Students Punished for Internet Scheme
By Frances Robles, Miami Herald, June 10, 2006
( http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/14785313.htm )
EXCERPTS:
Cuba's Internet police, the Office of Information Security, caught the students at the University of Information Sciences (UCI) using school property to charge $30 a month for stolen Internet passwords, according to a video of a campus meeting, smuggled out of the island.
Critics of Fidel Castro's government say the video illustrates the lengths to which young Cubans are willing to go to access information in a place where the government tightly controls all information. A university whose dean says in the video is aimed at ''training the guerrillas of the new era'' instead found its students using their skills to hack their way to the outside world....
'It's easy for you to say: `They were using stolen passwords or appropriating government resources,' but that's because here we have the option of using the Internet,'' said Antonio Rivera, editor of the online news site La Nueva Cuba, which obtained the video. ``They have no other alternatives...''
''We have to be very careful of these semi-clandestine chats which are not official chats,'' university chancellor Melchor Gil Morell, former vice-minister of Information and Communications, said on the video. ``The majority wind up hurting the revolution and conducting illegal acts.''
He said the government will revise its penal code to make illegal Internet access punishable by up to five years in prison.... "The war the enemy has against the revolution takes place on many fronts, including the Internet,'' Gil said....
The video, filmed Feb. 17, was shot two weeks after Cuban dissident journalist [and independent librarian] Guillermo Fariñas began a hunger strike to demand Internet access. His e-mail account was cut off by the government after Fariñas was quoted in a Miami Herald article.
Fariñas has been fed intravenously for more than four months and is in critical condition, dissidents said.
CONTROLLED INTERNET
Reporters Without Borders last year denounced Cuba as one of a dozen nations with the most controlled and least accessible Internet, grouping the country with Iran and Vietnam....
''One of the things young people here most want is Internet, or satellite TV, or anything that offers different options than the ones offered here,'' dissident Vladimiro Roca said in a telephone interview from Havana. ``Young people have great initiative. They are fast at getting what they want. One way or another, they find it....''
University officials said in the video that many students and even professors were using the passwords to access unauthorized Web sites.
''We're going to sit down and visit them,'' university official Silvano Merced said in the video.
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