The program, sponsored by the Catholic Church, aims to teach Cuban students how to start and market their own businesses in the new Cuban economy.

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MARCO WERMAN: Cuba has been shrinking its government workforce. The Cuban government wants to lay off as many as half a million government workers. At the same time, President Raul Castro is liberalizing the island’ s economy, allowing more Cubans to run their own businesses. And this week comes the launch of a new MBA program in Havana. It’ s sponsored by the Catholic Church and it’ s said to be the first of its kind there. Reporter Mark Franc writes about it in today’ s Financial Times.

MARK FRANC: You know it’ s really a sign of the times, both in terms of the government’ s acceptance of small business and also the warming trend in the Catholic Church. So it kind of hits two balls out of the park at the same time.

WERMAN: What made it possible for this new business school to launch?

FRANC: Well, I mean there’ s two things. First of all, a year ago all of a sudden the Cuban government announced that far from treating small businessmen like criminals, that in fact the country needed small businesses. And in fact they would be an important part of the socialist economy in the future. It then began giving out licenses to just about anybody who wanted to go into business. And so as far they’ ve given out about… I would say about 2,000 a week. So on the one hand you have this big boom, and people wanting to go into business, and the government allowing them. But the fact is that the country’ s never been prepared for such a thing. The Economy Faculty at Havana University doesn’ t teach of course how to run a small business, and so it step the church. And the MBA is just the first of many courses that have been planned to be here in Havana and around the country.

WERMAN: You know for the hungry capitalist wannabes in Cuba I would assume that if they really had their druthers they’ d like to go to Harvard and get an MBA there. Do they see getting an MBA from the Vatican as kind of settling? Is it good enough for them?

FRANC: Well when you have zero alternative of course it’ s great. So the people in this first course, it’ s like 30 of them, they are mixed. There’ s a few businesses students from Havana University, there’ s a few people who already run small restaurants and snack shops, and there’ s people who want to run businesses in the future. And so they are certainly very happy with their chance to learn how to do business better, even if it’ s not Harvard or Oxford.

WERMAN: Tell us about this one little street where the school is actually located, Chacón, Chacón Street. Do you see small businesses opening up there? And are these the businesses that are going to bloom in the future?

FRANC: First of all everywhere there’ s lots of businesses just popping up of all kinds. There’ s snack shops, there’ s restaurants, there’ s computer repair shops, and you can go on and on. Now, on the block that the school is located, you just go right out of the door and you walk down one block, there’ s three little kind of home-based snack shops. And of course going up and down the street there’ s lots of private taxi cab drivers, which also weren’ t before. And of course it is interesting, because the school is located in the colonial part of Havana, but basically these people who are selling in this area, they’ re selling to tourists, not necessarily the Cubans, and so they’ re competing directly let’ s say for the tourists and dollars, something that was totally forbidden just a year ago.

WERMAN: Marc, you obviously know the other big headline in Cuba involving capitalism in the past week. The government announced that new cars would be able to be sold and bought on the island, which hasn’ t happened since 1959. Is this how the revolution ends in Cuba with a Cadillac Escalade and an MBA?

FRANC: [laughs] I think that’ s a ways of action. The new law just allows people basically to buy and sell the cars that already exist in Cuba. And the government restrictions on Cubans’ buying new cars or importing cars- it really hasn’ t changed. So it’ s going to be a while before you can buy a really nice car.

WERMAN: Reporter Marc Franc with the Financial Times in Havana. Thank you so much.

FRANC: Pleasure. Thank you.

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Fidel Castro in New York in 1959 (Photographer: Alejandro Saavedra/photo courtesy of Mike Wilkins)

Fidel Castro made his first public appearance in five years today as his brother Raul was officially made head of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party. Raul Castro took over the presidency from Fidel five years ago. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with professor Andy Gomez of the University of Miami about the significance of the announcement.

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins, and this is The World.  Today Fidel Castro made his first public appearance in Cuba since he handed over power to his brother Raul five years ago.  Party leaders gave Fidel a rousing welcome.

