Much like Venezuela, but with a bit better press.
Those who do have laptops, smart phones and tablets only managed to
acquire them because their relatives who escaped bought them in Florida.
The government doesn’t mind too much since only a handful of wi-fi
hotspots even exist, and using them is prohibitively expensive for just
about everybody.
The Castro government is under relentless pressure from both inside
and outside the country to lighten up, so it promises to boost access to
the Internet by creating 35 wi-fi hotspots around the country. Stop for
a second and ponder that sentence. Think about all it implies and
you’ll understand why Cuba is so far behind almost every other country
on earth and why, Castro propaganda to the contrary, it is not because
of the US embargo.
...
The United States has a minimum wage. Cuba has a maximum wage, and it’s just 20 dollars a month. Cubans are required by law
to be poor. Prosperity is a crime. And when I visited the island in
2013, it cost 15 dollars an hour access the Internet on a shared dial-up
connection in a hotel lobby. It goes without saying that nobody who
ekes out a meager existence on the state-imposed maximum wage and a
ration card could afford that. Those hotspots were strictly for
tourists.
The government recently dropped the price to $2.25 an hour.
That sounds almost reasonable, except for two things. It’s still vastly
more expensive than using the Internet in America—which is free at most
public hotspots and only costs a few dozen dollars per month
to use at home. Cuba’s new “low” price still costs more than ten percent
of a person’s monthly salary, and that’s just to use the Internet for
an hour.
But don't worry, idiots will still wear Che shirts and proclaim any problems in Cuba are the fault of the evil United States.
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