briefly from santa clara, cuba
By Helen Varley Jamieson - 18/01/2008
imagine living in a country where there is no advertising. imagine living in a country where it is illegal to have the internet at home. imagine living in a country where there is zero unemployment and everyone is guaranteed a job when they graduate from art school. imagine living in a country where you can have a space for a theatre and salaries - once you have official permission. imagine living in a country where there are no multinational corporations and shopping is not a leisure activity.
it's impossible to write briefly about cuba - but i must write briefly because i have queued for half an hour and am paying 6 euros for an hour on the internet. i have managed to clean out hundreds of spam from my email to find the few that are actually important, but now almost nothing i try to send will actually get sent. but i'm having an incredibly amazing time and i will try to write something about it afterwards.
Comments
Keep 'em coming Helen
It sounds more like a parallel universe than another country. Is there a connection between a country with no corporations/no advertising/shopping as a leisure activity and the illegality of internet at home? At first I wondered if there is just not the money for building infrastructure...then if it's more to do with retaining cultural autonomy. I searched and found a BBC news item that suggests it's a combination of both. Fascinating. So does Cuba have any net artists? Do they have internet connections in their art colleges? Keep 'em coming Helen, even if they are necessarily brief.reporting from home
sorry, it was too difficult; i abandoned cyberspace and had a holiday instead. back at home with the luxury of wireless broadband, i'm trawling thru an inbox clogged with spam & other deletable mail. in cuba they don't really know what spam is ... i think some cubans can get around the ban on internet at home, if they have friends who are foreign residents as they are allowed to have the internet at home. also at the public terminals it's possible to access everything - but that costs CUC6 per hour, which is about two weeks' salary for the average cuban. & downloading attachments was just NOT possible. i've tried to find cuban net artists, without success, but there must be some, somewhere (hola????) ... in santa clara i heard about a performance that featured a "ciberamazona" & the blurb talked about "juego digital" (digital games) among other things from pop art to dracula ... it was on at mejunje which is the hippest night-club in santa clara, but it was on late & we were staying a bit out of town & there appeared to be no easy way home other than the festival bus which left before the performance. so i had to miss it, damn. sometimes things are just too difficult. but we did have a great dance at mejunje on the final night of the festival. i have to go & deal to my jetlag so that i can prepare for my breaking solitude performance - more on cuba later.2 weeks salary...
...for one hour's Internet connection! That would certainly change one's approach to surfing. Since reading Mary Anne Francis's Open Source Fine Art: Infinities of Meaning for an Age of Finite Means I've been pondering on how our experience of the Internet and digital culture, propagates the idea of limitless resources, and whether this contributes to the material wastefulness of our culture. See you for Breaking Solitude. Good luck with the jet lagged preparations!cuba after castro ...
in the wake of castro's resignation last week, many people are asking me what i think about it. 3 weeks in cuba hardly makes me an expert, but i'd say he's made a smart move. most cubans want some change, but they don't want to let go of the ideals of the revolution. of course this depends on who you read or listen to, but from the number of ordinary cubans proudly wearing che quevara t-shirts & the way they spoke about their country & government, i'd say those wanting radical reforms are in the minority. they know there are problems that must be addressed, but they aren't going to throw out the baby with the bathwater. bush may be chaffing at the bit to liberate the cuban people, but none of them have forgotten that they already liberated themselves 50 years ago under castro and other heroes. i don't think bush has anything to offer them. bowing out gracefully may seem surprising for such a colourful figure, but it puts castro in control of his exit. it deals to the speculation and clears the way for whatever kind of 50th anniversary celebrations will be held next year without the risk of the country being thrown into chaos by a sudden departure. most people have their money on fidel's brother raul as his successor; i'm kind of hoping they'll go for one of the (slightly) younger contenders - not that i know much about them. in fact it's hard to find information about them. & i'm quite disturbed by the bbc news site which invites us to comment on who we think should be selected: as internet access for ordinary cubans is very restricted, it's unlikely any of them will be able to contribute to this forum, so it's all about "us" out here putting in our two cents worth. and while there's a full profile of raul under the link "raul castro: fidel's successor", there's almost no information on the bbc site beyond names and ages of any other candidates. hmm ...Disconnected
