El Paquete Semanal | Hacker News Reader

El Paquete Semanal

en.wikipedia.org

183 pointsjrott51 comments

"Internet in Cuba is limited due to current government rules and regulations but also due to US sanctions that block Cuban access to some platforms like Zoom.[5] Cuba's Internet connection is via the ALBA-1 cable to Venezuela. The United States refuses to allow an undersea cable to pass 100 miles from Cuba to Florida. "

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba

Lol. That last sentences says "citation needed".

> Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.[10]

It seems like another conclusion could be they just don't want to give gov an easy excuse for a crackdown. Even in dictatorships optics matter, and its much easier to shutdown something for being porn

I witnessed El Paquete first hand in Cuba. To be honest, it's an easier and cheaper way to get quality content than the mess of walled gardens and DRM we have in the US.

Piracy is nothing if not convenient.

It explains the success of Spotify. It was among the first music services more convenient than P2P downloading and manually tagging MP3s.

So sneakernet never went away, it just got less fashionable.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

I don't remember where I read it but there was sneakernet for remote villages in India(?) where the bus stop had a computer that transferred data to/from the bus that only came through every few days. People would request what they wanted and it would be sent back on later buses.

Between the two methods, this is also an unintended analogue to how interplanetary Internet would look like. Mars colony designers and hard sci-fi writers, take note.

nncp-go it's a thing.

It's possible to send HDDs full of data to cloud services. Amazon even quotes Andrew S. Tanenbaum

https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001918654-Fi...

OLPC also at times went with "some of the goodness here is the info, which we can distribute as HDD or CD and not as fetch it live" -So wikipedia and teaching materials do of course get revised but core competency knowledge overt in the older documents is rarely contradicted for maths, music, literacy, natural history, biology, chemistry to high school level.

Whats different in El Paquete Semanal is the "samizdat" quality. I don't generally like the John Perry Barlow "information wants to be free" but it seems plausible that when governments put barriers to information flow, people turn to mechanisms for information flow which do not align with those barriers.

I'm thinking about the number of satellite dishes in the middle east which moved indoors under RF transparent roofing materials, when governments banned dishes to control media access. Now, with Starlink: this might be a bypass to 2 way information flow.

In Cuba there are also satellite dishes under RF transparent roofing materials, usually DirectTV dishes smuggled from the US. I wonder if people have done the same with Starlink.

For years I've been joking about selling an "internet battery" for people going off the grid. I had no idea that some mad bastards actually did it!

And also done as a local wifi server - https://internet-in-a-box.org/

That is amazing and heartwarming.

I got a copy of El Paquete a while back and wrote about what it covered here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/

Nice article. Fascinating stuff indeed.

I think it's interesting to compare El Paquete Semanal to the response in the US to net neutrality and various social media scandals.

When the threshold for action is high enough, the lack of open internet is overcome in Cuba without any special technology at all. Similar creative solutions pop up anywhere internet access is limited.

In the US, most of the energy is spent on open source, high tech solutions that rarely get wide adoption, such as CJDNS, Hyperboria, Mastadon, Lemmy, Fediverse, ActivityPub, various DHT based tools, and others.

Hypothesis 1: if the threshold for action were high enough in the US, people would adopt these higher tech offerings en masse.

Hypothesis 2: the low tech nature of El Paquete Semanal and similar networks is critical to their success.

If hypothesis 2 is correct, then building a similar network using "boring" technologies would be more impactful than working on high tech open source tools.

The high tech offerings are hype and little else, and are not social media, but venture capital sinkholes. The public does not interact with them, just rich people talking to rich people about it. Come to think, it's actually just rich people trying to make a buck.

The situation in both countries is different - there is no internet in Cuba, so the least work for the best outcome is to run this kind of "net".

In the US, you can always get access to whatever you need for free, with a little work, by torrenting for example. Torrenting is much less work than El Paquete or the stuff you listed.Why would anyone pay for those offerings instead?

I think it's apples to oranges.

You make a lot of good points. There's also the issue of scale. The US has a lot of land mass, and a whole lot of people at the very opposite edges of that huge land mass. Sneakernets work better across shorter distances.

Not sure what you mean by "threshold for action" but I think cost has a great deal to do with it.

Running a cable (copper or fibre) along a street is expensive. So is putting up a wireless tower. And either have to be connected to the next town (cable, microwave, satellite, etc) and so on.

