‘I Even Left My Girlfriend For Wifi’
Internet in Cuba is tough.
In a lot of ways, it’s like traveling back to the ‘90s in the U.S., when people still couldn’t decide what the Internet was when most accessed it at universities and jobs.
In Cuba, forget having Internet on your phone or in your home. You can access the web almost exclusively at hotels and the price — $5 an hour for the connection I’m using to write this post — is unattainable for most Cubans whose monthly salary hovers around $25 a month.
The politics are thorny: The Cuban government blames the U.S. embargo for the lack of infrastructure, while American observers say the Cuban government wants to maintain control over its people.
On the ground, the lack of Internet is one of the first things you notice. In parks at restaurants, people talk to each other. No one waiting for a friend has his face buried in a smart phone.
Things, however, seem to changing. We traveled to a poor neighborhood of Havana called El Romerillo. That’s where the artist K’Cho (pronounced CAH-cho) built his studio.
He told us that the 2 MB ADSL connection was too broad just for him to use. So he installed wireless routers and decided to share it with the neighborhood for free.
It’s on 24 hours a day and there are posters that tell you how to connect to the Internet. That means that the place is a hive of activity: There are people leaning on the outside walls, staring at their smartphones. In the library, people get on a waiting list to watch funny videos on Yahoo!
I found Yoan Istameyer, 29 and wearing the black shirt, and Yendy Rodriguez, 20 and wearing the orange shirt, sitting along a concrete retainment wall.
Yoan said he had been he since the night before.
“I never leave,” he said. The web and especially Facebook keep him hooked.
He said that there are only two places in Havana with free Internet: K’Cho’s place and the U.S. Interest Section along the Malecon. He’d gone to the Interest Section twice before, he said, but he decided to stop because of the political baggage that comes with stepping foot inside a U.S. installation.
Yendy told me that he had just heard of this place and he was thrilled. I asked him if the Internet had changed his life in any way. He nodded that not really.
Then Yoan cut in. He’s young. He’s brash. He’ll hand you his email address as soon as he can.
“I even left my girlfriend for wifi,” he said.
His friends laughed. The Internet — and the social connections across the world that it gave him the freedom to make — had drawn him in so much that she gave him an ultimatum: WiFi, which Cubans pronounce wee-fee, or me.