[rally, cheering in Spanish]

MULLINS: The two Castros received a long standing ovation today, followed by a rendition of the Cuban national anthem.

[music of Cuban national anthem, group singing in Spanish]

MULLINS: This all took place before the Communist Party Congress in Havana.  Now Raul Castro is already President, but today he officially succeeded his brother as head of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party.  The Party also named a new slate of leaders, most of them who are in their 70s and 80s.  Andy Gomez is Assistant Provost and Senior Fellow of the Cuban Institute of the University of Miami.  Professor, we know that Raul Castro and brother Fidel called for fresh faces and new ideas in the top leadership of Cuba.  Did they get it?

ANDY GOMEZ: Well, no they didn’t.  And those Cuban that are young that were told that they are the ones responsible for carrying the revolution forward should be a little bit disappointed, because what Raul and the Power Bureau did was keep the old power in place.

MULLINS: So what’s going on, because we have heard about economic opportunities, some new market forces including the possible buying and selling of homes by Cubans?

GOMEZ: Yes.

MULLINS: Why is that not reflected in the new Communist Party Congress?

GOMEZ: Well, because we’re beginning to see very clearly that they wanna control the political system in itself.  What they’re opening up is the economic reforms, which they were voted on, all 300 plus, trying to improve the conditions of those Cubans that live on the island.  Now that’s gonna be tough.  Telling Cubans that you can buy property, telling Cubans you can start your own business¦ where are you gonna borrow the money from? Where are you actually ; how people are gonna pay for those services.  I give Raul six months to a year to meet the basic needs of the Cuban people: more food, better shelter, better health care, better education.  If that doesn’t happen within the year, I think you can see social unrest in Cuba.

MULLINS: But what about Fidel? He’s 84 years old right now- came in surrounded by body guards, dressed in his blue track suit, looking better than he has in the past, being greeted by roars of applause.  Does he have any more say in the government now?

GOMEZ: I think that Fidel has a say in the government, just for the fact that Raul has been next to him all his life. Fidel will concentrate or, or will be asked for advice on international issues.

MULLINS: And what does that mean for US-Cuban relations?

GOMEZ: Oh I think US-Cuban relations have come now to the old Cold War, at a standstill. The Obama administration is not gonna be willing to give them any more concessions.  It is up to Cuba to make the next move.

MULLINS: We’re speaking to you in Miami – how about,  especially in Miami, Cubans who are so active in Cuban American affairs, is this going to effect your relationship at all?

GOMEZ: [Under]stand that the Cuban American community in Miami has changed tremendously.  We are concerned about Cuba but it’s not on the top priority, and we proved that when we conducted a poll scientifically during the last presidential election.  Most Cuban Americans were concerned about the economy and the war in Iraq than they were on Cuba.

MULLINS: That’s Andy Gomez, the Assistant Pro Senior Fellow at the Cuban Institute at the University of Miami.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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Elian Gonzalez holds a Cuban flag during the UJC, Union of Young Communists, congress in Havana Sunday April 4, 2010. Gonzalez, the Cuban boy at the center of an international custody battle 10 years ago in April 2000, attended Cuba's Young Communist Union wearing an olive green military school uniform. (AP Photo/Ismael Francisco, Prensa Latina)

Alan Diaz's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph

Geo Answer:
Ten years ago this month — US authorities returned him to his father’s custody in Cuba. He’s now 16 years old and some snapshots of him have been published on a Cuban government website. Listen to the interview and the answer:

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Photo by Lonely Planet's Rachel Lewis