Passing around some USB sticks is much cheaper - has rather poor latency but fine bandwidth :)

I'd like to see some kind of peer-to-peer system doing the same thing. I imagine small devices (phones, raspberry pis etc) close enough that they could propagate updates or messages autonomously, and providing local wifi access to their collection of data. Perhaps fetching more recent updates from users when someone with more recent data wanders into town. Wouldn't work for streaming movies but might provide a nice sneakernet alternative.

The problem with trying to build a samizdat internet in the West is that the corporate alternatives are OK enough for most people most of the time. That basically takes away the drive for alternatives.

I think there's an issue in your thinking: you're only approaching this situation in terms of technology. This is in fact the reason why the "solution" in western countries is open source and decentralization: we think it's a technology problem, so the solution is technology. But, like most things, it is inherently a social problem.

Cuba has been under embargo for decades now, and its internet has been heavily censored since; they haven't known how ingrained FAANG are, how ubiquitous Android and iOS and twitter and all those things are. For us, Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter; if there never was an ubiquitous Twitter to begin with, would we have created a heavily asymmetric client-server architecture ?

Sneakernet is the digital continuation of gathering with people and exchanging. Cuba already had an intranet between interconnected homes. The social shape always defines the communications shape, so the reason a sneakernet works there is not enough to say that a sneakernet would work here.

On the contrary, I wrote this as a reflection on our tendency to focus on technology systems instead of social systems. Another way to think about it is that a social system is just a different type or level of technology that can exist independent of or in close harmony with a technical system.

For example, the air transportation system is a complex social-technical system, where both the human patterns and the technology those humans use have evolved together over many years. Another example: a call tree, where the technical system is the phone line, and the social system is the training of people on who to call in the happy path and what to do if someone doesn't pick up.

If you know Spanish and want to learn more about a similar topic, The Street Network[0] is a great episode about SNET[1], how it was formed, interview to key players in it and how it crashed. Really good journalism and a great insight into how people tried to stay connected inside Cuba without internet.

[0]: https://radioambulante.org/en/audio-en/the-street-network

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba#SNET

I've used it for many years while living in Cuba: for 1 USD I could buy it and someone come home with an external HDD and let me copy it or I would visit them and copy it myself. It was/is our main source of information away from the national media propaganda that constantly bombard us. The Cuban intelligence services quickly realize the threat of "El Paquete semanal" to bypass its communist censorship and infiltrated and threatened the main distributors to remove anything criticizing the government or news concerning what happens in Cuba. Currently is a shadow of what it was: just a collection of pirated movies, software, music and of course, infiltrated communist propaganda as well.

> It is still unknown who compiles the material or from where it was obtained.[9][2] Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.[10]

Indeed

> “It is still unknown who compiles the material or from where it was obtained. Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.”

Curious to note. This opens the possibility of it being almost like The Matrix: a “resistance” movement that’s even then ultimately controlled by the system.

You should read 1984 - you're in for a treat.

Snowpiercer as well.

In the big classics you also have Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World.

There is no evidence that the islands in Brave New World are not to be taken at face value.

Linus did a short video about it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Duspzmudk

This video talks a bit more about El Paquete Semanal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E

In Havana they also used to have "StreetNet" until 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFPjJM6yYS8

this some cyberpunk shit

I read this and I can't help but think the CIA is involved.

It's bizarre how the US attempted to block Cuba from getting the Internet, and still blocks Cuban Internet through many means ( https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g... ), but the presentation is that the suppression of content is of Cuban origin.

It reminds me of when the US said Cubans were not allowed to leave Cuba, and the mental hospitals and prisons were filled with political prisoners. Castro announced anyone who wanted to leave Cuba, even those prisoners or mental patients, could go to Mariel harbor and leave if they wished. Suddenly the US did a turnabout and began demanding Castro stop letting Cubans leave Cuba, and too many were prisoners and mental patients, when the US suddenly discovered those were the inhabitants of Cuba's prisons and mental hospitals.

This is a positive, unbalanced spin on the Cuba issue if I’ve ever seen one.

Read about what this person is talking about for yourself here, especially the section titled “Emigration process and violence”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift

From outside (I am not American) the anti-Cuba position seems to have an almost religious fervor!

Almost like They're socialist, we're capitalist; it's natural, true, and necessary that we must oppose everything about them. Similar to the catholic v protestant division that was very strong in the anglo world last century.

