By Brian Carnell

Sunday, February 22, 2004

Cuba received widespread condemnation in early January when it implemented a ban on ordinary Cubans using the Internet.

Under a law that went into effect on January 18, 2004, only people with special authorization from the government will be allowed to have Internet access.

Technically, access to the Internet in Cuba has always required government permission, but as many as 40,000 people have skirted the law to obtain unofficial access to the INternet. The new law is an attempt to crack down on such access so that Cuba can more closely monitor who is using the Internet and for what purposes they are using it.

As Amnesty International noted in a press release about the change,

The new measures, which limit and impede unofficial internet use, constitute yet another attempt to cut off Cubans' access to alternative views and a space for discussing them. This step, coming on top of last year's prosecution of 75 activists for peacefully expressing their views, gives the authorities another mechanism for repressing dissent and punishing critics.

But to be fair to Cuba, the government said it only had its people's best interests at heart. As Friends of Cuban Libraries noted in a press release, Cuban officials offered up a number of justifications of the new law, including this:

In a letter to a New Zealand newspaper (Scoop, January 24), the Cuban ambassador, Miguel Ramirez, described Amnesty International's protest as "totally biased and full of prejudices according to the values of western and developed countries...," and he defended Cuba's new law as a reasonable measure to "regulate access to [the] Internet and avoid hackers, stealing passwords, [and] access to pornographic, satanic cults, terrorist or other negative sites..."

I can understand why they wouldn't want people to have access to satanic sites, though -- after all, Castro's getting a bit old for that sort of competition.

Sources:

Cuban law prohibiting Internet access to take effect. UNWire, January 15, 2004.

Cuba Says Internet Ban Deters "Satanic Cults". Press Release, Friends of Cuban Libraries, January 27, 2004.

Cuba: Further bans on freedom of expression. Press Release, Amnesty International, January 12, 2004.

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