Cuban digital identity: A summary of recent evidence

With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many people predicted the imminent collapse of the Cuban regime and some critics saw the Internet as playing a major part in that collapse. But this has simply not been the case and the socialist system remains today. It is a widely held viewpoint that Internet use in Cuba is restricted due to a number of factors and this paper intends to examine those factors and to attempt to discover to what extent the lack of access to the World Wide Web has helped to maintain (with some evident changes) the socialist status quo on the island. The paper follows an article soon to be published in BLAR that also takes a brief look at how the Internet is used to represent the nation externally and ultimately argues that there is a great deal of work to do by the Cuban government if it wishes to take full advantage of what the Internet can offer.