Author: Alfredo Fernandez

Writing for a site that you can hardly access is something normal here in Cuba. Cyberspace is filled with Cuban blogs whose authors only rarely are able check their entries, much less interact with their readers.

With God’s blessing, I don’t plan to attend the mass set for this coming March 28 in Revolution Square. Though it will be presided over by the Pope, for me he’s only a figure representing power, someone who I can’t associate with anything other than backwardness and false morality.

Here in Cuba, USB flash drives are used as a substitute for the Internet. People somehow manage to copy TV series, documentaries, books, movies and all kinds of information. They store these on their USBs and then they get distributed randomly.

That structure from the Bible in which all of the world’s languages mythologically and eclectically converged actually exists in Havana. Its location is on Lealtad Street, in the Centro Habana neighborhood.

A not so good obsession has forced me to delve deeper and deeper into the writings of the past for that compelling fact that sparks my curiosity about a historic moment in which I didn’t live but which I find as interesting as the present.

All too frequently I experience moments in which I don’t feel human. Every day I feel like one of those race dogs you occasionally see in American movies.

On alternating days and for about six hours each day, water is supplied to homes in Havana’s Playa municipality. The low pressure under which the resource tends to flow from faucets has turned many residents of that municipality into veritable “hydraulic engineers.”

It’s difficult to know the number of people who — desperate to make a decent living as soon as they can — make use of our limited Internet access to establish a “romantic” relationship with a foreigner.

Related to my master’s thesis, a friend gave me a mobile phone. He saw that my thesis addressed the issue of “unexpected uses” of the New Technologies of Information and Communications (NTICs), so he wanted to keep up with my research.

“Indirect users” are no more than those people without Internet access, or even email, who construct social networks based on friends who have access to the Web through their jobs or, in rare cases, those who are allowed to have email at home for a few hours a month.