For the second episode of our new travel podcast, The World and Lonely Planet take you to a country where Americans are technically barred from traveling – Cuba. OK, technically, it’s not the US State Department that stops US citizens from going, but rather the US Treasury Department that makes it a crime for Americans to spend money there. Read more here. The travel ban has been in the news again recently. Critics and supporters of the ban were on Capitol Hill for hearings on lifting the ban. Critics contend that allowing Americans to freely travel, and spend money, in Cuba will only line to pockets of the government, specifically Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, who is now Cuba’s president. Has anything changed under Raul’s rule? That’s the topic of a new report by Human Rights Watch, entitled “New Castro, Same Cuba.” In our podcast, you can hear Lonely Planet‘s Robert Reid and Tom Hall talk about the practicalities of traveling to Cuba, and about the millions of Europeans who can and do spend their money on the island. You’ll also hear about how online travel company Orbitz has launched an Open Cuba campaign to get the US travel ban lifted. So, would more person-to-person contact between American tourists and Cuban locals help to ease tensions between the two governments? It’s a tricky and tantalizing question, as you can hear in our latest podcast.

Our music this week is a track called ” El 4-5-6″ by a group called Los Brito, from the album Si Para Usted, Vol. 2.

A once neglected masterpiece of Cuban literature is now available in English

By Bill Marx

Guillermo Rosales destroyed most of his work before he committed suicide in 1993, but the anguished Cuban writer published a short novel during his lifetime entitled “The Halfway House.” Neglected when it first appeared, the book is now considered a modern classic.

Translated by Anna Kushner for New Directions, “The Halfway House” is a masterful kick-in-the-teeth. The plot revolves around a man who, after his release from a Miami psychiatric ward, struggles to maintain his sanity in a hellish halfway house while grappling with his traumatic memories of the Cuban Revolution. An unconvincing note of sentimentality in the book’s final pages doesn’t dilute the story’s gaunt, gut-wrenching impact.

Acclaimed Cuban writer José Manuel Prieto, author of the novels “Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire” and more recently “Rex” (reviewed by World Books) contributes an informative prologue to “The Halfway House.” But his discussion left me wondering why it took so long for Rosales’s savagely beautiful book to be translated, and how he is viewed in Cuba today. I fired off email questions to Prieto, whose thoughtful responses, via the expert translation of Anna Kushner, are below.

World Books: In your introduction to “The Halfway House” you write that the novel is “one of the best Cuban novels of the second half of the twentieth century.” Why was the initial reaction of Latin American critics to the novel so lukewarm when it was published in 1987? What are their estimations of the novel today?

José Manuel Prieto: The reaction was so lukewarm because it was published by a little-known publishing house with small circulation. Another factor was the stigma of living and writing in Miami, which was still very strong back then. You simply wouldn’t pay attention to an author like Guillermo Rosales, he was something lowly, an enemy of the Revolution, which still had a strong mystique.

Today this has all changed, making the book’s acceptance possible. Now you can understand what the book says, what it recounts, understand it’s not made-up. It corresponds to a real situation. And it was written by a real author, a very talented one. This didn’t escape the notice of the jury members who awarded it prizes in the 1980s. The novel, which was praised by the esteemed Mexican writer Octavio Paz, started to make the rounds, although just barely, and slowly it became well-deservedly famous among Cuban exiled writers.

Its stylistic achievements, its brevity, efficiency and its deep artistic and emotional impact can be compared to the work of authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Reynaldo Arenas, or Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

World Books: What particular resonances, political or literary, does this “lost masterpiece” have 20 years after it was published?

Prieto: From a literary point of view, the resonance is enormous. “The Halfway House” is a book that, while very Cuban, is simultaneously universal. As I’ve said, its literary quality is undeniable and its language is very efficient, very “American,” perhaps it’s even worth saying that it’s “Hemingwayesque,” since Rosales expertly internalized the influence of authors such as Ernest Hemingway.

It’s one of the few books which denounces the Revolution’s excesses and psychological damages with great literary dignity. The book never falls into propaganda. Rosales knew how to develop his own alphabet based on his experiences and, undeniably, he had a very powerful story to tell, that of a man whose spirit has been broken, a “loser” who ends up in a mental institution and who is able, once inside, to notice everything, to be a witness to the horror.

