This article is kinda weird. Accessing the internet is very easy in Cuba; the island has full 3G coverage and smartphones are everywhere. The only "restrictions" are US-based firms blocking access to their content to connections from Cuba (experienced this myself with zoom)
For years, Cuban teens resorted to espionage tactics to watch Game of Thrones and play World of Warcraft. Today the "SNET" stands as a a triumph of collective action:
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Due to the US-imposed blockade, all online traffic has to go through Venezuela - which is why the solutions described in the article are useful: they allow local "caching" of large files and a way to avoid low ping for gaming. The article implies all sorts of other stuff however.
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@JDespland
I read a whole article on how tourists get wifi in cuba, you gotta use the same wifi as the locals and it seemed like a pain in the ass, but i'm gonna assume that's due to having only one undersea cable going thru venezuela and them having to ration bandwidth 🤷♀️
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@JDespland
@bloomfilters
This is the second time (to my knowledge) Polygon has tried to do this kind of weird anti-Cuban shit. The first was a mini-series of articles YEARS ago about the burgeoning game scene in Cuba, that had a similar bend that was also widely panned and eventually discontinued.
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@JDespland
Besides the clickbaity site, the story about a bunch of Cubans basically creating a big LAN (this was before wider Internet availability) in itself is interesting.
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@JDespland
I'd love for the world to give Cubans free and available internet. At least then they'd finally be able to organize and protest and hopefully take down this tyrannical communist military dictatorship and hold them accountable for their crimes against humanity.
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@JDespland
“[SNET] lasted from the early 2000s to 2019.”
It may be different now, but as someone who lived in Cuba for several months in 2015, it was very difficult to access the internet through sanctioned channels
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