Hopscotch, marbles and dominos – the world before it become one wide web

Walking down the street here and you have to dodge kids playing marbles on the pavement and chalking the hopscotch grid road. Join your family or extended family on a Sunday afternoon and expect to spend a good chunk of time playing dominos. Whatever the pastime one thing is noticeably absent from the scene - for me at least – and that is the internet.

Of course for the majority it is not noticeably absent; the internet genie hasn’t been let out of its bottle yet and whilst it stays in there no one particularly misses it. Microsoft Encarta still rules the waves and emails are made possible through the use of a programme akin to Microsoft Outlook – which enables those lucky enough to own a computer to send their emails whilst preventing them from roaming the internet freely.  Furthermore, connecting times are limited – between the hours of 3 and 8 the airwaves are reserved for professional use only. If Isis wants to send an email it has to be after 8pm.

In the UK I’d dare to say a majority of professional work relies upon an accessible WWW; be it research, a functional internet… you name it we’ve built a world around the web. For this reason some professions in Cuba are permitted an almost free use of the internet -  I believe this includes politicians, doctors and some university professors. As a university student you can also connect. However, the days of whiling away hours surfing the net are a way away.  

This can of course be viewed as both a good and a bad thing.

Let’s lead with the good. Firstly, returning to the beginning of the blog, the absence of the internet can be seen as a small contributing factor to the continuing importance of time spent within the family unit.  If you can’t spend the evening on iplayer or chatting on facebook, you spend it someway else: Drinking a beer with friends, playing dominos, or sitting down as a family and watching a telenovella. I don’t want to take this whole ‘internet has ruined our ability to socialise and play family games theory’ too far, especially as there are obviously so many other factors involved, but it’s worth mentioning at least as an observation.

Secondly, together with the lack of advertising (there really isn’t any here unless its talking about socialism and year 53 of the revolution!), the lack of pornography in society is another interesting factor, and one which I think could have something to do with the noticeable absence of concern or preoccupation over one’s looks. Sure, there are magazines and images if you look hard for them, but what there is not is an idealist female or male image which penetrates deeply into society. It’ true that so far  I’ve not spent a huge amount of time with girls my age, and of course western films still depict a certain stereotype size zero’ belleza’ who we’re meant to try and aspire to become, but this is notably a society without pornography. It’s not that young people don’t care, but they’re not apparently being destroyed by a desire to seek perfection in their looks and relationships. Again, I’m only speculating but given the current interest in the effect of a proliferation of porn in western society, Cuba seems like an interesting point of discussion.

I’m sure there are more good things but I want to mention the bad before I lose you. The first is obviously the absence of the possibility to access the internet – free information does not exist. We raise up our arms in disgust when China censors Google, but this is a censorship of the world wide web for a whole society.  Cuban’s a curious people, I was told before I came and they themselves have repeatedly told me since, and who can blame them? Apart from what the government chooses to let onto the TV stations there is no chance for people to learn for themselves and get closer to other cultures and experiences through the internet. How can it be fair that I can sit down in the telephone centre and surf away, whilst others can only look on in curiosity?

Then there is the utility factor. The organoponoico has no web page because it cannot access the internet, but imagine how rich a resource it could be if it could develop one. An online bus timetable, the ability to make appointments online, to skype friends and family abroad, to see pictures and read tales…I could go on and on. There are no apps here – people survive of course, but they could do with for starters a happy medium between the level to which the WWW has penetrated our societies and the level at which they’re running at the moment, which is close to zero.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just frustrated because accessing the internet is such an expensive, slow and unreliable pain in the bum. It also just doesn’t seem to exist on Sunday’s. But at least I can do it I guess. This paranoid censorship may fit in with the rest of Cuban life but that doesn’t make it right.