Google executives, Google colleagues, and open internet advocates reportedly took a trip to Cuba this past week in an effort to "promote the virtues of a free and open Internet," as described by a report on 14ymedio.com. Though it's not an official confirmation of the visit, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt did retweet a message that blogger Yoani Sanchez posted about the Google visit on Twitter.
According to NDTV, neither Google nor Cuba have made any kind of official statement about the trip.
A 2012 report by Freedom House on Cuban connectivity indicated that only around five percent or so of the total population have access to the "real" Internet, and they can only connect up via "black market sales of minutes by those permitted to have such accounts." Otherwise, government-sponsored "Intranet" is the best that just around one-fourth of Cuba's total population can enjoy.
And that, we should note, is a fairly expensive prospect. According to a 2013 report by The Washington Post, the 118 government-run computer cafes around Cuba cost an average of $4.50 per hour to use. That might not sound like all that much given what one might spend in the United States for on-the-fly Internet access, but it's a tough sell for Cubans whose average salaries — for state employees, to use one example — hit around $20 a month.
In general, most Cubans live fairly offline lives, as noted by Sanchez in her description of Google's visit.
"I asked if they had connected to the web from any public place. 'Slow, very slow'... they explained. Then we started talking about the future, their commitment to Cuban internauts and the relief of knowing they were aware of the information difficulties we are facing on the island. Before that we had talked with Eric Schmidtand understood that something of the sharpness of his eyes and the certainty of his words could already be guessed in the simple wisdom of Google's homepage," Sanchez wrote.
"It was a technological night without technology. No one took out their cellphones to check the web -- it's not possible in Cuba -- and it didn't occur to anyone to show us the latest doodle, nor to tell us in figures the scale of the company in which they work. We had the immense good fortune of standing in front of the magic mirror, but we didn't ask questions nor did we want answers, we just described who we are and where we are going."
It remains to be seen just how Schmidt got to Cuba in the first place, given the larger difficulty most have in travelling to the island as a result of the U.S. Government's ongoing prohibition against travel to the country and spending money in it. However, that does add a bit of gravitas to Schmidt's trip, the latest in a series of visits by the Google executive to countries that otherwise lack the Internet freedom most others enjoy (North Korea, Myanmar, et cetera).