World Books: Critics are anxious to view this novel as a dank version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” set in Miami. But you compare it to the fiction of Milan Kundera and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Why the resistance to the book’s vision of totalitarianism?

Prieto: I don’t think it’s a completely mistaken reading, that is, the view of the mental institution replicating the State in which an individual, the patient, fights to maintain his humanity.

My reading, however, takes this into account as a jumping point: that Figueras, Rosales’ main character, comes from a totalitarian state in which the State’s presence is still much larger, incommensurately larger. I get the impression that, despite its seriousness and its reach over the greater part of the 20th Century, the totalitarian experience has yet to be completely understood. In other words, it’s easier to “read” a work like Rosales’ from a more classic, bourgeois if you will, perspective. But as I lay out in my prologue, Rosales should be read in the same vein as Milan Kundera or Primo Levi’s novels, and less in the classic tradition of a “story of madness,” like Anton Chekhov’s novella “Ward Number Six.”

World Books: Do you see any humor in the book – or is “The Halfway House,” in the words of one of its insane characters, “the tragedy of a final melodrama without any prospects”?

Prieto: That’s a good question. Rosales’ vision is quite dark, it doesn’t lend itself to irony nor does it try to be sarcastic. Nonetheless, where humor does play a part, where he allows himself to joke, is in his dreams. I’m talking about those appearances by Fidel Castro who moves around as agile as a mountain lion, dodging bullets, or that scene, which has its roots in Cuban folklore regarding wakes (there are endless jokes on this theme), in which Fidel Castro pops out of his coffin and asks, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, for some coffee. He then says: “Well, we’re already dead, now you’ll see that doesn’t solve anything, either.” These are the moments of subtle humor in the book, but in the immediate reality of the asylum there’s no humor, just suffering, hardship.

World Books: What do you see to be the challenges of translating “The Halfway House” into English? Has anything been lost in this translation?

Prieto: Anna Kushner, the translator, did an excellent job. She is of Cuban descent and is perfectly bilingual; almost all of the reviews mention the high quality of her translation. Anna was able to grasp all of the nuances of Rosales’ Spanish, which, in fact, is fairly direct. Rosales, as his main character says, is a great admirer of Hemingway. He belongs to that tradition of Cuban writers who are removed from the baroque prose styles of Alejo Carpentier or José Lezama Lima. He is closer to a sparse, frugal Spanish literature that has been largely influenced by the English of American authors (another example of this, save for the vast difference in subjects, intentions, etc. would be Jorge Luis Borges).

Given that, the book seems to be an ideal candidate for translation into English. Remember that even the title of the book in Spanish was in English. It is called “Boarding Home.” Great thought was given to changing the title since a “boarding home” isn’t exactly a mental institution. Thus, as paradoxical as it seems, a novel that already had an English-language title, which seemed ready to go with its original English-language title, had to be changed because the title didn’t work in English. An irony.

But this doesn’t diminish the book’s impact in the least. The English version maintains, as I’ve already said, all of the power and elegant brevity of Rosales’ writing.

World Books: In your introduction you also argue against an autobiographical reading of the book – but doesn’t Rosales’s troubled life, which ended with suicide in 1993, explain his deep understanding of mental illness?

Prieto: The descriptions of the mentally ill, the world that Figueras finds in the “halfway house,” are undeniably taken from real life. By the time Rosales wrote this novel, he had spent many months confined in these types of institutions and was unquestionably ill, a man who was seriously mentally disturbed.

What I argue against in my preface is reducing the book to a simple autobiographical novel by a mentally ill person, viewing it as a sort of memoir. I think that it is a book, on the contrary, that is thought through to the tiniest detail, a real work of art, a novel in the strict sense of the word. Indeed, the narrator’s illness is not the book’s main subject, the narrator is completely lucid: he sees and “reads” everything happening around him with utmost clarity, he passes definitive and weighty judgments. His observations, furthermore, are informed by his reading, he is more of a literary being than an insane man.

