CUBA CRITICIZED FOR LIMITING CITIZEN'S INTERNET ACCESS, BUT US PREVENTS HOOKUP.

In accordance with its blockade policy, the US has blocked Cuba's access to a fiber-optic cable that would permit wider, faster, and broader access to the Internet. Use of the cable would also be far cheaper for the island and provide better quality service. Cuba is now constrained to use satellite service,

The OFAC also maintains vigilance of Cuban Internet traffic to monitor and prevent electronic financial transactions that violate blockade policy.

At the same time, the US has vociferously criticized Cuba's restraint of citizens' access to the Internet as another example of lack of freedom on the island. Cuban officials were quick to attack that position. "In 2003, the United States created a war strategy in cyberspace," said Rosa Miriam Elizalde of Cubadebate.com, an online publication of Cuban journalists. "In a secret document revealed some months ago, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that the Pentagon was going to use the Internet as if it were a weapon of war."

The US has pressed the Organization of American States (OAS) to criticize Cuba's Internet-access policy, and, on June 20, an official organ of the State Department, The Washington File, issued a news release saying that OAS human rights official Ignacio Alvarez "observes with concern" a Cuban decree, Access to the World Computer Network from Cuba, which is "incompatible with the right to freedom of expression. Alvarez was appointed OAS rapporteur on freedom of expression in March.

The OAS report was made in connection with the case of the director of the Cubanacan Press Guillermo Farinas, who has been on a hunger strike since January to protest the lack of Internet access. According to reports, however, Farina has been offered Internet access by officials of the telecommunications company, but he has refused.

An Internet search turned up a single dispatch from Cubanacan, but Reporters Without Borders, an anti-Cuban-government media watchdog group, reported, "Until 23 January, the journalists working for Cubanacan were able to send their dispatches from a public Internet access center in the central city of Santa Clara, but since then they have been prevented. Cubanacan Press concentrates on covering human rights violations in Cuba and on reflecting viewpoints that are excluded from the official media."