A recent article in the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde described the "cyber-warfare"being used by the United States to subvert Cuba.

A stylishly-dressed man in his late 20s hawked pirated DVDs and computer games from the doorway of his apartment in the alleyways of Old Havana.

He is licensed and fully sanctioned by the Cuban government to do so, he told me, adding that if I wanted a TV show or movie that he didn’t have, he could almost definitely find it for me.

Illegally copied media is not an officially recognized issue in this country.

Internet access is another story.

When I asked the DVD seller about his Internet-related behavior and practices, he quickly hushed me up and insisted we move to the other side of the road to speak.

“Internet? Things here are bad,” he said quietly. “They’re really bad.” When I inquired about his use of the Web, he shut up completely and walked back to his booth.

This is a typical story in Cuba, where only a tiny fraction of Cubans have legally-sanctioned Internet access and many more use a variety of clandestine methods to log on and connect with the rest of the world.

As of 2010, Internet penetration in Latin America and the Caribbean stands at 34.5 percent, based on data from Nielsen and the International Telecommunication Union.

But a recent survey done by Cuba’s National Statistics Office says that only 2.9 percent of Cubans have direct access to the Internet–a number that includes state and academic officials.

Even for them, it’s mostly at work where they can use the connection, because it can be monitored. The Big Brother treatment extends to the home as well, one university professor with a connection in his house told me.

The key word in that statistic, though, is “direct.”

In my conversations with average Cubans, even outside of urban centers like Havana, people showed an impressive knowledge of popular Web sites, online services and modern hardware.

More than once, as I used it to snap photos on the street, my camera was correctly identified by cries of “iPhone, iPhone!” by excited children.

So without direct access, how is this information coming through? Certainly, many Cubans are in regular contact with their family members in other countries, and some interact with tourists on a regular basis.

But others are finding different ways of getting online in their own country.

One teenager told me about her friend of a similar age, who set up his own pirated connection at great financial cost and legal risk.

“It is a big risk, but for him it is worth it,” she said. Sometimes she uses his connection as well, but made me promise not to say a word of that to her mother.

Individuals with sanctioned and illegal connections alike share them with other Cubans, a sort of Internet black market. As it was explained to me, people will offer up their bedrooms or workspaces, wherever a computer may be set up, as illegal cyber-cafes of sorts–one of many ways to supplement their universally meager income.

Another journalist who recently visited related her experience in one of these situations.

“I would go to a home to check my email, and I did it seated on a queen bed, beside another customer who was also surfing,” she said in an email.

Once connected, some of the more daring users will access sites like Revolico.com, a sort of Cuban black market craigslist, where people can post classifieds to sell anything from computer parts to cars or apartments.

Private buying and selling of the latter two have been very tightly restricted by the government, but new laws mentioned at the country’s Communist Party congress in April may change that.

Knowing all of this, I felt a bit guilty when I was easily able to check my email from the hotel’s computer. The price for 60 minutes of access is about $6.00, a sizable chunk of the average Cuban monthly salary of $20.

Considering the intolerably slow connection speed (by American standards), it comes out to the value of most of a week’s work for the typical state employee for me to find out that AT&T is buying T-Mobile, shoot off some one-sentence responses to friends and delete a few daily Groupon offers.

There was some hope for improvement in the country’s connectedness when a fiber optic cable from Venezuela arrived in Cuba in February, after four years, with nationwide installation estimated to be complete by July.

But state officials have made it clear that, while this cable will dramatically increase connection speeds and lower costs to go online, it will only benefit those who are already on the Internet, which includes foreign businesses, high-ranking government workers, some students and foreign visitors like me.

To make matters worse, Raul Castro’s government has a history of characterizing the Internet as a means for nefarious capitalists to corrupt Cuba’s socialist ideals, with an obvious focus on the United States.

Most scholars on this side of the Florida Strait agree that the new cable won’t do very much to let Cubans see the rest of the world in any truer light than what state-run media casts.

But those Cubans I spoke to who even knew about the project were optimistic. After all, what choice do they have?

I couldn’t help but be optimistic for them myself, even as I stood in the immigration line at Miami International Airport 100 miles away, lamenting the spotty 3G coverage inside the terminal building.

Cuban blogger Claudia Cadelo will not tell you about her Web posting habits, at least not via phone or email. And, even though she is someone who writes and tweets regularly, the way she gets online is a closely guarded secret.

That’s because Cadelo–better known by the title of her blog, Octavo Cerco–is one of the best-known members of the Cuban blogging community.

Made of up just a handful of writers–a tightly networked community of Cuban “blogeras”–they walk the fine line of being public figures, while also knowing that their every post is monitored by a watchful government.

