Barack Obama tweeted a special greeting to Cubans after touching down in Havana, becoming the first serving US president to set foot on the island for 88 years.
After landing he posted the tweet ¿Que bolá Cuba? which translates as ‘What’s up Cuba?’
The problem? A very small percentage of Cubans actually have access to the open Internet.
Oops.
Home connections are practically nonexistent, and only government officials, academics, doctors, engineers, or regime-approved journalists have Internet access at work, Ellery Biddle, a researcher who has focused on Cuban Internet issues, reported, according to Mashable.
For everyone else, there are expensive government-run Internet cafes where an hour of connection can cost between $6 and $10, a prohibitive amount of money in a country where the average weekly salary is around $20.
Where connection is possible, the speed is so slow there’s very little they can do online but check email and sluggishly surf websites. “When they do access the Internet, they try to do really the bare minimum,” Cynthia Romero, the Latin America Senior Program Officer at Freedom House, told Mashable.
So perhaps Obama’s Tweet was not in the best taste, considering the dictatorship he’s visiting doesn’t even provide internet service to its people.
Obama’s three-day visit will include a meeting with Cuba’s president, Raúl Castro. Obama is also set to address the Cuban people.
Andy Heller-Matzav.com Newscenter
…it’s noteworthy to point out that our Muslim-in-Chief has never gone to Israel once as president, yet he has gone to many Arab countries and he now visits a non-ally country. He is writing his own legacy…
it shows how clearly he thought out making peace with the Cuban dictator. It’s nice that he wants to make nice with the president but the country is still communist. Making peace in this situation is essentially giving his approval to the regime. Which is fine by me considering that Alan gross was released but it is entirely contrary to American values. He and Kerry think they outsmarted all the previous presidents with this deal and the Iran deal and while really they sold their morality for the sake of the hall of fame.
Anonymous, just FYI Obama did come to Israel once as president.