Tag: CUBA

Former Cuban President Fidel Castro hit that all-important milestone this week: 100,000 followers on Twitter. Castro's account -- a collection of the 84-year-old's thoughts on world and local affairs -- was launched in late 2009. While his follow count is far lower than some leaders we know, he is one of the leading tweeters in Cuba. For what it's worth. ...

Yoani Sanchez is a 35-year-old Cuban dissident who regularly criticizes her country's communist regime on her blog, 'Generation Y.' Her outspoken writing has garnered plenty of awards and has been translated into 15 languages. But, since 2008, Generation Y has been blocked within her native Cuba. On Tuesday, however, the Cuban government suddenly re-established access to the blog, much to ...

Wikipedia is a seemingly bottomless and damn-near indispensable source of information in our modern world. So, it's only natural that oppressive regimes like Cuba would seek to control the flow of information by creating their own alternative to the community-created encyclopedia. The site, called EcuRed, launched Tuesday with over 19,000 entries, a far cry from the over 3.5 million found on the ...

Apparently, Cuba's Castro family is much easier to fool than you would think. A couple of Miami DJs pranked former leader Fidel in 2003, and now, a Miami blogger and Cuban exile claims that he fooled Antonio Castro (pictured), Fidel's 40-year-old son, into believing that he was a female Colombian sportswriter -- posting the evidence online. According to BBC News, Antonio's blind spots are ladies ...

Alongside the United States' sanctions on Cuba, which include restricted travel and trade, Microsoft has added a technological blockade against the country, CBS News reports. The software giant's Messenger has been available on the island for about a decade without interference, but that all reportedly changed late last year with the most recent Windows Live Messenger Update. News of the change ...

While those of us in the United States might consider an iPhone or BlackBerry to be the ultimate mobile status symbol, Cubans are just now lusting after the most basic of cell phones, we learned from the Washington Post via Textually.org. Cuba's new president, Raul Castro, has introduced cell phones to the Cuban marketplace -- along with other formerly contraband devices like DVD players, ...

Cell phones are finally available for purchase in Cuba, but they're so prohibitively expensive that many Cubans can't afford them. Luckily, President Bush recently announced that the ban on sending cell phones to Cuba would be lifted soon, which means that Americans will be able to send phones to relatives or friends who can't afford them. It's perhaps just the first step towards more open ...

Times they are a'changing in Cuba. Since their inception, mobile phones and personal computers have been banned in the island nation, but with new president Raul Castro have come a number of reductions in such prohibitions. First came cell phones, and now Cuban citizens are being allowed to buy personal computers -- if they can afford them. The detailed specs of the machines unfortunately have ...

Yoani Sanchez, dressed as a tourist in her own country, ducks into posh hotels that provide Internet access for foreign travelers on a regular basis, just so she can spend large chunks of her modest paycheck to post complaints about the Cuban government on her blog. Her blog, Generation Y, is widely read both in Cuba and abroad and has earned her many fans. Sanchez posts under her real name, ...

Despite prohibitively high activation fees of $120 (about half a year's salary for an employee of the government), Cubans lined up on Monday to get their hands on the first legally available consumer cell phones in the country. Of course, a cell phone and minutes were an additional charge, but that didn't stop people from flooding the streets causing waits of up to an hour just to sign up for a ...

A modern version of the "sneakernet" is alive and thriving in Cuba, where Internet access and an open online discourse is seriously limited by the government. Case in point: an underground, informal network of Cuban citizens share Web video, articles and messages that most of view and share online by way of flash drives, which they use to manually transfer data to one another, bypassing the ...

In a sign that Cuban residents will be getting more freedom, president Raul Castro announced that he would allow mobile phone use for the country's citizens. Previously, access was limited only to employees of foreign firms and government officials. The announcement, made in Communist newspaper Granma, said that Cuban telecommunications monopoly ETECSA "is able to offer mobile phone service to ...

Travelocity's roaming gnome must either have a taste for cigars, or a taste for La Revolución. The company has just settled a fine that it was recently socked with for booking illegal trips to Cuba; Cuba, as any decent bald eagle saluting American knows, is our mortal enemy (or, one of many). Relations are so strained with the island nation that travel to it by U.S. citizens is forbidden by ...