Cubans are finally getting internet on their cell phones

Cuba's communist government has long kept a tight grip on its citizens' limited web access, but now — 22 years after mobile internet became commercially available and 11 years after the first iPhone was released — some Cubans are being allowed to have the internet on their phones.

Select users are already connected, Reuters reports, and Havana aims to roll out nationwide mobile internet by 2019. Among those permitted early access are reporters at state-run media outlets who can use the connectivity for work purposes. "It's been a radical change," said one such journalist, Yuris Norido. "I can now update on the news from wherever I am, including where the news is taking place."

Unfortunately, even once mobile internet access is more widely available, it will remain unaffordable for most. Hotspot use costs $1 per hour, a hefty price in a nation with an average state monthly wage of $30.

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Cuba's new President Miguel Diaz-Canel has endorsed expanding internet access as a means of spreading his regime's ideology abroad. "We need to be able to put the content of the revolution online," he said last year as vice president, arguing that Cubans, once online, will "counter the avalanche of pseudo-cultural, banal, and vulgar content" from which the internet now suffers.