We could look at it from another angle: we are not introduced to a world of hallucinations in which we need to fight against ghostly emanations. A bit like the “cloud” that always hangs over the Indian in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

José Manuel Prieto

The world that Rosales describes is completely real, tangible, and even terribly lucid. That is the book’s power. If the narrator were truly “crazy,” then we’d have a distorted “impressionistic” image of reality, we would hear voices, etc. I believe that at no point was Rosales looking to paint a subjective picture, reality as seen through the distorted prism of a mentally ill mind, but rather quite the opposite, he wanted to paint an objective picture in a mentally ill milieu. Thus his main character is, perhaps, the sanest person with the greatest aptitude for critical thought in the whole book. It’s something that really stands out. And that’s what leads to the book’s combination of deep emotional impact and unquestionable veracity.

World Books: One of the characters in the book, a woman Figueras falls in love with, is an artist. Does Rosales draw links between art and madness? Does he idealize the connections?

Prieto: Rosales is interested in highlighting that there is salvation through art. The only person who is not completely out of it is Frances, the woman with whom Figueras falls in love, another patient. She is able to create, to leave a record of the horror. This is also the most urgent task that Figueras imposes upon himself. He is a man of letters, a writer… In fact, one is left with the impression after reading this book that Rosales always thought of himself as an artist, very conscious of the responsibilities and the trade of a writer.

In exile, he found the possibility of putting into writing not only the story of his life in the asylum, but also—and this is the most important thing about the book, to my understanding—delivering a harsh and critical judgment on two things. First, the abandonment of a certain sector of the exiled, a denunciation of the cruelty of the American dream, but also, secondly, of his life within the Revolution, of his revolutionary past in Cuba. To speak of the effect on him and on his country that a figure like Fidel Castro had, whom he “interrogates” in his dreams.

The artist is the person who is capable of articulating his ideas, of leaving testimony of something that would otherwise happen without leaving a trace. And who is able to articulate it not only intellectually, but emotionally. One of the virtues of this book is that it is memorable, that Rosales, in a short expanse and with a reduced, deliberately reduced, alphabet of situations and expressions, is able to transmit such a powerful message, which cannot leave the reader indifferent.

World Books: In your latest novel, “Rex,” literary history plays a pivotal role – in what ways has Rosales influenced your writing? On the surface you appear to be very different writers stylistically: he is a minimalist, you a maximalist.

Prieto: No, Rosales hasn’t influenced me in any way. I read him relatively recently, he was unknown to me previously. His style and his concerns are very different from what I set out to do with a novel like “Rex,” which is a book that does not aim to be a portrait of reality, but rather, a literary game, or to put it in plainer language, perhaps even precisely Nabokovian or Proustian. I see the novel as a vehicle not only for telling a story, but also for contributing reflections that go beyond the plot, that can cover essays, philosophy, etc. I’m more interested in, I’ve always been more interested in, that type of book.

Nonetheless, if there’s something in common between my book and Rosales’ book, it’s that it relays the circumstances of a survivor of totalitarianism. In both “Rex” and “The Halfway House,” the characters have left behind a traumatic experience, of life within a Revolution, in the universe of mirrors that a totalitarian country is. In the case of Rosales, the experience has damaged him deeply. Figueras tries to save himself, he makes optimistic plans with Frances, but he fails. The ending is pessimistic; I would call it dark.

For the main character in “Rex,” just as for the ones in the other two novels in my Russian Trilogy, the experiences were less traumatic, the tone is different. Nonetheless, the protagonist is conscious, and it’s very obvious in, for example, the “Encyclopedia,” that he has a very critical attitude of living life under a harsh regime like that. I would have loved to have given “Rex” to Rosales for him to read, to have heard his opinion about it. I am sure that I would have learned a lot.

Anna Kushner translates from Spanish, French and Portuguese. She is the translator of three books, “The Halfway House” by Guillermo Rosales, “The Autobiography of Fidel Castro” by Norberto Fuentes and “Jerusalem” by Gonçalo Tavares. Her writing has appeared in “Dzanc Books Best of the Web 2008,” “The Bucks County Writer,” “Crab Orchard Review,” “Ep;phany,” and “Wild River Review.”

