“There are two main ways to get online in Cuba. You can take the official route, forming lines behind 25 other individuals for more than an hour at an office of Etecsa, the Cuban government entity that oversees telecommunications and connectivity. There, you can buy top-up scratch cards to access the Etecsa Wi-Fi hot spots around Havana. It’s a relatively new development: Internet access in Cuba dramatically changed in 2015, when the government opened 35 public Wi-Fi hot spots in several cities across Cuba. Today, according to the Etecsa website, it operates more than 986 hot spots across the country that consumers can access via top-up scratch cards. Etecsa charges 1 CUC (about $1) per hour of internet consumption. In a country where the average income is 30 CUC per month, that’s expensive and inconvenient—which means consumers are open to more creative workaround solutions.”
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