Cuban Internet access

Cuban Internet access continues to evolve. The Cuban ‘intranet’ is both cheap and highly censored, according to Amnesty.org. Some sites, like Skype, are not accessible in Cuba without a VPN. Skype is blocked in Cuba, according to a report from the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), which works under the Tor Project. According to the Miami Herald, while pervasive, these methods are not truly sophisticated. Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady just called Google a ‘resource provider’ to the Castro regime in Cuba. Google servers went live on the island of Cuba in April — meaning that services like YouTube videos can now be cached locally, inside the country. In addition to localisation, the supporting agreement signed in Havana in December contains a clause in which ETECSA (La Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A) commits to ‘not censor, surveil or interfere with the content stored as cache on those servers’. SNET, a separate and ‘dark(ish)-web intranet first concocted in the early 00’s by gamers tired of lugging their desktops to each other’s houses to play StarCraft or Counter-Strike,’ which evolved separately, offers the closest thing to the access that most of the world uses, sometimes with faster speeds.