Roundup: Cuba hosts U.S. delegation on improving bilateral telecommunications

Cuba and the United States wrapped up three-day talks in Havana Thursday on improving telecommunications between the two countries, according to Cuba's Communications Ministry. The U.S. has announced measures to relax restrictions on Cuba's telecommunications as a result of Washington's five-decade trade embargo against Cuba. However, putting them into effect is complicated by the fact that the embargo itself remains in place, the ministry indicated in a statement published late Wednesday in state daily Granma.

The two sides discussed "the reach of the new regulations issued by the U.S. government to implement changes to the application of the embargo in the area of telecommunications and the restrictions that still remain in effect, which impede a normal relationship between the two countries in this field," the ministry said.

During the talks, Cuba provided the U.S. team with information on its policy on national cybersecurity and information technology, the ministry added.

The U.S. delegation was led by Daniel Sepulveda, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy in the State Department's Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, and included officials from the Department of Commerce and the Federal Communications Commission.

The visitors also toured the state-run Telecommunications Company of Cuba (Etecsa), the University of Information Science, and the Jose Antonio Echeverria Technical University.

Following a joint Cuba-U.S. announcement in December on normalizing ties, the U.S. has made several mostly symbolic changes in its regulations concerning Cuba, such as allowing travelers to bring back a limited number of cigars and bottles of rum.

In telecommunications, the first agreement was to reestablish direct voice telephone calls between the two countries, which Etecsa announced nearly two weeks ago.

Internet connection is the pending issue. Cuba connected to the international web in 1996, but via satellite due to embargo restrictions that bar it from linking to nearby undersea cables. As a result, Cuba has one of the world's lowest rates of Internet access, at 5 percent. Broadband access is even lower, at 1 percent.

The luxury of a home connection is restricted to just a few professions, such as journalism, medicine and public office. Everyone else has to use cybercafes that charge 4.50 U.S. dollars an hour, a rate that's prohibitively expensive for an average monthly salary of 20 dollars, even though health, housing, education and basic needs are covered by the state.

A week ago several executives from Google, led by Deputy Director of Google Ideas Scott Carpenter, visited Cuba to explore business opportunities.

Netflix almost immediately announced its entry into the Cuban market, without any prior negotiation with local authorities, but using the movie-streaming service in Cuba is next to impossible given the slow connection, not to mention the price and the credit cards required to pay for it. Enditem