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Tell HN: HackerNews is the greatest site to browse in Cuba

15 points by ChicagoBoy11 ↗ HN
I am in Cuba for a week for business and pleasure. Internet here is, unsurprisingly, incredibly scarce and insanely expensive. Even for foreign businesses, 1mb connections can cost in the thousands of dollars a month.

In my downtime, I have tried surfing the web, and every experience under the sun has been pretty painful, even for sites technically optimized for slow connections like Gmails HTML view.

But damn it, I´ve been browsing HN just as well as if I had been back home.

Thanks, dang

7 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 26.1 ms ] thread
ck2
Is Cuban internet censored like China?

Surprised there isn't sat internet more available there, you can get that on even remote islands in other parts of the world for a couple hundred US$ per month.

ChicagoBoy11
I am not sure -- not that I´ve noticed, but then again I certainly haven´t been trying too hard to do anything that would run afoul of what could possibly be considered ok. News sites all over the world work fine.

I am using the web out of an int´l firms office, though, and I know they have to obtain a special permission to use the internet, so that might be the big issue.

What I have seen is sort of a reverse censorship, though: I was navigating some docker documentation, for instance, and at one point I landed on one of their pages which said that, because of the embargo, they could not serve me the content I was trying to access.

dalke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba give some specific details about censorship on the Cuban internet.

The only direct comparison to China is in the latter, which says:

> Reporters Without Borders suspects that Cuba obtained some of its internet surveillance technology from China ... However, it should be noted that Cuba does not enforce the same level of internet keyword censorship as China

but also:

> Rather than having complex filtering systems, the government relies on the high cost of getting online and the telecommunications infrastructure that is slow to restrict Internet access

You'll need to decide for yourself what "like" means.

If I read http://laredcubana.blogspot.com/2013/11/ilegal-satellite-int... correctly, satellite internet is illegal, and expensive:

> getting the equipment in and installed costs between $3,500-$4.200, paid in advance in Miami. The bills are generally paid for by families members who live in the US and it seems that the motivation is purely business -- cheap phone calls and Internet access -- not political.

ChicagoBoy11
On a sidenote, you cant help but walk around here and also feel that, should commercial relations someday be fully normalized, there is going to be an economic boom here unlike any the world has ever seen
bbcbasic
It's also the best site on my phone deep in a train tunnel where there is some connection but very slow!