30 October 2014, The Tablet

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Cuba Offline, BBC Radio 4

 
IsaiaH Berlin divided humanity into hedgehogs and foxes. The fundamental separation here in Cuba Offline (23 October) seemed to be between the connected and the unconnected. “You’ve never been online?” we heard the journalist Nick Baker enquiring of a middle-aged Cuban, and his air of incredulity suggested that the British equivalent would have been confessing to never having travelled in a plane or attended a rock concert. With internet access available only to a well-heeled elite and a suspicious regime keen to monitor traffic, an hour in an internet cafe – government-run, naturally – costs half the minimum monthly wage.A whistle-stop tour of Havana business life  soon revealed just how limited take-up was. There were queues outside the offices of the
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