Category: Cuba

Now it is official

Last November, we wrote on how US tech firms with support from the US government, were moving into Cuba, occupying the country’s information sector ahead of any political détente with the US and threatening Cuba’s national sovereignty.[1] This week, US President Barack Obama made a three-day state visit to Cuba, the first US president to visit since President Calvin Coolidge in 1928.  On this “historic trip,” the US president didn’t go alone. Along with his family, Obama was accompanied by a phalanx of executives from US firms including Google, Xerox, Airbnb, Priceline Group, PayPal, Xerox, Stripe, and Kiva[2] – as well as nearly 40 members of Congress.[3]

Obama’s visit of course was not a spontaneous occurrence but, rather, a result of long  preparations by the US government and US industries, whose shared aim is to reintegrate Cuba into the US-led global capitalist economy.  Predictably, the president deployed the language of “universal human rights” and “democracy” in his address to the Cuban people[4]; however, the U.S. president actually was there to green-light US capital’s self-interested program.

The U.S. strategy, it is evident, is to exploit the promise of modernizing Cuba’s information and communication infrastructure, in order to re-annex chunks of the country’s economy.  Under the pretence of freeing the flow of information (obligingly symbolized by the superficially defiant Rolling Stones) it is actually U.S. capital that is to be set free, to work its will upon a small country that has stood up against the full measure of US power since 1959.  Obama sought to entice the Cuban people by stating that, “The Internet should be available across the island so that Cubans can connect to the wider world and to one of the greatest engines of growth in human history.”[5]  In reality, these are at most secondary considerations:  Obama was fronting for US business interests.  The US President thus brazenly announced that “Google has a deal to start setting up more WiFi and broadband access on the island.”[6] In actuality, Google is doing more than this; the search giant also is establishing a technology center equipped with glittering new capabilities, where Cubans will be able to gain access to the “free” Internet. Obama thus offered a tantalizing taste of a modernized high-tech US capitalism, hoping that this may go down better than military force ever did to bring Cuba back into the US orbit.

Assuredly, further flashpoints of conflict will need to be addressed.  The US Congress has not given any sign of curtailing the economic blockade of Cuba that was imposed in 1962.  On the other hand, the Cuban government has insisted on an end to the US occupation of Guantanamo – a transgression on national sovereignty that has persisted since the “Spanish”-American War.  We may hope that Cuba’s leaders still possess sufficient bargaining strength to put in place safeguards and restraints against this new attempt at what, in an earlier manifestation, was called “coca-colonization.”

[1] Dan Schiller and ShinJoung Yeo, “Uncharted Territory: Cuba’s information sovereignty & US digital capital,” Information Observatory, November 19, 2015.

[2] Todd Weiss, “More U.S. Companies Line Up to Seek Sales in Cuba After Obama’s Visit,” eWeek, March 23, 2016

[3] “An American Invasion,” Economist, March 26, 2016

[4] “Remarks by President Obama to the People of Cuba,” Office of the Press Secretary, March 22, 2016.

[5] ibid.

[6] “Google set to expand Wifi, broadband access in Cuba, Obama tells ABC,” Reuter, March 21, 2016

 

Uncharted Territory: Cuba’s information sovereignty & US digital capital

Cubans repeatedly rebelled against the mono-culture of sugar that an empire of capital forced on both land and people[1]; only the Cuban Revolution of 1959 finally succeeded in overcoming this bondage.[2] However, even before attending to a new agrarian law, needed to put an end to the plantation system and to redistribute foreign landholdings, Cuba gave an immediate demonstration of its newly won sovereignty. Just two months after Fidel Castro marched into Havana, in March 1959, telephone workers tore down a telephone advertising billboard, placed it in a coffin, and marched it down a boulevard before tossing it into the sea.[3] The ad was an icon of foreign domination. The Cuban Telephone Company, owned by the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, controlled and profited from the country’s thoroughly inadequate telecommunications. Cuba’s revolutionary government now took over management of this company; to the cheers of the Cuban people, formal expropriation followed.[4] In the ensuing years, what had been an unbalanced, Havana-centric telecommunications system was extended substantially into Cuba’s countryside. Meanwhile, other companies, based not only in the US but also in Western European countries, were also nationalized.[5] Every government apart from that of the United States duly accepted the legality of nationalization under existing international law, and negotiated financial settlements with the Cuban state.

The U.S. Government neither forgave nor forgot. It imposed a punishing economic embargo, which has lasted for more than half a century. Successive U.S. Administrations made repeated attempts, overt and covert, to overthrow the Cuban Government; since the 1980s, the US government has doled out more than $1 billion (under the pretense of “democracy” and the “free flow of information”[6]) to stir unrest against Cuba’s government. The 1992 Torricelli Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act turned the embargo into an even more devastating blockade, by adding further extraterritorial sanctions. Helms-Burton enabled the original owners of nationalized Cuban assets who afterward became U.S. citizens to use US courts to prosecute foreign companies that took over these properties.[7] Such provisions violated international law; but they were still deployed against a Mexican telecommunications corporation for making use of IT&T’s onetime Cuban telephone property.[8] Year after year, for twenty years, the United Nations General Assembly has resolved by overwhelming majorities that the U.S. embargo should be ended. The blockage continues; but real changes are afoot.

If Cuba’s entanglement in the circuits of capitalism had long revolved around sugar, information and communication have now become pivots of the country’s reintegration into a newly digital capitalism. In the run-up to President Obama’s 2014 announcement that the US was negotiating with Cuba to restore diplomatic relations, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was funding a Cuban version of Twitter – “ZuneZuneo” – through the Cuban-American youth group called Roots of Hope,[9] and was infiltrating the underground Hip Hop scene by sending a Serbian music producer to recruit Cuban rappers to provoke fans to spark a youth movement against the Cuban state.[10] As the U.S. shifted its foreign policy strategy – the two countries re-established formal diplomatic relations in July 2015 – it also moved networks systems and applications into the foreground.

The previous June, Google Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt had visited Cuba, with a team of Google executives including former State Department advisor Jared Cohen, and accompanied by the usual noise about a “free and open internet.”[11] Expressly criticizing the embargo, Schmidt geared his visit to scoping out future business opportunities. Soon after, Google released its Chrome browser and free versions of Google Play and Analytics in Cuba.[12] This was possible because, while the US trade embargo still remains intact to this day and can only be lifted by an act of the US Congress, Google tactfully offered free services – which fell between the cracks of the embargo – to test the waters in Cuba. As Google anticipated, the Obama Administration eased regulations in a few strategic fields including telecommunications.[13] To “initiate new efforts to increase Cubans’ access to communications and their ability to communicate freely,” the U.S. relaxed its controls to allow U.S. companies to sell telecommunications equipment and services, software, and Internet services in Cuba.[14]

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