Culture
Cuba's DIY Pirate Networks Are All Offline
How rogue hard drive traders provide a cheap solution to the island’s expensive internet fees.
Getting online is expensive in Cuba. A connection costs roughly $2 an hour, which is too expensive for most ordinary folks to afford. Despite this, there is a huge demand for pirated foreign media and information.
That’s where a service called “El Paquete” comes in. The term refers to a DIY subscription service that revolves around hard drive traders who scrape and curate the best content from the internet for their offline consumers. These 1 TB disks include everything from TV shows and movies to club music and popular magazines. So even though Cuba is still mostly offline, these networks keep it connected to the rest of the world.
The networks feature extensively in a new documentary called Give Me Future. Read more about this remarkable phenomenon on FACT.
Read more: Experience Cuba’s vibrant rave culture in virtual reality
(Photo via FACT)
