Havana online

In Cuba, black market Internet access makes it easier for prostitutes to get connected than doctors.

By David Lipschultz

Oct. 10, 2001 | HAVANA -- The apartment is an unlikely home for Cuba's burgeoning Internet revolution, the last place in the world that might encourage the use of words like "superhighway" or "digital." The walls are coated with plaster ready to crumble at a simple touch. A half-century-old mufflerless Chevy booms out a loud groan with a belch of exhaust on the narrow street two feet from the door. From appearances, you could be in any normal Cuban home in Old Havana. Instead you're in the residence of one of Cuba's few cyber criminals.

Rodrigo (who requested his name be changed for obvious reasons) is a little nervous. He is dressed in knockoff Gap khakis and a Polo button-down. He speaks some English, enough to show he's not a simple Cuban peasant but not enough to speak his mind. He circles the room a few times as if he is wondering how it is that I got here and what exactly he is supposed to say. Hadn't he made it very clear to my Cuban liaison that he was hesitant to discuss his extracurricular work? Still, he has let me into his house. He seems to feel some desire to self reveal.

Rodrigo is a classic example of modern Cuba's penchant for glaring contradictions. He is a member and employee of the Young Communist Association (YCA), an organization that espouses the communist axioms of anti-individualism and group equality. Yet he is also a totally self-motivated free marketer. As a systems administrator for the YCA he helps manage its computer network so that a very select group of academics and government officials can access the Internet. But in the true spirit of modern Cuba, he also steals all their logins and passwords and resells them on a newly formed black market to wannabe Net surfers.

In his day job he makes around $15 per month. His night job brings in $50 a person per month, and already he has a roster of dozens of customers.

He's a typical Cuban capitalist. He may be a member of the new economy, but he's not so different from the thousands of cigar factory workers who steal boxes of Cohibas with $150 price tags and then resell them for $40 on the black market. Or the rum peddlers who have been taking advantage of the fact that the end of the Cold War, and the demise of Cuba's chief benefactor, the Soviet Union, have forced Castro to open up Cuba to tourism and the U.S. dollars that come with it.

"The people live here off stealing from the government," says Alfonso, an ex-government security officer who won't divulge his last name.

And for some reason, maybe because he already assumes everyone knows this, or just out of simple entrepreneurial pride, Rodrigo does eventually sit down in front of me and begin talking about his illicit activities. "Even if the government tries to control it, people here understand that information is everything and they'll pay to get it," he says. "So I found a way to give it to them."

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