TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY BERT STEPHANI
At first sight the Cuban Revolution and it’s heroes are still going strong in Havana. But it doesn’t take much time nor a trained observer to see it’s often no more than a thin layer of revolutionary varnish. The Cuban people, particularly the younger generation, don’t want to live in heroic isolation anymore, they want to be part of the world.
It’s only very recently that you can access the internet from Cuba. Connections are slow when they work at all and there are only a couple of wifi hotspots around the city. But the internet is clearly here to stay. Every night and on weekend days, Cubans with tablets, laptops and smartphones (often donated by relatives abroad) flock to these hotspots to Skype with family members in the US and other parts of the world. Faces lit up by the blue glow of their devices hang on to the images and sounds from outside the boundaries of their island.
