What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
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What many may not know is that there's one major high speed link to the world through ALBA-1. This article is about the ARCOS-1 cable network in the Carribean. An extension was supposed to be added to Cuba but mysteriously was dropped around the last US presidential election. As far as I can tell this is the only recentish article about the application being withdrawn.
I'm not looking to fuel partisan strife, I genuinely want to shine light on this and hope some of the HN community might know more of the story.
The obvious conspiracy theory is that those in the halls of power embarked (successfully) on a multi-decade project to suppress and discredit Communism as an acceptable political belief.
Rhetorically, to pick a couple of examples, Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio correctly have identified the Communist regime as the cause of the unrest in Cuba. And if the age of postmodernism has taught us anything it's that rhetoric matters.
AOC, self professed "trained Marxist" Patrisse Cullors, and many Democrats, instead blame all the problems in Cuba on the US embargo and forgive the regime for its many crimes, and BLM put out a statement of support for the regime.
The GOP isn't unified but at least some of them seem to understand the reality of the regime there and aren't eager to kowtow because the regime claims to have universal education and healthcare.
Like with sanctions in the Middle East, it just hurts regular people and the government continues to not care.
An unbuilt cable is unlikely to be related to current disruptions. It's much more likely the regime is using disruptions as an anti-protest tactic against the recent protests.
Note that, like other communist countries, Cuba hasn’t had free elections since the Communist Party took over. So the “US undermining Cubans’ right to choose their own government” would be an absurd error—it’s very, very hard to believe BLM doesn’t know this and accidentally stumbled into rote Communist rhetoric.
Similarly, it’s pretty hard to believe that the they think the US embargo is responsible for the disconnection of Internet, the police brutality toward protesters, etc or other overtly authoritarian facets of the protests. Nor the lack of medicine or food considering the embargo specifically allows those items, but Cuban policy effectively prevents Cubans from accessing those items (the government fears that it’s citizens might become sympathetic to US interests if the US is the one feeding and treating its population).
Again, these are people who see “authoritarianism” in every aspect of US government and culture, and they accidentally overlooked it in Cuba?
> The application for license for the ARCOS-1 Cuba Extension is still pending for approval.
However, though this page is a good resource about the cable itself, this quote appears not to be correct. See below for the edit history containing what I think is the most likely current publicly known state of the project:
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Edit: a quick google for "arcos-1" "cuba" site:.gov yielded the following which may be relevant. I'm still parsing.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-368065A1.pdf
Edit 2: from above,
> By letter filed October 26, 2020, ARCOS-1 USA, Inc. and A.SurNet, Inc. (together, Applicants) notified the Commission of the withdrawal of the request to modify the license for the ARCOS-1 submarine cable system - SCL-LIC-19981222-00032, SCL-MOD-20010302-00007, and SCL-MOD-20020701-00056 - to include a new landing point in Cuba.
So uh... dead in the water unless anyone finds anything more recent. That quote is more recent than the linked article.
Is there any real reason or credible threat that the small island could damage the US?
It seems like US is holding the grudge way too long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban-American_lobby#Political...
Sometimes I feel US foreign policy is much too dependent on the whims of the current administration. Presidents should perhaps have Congress ratify/codify decisions with long-term implications, which would make it harder for the next administration to change?
This is how it works. Lets take the JCPOA as an example. That was the Obama era nuclear deal with Iran. Because of the voting situation in Congress there was no way to get it accepted there. What could have been ratified by Congress would not have been accepted by Iran. Therefore Obama signed the deal as an executive action. He couldn’t have done that if the deal would be bidding with long term implications, so they worded the deal such that the executive of the USA had to re-affirm their commitment to the deal periodically. Trump did re-affirm it at first but when it came up again the second time he refused.
In short: it works exactly as you say already. Obama just simply didn’t have the votes in Congress to push through a binding treaty.
[1] https://www.state.gov/cuba-internet-task-force-final-report/
A hostile regime left on its own could become a major threat to the US economy by making traversal of those straits hazardous to US shipments. This is major commodities. Petrochemicals, agriculture, raw ore, fertilizer, etc.
There is always some political angle, but the adults in the room are generally aligned that Cuba needs to either be friendly or at least be impotent.
Cuba possess exactly 0 anti-shipping threat to the US. There is no feasible scenario where Cuba develops enough, with a population of 11 million, to become a military threat to the US. It could fire off a few missiles before the positions get destroyed, sure, but so could any nation with an SSK.
The reason for the enmity towards Cuba is nothing else than the Monroe Doctrine, and despite any appeals to "adulthood" which are thinly veiled appeals to paternalism, the Monroe Doctrine is interpreted better through an elementary schoolyard bully lens than through the eyes of the adults in the room - "if you're ij my class you can't be bestest friends with anybody else". It doesn't come with any consideration for anyone beyond the US and its not even about security, it's about dominance.
> Cuba possess exactly 0 anti-shipping threat to the US. There is no feasible scenario where Cuba develops enough, with a population of 11 million, to become a military threat to the US. It could fire off a few missiles before the positions get destroyed, sure, but so could any nation with an SSK.
> The reason for the enmity towards Cuba is nothing else than the Monroe Doctrine, and despite any appeals to "adulthood" which are thinly veiled appeals to paternalism, the Monroe Doctrine is interpreted better through an elementary schoolyard bully lens than through the eyes of the adults in the room - "if you're ij my class you can't be bestest friends with anybody else". It doesn't come with any consideration for anyone beyond the US and its not even about security, it's about dominance.
