[NYTr] Dateline Havana: Broad-band Carom
 
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:13:21 -0500 (CDT)

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Progreso Weekly - Oct 25, 2007
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=206&Itemid=1

Dateline Havana

Broad-band carom

By Manuel Alberto Ramy

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 ChC!vez FrC-as 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 ChC!vez 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. ChC!vez 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.]

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