09 February 2011

CUBA: 10 Feb UPDATE: Bread Shortage As Black Market Devours Flour; Blogger Yoani Sanchez Posts Unblocked On Isla; Undersea Cable Reaches Isla.

G.POST/ NICK MIROFF / Apparently Miroff is still only a freelancer for the WashPost /

    For over 50 years, a ration of one bread bun per person per day has been the accepted norm in Cuba.
    But with a slew of new small businesses opening up under Raul Castro's reforms, state-run bakeries are suffering shortages as the black market bids up the price of flour...as popular 10 peso pizza kitchens pop-up like weeds after a rainfall.
     “We’re making about 60 percent as much as we used to,” said one La Habana government baker where customers were turned away. “We don’t have the flour,” he said.

 AND:  10 Feb UPDATE -- WITH LINK CHANGE:
    The Castro regime has unblocked access to dissident Yoani Sanchez's blog, off limits on the island's Internet since 2008.
 "In the long night of censorship, a small hole has opened. My blog Generation Y returns to the insular light,"  wrote the 35-year-old blogger on Twitter.
   Now Habanistas around the world are trying to figure out why the government has unleashed Sanchez.
  Sanchez and her husband believe it is because Cuba is hosting an internet conference.
 “It would not be very elegant for those persons to be able to confirm that in Cuba there are blocked Web sites,” he told El Nuevo Herald. The blocks could be put back once the foreigners leave Cuba.

ALSO: Undersea Cable Reaches Santiago from Venezuela:
   A $70 million usd undersea fiber optic cable financed by ALBA has reached Cuba's shore. 
It can potentially increase Internet speed 3,000-fold and handle about 80 million simultaneous phone calls.
   It will be ready for use in July.
  Cuba currently has the second slowest Internet speed in the world and the lowest internet penetration in the Hemisphere with just only 2.9 percent of the population having used the Internet during a 12-month period.
Labels: , ,