When looking at the potential of the Internet in Cuba, it is useful to take a comparative perspective. The Internet challenges the control of governments all over the world, and not just in authoritarian countries. Western democracies talk about Internet freedom, yet leaders will sing a different tune if it looks like the use of […]

Notes1 This study models the debt dynamics currently at play in the Venezuelan economy that are increasing the short-run risks of a debt crisis in that country. The inevitable interruption of subsidized oil exports that would result from such a crisis could deal a devastating blow to the Cuban economy, as well as the rest […]

Notes1 Within the larger social shaping framework and with roots in media studies and anthropology, domestication theory explores how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are incorporated and appropriated by their users, initially stressing how they were fitted into the household (Silverstone, 1994; Silverstone and Haddon, 1997). Yet this theory allows us to ask broader questions […]

Today, with the development of information technologies, […] social networks, […] computers and the Internet, to prohibit something is nearly an impossible chimera. It makes no sense. Today, news from all sources, good and bad, manipulated, true, and half-true, circulate on the web and reach people. The worst response then, what is it? Silence. —Miguel […]

Notes1 Recently there have been several estimates of Venezuelan economic assistance to Cuba — for example by Lopez (2012) and Mesa-Lago (2013). My latest estimates suggest that payments from Venezuela increased rapidly during the first decade of the XXI century and peaked at almost 19% of Cuba’s GDP in 2009. They declined over the following […]