Citizens of the communist dictatorship of Cuba are finally getting to enjoy a certain amount of internet connectivity, even if it’s slow, prohibitively expensive, and highly censored.
In the Editor’s Note for the June 2016 issue of Reason, Matt Welch writes about his recent visit to Cuba, where he observed how ordinary Cubans are able to consume culture beyond their shores through mysterious paquetes semanal (“weekly packets”), hard drives filled with movies, shows, newspapers, and other contraband, which are ferried around the island by “data mules.”
Welch juxtaposes this image with his what he saw in his first visit to Cuba, in 1998:
I vividly remember attending a hush-hush gathering in a private home with a handful of Cuban longhairs and a middle-aged American lefty who had assembled for the semi-clandestine purpose of listening to, talking about, and singing along with The Beatles. Yes, that’s right: Such was Fidel Castro’s vice-like grip on the means of production and consumption for that you could not listen to “Yellow Submarine,” nor for that matter wear your hair long as a man, for much of the 1960s and ’70s without running afoul of the cops. And God help anyone caught in the act of being a homosexual, an aberration punishable by forcible relocation to a quarantined camp.
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