Nick Miroff writes about how Cuba appears on the brink of vastly improving its communications technology:

Great technology companies are born in garages, of course, and that is where 31-year-old Bernardo Romero has launched his Cuban start-up, Ingenius. And like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the 1930s, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the 1970s, Romero doesn’t have Internet access, either. “At least,” he said, “we have a garage.”

That is no small feat, by Cuban business standards. Romero also has five employees, a sign, printed advertising and a government license to operate his company — almost none of which was allowed by communist authorities a few years ago.

What keeps Romero and other similarly aspiring entrepreneurs crippled is a near-total lack of Web access. Raúl Castro’s limited opening for private business has been good for Cubans in physical trades such as shoe repair and plumbing, but the country’s digital laborers are still largely disconnected.

When one of the engineers at Ingenius needs to upload work for a client, he travels by bus or bicycle to a cybercafe run by the state telecom monopoly, ­ETECSA, paying $5 an hour for mediocre WiFi. The converted garage, like most of Cuba, isn’t plugged in.

“If we had Internet, we could really take off,” said Romero, who will design and build an entire Web site from scratch for $150.

That is a wisp of what it would cost in the United States. And as a result of President Obama’s recent moves to ease 1960s-era trade sanctions, American companies and clients can now hire private Cuban businesses such as Ingenius for services such as translation work, software development and accounting.

The potential bonanza is not lost on Cuba’s highly educated, lowly paid professionals, now more eager than ever to hire out their services to U.S. clients. Romero estimates there are at least another 20 small, licensed, tax-paying technology start-ups like his in Havana. Far more Cuban programmers and software engineers are said to be freelancing for foreign customers off the books.

Nearly all are stuck with the same problem: They can’t reliably and affordably get online. That deprives them of the tools essential to work with customers remotely, such as video conferencing, access to software updates and the ability to send and receive large files.

[. . .] Cuba has fallen so far behind in technology that even its problems are obsolete. When manufacturers of laptop computers phased out the 56k modem about 10 years ago as a standard accessory for connecting to the Internet through a phone line, most of the world had gone wireless by then and barely noticed. But for Cubans, it was a hardware crisis.

A generation after Americans dialed into AOL accounts through a series of beeps, squawks and static, many Cuban Web users still connect that way. On a good day, they can achieve download speeds of 4 or 5 kilobytes per second, approximately 10,000 times slower than the U.S. residential service offered by Verizon or Comcast.

“I would not be surprised if Cuba had the highest rate of dial-up among Internet users of any nation in the world,” Press said.

Online classified sites such as Revolico — Cuba’s versions of Craigslist — offer $20 external USB modems for connecting a modern laptop to a phone line. [. . .]

For full article, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/starting-up-in-cuba-but-not-connected/2015/04/13/e64891d4-d16c-11e4-8b1e-274d670aa9c9_story.html