With the help of software from an American company, Cubans are bypassing the Castro dictatorship’s internet controls and censorship to access the web.
The Philadelphia-Based Company Helping Cubans Get Online Illegally
Across the country, people have turned to a Philadelphia-based company to access the internet.
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.
Instead, many Cubans consume internet the second way: via Havana’s network of informal, clandestine, and illegal Wi-Fi hot spots known as Conectifai, which piggyback off the public Etecsa network. Taking this approach saves users hours in line, headaches, and at least 20 CUC. Conectifai entrepreneurs set up their own private hot spots and, through a network of street “dealers,” sell access to their internet at a much cheaper price, providing a far more attractive solution for the average Cuban.
It’s all possible thanks to a single American company. The name “Conectifai”is the phonetic spelling of the Spanish pronunciation of Connectify, a Philadelphia-based software company whose primary product, Connectify Hotspot, allows users to turn a PC into a Wi-Fi hot spot to share internet with other devices. Connectify has no official presence in Cuba—in fact, its use is illegal. Still, Conectifai entrepreneurs connect to the Etecsa network with a computer and download the Connectify software to create private hot spots.
Connectify has been in Cuba since Etecsa set up those public hot spots in 2015. Although aware of the illegality, the company has embraced its product’s utility as a “popular tool for creating ‘do it yourself’ infrastructure using nothing more than a laptop” among these internet entrepreneurs and remains committed to their “ongoing efforts to get the people of Cuba online,” according to a blog post from April 2017.
Not only has the Connectify Hotspot software been available in Spanish since 2017, but the company also launched the ¡Viva Hotspot! campaign, which “provides Cuban citizens with free Connectify Hotspot MAX licenses.” Today, Connectify has made essentially all of its Premium features free to users in Cuba. The company also provides free Spanish-language versions of Speedify, its virtual private network, which allows users to browse the web with a private connection—particularly relevant considering Cuba’s strict censorship. (You could face jail time for Googling anything “anti-revolutionary.”)
There’s no government data on illegal connections to Etecsa hot spots, making it impossible to compare how many Cubans get online directly via Etecsa vs. Conectifai. But numbers from Connectify give us some hints. In 2018, the company says it saw 53,667 new users in Cuba, which is defined as a computer running the software and setting up at least one hot spot. From January–May of this year, 20,663 new users have hopped on. And each hot spot can host many users, whether it’s entrepreneurs offering it as a service for a fee or families setting up internet access at home. Compare that with the roughly 1,000 Etecsa hot spots nationwide.
Héctor, a Conectifai entrepreneur, runs two locations: a sleepy corner park in Old Havana, where he “deals” to locals, and one of several Conectifai hot spots outside of the famous Bar Floridita. (Héctor and other Conectifai entrepreneurs’ names have been changed to protect them.) Two young men working for him “deal” internet at his Floridita location. Being a Conectifai“dealer” consists of sitting out on the street all day, collecting cash, and entering the network password in the phones or PCs of customers who approach.
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