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Fidel Castro Loves the Internet

BY Raphael Majma | Tuesday, February 7 2012

“The Internet is a revolutionary instrument that permits the receiving and transmission of ideas, in both directions, that is something we should know how to use,” Fidel Castro told a crowd of supporters on Feb. 4, according to the state-owned Cuban newspaper Granma International. Castro, who made his first public appearance since April 2011, launched his two-volume memoir, “Guerilla of Time,” and took the opportunity to discuss issues of importance to him. Earlier this week, Miranda Neubauer reported that one of these topics was the need for the Internet.

Castro has been a proponent of the Internet as a tool for the exchange of ideas since 2003, but the average Cuban citizen faces great difficulty getting online. Internet speeds are notoriously slow in the country, even after the installation of a fiber-optic link to Venezuela, and the Internet is primarily accessed through ”public access points”. Content is usually censored in accordance with the belief structure of the governing regime and access to wider content is largely limited. American diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks state that ”Cuban government officials are more fearful of what bloggers represent than they are of the “traditional” opposition.

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