’ use of the service, and my recent email query to Facebook’s press office for this info went unanswered.
EIt does appear that the Cuban government has allowed access to Facebook to rise unimpeded, with rare exceptions. An IT worker at the University of Havana told me that because Facebook is so popular, some departments are forbidden from using it during peak hours, lest they sop up too much of the country’s limited bandwidth.
4) Non-state journalism is on the rise, at least in fits and starts
Cuba has precious little print media, especially given the country’s high literacy rates. And while the vast majority of newspapers and magazines continue to be run by the state, there are exceptions, and a growing number of mostly online outlets are in the hands of private groups and individuals.
Two journals published by the Catholic Church, Espacio Laical and Palabra Nueva , which critique Cuba’s government, at least in general terms, have gained a toehold. It’s a notable aberration in country where the law dictates state ownership of mass media.
More remarkable still is OnCuba, a magazine published with staff in both Miami and Havana that is headed by a Cuban American, has a Cuban Web editor, and is credentialed to operate on the island.
While the glossy and fairly high-end print version is available almost exclusively in South Florida and on a monthly schedule, the online version of OnCuba publishes increasingly professional and evocative content daily. Recent commentaries have decried self-censorship in the Cuban media and the grueling challenges of everyday Cuban life.
Beyond those examples is a burgeoning number of independent news and opinion blogs, scores of which are run by either small groups or individual Cubans. Some are produced and published entirely on the island, while many others email their content to publishers in the US or Spain, among other countries, to be uploaded there.
Dye, the Georgia Institute of Technology-based researcher, suggested a Cold War metaphor about the phenomenon that is Cuba’s insipient and still meager private media evolution.
“It’s not like the Berlin Wall coming down, all at once with a new reality and a new system,” she told me recently. “It’s more like they are poking holes through a wall, little by little, and adapting based on what comes through it.”
5) TV still reigns among news consumers and is branching out
According to a 2015 poll in Cuba by Miami-based public opinion firm Bendixen and Amandi, 80 percent of Cubans turn first to TV for their daily news, with a mere five percent relying on newspapers.
TV’s prominence was visible when I first visited Cuba 20 years ago, though the programming was at times both popular and pitiful, and seemed settled-for as much as sought-after. Only two national channels were available—one mostly dedicated to news and education, another bent more towards sports and entertainment.
Every weekend, though, every home in Havana seemed to be tuned into the Saturday night movie, invariably a Hollywood production featuring some blend of sex, violence, action, and intrigue.
Because there was no copyright agreement between Cuba and the US (which remains true today), Cuba has had no compunctions with pirating some of the most popular American shows and movies for domestic consumption. (I was stunned during my April visit when the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, was on Cuban TVs while it was still only available in the United States in theaters.)
Since my early visits, the number of Cuban TV channels, all of which are delivered for free, has risen to five nationally, along with a sixth local-focused station in each of Cuba’s 11 provinces. And Cubans are accessing significantly more TV shows from countries around the world.
In fact, one of the national channels, Multivision, carries only shows from around the globe, including the United States. Another, Venezuela-based Telesur, carries news and other programming from five leftist Latin American countries, at least for now (political shifts in those countries could ultimately scuttle or downsize the network). The station is hardly shy about its overall political bent, but its production values and range of topics noticeably eclipse those of Cuban news programs.
6) A “weekly package”of bootleg digital media is spreading widely
On a recent visit, a Cuban friend chided me for being behind on a season or two of House of Cards, the Netflix political drama. She was totally up to date, thanks to the paquete seminal, or “weekly package,” a cornucopia of pirated media that circulates the island on hard drives and thumb drives at bottom-dollar prices.
While its origins remain shrouded in some mystery, and in fact there is more than one version of this underground media-sharing sensation, the contours of the paquete’s distribution are becoming increasingly clear.
According to recent reporting by Vox and other sources, most of the content is gathered in Miami via cable and Internet feeds and in Havana via clandestine satellite receivers and internet-equipped government offices. Large and complex distribution networks take it from there, with no sign as yet of government interference.
Remarkably, for as little as $2 a week, the paquete provides as much media as many American cable customers purchase for more than $100 a month.
What exactly is contained on the various paquetes? We have a clearer picture thanks to new research by Dennisse Calle , a recent Harvard sociology grad who interviewed 45 Cuban paquete consumers last year and surveyed months worth of the weekly packages.
She found that 35 percent of the content is TV shows, while 29 percent is music, with movies, classified advertisements, software, and other miscellany filling out the balance. Perhaps her most surprising finding was that 57 percent of the TV shows included in paquetes were from the US.
It would appear that little in the way of hard news is circulating via the paquete. But it’s hard to imagine a devoted viewer of House of Cards not absorbing some perspectives about political power and abuses thereof.
7) A push for official transparency is stirring
As the Cubans media scene slowly opens, proposals for a radical shift that could change the whole game are increasingly in play. In recent years, discussion about the need for a freedom of information law has quickened among Cuban journalists and at least a few government officials.
Even President Castro has addressed the matter, saying at the April Communist Party Congress that the country’s “secretism” needs to end, though he didn’t elaborate.
Alfonso Herrera, a young Havana-based delegate at the congress, pushed the point. He called for the government to both quickly expand computer and internet access and “strengthen the right to information as a condition for the full exercise of criticism and participation of the people,” according to Granma’s report.
“The mere fact that [freedom of information] is under discussion is big news in the Cuban context,” Cuban lawyer Raudiel Pena recently wrote in a June 12 OnCuba opinion piece.
He framed his argument around the government’s broad goals, but called for a new official openness: “As part of the process of building socialism, the design of a full and coherent information environment is necessary,” he wrote. “It must be established as a democratizing element of our society.”
The fate of his proposal is unknown at this point, but a chorus of such calls for openness is building. On June 13, a writer for Joven Cuba (Young Cuba), an independent blog run by college students, scolded the state in sharp terms for including too few voices in crafting its potential upcoming media laws.
And on July 14, one of Cuba’s most innovative and locally focused independent news sites, Periodismo del Barrio (Neighborhood Journalism), published an editorial that bluntly confronted the state’s media strictures.
“As those who chose alternative paths from the state’s, we are also the result of the history of Cuba,” the publication asserted. “It was in this country and not another where we learned to think freely, to defend our ideas and to assume the consequences of our actions.”
Jon Elliston has studied Cuban media and mass communication for the past 20 years.
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