Still, calling herself the “Queen of Incredulity,” she writes with a candor that no visitor to Cuba should expect to hear in any but the most private places, airing grievances to her online audience with no hesitation.

“Having access to free information is a human right,” Cadelo said in a phone interview recently. “I, personally, want to be heard, and I want the right to know what is going on outside of the borders of this island.”

Of course, that’s no easy thing in Cuba, one of the most closed countries in the world, where typical Internet blogging free-for-alls are not tolerated.

Which is why Cadelo writes that her country denies its citizens access to mass media, while offering low Internet connectivity, with “arbitrary laws against freedom of expression and with the impunity to defame, distort, lie and lay waste on national television to those who think differently.”

And while President Raul Castro started allowing Cuban citizens to use the Internet offered to guests in hotels in 2008, Cadelo was quick to point out that the average cost of such services is $10.00 per hour.

That makes one hour of Web access cost between one and two weeks of work under the average Cuban wage.

Cadelo, who was born in 1983, had a comfortable upbringing in Cuba, rife with Communist indoctrination, until the collapse of the Soviet Union when she was six years old, which resulted in a severe economic crisis in Cuba and increased repression by the government.

“By 13, I already knew what I could and could not say,” she said in an essay detailing her background. “By 18, I was completely disillusioned with the system and couldn’t even really pretend to myself any more, although I was careful not to externalize it.”

It all started for her three years ago, when the lead singer of Cuban punk rock band Porno para Ricardo, a group known for its anti-establishment message, was arrested on the charge of “pre-criminal dangerousness.” That translates to the potential that one might commit a crime.

Cadelo went into action, along with several friends, and began a campaign to have the singer, Gorki Aguila, released.

“For a novice in the uses of freedom of expression it had everything: Beatings, a police operation and arrests,” she wrote of the experience.

Following Aguila’s eventual release, Cadelo’s disillusionment and activism continued to grow, and her career as a blogger was nurtured by another long-time Cuban voice of dissent, Yoani Sanchez. Cadelo began writing that same year, and now has thousands of followers and readers.

Her involvement with Porno para Ricardo continues as well: she is married to Ciro Díaz, the band’s lead guitarist.

While Cadelo writes on contemporary events in Cuba, much of her musings consist of her feelings on daily life in a country she hopes to someday leave. Although she would not speak at length about her political opinions and feelings on what was almost certainly a monitored phone conversation, she has no qualms about broadcasting them to the world on her blog.

“I get up in the morning and get my bath of unreality watching the morning news on TV,” she began a recent post. In fact, arguing with the television was a method of the teenaged Cadelo’s for venting her dissatisfaction with the government, years before having access to an online platform.

But vent she does.

“It’s a fact: This island is governed by madmen,” she wrote in reference to the country’s effective shutdown to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. “We Cubans say we are paranoid, and, honestly, if we weren’t we’d be really sick, because there is nothing more chilling than to stand on the balcony and see a squad of soldiers screaming obscenities and stomping the ground.”

Feelings of frustration and hopelessness are central themes in her writing. Even the title of her blog, translated to “Eighth Circle,” refers to a poem by a Polish dissident who likens living in a satellite country of Soviet Russia to being in one of the deepest parts of hell.

At times, Cadelo, who seems to be speaking for her generation, clearly feels the same way about Cuba. Although her writing is often informative, she frequently waxes poetic.

“Havana has been asleep since I was born. I like to stand at the end of Calle 12 and look at the line the sea draws in the distance,” Cadelo wrote in March. “Almost all my friends live, or intend to live, on the other side of that line. Where my eyes cannot go.”

(While many blogeras do not know enough of English or any other foreign language to write in them, there are resources to ensure that their work is translated to reach a much wider audience. Hemos Oido, meaning “We Have Heard,” is an online initiative to translate Cuban blogs into English, French, German, Danish and others, and is the means by which Octavo Cerco reaches as many readers as it does. You can visit the English version of Cadelo’s blog here.)

The president flew to Michigan to deliver his remarks on the subject and saw a demonstration of WiMAX technology in use at Northern Michigan University.

Obama hopes to build this network with money raised from two key sources, thankfully neither involving any additional direct burden on taxpayers. First he’d like to make changes to the Universal Service Fund, which has historically been used to help connect remote and rural areas to the telephone network. Some $5 billion from that fund that currently goes to subsidize phones in rural areas will instead be put to work building wireless towers and other related infrastructure in places where such networks don’t yet exist. Police, firefighters and other emergency workers would get access to their own wireless network built with another $10 billion. Yet another $3 billion would go toward research and development on other ways to use wireless networks.