Surely, if one really wanted to dismantle an evil empire, one would open the borders as much as possible and release the forces of greed and assimilation.

In politics it's helpful to have an antagonist to point at and blame for everything bad. There's a villain in every story, and I best point him out to you in case you think it's me.

Cuba is somewhat unique in that there are lot of ex-Cubans clustered in Florida, a swing state, who are there by virtue of being anti-Cuban-government. They are in favor of any policy that hurts the govt, even if it hurts the people left in Cuba more.

Ultimately all this animosity boils down to the nationalisation of private (US) property in the 60s. An unforgivable crime As Amerixan William Wallace might have said "you can take our freedom, but you can't take our money."

Politically though being anti-Cuban has little downside, and wins important votes.

The nationalization of private property wouldn’t have been a problem if it was just US property. Many countries make it difficult/impossible for foreigners to own land.

The problem was that they did it to their own citizens, resulting in many of them becoming the Cubans in Florida.

BTW, labeling them “ex-Cubans” is a good way to piss them off (maybe that is your intention). Many see themselves as Cubans in asylum just waiting for the regime to fall and for their family homes/businesses to be returned.

>> BTW, labeling them “ex-Cubans” is a good way to piss them off (maybe that is your intention).

It was not. I was not aware that term is offensive. My apologies. Cuban Exiles is perhaps a better description.

Now that we are here, calling exiles anti-Cuban is also a good way to piss them off. That's the government stance: if you are against us, you are anti-Cuban.

This is not only a stance towards exilees, btw. If you oppose them, you get labelled the same no matter where you are.

Stop buying into the official position. It is demeaning

Yeah, as sibling comment says: the "US" as a a whole has no real interest in Cuba either way, other than a general Monroe Doctrine one. But there are enough Floridians who want to re-litigate the revolution, that feel really strongly about it, and they get to control US discourse on the subject. Because nobody else cares.

I think the corn sweetener people might also care?

That is not true. The US does not block Cuba from getting to the internet in general (https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/912206/download?inline), although it blocks most commerce in general under its embargo. Your linked webpage is a Github policy restricting the availability of Github Enterprise Server and Github Copilot in Cuba, not the internet.

Your characterization of the Mariel boatlift is misleading and wrong. Cubans were mostly not allowed by their government to leave Cuba. During the 1980 Mariel boatlift, Castro suddenly temporarily abolished this policy due to preceding events where thousands had rushed into the Peru embassy in Havana hoping to leave. He announced that foreign relatives of any Cubans who wished to leave could come pick them up in boats in the Mariel harbor. Those wishing to leave where subject to abusive acts of denunciation and beatings by mobs organized by the government. In a cruel twist, Castro then demanded that in addition to their relatives, the boats had to be filled with common prisoners from jails and mental patients, who were given the choice of staying in prison or trying their luck emigrating on those boats. Castro wanted to provoke a crime wave in the US to tarnish the reputations of those Cubans living there. (source: I was one of those Cuban Marielitos that arrived in 1980 in one of those boats).

> Castro then demanded that in addition to their relatives, the boats had to be filled with common prisoners from jails and mental patients, who were given the choice of staying in prison or trying their luck emigrating on those boats. Castro wanted to provoke a crime wave in the US to tarnish the reputations of those Cubans living there.

I can't help but to see a parallel with the out of control flood of migrants (some of them potential legitimate refugees) Turkey let into Europe in order to put pressure on the European Union back in 2015.

It wasn’t until 2013 that Cubans could more freely leave: https://havana-guide.com/can-cubans-leave-cubaall-you-need-t...

Your post implies that Cubans suddenly weren’t allowed to leave Cuba after the US asked. That’s not the case.

I've worked at a company that shipped goods to Cuba from USA between 2009 and 2011.

The biggest restrictions where on the Cuban side. And nobody told me, I implemented the software that did the controls.

We also had to close as the Cuban Government couldn't handle the amount of goods that we send them monthly.

The only limiting Cubans access to internet is its own government that restricts internet access, blocks many websites, monitor every citizen's social media, don't respect privacy rights, and even have laws that fines and can put in jail Cubans for posting on social media complaints against the government and its politics. The Cuban dictatorship sees internet as its enemy because they cannot control the information there. I have lived through that hell for 30 years.

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