By Eloise Quintanilla, Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor Thu
Jul 12, 4:00 AM ET
Havana - Before the police raid, the Perez family paid $7.56 per month
for a DirecTV window on the world.
Daniel, a literature major at the University of Havana, watched the
Chicago White Sox on ESPN. His mom, Marisel, never missed an episode of
"La Fea Más Bella" (The Prettiest Ugly Girl), a popular Mexican soap
opera on Univision. And Daniel's younger brother was an avid fan of the
VH1 music videos.
Now, they are stuck with four Cuban TV channels - and two of those are
devoted to educational programming.
"Cuban TV is boring.... There isn't much variation," says Daniel Perez
(who fears arrest, so asked that his family's real name be changed). "I
like being in the loop, knowing about the newest trends and feeling like
I'm in touch with the world."
Having a satellite TV, cellphone, or Internet connection at home is
illegal for most Cuban citizens. But that hasn't stopped the spread of
such services on the black market.
Pedro, a young underground entrepreneur, gets his nightly news from
Channel 23 (Univision), "because Cuban TV doesn't give me unbiased
coverage of world news.... But neither does American news. So I watch
both and compare them."
Pedro, who requested his last name not be used, estimates that 90
percent of his neighbors get satellite TV service. "That business really
started to accelerate about a year ago," he says. "All of our neighbors
know about [it] but nobody talks about it. The woman who lives below me
is the president of the CDR [Committee for the Defense of the
Revolution] and even she has cable television."
But in recent months, the Cuban government has stepped up efforts to
curb this booming underground industry. Two months ago, the police
raided Pedro's neighborhood early in the morning. They blocked off the
streets, climbed on the rooftops, and began cutting cables leading to
the satellite dish, he says.
"My neighbor started making hand signals at me from the window of his
house that the police were here and to take down my cables," says Pedro.
Although Pedro escaped detection, he decided to remove his cable
connections permanently for fear that the police would discover his
illicit CD-making business. As for his neighbors, "Two days later,
people were already putting up their cables again."
Mauricio Barroso, a telecommunications official in the Ministry of the
Interior, says that 37.6 percent of households in Havana were connected
to the service when the police began the raids in March. By early May,
one set of raids had netted a significant amount of coaxial and neoprene
cable, three satellite receptors, five satellite dish antennas, 43
signal amplifiers, a computer, and five LNB (low-noise block
converters), according to the government-run newspaper, Granma.
The Cuban government is also levying multi-tiered fines and jail
sentences on satellite TV providers. According to Granma, signal
distributors were slapped with fines of 10,000 ($450) and 20,000 ($900)
Cuban pesos and jail sentences of three to five years. Users of the
service were fined only 1,500 pesos ($67.50).
Mr. Barroso says that illegal satellite TV service in Cuba has been
around since the 90s, "but people gain access to the service much more
easily now.... The service is much more affordable. That's why it's
increasing at such a rapid rate. For the service to build up to the
levels of '93, it took three years. Now, they [the service providers]
fill up half the city in three months."
In Daniel's neighborhood, the satellite TV guy is a 6-foot-4-inch tall
Afro-Cuban named Alberto. He declined to give his last name. Two gold
teeth glint as he smiles and explains his fee structure. He charges a
one-time connection fee of 10 CUC (Cuban Convertible Pesos) or about
$11, and 7 CUC ($7.56) a month for service. In a good month, with 300
households in his neighborhood as clients, he rakes in up to 2,000 CUC
($2,160). He still has a legal $15 per month income as a truck driver.
He keeps this job in order to keep a low profile. By Cuban standards,
Alberto is wealthy.
When Alberto started his business four years ago, he had to shop for a
satellite dish antenna, a receiver, an access card with the correct code
to capture the signal, a signal amplifier, and cable on the black
market. He distributes the satellite signal from his single dish antenna
to his neighborhood through a spider web of cables over the rooftops.
There's a catch, however. Everyone on the network has to watch the same
channel that the satellite dish owner is watching. Alberto does an
informal survey of his customers to find out what they like to watch.
His programming schedule includes telenovelas from Univision and
Telemundo, movies from HBO and STARZ, popular talk shows such as "Don
Francisco Presents," and the variety show "Sabado Gigante."
But the average official monthly wage in Cuba is only $15. How can
Cubans afford this service? Many have illegal businesses and relatives
living abroad (mostly in the US). According to The Economist
Intelligence Unit, an estimated $812 million were sent to Cuba in the
form of workers' remittances in 2006 alone.
Pedro, for example, gets $100 a month from his brother in Washington,
D.C. His second source of informal income comes from the sale of pirated
copies of CDs produced with a computer from his brother. "In two days, I
make what a Cuban doctor makes in a month. That's how I am able to pay
for a cellphone and satellite TV service," says Pedro.
In May, the government-run media reported that satellite TV is part of a
US plot to overthrow the Cuban government. Mayra Espina, a researcher at
the University of Havana, says that may be an overreaction. "Watching
'La Fea Más Bella' is not an act of opposition against the state. It is
not a political attitude. It is a phenomenon of free time."
Despite the recent crack down, satellite dishes continue to pop up on
roof tops. "If there is censorship," says Alberto, "There is business."
o Daniel Palacios contributed to this story from Havana.
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