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. Communication between the United States and Cuba has been increasing lately. True there’s still a US trade embargo on the island and most Americans can’t travel there but the Obama Administration has lifted restrictions how often Cuban Americans can go to Cuba to visit family. Washington and Havana have also held talks about immigration and postal services. All this communication has sparked protest from some in Florida’s Cuban-American community. Yet as we hear from reporter Ruth Morris new voices are emerging from that community as well.

RUTH MORRIS: In Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood there’s a museum dedicated to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion when Cuban exiles with CIA training tried to overthrow Fidel Castro. For many Cuban-Americans it’s not just a memory.

ESTEBAN BOVO: We lost 14 members of the brigade and to this day I haven’t forgotten them.

RUTH MORRIS: Veteran Esteban Bovo was a pilot for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He represents an entrenched old guard. He hasn’t been back to Cuba in almost 50 years. He says traveling to the island puts tourists dollars in the hands of a murderous, communist regime. And he’s dismayed by more recent Cuban arrivals who tend to travel back often to see their families.

BOVO: You come over. You go and you claim to be political asylum because you were persecuted in Cuba and after you get you papers you go back to Cuba. What the hell is this? If you were persecuted a year ago, you’re persecuted now.

MORRIS: No ambiguity here when it comes to Fidel Castro.

BOVO: The guy is a criminal.

MORRIS: And President Obama.

BOVO: I didn’t vote for him.

MORRIS: For decades the old guard has dominated the political discourse here, on the airwaves, at the ballot box, and across the coffee counters in Little Havana. They strongly support the embargo. Disagree and you may be branded a communist. But it’s getting easier to meet Cuban-Americans who disagree with the old guard. A few years ago, Neli Santamarina opened her own coffee bar on the outskirts of Little Havana. It’s called Tinta y Café. There are Cuban travel books on the shelves here.

NELI SANTAMARINA: I was tired of not having the possibility of speaking freely you know without being antagonized, criticized, censored.

MORRIS: Santamarina started holding political chats at the café. She says she’s less interested in telling Cuba what to do and more interested in hearing from Cubans.

SANTAMARINA: The analogy that I give it is if you’re a doctor and you have a patient that has cancer and you don’t see a patient, that patient, and yet you stand on the other side of the hospital and you prescribe medicine how can you do that? You have to have contact with your patient. And in this case the patient is the Cuban people.

MORRIS: This more moderate stance has been around for awhile. But now the so-called bridge Cubans like Santamarina have a new ally – the youth. Felice Gorordo is a regular at Tinta y Café. He sips strong Cuban coffee and speaks Cuban Spanish but he was born here in Miami. At 26, he’s a co-founder of Raizes de Esperanza.

FELICE GORORDO: Raizes de Esperanza started in 2003 as a network of young Cubans and Cuban Americans who could best be described going through an identity crisis. And we realized very early on that politics did not unite us. We had those who were supportive of the restrictions and the embargo and those who were against it. And we did agree on was that we all wanted the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities here in the States for our counterparts on the island.

MORRIS: Raizes is growing fast. They’re on 55 campuses already. They reach out in practical ways. The group refurbishes all cell phones for example and puts them in the hands of young Cubans. The old guard might own the airwaves but they youth have texting and the internet.

ROMINA RUIZ: Cuba and the picture of change? It’s four gigabyte USB.

MORRIS: Romina Ruiz is a Cuban-American freelance journalist. She’s 23.

RUIZ: Cuba tends to be like this bubble. The average Cuban feels like people are piercing in but rarely do they get to pierce out. And the internet has been the useful tool for them to be able to pierce out. And so there’s like this blogostroika going on where people are anxious to communicate. They’re saying I’m not interested in politics I just want to let you know what my daily life is like.

