"the Luddite", you say you are returning to Cuba soon...I guess the fact that you werent back there yet explains why you were able to type your post and express yourself in the first place?...or do you have a "hacked password" ?
CONTROLLED INTERNET
Reporters Without Borders last year denounced Cuba as one of a dozen nations with the most controlled and least accessible Internet, grouping the country with Iran and Vietnam. While Cuba boasts that it has computers in every school, a U.N. Human Development Report says the number of its Internet users pales in comparison with Costa Rica, with 288 users for every 1,000 persons, and Honduras with 44. .
Individuals cannot legally buy computers or sign up for regular Internet service without government permits that are almost impossible to obtain, so the nation's 335,000 desktops and laptops belong largely to the government, state enterprises and special individuals such as trusted doctors.
Internet cafes aimed at foreigners charge up to a Cuban's average one-month wage for an hour of surfing. But a black market has emerged, where users ''rent'' time slots from legally approved contacts.
''One of the things young people here most want is Internet, or satellite TV, or anything that offers different options than the ones offered here,'' dissident Vladimiro Roca said in a telephone interview from Havana.
Five Cuban university students were suspended for up to five years for violations that their information technology school deemed ''very grave'': running chat rooms and using school servers to sell Internet access to others.
Cuba's Internet police, the Office of Information Security, caught the students at the University of Information Sciences (UCI) using school property to charge $30 a month for stolen Internet passwords, according to a video of a campus meeting, smuggled out of the island.
Critics of Fidel Castro's government say the video illustrates the lengths to which young Cubans are willing to go to access information in a place where the government tightly controls all information. A university whose dean says in the video is aimed at ''training the guerrillas of the new era'' instead found its students using their skills to hack their way to the outside world.
'It's easy for you to say: `They were using stolen passwords or appropriating government resources,' but that's because here we have the option of using the Internet,'' said Antonio Rivera, editor of the online news site La Nueva Cuba, which obtained the video. ``They have no other alternatives.''
La Nueva Cuba posted the hour-long video, titled ''Point of Necessary Reflection,'' on its Web site. Intended by its makers for internal use, Rivera said it was smuggled out through a third country but declined further comment.
The video shows university officials blasting students for creating three chat rooms for students' online dating, and also for running a discussion forum hosted by a Cuban-American in the United States.
HACKED PASSWORDS
The students, officials added, also distributed hacked passwords belonging to authorized Internet users. A meager nine out of every 1,000 Cubans are estimated to be Internet users, most of them linked to the government.
None of the suspended students' activities were political, but university officials cautioned that at any moment they could have taken a turn against the Cuban revolution.
''We have to be very careful of these semi-clandestine chats which are not official chats,'' university chancellor Melchor Gil Morell, former vice-minister of Information and Communications, said on the video.
``The majority wind up hurting the revolution and conducting illegal acts.''
He said the government will revise its penal code to make illegal Internet access punishable by up to five years in prison.
Among those leading the meeting on the video are student leader César Lage, the son of Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage, who urged students who have computers to use the Web to spread positive aspects of the government.
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