Very little has been published about the plans that the telecommunication authority has to roll out internet connection to people’s homes. According to recent statements by Odalys Rodríguez del Toro, director of ETECSA’s Havana division “a pilot test will begin to bring internet to homes in specific areas.” These connections will be via fibre optic, thanks to an agreement with the Chinese business Huawei and “will advise about prices at the right time,” according to the Cuban News Agency. The beneficiaries will be two People’s Councils in the municipality of Old Havana, whose inhabitants will be the first who can take out a broad-band service for their houses. What follows this “pilot plan”? Little or nothing more is known. At the beginning of June 2015 a strategy for the development of connectivity, whose authenticity has been neither publicly confirmed nor denied by the authorities, was leaked online. A timeline from the document began circulating detailing that by 2020 50% of Cuban homes should be able to access the internet on broadband ADSL connections. Today there is only 27% internet access penetration in Cuba. It was also the country in America that was furthest behind in a ranking compiled by the...

After a two-year refurbishing process under Cuba’s Palco real estate agency, everything indicates the Someillan building located at the intersection of Linea and O streets, facing Havana’s Malecon ocean drive, will became one of the residential complexes for the new U.S. embassy in Cuba. The reason behind this choice is more than obvious: the building is located in Havana’s exclusive neighborhood of Vedado, near the Hotel Nacional, the Capri and Habana Libre, a mere 400 meters away from the US embassy. It has a garage, large apartments (approximately 700 square meters each) and an enviable view of the city. From the building, one can easily walk to popular nightclubs such as the Gato Tuerto or La Zorra y el Cuervo. The 30-story building was built in 1957, designed and planned by Fernando R. De Castro Cardenas and Jose A. Vila Espinosa. Facing the Someillan building, about thirty meters away, is the monument to the victims of the Maine, whose pillars once held the imperial eagle, toppled in 1961 following the Bay of Pigs invasion, a symbol of the falling out between the two nations – now a metaphor of the new political game between Washington and Havana. “We’re almost done...