No Facebook or Gmail

Osmel Almaguer        

HAVANA TIMES – For about two months now we haven’t been getting Facebook or Gmail at the Pabellón Cuba internet locale. The people using the facilities – offered free to members of the Association Hermanos Saiz – are worried and don’t know what is happening.

If these years of revolution have taught us anything it is “to be wary of the enemy.” As advanced students of the system we tend to see the hand of the enemy in just about everything.

There’s no doubt about where the finger is pointing for the fact that Havana’s creative artists can’t connect to the rest of the world, even at the most rudimentary level we have come to expect in this country, and that’s at the enemy. But who is the enemy?

Jokes about that have now gone beyond simply alluding to state “intelligence” agencies.” Now some comedians are starting to paraphrase Kafka: “they say there’s someone who has a friend who was able to connect to Facebook, but I don’t know him” Hahaha.

The network administrators say they can’t say or don’t know what has caused the blockage, which I guess is unique to this locale because I haven’t heard of it happening elsewhere.

For sure nobody knows what is going on and we all know that you can’t ask or don’t dare ask because of what could happen if you do. Most suspicious of all is the fact that you can get on line in other places without difficulty.

Let’s hope it will be a simple job for all us young artists to get a decent internet connection in the future. Being able to express ourselves is critical for artists and in the cybernetic age which will determine our production.

All we can do in the meantime is hope the situation will improve, something we’ve become highly skilled at after five decades of solid training every day.