- A midnight rain fell through the oak trees of Vedado, a neighborhood in Havana, onto the heads of a dozen people gathered outside a small hotel. The power was out. The only light on the block came from the screens glowing in their hands.
Weaker souls had taken off when the rain began to fall, but the stalwarts along the wrought-iron fence weren’t going anywhere. They had come to this corner among the faded manses of pre-revolutionary sugar barons and mafiosi to taste one of the rarest commodities in Cuba — the internet — at one of the wireless hotspots the government set up a few weeks before. They weren’t going to let a little signal outage, or a rainstorm, stop them from trying to get online.
- Much of the information comes in offline, through phone calls and visits to relatives abroad, pirated TV signals, and dribs and drabs that make it through the state-run media. But thousands are also watching Juego de Tronos shortly after it airs on HBO. They get it on the paquete semanal, or weekly package — a fresh terabyte of movies, TV shows, video games, phone apps, articles, and advertisements that arrives on the computers of kingpins in Havana every Monday, then proliferates across the country on portable hard drives.
I went down to a seaside neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital to see how this worked. A paquete distributor in his late 20s, who works as a researcher in a state medical lab, greeted me on the front porch of the one-story home he shares with his parents. The deal is simple: each week he pays $5 to download the paquete onto his portable hard drive from a distributor higher up the chain, then he charges $1 to 20 or so regular customers to download from him.