One e-mail per child

I have a confession: I’ve been corresponding with a woman in Havana. Via e-mail. It’s been going on for years. No, it’s not Yoani Sanchez, the spunky 33- year-old philologist (and editor of the digital magazine Consenso) who recently won Spain’s highest accolade for journalism, the Ortega y Gasset prize, for her blog Generación Y. I mean, I wouldn’t mind getting something started with her. But the woman I’m talking about is a bit older. Let’s just call her Concha. Some people would really prefer that Concha and I didn’t have this thing going on. People such as her government, which controls Cuba’s state-run media and prohibits free access to international media, including the Internet. And people such as my government, which, under U.S. trade sanctions against the island, bars Cuba from accessing a major undersea fiber-optic cable available to all other countries in the Caribbean.

Technically speaking, the Cuban government has no choice but to buy costly, slow, and limited satellite bandwidth to connect the island to the Internet, which gives Cuban officials a big excuse for tightly restricting access to the band. If everybody had it, they suggest, the system would flow about as well as gridlock on a Los Angeles freeway during rush hour.

Meanwhile, my government complains that Cuban officials are keeping a grass-roots counter-revolution from springing up in Cuba. The Internet is one place that could start happening. But it can’t because my government won’t allow Cuba to access that big fiber-optic cable; and because her government has kept the vast majority of Cubans so poor they can’t afford a computer, which my government doesn’t allow U.S. companies to sell to Cuba anyway.

So, this ladyfriend and I—we find ways. Actually, she finds them more than I. “Thanks for worrying about the state of the Internet in our corner of the planet,” she responded last year after disappearing from the e-mail circuit for months. “In reality, I’ve had a difficult time in recent weeks because the thing got hot, but one always finds alternatives. I have a yuma friend, born in California and resident of Cuba, that does have the privilege of being able to legally contract the service. She conceded the right to me and, well, here I am again.” (Yuma=yanquí.)

Then she went bonkers, signing up for Gmail and Yahoo! chat services. When you pay the equivalent of $50 per month for 60 hours of usage—the average monthly salary in Cuba is about $20—you max out the free stuff to get your money’s worth. (The country’s official currency is the Cuban convertible peso, or CUC, which is worth about a dollar.) Still, she feels a little guilty because she knows she’s living large. “Maybe I see things from a different angle because my economic situation is way above that of the majority of Cubans,” she wrote recently. “The father of my daughters sends me a good sum of euros every month, which allows me certain privileges, like paying for an Internet account.”

In February, when Fidel Castro announced that he was standing down as president, my Concha sent me an update. “Dear chief Editor [a term of endearment]: I think we are the most unpredictable citizens in the world, perhaps because it was something that we calmly expected, but the euphoria that your Floridian neighbors are suffering hasn’t infected us.

“In addition, everyone is talking serenely, with apparent certainty that changes—soft ones for sure —will come in the spring, approximately by the month of April. Where does that idea come from? I don’t know.

“In my very particular case, I have a mixture of uneasiness and impotence, the first because I don’t understand the utilization of the term ‘transition’ which appears in every foreign news agency report, basically because when they talk about transition they always talk about the absolute absence of the brothers, and I don’t think that is going to be the case immediately. And it annoys me that the one who told me the news–at three in the morning—was the father of my children calling from Europe, since at the hour when it was disseminated the Cuban people were asleep. That’s like finding out from a neighbor what your children are doing.”

Indeed, by April the new Cuban president, Fidel’s brother Raul, had given the island’s highly-advanced totalitarian consumer economy some soft but radical, if not counter-revolutionary tweaks. Cubans could now buy cellphones, computers, and DVD players.

“Cellular telephones are a mirage for the majority of Cubans, 110 CUC [$110] to activate the line, 50 CUC [$50] for one of the most economical telephones, plus ten dollars for every balance recharge card, which one is obligated to renew every three months even if you don’t use the service, and every call costs between .48 and .60 CUC [48 and 60 cents),” Concha reported this month. “Who can give themselves that ‘luxury’ no matter how useful and necessary it might be?” Besides, she continued, some people managed to get themselves hooked up with more affordable black market service a long time ago.

Regarding other newly allowed consumer goods, she added: “The stores shine like candy store displays for diabetics. Computers for 1000 CUC [$1,000], DVD players between 130 and 150 CUC [$130 and $150], scooters for between 700 and 900 CUC [$700 and $900]. I don’t know anyone among my friends who has sprung for that kind of craziness.”

Cubans can now also rent cars and stay in tourist hotels. Concha says she’d rather spend the $60 it would cost to rent a car per day (i.e. three months’ salary for the average Cuban) and buy a month’s worth of gasoline for her old clunker (another luxury made possible by euro re-mittances from the father of her daughters). As for staying in a tourist hotel, she wrote: “I can do a lot of things in a month for $100,” which is how much she says a night in a tourist hotel costs. “I prefer to spend that money on private music or language classes for my daughters,” she continued. “Or go on a Sunday afternoon to see a spectacular classical ballet of Cuba performance, which costs only five Cuban pesos, the equivalent of 25 cents.”

But there’s a method to the craziness. “Don’t be fooled,” Concha warned. “This whole scenario is a way to gather up the excess cash circulating from the hands of a few who live off their relatives who work like mules outside of Cuba.” Or from the “parlor delinquents,” her term of endearment for people who work in the tourism industry who swindle foreigners by concocting fees for products and services.

Despite all these changes on the island, I’m a little concerned about the future of my ability to keep this thing going with Concha. The last time she went to pay her Internet bill, she noted in her last e-mail, the clerk told her not to miss a payment because the state-run phone company’s policy is to try to reduce the number of clients. Knowing Concha, a single mother of two living in Havana, I can’t rule out that kind of contretemps.

But I’ll be okay. Because I have another confession: Concha’s not the only one.