HAVANA, July 3 — The U.S. economic embargo prevents Cubans from accessing many Google services, Communist Party daily Granma said, reacting to comments by the search giant’s chief during a recent visit to the island CEO Eric Schmidt and three other Google executives traveled to Cuba last week “to promote the virtues of a free and open Internet,” dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez said in a post on her site, 14ymedio.
Cuba is “one of the few countries in the world that cannot access a good part of the services” offered by Google because the California-based company is bound by
the “unjust laws” of the U.S. economic embargo, Granma said.
Neither Android apps nor platforms such as Google Analytics are available to Internet users in Cuba, the newspaper said. Granma noted that Schmidt criticized the U.S. embargo in comments online after his visit to Cuba.
Schmidt has described the Internet in Cuba as “trapped in the 1990s,” heavily censored and with a weak infrastructure dominated by Chinese equipment because
of the U.S. trade embargo.
The embargo “makes absolutely no sense to U.S. interests,” Schmidt wrote in a column. “If you wish (Cuba) to modernize, the best way to do this is to empower
the citizens with smartphones (there are almost none today) and encourage freedom of expression and put information tools into the hands of Cubans directly.”
Schmidt’s column was posted on Google Plus shortly after he and three other company executives returned from a brief trip to Cuba, where they met with
government officials and blogger Yoani Sanchez and visited the Information Sciences University in Havana.
“The Internet of Cuba is trapped in the 1990s. About 20-25 percent of Cubans have phone lines … and the cellphone infrastructure is very thin,” he wrote,
adding that only 3-4 percent of Cubans “have access to the Internet in Internet cafes and in certain universities.”
Turning to U.S. policies on Cuba, Schmidt wrote that the half-century-old embargo had opened the doors to Chinese equipment. “As U.S. firms cannot operate
in Cuba, their Internet is more shaped by Cuban narrow interests than by global and open platforms,” he argued.
The embargo and keeping Cuba on the U.S. State Department’s list of nations that support international terrorism “defy reason,” Schmidt wrote. “There are dozens of countries we call our allies and we are free to travel to that present much worse threats and concerns to the U.S.”
U.S. restrictions “make even less sense when you find out that Cuba imports a great deal of food from the U.S. as compassionate trade. The food imports to Cuba are important but so is importation of tools to Cuba for the development of a knowledge economy,” the Google chief added.
“Walking around (Havana) it’s possible to imagine a new Cuba, perhaps a leader of Latin America education, culture, and business,” he wrote. “Cuba will have to
open its political and business economy, and the U.S. will have to overcome our history and open the embargo. Both countries have to do something that is hard
to do politically, but it will be worth it.”
Very few Cubans have Web access from their homes and the only option for most people is going to a government-run Internet cafe or to a hotel serving tourists. Connection charges are steep for a country where the average monthly wage is $20.
While Cuba’s Internet links improved substantially with the arrival in 2011 of an underwater fiber-optic cable connecting the island with Venezuela, the government says it will take years to upgrade telecommunications infrastructure to the point where widespread home Web access will be possible.
– BERNAMA