MORRIS: Felice Gorordo says the key is building bridges between generations. He points to his own grandparents. When he first told them he wanted visit Cuba they ran an intervention and tried to stop him. But he went and brought back photographs and family gossip. Little by little his grandparents came around.

GORORDO: On trips after that they actually gave me money and letters to give to the family members that I would visit with. And this last time that I went they actually, for the first time ever, gave me their blessing which was something that I’d never received before.

MORRIS: For The World I’m Ruth Morris in Miami.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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MARCO WERMAN: So plenty of thoughts and opinions to blog about on this side of the Florida straits. But what about the other side. Robert Faris is research director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and perhaps there’s a blogastroika in Miami. What about in Cuba Robert Faris?

ROBERT FARIS: It’s certainly opening up a little bit. Those people that are able to find their way onto the internet are blogging out of Cuba but it’s very, very limited compared to almost any other country in the world. Cuba has very, very little bandwidth and is able then to ration its access to the internet and very, very few people have access to the internet as a result.

WERMAN: And what does it look like on the ground? I mean how do Cubans in Cuba get online now? Are there cyber cafes in Havana? Do they go to the international hotels to get access?

FARIS: A little bit of both. The access at the international hotels is one of the few points where you can get to the internet in its entirety but they try to keep Cubans out of there. They’re primarily for western visitors. There are cyber cafes and they have a much narrower version of the internet that’s available there. It’s mostly intranet within Cuba itself.

WERMAN: And what is the Cuban government’s official or stated position on internet access for its people?

FARIS: There’s a couple versions. One is they give access to their people as much as practical given their bandwidth. But that the reason more people aren’t online and aren’t accessing the internet at large is because of the United States policies towards Cuba and not the Cuban policies themselves.

WERMAN: So what is Washington’s position then? Is the Obama Administration keen to have say for example fiber optics go to Cuba?

FARIS: I’m not sure yet. I haven’t heard from them. I hope that they are. But the US policies towards Cuba have been formed largely by the Helms-Burton Act which curtails commercial activity with Cuba and that’s prevented Cuba from connecting to a fiber optic cable which means that the nation of Cuba probably has less bandwidth than Harvard University. Everything is via satellite. And so the Cuban government has that excuse. It can say well we just don’t have the bandwidth. We’re not able to put people online. Where as the US government is pointing fingers at Cuba and saying well you’re not giving people enough access to the internet.

WERMAN: Well let’s take a real case example. We heard today that a small Miami-based company called TeleCuba Communications says it’s been granted a license by the US Treasury Department to install a fiber optic cable between Key West and Havana. And I guess they still have to get permission from the Cuban government. But what are your thoughts on that? I mean will Cubans actually have high speed internet and cable TV from Key West in a few years?

FARIS: I haven’t heard official word back from the State Department so I don’t know if they do in fact have authorization to put in a cable. If they have that’s a great leap forward and I would applaud that. What the Cuban government will do with that? I’m not sure. I think it will put them in an awkward situation in that they wouldn’t be able to blame the US government anymore if the US government dropped that policy of preventing fiber going to the island. There’s a few things they could do. They could provide people access to the internet and open it up to things. They could also install filters like we see in a lot of countries around the world. I guess the irony in all this is that there are so many high capacity cables that are running around the island of Cuba. The things going from the Caribbean to the United States, from the Yucatan in Mexico to the United States. These cables are just sitting off the shorelines of Cuba and they could have been tapped into many, many years ago.

WERMAN: I’ve got to say when we say Cuba and online we’re probably thinking political bloggers and people saying things bad about the government there but aren’t Cubans searching for the same things that the rest of us are searching for?

FARIS: Oh they certainly. And among the people that are online a fairly small minority are really political junkies who are looking to get those kinds of things. So the lost educational opportunities and healthcare opportunities, and healthcare opportunities, and commercial opportunities given the access to the internet are profound.

WERMAN: Alright we’ll leave it there. Robert Faris, research director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. Thank you so much.

FARIS: My pleasure.

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