You're essentially claiming that the US is holding a multigenerational grudge rather than implementing some sort of strategic objective.
Can you help me understand why you believe this? Ideally with citations and without hostile language like "delusional"?
The purpose isn't defensive, it's agressive, and it obviously furthers US interests if having the most power possible fits your definition.
As for a citation, the Monroe doctrine is almost official.
We don't live in the golden age of piracy when privateers ruled the sees.
We live in the age of Cuba's ports being within the range of cruise missiles from Florida.
I think that argument depends on a fairly narrow, and largely private-property-centric model of "freedom".
I don't think it will be elections or free media that would unlock the Cuban embargo, but rather privatization.
But in any case, the idea is that embargoes are about compulsion and not about judgment.
You haven't paid much attention to US policy toward Latin America: favorable policy is driven by being a capitalism and pro-US geopolitical orientation together, not democracy.
> We were already moving toward Cuba under Obama and Cuba wasn’t showing any signs of privatizing.
Both Obama and Clinton made steps toward normalization; neither of those prices durable, and lots of Dems, even who agree on the policy, think those steps were bad politics that have hurt Dems, particularly in Florida. I think Biden would nevertheless be inclined to say least an initial opening toward an opening with Cuba in the event of a democratic transition. But domestic politics either going into or resulting from the outcome of the 2022 midterms might effect that significantly, especially in the event that a faction not favorable to the neoliberal capitalism and US geopolitical capitalism won, or seemed likely to win, in that democracy.
> especially in the event that a faction not favorable to the neoliberal capitalism and US geopolitical capitalism won, or seemed likely to win, in that democracy.
There's no real scenario in which Cuba becomes a democratic country but retains its hostile relationship with America. Any democratic revolution is going to be supported by the US because the US wants to ensure friendly relations with the new government for its own interests (e.g., trade). Moreover, even in the extremely unlikely event that democratic Cuba is hostile toward US interests, it's even more unlikely that they would stay that way because ordinary Cubans (like all 2nd world countries) want access to the 1st world lifestyle and the elite will want access to US markets, so internal pressure will favor more open trade with the US and even if the US is run by greedy capitalists (and I think it is to a large extent) it's in their interest to lift the embargo on a democratic Cuba.
https://www.circleid.com/posts/20210223-simple-suggestion-fo...
So Google is now a player on this topic...
The answer to your question in general, though, is that it is very hard to do business with Cuba when a superpower disapproves of it.
Sadly, it wasn’t due to some principled stance against US economic warfare.
SES S.A. from Luxembourg connected Cuba to the world via satellite.
Telefónica of Spain owns a significant run of Caribbean undersea fiber. They're actively trying to increase their business with Cuba but Cuba refuses to open more of its communications network.
The following quote from José Ramón Machado Ventura, a high ranking Cuban official, offers an alternative explanation to why Cuba doesn't have better Internet.
http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/cuba/2015-07-11/a-los-jovenes-...
>Todo el mundo sabe por qué en Cuba no hay más Internet, porque ello tiene un alto costo. Existen algunos que nos la quieren dar gratis, pero no lo hacen con el fin de que el pueblo cubano se comunique, sino con el propósito de penetrarnos y hacer trabajo ideológico para lograr una nueva conquista. Tenemos que poseer Internet, pero a nuestra forma, sabiendo que es una intención del imperialismo manejarla como una vía más de destruir a la Revolución.
Rough translation
>Everybody knows why cuba doesn't have more Internet, because it comes at a high cost. There are those who want to give it to us for free, but not with the intent of helping the Cuban people to communicate, but with the purpose of penetrating us and doing ideological work to create a new conquest. We need to have Internet, but our way, knowing that it is the intent of the imperialists to use it as a way to destroy the Revolution.
This free internet makes Venezuelans furious as our corrupt, dictatorship government rather give CUBA a big part of our own international connectivity that actually use that for our own connectivity/broadband. Note that we have one of the slowest internet connections in the world [1], this last 24 months, we have improved a lot (from rank 200+ to 139) due to some private ISPs finally allowed to purchase a bit more of bandwidth, but it’s still hoarded by our national ISP (gov controlled) and Cuba itself, there has been reports of the CUBA's power going as far as actually having managing positions on venezuelan national's ISP and helping Venezuela's gov on censuring our internet. [2] [3]
I don’t want to get political here, but in before you start criticizing sanctions/blockade and come with sob stories, lets talk about what Cuba really is, a 60 years old dictatorship where human rights are violated everyday making every citizen life a living hell.
tldr; Cuba gov controls all internet access to the island, and they get internet from Venezuela for free no matter what USA does, so they aren't really disconnected from the world because of sanctions/blockade.
[1] https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/venezuela#fixed
[2] https://www.cubanet.org/tecnologia-2/asi-funciona-la-censura...
[3] https://venezuelaaldia.com/2019/05/21/cantv-cubatel-costo-us...
IMO, the US government is opposed to the proliferation of communism/socialism and for that reason maintains certain embargoes/sanctions. The current sanctions that I know of are against Venezuela, North Korea, and Cuba, all openly communist dictatorships.
To conclude, sob stories aside, the existence of a dictatorship in Cuba is not a motivator for the sanctions against Cuba.
Cuba, regardless of its government situation, should have multiple high speed links to the rest of the world. Assuming that you are posting from there, you would be in benefit of this. Having a single link makes it extremely vulnerable to outages caused by both technical and geopolitical issues.
Filtering/control of their people's access is a real but separate issue.
The gov controls everything and will use that to manilulate information and more
Problem is not amount of links, problem is their dictatorship gov.