People frequently ask me to compare Cuba and China on the question of Internet use, and just about everything else. Fine. They’re both remote, exotic, Communist (flashing red light) countries that people are very curious (but know relatively little) about. Yet there are many fundamental characteristics that set them apart, though some are more obvious than others.
On the question of the Internet: China has poured untold amounts of money, human capital, and legislation into restricting Internet use among its citizens, while Cuba, as far as foreign researchers know, has gone the cheap route: Internet access is so hard to come by (and expensive to provide) that extensive content filtration simply isn’t necessary, and Cuba’s chillingly effective regime of social control keeps many Internet users from using the Web freely anyway.
