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Locating the Internet in the Parks of Havana Michaelanne Dye David Nemer Laura R

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Locating the Internet in the Parks of Havana Michaelanne Dye David Nemer Laura R Locating the Internet in the Parks of Havana Michaelanne Dye David Nemer Laura R. Pina Georgia Institute of Technology University of Kentucky University of Washington Atlanta, GA, USA Lexington, KY, USA Seattle, WA, USA [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Nithya Sambasivan Amy S. Bruckman Neha Kumar Google Inc. Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Institute of Technology Mountain View, CA, USA Atlanta, GA, USA Atlanta, GA, USA [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT minute, a screen appears with a countdown clock, showing Since March 2015, the public squares of Havana have been that 58 minutes remain. Lara enters some text and hits send. transformed from places where people stroll and children After another five minutes, the website has still not loaded. play to places where crowds gather to try to connect to the “You’re wasting our minutes if you keep trying here,” Yuniel internet at all hours of the day and night. We present a field tells her, “The connection is too slow.” Yuniel maneuvers the investigation of public WiFi hotspots in Havana, Cuba, and car through Havana Vieja’s crowded streets, past the capitol examine the possibilities of internet access these limited and building, and into the Galeano neighborhood, home of the expensive hotspots present to individuals, many of who are popular Fe del Valle Park WiFi hotspot. The ten minute drive experiencing the internet for the first time. Drawing on field- between hotspots proves useless, however, as large crowds work conducted in 2015-2016, we underscore the reconfigu- are overloading the router in this park as well. Two hours rations that have resulted from this access, as evolving inter- and four hotspots later, Yuniel and Lara are finally able to net users reconfigure their interactions with place, time, and dispatch the web form by connecting to the internet from a individuals in their efforts to locate the internet. We also dis- hotspot near El Malecon´ . As they start to head home, Yuniel cuss the implications our findings have for the design of in- says, “We are very lucky. at least we have a car and don’t ternet access interventions in Cuba and in other low-resource have to search for the internet on foot.” environments across the world, as well as the broader impli- With nearly four billion people lacking access to the inter- cations for social computing across diverse geographies. net [29], efforts to expand internet access are growing rapidly Author Keywords across the world. Cuba remains one of few nations where this Cuba; internet; WiFi; place; HCI4D; social computing access is still affected by historical trade embargoes and re- strictions. Since the 2014 announcement of the normalization ACM Classification Keywords of relations with the U.S., however, internet access in Cuba is H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): growing. This access is primarily made available through the Miscellaneous introduction of approximately 200 public WiFi hotspots in lo- cal parks, squares, and streets as of 2016 [18]. INTRODUCTION Through interviews with 41 participants, participant observa- Around 11.30 PM on a muggy evening in April 2016, Yu- tion, and fieldwork, our research examines the impact of the 1 niel , a 26 year-old theology student, and his wife, Lara, drive newly opened WiFi hotspots in Havana on the lives of local to Habana Vieja. “She needs to fill out an online registra- citizens, as they go about their efforts to locate the internet in tion form for school,” he says. Neither gets out of the car parks, plazas, and streets. We find that users reconfigure their as Lara pulls out her iPhone and an ETECSA internet card. lives in diverse ways in order to accommodate the model of Shifting glances between the card and the screen, she first internet access that these hotspots enable. First, having ac- enters a long string of numbers for her user name and re- cess to a physical space that is also online has shaped how the peats the process for the password. After waiting about a local Cuban people interact with this space. There is thus a 1All names have been changed to protect participants’ anonymity. reconfiguration of ‘space’ and ‘place’ that is occurring simul- taneously. Second, given the limited and expensive access even in these public settings, users have to carefully prioritize Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or their time while they are online and offline, so that their in- classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed ternet needs are fulfilled affordably. Further, as these Cubans for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- go online to connect with their families after long years of tion on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or re- separation, they are finally in a position to try to regain com- publish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission munication with them and reconfigure these relationships. and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. CHI 2017, May 6-11, 2017, Denver, CO, USA. Copyright c 2017 ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-4655-9/17/05 ...$15.00. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025728 1 By investigating how the rationed, public introduction of the The times are changing, however. The adoption of mobile internet impacts lives of users, our paper makes the follow- phones has grown since 2008 and there were more than 2.6 ing contributions. First, our findings document this dynamic million mobile phone users in 2014 [50]. In addition, in De- process by building on prior research on increasing internet cember 2014, the United States and Cuba announced that they access in Cuba [15]. Second, capturing this transition as it un- would begin the process of normalizing relations [5, 51] and, folds helps us understand both online and offline constraints in July 2015, formal diplomatic relations were officially re- and affordances and how these impact internet use and pri- established [11]. The two countries also agreed that Cuba orities, particularly in the Cuban case. Third, although the would allow internet access for its people and the U.S. would specifics of Cuba may materialize differently in other con- facilitate this access by permitting Cuba to connect to fiber- texts, our study presents design and policy implications for optic cables, linking the two countries as well as allowing other constrained environments that fall in the purview of North American telecommunication companies to do busi- the area of Human-Computer Interaction for Development ness with Cuba’s state-owned enterprises [51]. Research from (HCI4D). As services (e.g., Facebook) developed in highly- 2015 showed that Cubans were severely restricted in their in- connected contexts are increasingly adopted in socioeconom- ternet use [15]. Reports estimated that only 5-25% of Cubans ically disadvantaged communities, the nature of access by had access, with only 5% of the population having full access these new and evolving users must be considered. With this to the internet (usually through their places of work) [46]. in mind, our paper also provides implications for the social computing community, highlighting the need for it to engage However, the recent introduction of WiFi has changed the na- with diversely connected geographies. ture of internet access for the Cuban people. As of September 2016, there were 200 hotspots spread across the country, with Our paper is structured as follows. We begin by briefly de- 28 in the capital city of Havana [18]. These hotspots present scribing the sociopolitical context in which our research study ordinary Cubans (regardless of their job or educational status) took place. After situating our research in a body of related with the opportunity to connect and communicate across bor- work, we describe the reconfigurations occurring as a result ders. However, as our findings also demonstrate, connecting of the nature of internet access in Havana. We then discuss the at these hotspots is not without its challenges. With our study, takeaways of our research for Cuba, the Global South over- we seek to provide an enriched understanding of the inter- all, and the social computing research community. The goal connected triumphs and travails of Cuban WiFi hotspots. of our research is to inform the responsible design of access- oriented interventions for sustainable development. In light of the massive internet access initiatives being undertaken by RELATED WORK actors such as Facebook (e.g., Express WiFi [19]) and Google Providing internet access has been a longstanding focus in (e.g.,partnership with Indian Railways and RailTel [35]), as global development agendas, national policies, and increas- well as the growing number of internet users worldwide, our ingly, the technological industry’s growth. We now highlight research sheds light on what these efforts might focus on to key research efforts in the areas of public internet provision provide access that holds meaning and value for new and and constrained networks in the Global South as well as work evolving adopters. that considers social computing in these “slow and expensive” contexts. Additionally, we discuss work on WiFi hotspots and reconfiguration in relation to internet access. BACKGROUND In 1996, with the support of the National Science Foundation Public Access in the Global South (NSF), Cuba became one of the first ‘developing’ countries Since the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were to connect to the worldwide web.
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