El Paquete: Cuban Ingenuity in the form of a USB

By Alejandro Murillo

A young man knocks on my neighbor’s door every Monday afternoon. She opens the door and he hands over a small external hard drive through the iron gate. My neighbor plugs the USB cable into her computer and copies the files she needs. A couple of hours later the delivery boy returns and my neighbor returns the hardware and discreetly gives him payment.  

Is this a dangerous group of hackers working towards some conspiracy? No. Is this an underground distribution system for extremely coveted and difficult to obtain information? Yes. Is this illegal? Not exactly. 

This is El Paquete - one terabyte of neatly organized media downloaded from the Internet that contains all the latest media released that week. 23 folders appear on this hard drive including Sports, Christian, Classifieds, Movies, Series, Music Videos, Anti-Virus Updates, Cartoons, and Magazines. Content from the U.S. is some of the most popular. Inside you can find HD quality movies that are still showing in theaters, NPR Tiny Desk concerts, this month’s Cosmopolitan magazine, and the latest episode of whatever’s trending on Netflix. 

A typical hard drive with media from El Paquete.

It is estimated that there are about half a dozen master distributors of El Paquete across the island. Each distributor collects media from various contributors who are tasked with compiling the content of a particular folder. It’s unlikely that these contributors download the content in Miami and fly in each week. Nor are they sitting in the heat of a Havana park downloading from the unreliable and slow WiFi hotspot connection. Contributors are likely folks with access to high bandwidth connections within offices of a government ministry or a foreign business operating in Cuba, like hotels. Once all the folders are compiled, hard drives are handed off to provincial distributors who travel to their respective Cuban province to begin copying the content to lower-level distributors. One master distributor has even sent one of his provincial distributors by plane to outpace the competition. 

Through this long but fairly uncomplicated chain of command my neighbor downloads Discovery Channel shows for her kid and Norton Antivirus updates for her work computer each week; all delivered to her door for $2 CUC.

Why all the fuss?

Internet access in Cuba for the overwhelming majority of Cubans is expensive and of mediocre quality. Blaming the U.S. embargo that prevents Cuba from tapping into the numerous undersea fiber optic cables crisscrossing the Caribbean sea or the Cuban government’s desire to control information and the media would be to oversimplify the context of Cuba’s 49.1% Internet penetration rate (2017). 

Map of undersea fiber optic cables in the Caribbean.

Cuba connected to the World Wide Web for the first time in 1996 via satellite using the Sprint network (yes, Sprint of the U.S.). Cuba depended entirely on this satellite connection until 2013 when an undersea cable, “ALBA-1” from Venezuela, afforded Cuba acceptable connection speeds. 

At the encouragement of the Obama administration during normalization of relations between the two countries in 2015, U.S. tech companies like Google, Stripe, and Cisco began coaching some Cuban entrepreneurs and collaborating with ETECSA (the government entity that is the sole provider of telecommunication services in Cuba). After reaching a deal in 2016, Google set up Google Global Cache servers within ETECSA data centers that allowed easier and higher-quality access to Google services, such as YouTube.

Today, the Internet is accessible to the public in a number of ways: at home using a DSL connection starting at $15 per month (only available in certain neighborhoods and requires a coveted landline), at a public WiFi hotspot or navigation hall for $0.70 CUC per hour, or on a cell phone starting at $5 CUC for 900 MB using a 3G or 4G network. Despite these advances, there are still major barriers to the Internet. Considering that most of the Cuban workforce earns an average government salary of $30 CUC per month, these prices are astronomical and streaming any type of media on the not so reliable connection would be out of the question. 

These are the geo-tech-political factors at play that created the niche market for El Paquete. For the price of one hour of mediocre internet connection in a public park, Cubans can watch more movies and shows than they have time for in the comfort of their own home. The demand for El Paquete is a no-brainer. 

And the demand is there. El Paquete costs between $1-2 CUC depending on where you get it and if it's delivered to your door. It was estimated that in 2015 this Internet workaround produced monthly revenues between 2 to 4 million CUC and was one of the largest employers in the private sector of the economy. Aside from distributors, advertising start-ups have emerged to provide small businesses exposure within El Paquete.

At first, the government’s response to this unfiltered dissemination of content was adverse and they outlawed it. Soon after, ETECSA debuted its own version. La Mochila was 500 GB of free cultural and educational media, in the classic sense of the word. This government alternative never rose to any level of popularity. For now, authorities seem to have maintained a stance of tolerance, save any pornographic or dissident political material that could arise. 

Obama’s push for U.S. companies to support internet infrastructure in Cuba made some strides but also proved how complicated this issue really is in Cuba. El Paquete is yet another example of Cuban ingenuity. In this case, a creative solution to barriers to high-speed Internet, characterized by many as a basic human right and one of the greatest engines of growth in human history. One wonders what Cubans could accomplish with unencumbered access to the Internet.

Suggested Resources

Vox Youtube video - “This is Cuba’s Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify – all without the internet” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E

Wired Magazine Article - Inside Cuba’s D.I.Y. Internet Revolution - https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revolution/