That’s almost $19 billion. Where will it come from? Spectrum auctions. The administration hopes to raise nearly $28 billion by re-auctioning some of the spectrum currently held by TV broadcasters but no longer actively used. (About $10 billion would go toward reducing the deficit.) The rub is that TV broadcasters are resisting pressure from the president and the Federal Communications Commission to voluntarily give that spectrum back. Under the plan being considered, broadcasters would get some portion of the proceeds from the auctions–no word yet on how much.

These give-backs are supposedly going to be voluntary, and one priority the National Association of Broadcasters hopes to see in this plan is a provision that allows broadcasters to opt out of the process without penalty. This suggests that the administration will get some spectrum back in some places, but not in others, creating the potential for a sort of inconsistent patchwork. More on the particulars of the plan here.

Building out the Internet is certainly a laudable goal. As I’ve written before, an Internet connection is now as essential to modern life as electric lights and running water. Places without adequate network coverage are essentially locked out of participating in the economic and cultural discourse that so many of us take for granted every day.

Consider for a moment how much of the recent political campaigns was conducted on the Web, and then ask yourself how well-informed a voter you’d be without relatively fast access to the Web day in and day out. As the Communications Workers of America pointed out in a recent study, roughly one American in three doesn’t have access to broadband at home; some choose not to have it, but other want it but can’t get it.

I thought about this a bit when I read that a new undersea fiber-optic Internet cable had been laid to improve access to the Internet in Cuba, courtesy of an international aid program paid for by Venezuela. As it stands right now, Internet connections there are handled via slow and cumbersome satellite links, and so only about three percent of the population has access to the Web. The new cable will allow connections 3,000 times faster than currently possible.

Say what you will about the ultimate political aims of Venezuela in financing the cable, or what controls the Cuban government will likely impose upon those who use it, but you can’t deny that any improvement in getting people in Cuba connected to the Internet is a good thing. Who knows what changes a better connection might bring?

Here my thoughts turn once again to Egypt and the changes unfolding there. During the past several weeks we’ve seen the power of the Internet brought to bear in Egypt, where what’s been widely called the Facebook Revolution seems on the cusp of toppling President Hosni Mubarak. It was Mubarak who shocked the world by cutting his country off from the Internet, and it so irritated people both inside and outside Egypt that they banded together to find ways around the digital curtain he tried to erect around his borders. The same chain of events has turned a humble Google marketing exec into a national hero.

It’s at moments like this that I’m struck by the immeasurable power of the Internet to be turned into a powerful force for good and for the empowerment of people in all walks of life, with better information, better communication, more economic choices. Without passing judgment on Obama’s proposal–it’s likely to spark a fight with congressional Republicans and with various constituencies in the broadcasting and telecom industries–it’s hard not to agree with his intent. It’s unfortunate that in 2011 the country that gave birth to the Internet hasn’t yet found a way to extend its many benefits to every sector of its population.

Here are a few highlights from the president’s speech today, courtesy of the Associated Press.

Unsurprisingly, Symbian is the leading mobile OS worldwide. It’s dominant in some 100 countries and accounts for more that half of all mobile Web usage in 75 of them. It essentially owns the Mideast and most of the developing world, thanks to those regions’ affinity for Nokia’s cheap mobile phones.

Apple’s iOS is the second most used mobile OS worldwide, with its iPhone and iPod touch claiming the most mobile Web traffic in 30 countries. In 21 of them, those devices accounted for more than half of all mobile Web traffic. IOS appears most popular in Canada, Cuba (!), Switzerland and Australia, where it claims over 70 percent of all mobile Web traffic. Interestingly, it’s quite a bit less popular in the United States, where it garnered a little over 35 percent.

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS leads four countries, with one–the Dominican Republic–where OS usage is over 50 percent. Shockingly, in its home country of Canada, it accounts for a paltry 3.6 percent of mobile Web traffic.

And Android?

It leads just one country, South Korea, with a 78.3 percent share of all mobile Web traffic. Presumably, that’s thanks to Samsung, which is based in the country and sells a number of Android phones. So while Android is surging ahead, thanks to Google’s strategy of flooding the market with multiple handsets on multiple carriers at a wide range of price points, there’s still a hell of a lot of market share that it hasn’t even come close to touching.

[Image credit: Chart and data courtesy Royal Pingdom]

The first is about Web “trolls,” who plague politicians’ Web sites by posting negative comments and links; the second looks at the Geek Squad of Best Buy; the third is about Queen Elizabeth II’s new YouTube site; and the fourth looks at a blogger who posts critically while also living in Havana, no easy task.

Internet Trolling

Geek Squad

YouTube Save the Queen

Cuban Blogger