To the Internet through USB
USB memory sticks work as a bridge of information among Cubans
By Jorge Morales and Harold Cárdenas
From La Joven Cuba (The Young Cuba)
MATANZAS, CUBA – A few yours ago, after permission was granted to import and buy DVD equipment, USB ports began to flourish. The positive result was the gradual decentralization of information. USB memory sticks began to proliferate and, in a short time, they were sold in the black market for a much lower price than at state-run stores.
With the eventual reductions in price (in the black market, not in the chain stores) and increase in capacity due to miniaturization, memory sticks [flash drives] have become very popular among Cubans. Even waitresses and street vendors carry their own USB sticks.
What’s interesting is that most of the people who own them do not own computers. But that doesn’t prevent Cubans from loading their USB sticks with “the latest stuff.”
Because of the limited use of Internet here, we Cubans have looked for ways to get around obstacles (some of which make no sense) and are using USB memories in the most sociable way – sharing them. A totally subterranean information market has existed for several years, where a large percentage of Cubans keep informed, away from the official channels.
This information vehicle is called a “cargue” – a loader. A loader containing from 60 to 120 gigabytes can, depending on your luck, be rented for 1 or 2 convertible pesos (CUCs) per week. Relatives, friends, and fellow workers pool their resources every month to obtain the latest loaders, becoming an entertainment cooperative.
In the loaders, you’ll find Champion League soccer games, soap operas and foreign programs. You can watch the Oscars awards ceremony (one day after the event) or the world’s most popular movies. It doesn’t matter whether the artistic level is high or if it’s a pirated film or if it’s in High Definition video. The cargues make no distinctions about art, although they do not contain pornographic material or anything from counter-revolutionary sources.
Sixty gigabytes per week is a lot of information, so you can just as easily find a documentary on photography as an absurd Colombian soap opera. In a loader, you can see the latest version of Wikipedia offline, Ubuntu Linux, and a lot more about the Scarabeo-9 oil platform than you see in the national TV newscasts.
As a result of this new system, the movie banks (which have always existed in the barrios, even though they’re prohibited) lose money, because most people nowadays prefer to rent the loaders.
A loader does away with the slowness – even immobility – of news reporting. Through them, I have seen sports programs from TeleSur, newscasts from Spanish TV, lectures by a renowned Cuban economist, courses in French or Russian. In sum, a loader holds a huge quantity of totally eclectic material.
The best thing is that loaders bring us up to date on everything that happens on the Internet (for the many who have no connection) because they carry not only videos but also text: news, digital books, courses, etc.
They are a totally different way for Cubans to get their information. By now, they know YouTube, Facebook and Google, even though they’ve never been connected to the Worldwide Web or owned a personal computer. The loaders are so popular that they go from hand to hand with astounding speed.
Writing in Granma, José Alejandro Rodríguez recently said that Cuban journalism was challenged by the dynamics of information, which are propelled by the new technologies. For example, a fistfight between members of the Industriales baseball team and the police was reported throughout the country by word of mouth because the official TV announcer did not have the gills to report the donnybrook live on the air. Such situations challenge the journalists to really report the news, not stay in the idyllic world some of them have created for themselves.
The USBs and the cargues enable us Cubans to evade the American and domestic blockades and see the world in colors other than red and blue. We are connecting with the world, even though we don’t know the status of the fiber-optic project that will link us to it.