Your comments about Cuba have been going through my mind all day today, Helen, because I have a friend who is on her way to Cuba now. When I went by her house the other night to borrow a book and say good-bye, we talked about your comments, which she has read too, and the odd feeling it gave us to imagine that she will be "disconnected" now for a whole month. It has become so "normal" to have the feeling of being able to reach someone at any time, but I have mixed feelings about that now. When my sons were traveling around Europe on Interrail last summer, there was a point (several points actually) when I thought it might be easier for everyone if they couldn't keep us constantly updated, especially about things that went wrong. I kept reminding myself that I was only a year older than my elder son was last summer, when I spent two months traveling around Europe entirely by myself and no one even knew where I was. Finally I realized that it wasn't so much my sons as their father who was causing so much stress. So I disconnected him from all means of communication (including even his phone) for a long weekend and things calmed down considerably. With that in mind, now I am imagining life in Cuba without an Internet connection at home as being much less stressful - without the sense of too many things going on in too many different places that one can't do anything about anyway. But at the same time, I'm thinking - what if my friend needs to reach someone while she is away? What if I have a crisis and I need her? Not being able to reach someone when you need them doesn't seem like a desirable exchange for a little peace either. Now that you are back in your everyday life and probably feeling the usual pressures mounting again, would you trade, Helen?over-connected
i totally agree that our over-connectedness needs to a whole lot of unnecessary stress. this idea that we should constantly be able to get in touch with our loved ones, know where they are & what is happening to them, means that if we DON'T hear from them there is a tendency to assume the worst. particularly parents of teenage children seem to immediately leap to the darkest conclusions if they can't rouse their teenager on their mobile - i have seen quite rational friends stumble into fear & paranoia because a phone is turned off or out of reception or just that the music is too loud to hear the phone. in my teenage years there were no mobile phones and my parents had no idea where i was or what i was up to, or even when i might come home; luckily for me they were pretty relaxed & trusting. 21 years ago i spent 3 months roaming india with a friend, we sent occasional postcards & checked the poste restante every week or so - we were delighted to receive letters from home, & i'm sure our families were equally delighted to get our postcards, but in-between those sporadic communications we certainly didn't lose any sleep. i have no doubt that your friend will be able to communicate with you when she needs to from cuba. public internet terminals do exist, & if her spam problem is minimal (unlike mine) then it will be easier for her to check & send email. she just needs to be prepared for the cost, the queues, & the inability to download attachments. if she has a crisis, there will be people to support her - cubans are very hospitable & resourceful; from my experience, they would bend over backwards to help a foreigner in a crisis. like your partner, & like me in cuba, your friend will probably find the reduced connectivity a real blessing! as for me back in my over-connected reality - i have to admit that i thrive on it. i wouldn't trade places, but i would gladly spend a couple of weeks every year in a state of enforced disconnection such as cuba. h : )ps - for those going to cuba ...
some things i wish i'd known before i got there: - take a universal sink plug; i don't think i saw a plug anywhere; - take toilet paper (you can buy it there, but it's not cheap & you may want it before you have the chance to buy it); - take some snack food - especially if, like me, you're vegetarian. meusli bars & that sort of thing may save you from having to bend your principles; - if you want to be able to give things to people on the street, take pens, soap & paper; - nice notebooks are good & practical gifts; - get some cuban pesos straight away to use for peanuts, pizza, books, anything in a cuban shop, & local (non-tourist) transport; - there are i think four different kinds of power sockets in use - quite often you'll find the european kind but also north american, both with & without the earth pin (& i think there is another sort as well). so you really do need to take adaptors. some places have two kinds of socket right beside each other but this is by no means guaranteed; - even a smattering of spanish will go a long way.