A step towards calculated openings?
A reporter´s notebook
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
ramymanuel@yahoo.com
February 4, 2011
The news started to go round at the very end of last year and one could its reflection printed on the severe face of a couple of Telecom executives as they walked down the corridors of Miramar´s Trade Center. Now it´s already reality: ETECSA (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A) has ceased to be a joint Cuban-Italian venture.
The acquisition by the Cuban counterpart of the 27 % of those shares that Telecom Italy used to posses was completed during last January. According to reliable sources, the operation was carried out by RAFIN, an enterprise which certain inquiries still deprived of official confirmation, is the financial side of GAESA, a group of entrepreneurial administration belonging to FAR, the army, whose enterprises are, in general terms, the most efficient of Cuban economy.
To put it swiftly, the $706 operation turns the Cuban state into the sole proprietor of the telecommunications monopoly in the island.
This, obviously enough, progressive move, coincides with the undertakings to place in submarine grounds the optic fiber cable destined to connect the Venezuelan point of La Guaira with Siboney beach in Santiago de Cuba, as well as punctual agreements between both administrations to set the project in motion. And, prudently speaking, might also be related to the recent appointment of General Medardo Díaz, a telecommunications engineer, as the Minister of Informatics and Communications.
The submarine cable will improve communication, and other, services in the island by rendering them cheaper and more efficient. And, of course, it will have an impact on the quality and possible democratization of internet options, to this day a privilege of specific sectors of society.
Due to the current policy of so-called Actualization of economy, whose general draft is being object of popular discussion, the country seems to head for, first, a widespread use of informatics including fostering a number of internet operations such as payments or document legalizations, an all demanding process integrating a fabric of institutions and social areas. But also, one could dare seeing it as a progressive fulfillment of a persistent popular demand: to freely enter the web.
About a year ago the use of cell phones was restricted; the sale of this sort of technological items to the population has meant a huge success for the governmental arks and a satisfaction for Cubans. According to official figures, there are nowadays more cell phones on the street than set phones in houses. And the government did not have to face anything but profit. Why the internet-for-all story shouldn´t be the same?
The experience accumulated by the Chinese and Vietnamese in those areas, especially in the massive use of the web, have surely been already analyzed. The access is free in those two countries, with the government busy only in blocking, sometimes transitorily (as recently observed in Vietnam during the Communist Party congress), those specific sites considered politically inacceptable.
Cubans are eager to navigate from homes, and not from hotels where they must pay a rate of 5 to 10 convertible pesos an hour.
Communications are today a must, whether in the case of web services or in inter-personal connections and access to information. Sustainable development has to move through such channels as well as economic and commercial efficiency. No web: no development.
As to free access to the cyberspace, that´s only a right. In today´s world it is not advisable to build or sustain communicational walls: they have a stubborn tendency to leak. It may so be that putting telecommunications fully in state´s hands, is a step prior to upcoming calculated openings. It will not happen tomorrow morning, but it will happen.
