Broad-band carom

From
Havana                                                                           Read Spanish Version

Broad-band
carom

By
Manuel Alberto Ramy
maprogre@gmail.com

About 20
kilometers north of Cuba, there is a cable to which Cubans might
connect, reducing the cost of all kinds of communications and getting
better service. But the blockade prevents their access and has
obliged Cubans to resort to an old satellite to conduct their
communications.

The
leasing cost is high, and the bandwidth — a feature that facilitates
the quality, quantity and diversity of the types of communication —
is 65 megabytes-per-second for download and 124 for uplink. To any
Internaut, these figures are as ridiculous as travelling by balloon
in an age when airliners can break the speed of sound.

"I
can never download filmed materials from YouTube or Telesur,"
says Angel, who describes himself as a Cuban "computer junkie."

Very
likely, within two years, Angel and others like him will not have
technical problems and will be able to circle the globe in less than
80 seconds. But that step forward will not be due to President George
W. Bush, who yesterday, Oct. 24, "offered" computers to the
Cuban youngsters with the condition that Havana allow all citizens
access to the Internet even as his own policy has blocked Cuba’s
connection to the cable mentioned above. Bush comes too late,
carrying an agenda that is unacceptable to a country that
historically has lived against every interference and has rejected
all conditions.

On Oct.
15, President Hugo Chávez Frías of Venezuela signed in
Havana a decree by which he created a state-run joint venture to
install, operate and maintain a telecommunications system between
Cuba and Venezuela.

With
this measure, both countries have played a carom that will join
Guaira, on Venezuela’s northern coast, with Siboney Beach in Santiago
de Cuba, on the southern coast of Santiago de Cuba province, by means
of a fiber-optic cable.

This
two-band operation, which will cover 1,550 kilometers, will have two
immediate consequences. First, the island will break the
communications blockade that afflicts it, a factor that also weighs
on the cost of international phone calls. Second, Cuba will broaden
the operational bandwidth, enabling a larger number of Cubans to
access the Internet.

Havana
maintains that the narrowness of the band and the high cost of
communications prevent Cubans from navigating through cyberspace. The
cost of the underwater cable is about $70 million and, as Chávez
said during a speech in Cienfuegos, the Chinese government will
finance the operation.

From a
technical point of view, the current (and extremely narrow) bandwidth
will gain a transmission capacity of 160 gigabytes per second. And we
mustn’t forget that this technological leap means a notable reduction
in costs for all users.

So much
for the economic and technical benefits of this carom, which could
become three- or four-sided. Chávez has said that the door is
open to other countries of the Caribbean and Central America to
benefit from the cable.

Undeniably,
the project has consequences and purposes in tune with the Bolivarian
vision of a federation of free republics. To make it come true, two
indispensable elements are needed: energy resources and
communications technology.

The
Venezuelan process is the only one that — in addition to a political
will that is shared by Cuba and Bolivia — sits on a huge sea of
crude oil and trillions of cubic meters of natural gas. Venezuela is
acting with extreme generosity by distributing and expanding these
resources (which are expected to last about 200 years) not only in
the southern half of the continent but also in the Caribbean and
Central America.

What
coal did to forge the present European Union, oil and gas will do to
permit the integration of our region, as a previous step to
unification.

However,
and this is the other aspect, ideas don’t travel along gas and oil
pipelines. While integration requires material support that is
tangible to our people, it travels along the Internet, TV channels,
and radio stations; in sum, via the communications.

Liberating
processes, like the mechanisms of imperial control today presented by
Bush, begin with the diffusion of ideas and express a counterculture.
The underwater cable could be the equivalent of the three- or
four-masted sailing ships used to bring to America the encyclopedic
ideas of the late 18th Century and early 19th Century.

The
creation of alternatives for the monopolies that dominate the main
avenues of communication is an indispensable step. This cable
represents independence and interconnection. It enables us to
rediscover our America, since often we know more about the history
and features of other cultures than about our own.

Our
values and history must travel through that optic fiber; so must the
news and the necessary debate of ideas that the region is
(fortunately) holding. It is not just a question of confronting the
Empire and the neoliberal globalization but also of our vision of how
to build a socialism as varied as the republics that will join the
federation.

The
promoters of this endeavor — Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia — have a
clear objective: to build socialism within their borders. But they
also are going through three different processes because of their
origins and the forms and modality in which they articulate
socialism.

Fortunately,
the acceptance of variety within unity seems to impose itself in the
conceptual and practical fields. But it must be disseminated, become
news, be the topic of debates and analyses accessible to the
majorities. It must circulate through the Web so all citizens can be
the actors in our socialism, and we can appreciate the virtues of
each measure launched in each of our processes of transformation.
Mutual influences do not detract from particularity; on the contrary,
they can enrich it.

Real and
concrete participation is the key. The reader should realize that the
popular movements that have come to power and the movements that are
emerging are products of the effective participation that has
displaced party rule, including the traditional left. That
traditional left, dogmatic and apologetic as it was, practiced
uniqueness, a concept that — by rejecting variety — stifled the
essence of unification.

The new
subjects of the revolutionary change in Latin America will not accept
being left out of the debate over how to build socialism. And, to the
degree that such access is denied to them, we would be opening the
door to the imperial enemy.

Welcome
to the liberating and integrationist cable that is not hobbled by
deals with the Empire but forged in a spirit of solidarity. But —
and I insist — the display of information and opinion that will help
us to forge the federation of republics must be open to the debate of
the variants of socialism that today navigate through the Web and
motivate important sectors of Latin America, including Cuba.

Manuel
Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief for Radio Progreso Alternativa
and editor of Progreso Semanal, the English-language version of
Progreso Weekly.