so i brought a bunch of stuff. the first thing people i was staying with was ways, give me all your dvd's. what are you going to do with them? taking them cross the street. what are you going to do across the street? there is a dvd rental agency. what it is, somebody in their house, has a computer, they make a copy of your dvd. give it back to you and make your dvd available for $1 a week as a rental. they had everything. they had old cuban movies. american movies from the '50s. it was better than blockbuster, no offense. and it was, it was really amazing. so, and the deal was, since i had given them back free access to my dvd's i could get free rentals. so i was very happy with that.

internet. that is also very good. a lot of misinformation about the internet. i dug into this including interviewing government officials about the internet. the popular myth is the internet is banned in cuba and you have these heroic bloggers who sneak into hotels and pretend to be tourists and blog away and sneak out. one of them was given a humanitarian award and freedom of speech award, et cetera. internet is the accessable and painfully slow by cuban standards. you can go to the post office, telecommunications office, doubles as a the post office and for, equivalent, maybe three cucs, $3, you get an hour's worth of internet time. it is dial up connection. so that is pretty. you don't get a lot of $3. $3 is a lot of money in cuba

if you're on a regular salary. or you can go to tourist hotel spend 7, $8, far a fast connection but i could afford it because i had dollars. some people have internet connections in their homes, internet connections as we have here and some have intranet services, which is, for example, doctors and medical workers have access to a server that provides them with medical information but you can't do a general internet search, for example. so i gathered all this information. i talked to lot of people. by the way, for the internet supposedly being outlawed, everybody in cuba has an e-mail account. whether they can check it or everybody gave me hotmail account or i can't account. so, the problem is, cuba doesn't have a cable connection that connects them to a phone system which enables them to get fast internet connection.

the cable to the united states is cut off from them. this is intentional. so on the one hand denouncing them for not making internet available. other than they're making it impossible to do so. so now they're running a cable to venezuela, probably two years, if everything goes right they have more access. it is a technical problem which is quite real that limits the internet access. the real test will come when internet is more widely available, when you can get it in your house, go to any internet cafe at reasonable price and get a decent connection, will sites be blocked? and right now the "miami herald" spanish edition is blocked. you can't access it. i did find a couple other sites. basically people, the sites that the cuban government thinks are propaganda against them they block. i'm sure if there is dissident group that tries to set up a web page it will

be blocked. there is no question there is internet censorship, it not a wide plot to prevent anybody getting anything on internet. once you go to the post office you can google most everything you can get here just certain sites are blocked. question in the back there. yeah. >> how much of the cuban economy basically the u.s. remits contribute to? >> a whole lot. several billion dollars. remittances as a whole, much of which comes from the u.s. because they get remittances from venezuela and spain and other parts of the world but a lot is from the u.s. it is ironic, isn't it, the people who denounce the cuban government the most, their friends and relatives here in miami, and south florida are helping, and help the cuban economy tremendously when it was in its most dire straits. right now, if you send dollars, and again, i may

not be saying, for folks in the other parts of the country may not be new but not people in miami. there is limit $1200 a year anybody can send to their relatives. there is basically a western union type service that will send it there. you can go a few blocks from the restaurant and find a guy who will send money above and beyond that. everybody knows that it goes on because the family members need it and why shouldn't you be able to send money to family members? the cuban government charges an extra 10% fee on top of conversion fee for anything received in dollars. this is a heady travel hint for anyone plan to go to go to cuba, bring euros or canadian dollars because they don't charge that fee. what the cuban government is saying we'll charge 10% on top of conversion rate because it is coming in dollars and a way of thumbing their noses at is

policy. so yes, remittances play a tremendous role in the, in the cuban economy. >> we have time for two more questions, please. >> let's see, in the back, yeah. >> can you turn looking glass the other and speak a little bit about what cubans perceptions and attitudes are towards cuban-americans versus other cube man communities in other parts of the world? >> very interesting question. there's different views. and i think it's changed over years. at one time cubans here were reviled as gazans, worlts, counter revolutionries. anybody he left the country was a counter revolutionary. there is still some of that attitude. particularly since the early '90s and that economic crisis. it's very handy to have somebody, a relative who lives in miami who is willing to send even, $100 a month, will allow you to

live pretty decently in cuba if you receive that in hard currency. i think people look to cuban-americans in hopes that they can help change u.s. policy. i think one of the big changes that is going to take place if the u.s. does lift the embargo will be for cuban-americans to become organized to oppose the line of hard-liners, doing everything possible to strangle the economy in cuba. i think cubans look to that as some hopes in that regard. then in a broader sense people are really hopeful about. there was a lot of hope that obama in the election would make for change in the u.s.. >> are there higher expectations held on cuban-americans then, than cubans in spain or cubans in other parts of the world? >> i see what you're saying. i think there is. first of all the largest exile community is here in the united states, right? also politically they play a much more key role.

so i think the expectations are higher hoping for change from cuban-americans. time for one more. >> [inaudible]. >> i will repeat the question. maybe we could let her ask one too. question is, what about violent crime in cuba? i did a about that one time. i went to hospitals in havana how many deaths from gunshots? actually i said, how many murders do you have? at that time of the year i was doing, like 75 murders, of any kind, actually murders and suicides in the last year. and of those, three were from gunshots. they were all military people who committed suicide. they were in the middle of a crime wave.

there were robberies about going on and burglaries. and so, when i asked people about the, the crime wave, because they had been used to having virtually no crime at all. when somebody burglarizes your house, they were very upset. when someone tried to steal your in front of your house, pretty much everyday occurrence in parts of the united states, they were really outraged. so the government did do a big crackdown on crime. this was in the late '90s. and apparently it turned things around because, certainly on the perception level, they don't have a feeling. people can still, women could walk late at night in the a cuban city and not worry about being raped or assaulted. you don't see a lot of street crime, certainly not serious crime. there is no bank robberies or other serious crime of that kind. they're concerned about, things on level of burglaries for example, break-ins. there was a woman who was

going to ask a question. we'll make the that the last one. who was it? yeah, go ahead. >> to me, a dictatorship is a dictatorship is a dictatorship whether it is on a level of scale of 1 to 10, you know. but when it's happening to your country and your people, whether it was the batista dictatorship of six years or fidel castro dictatorship of 50 years, now, it goes to the deep. my question is, oh, and, i'm sure that if you went back to the world health organization or united nations statistics for 1958 cuba had one of the highest literacy rates in latin america and one of the lowest infant mortality rates. it was a country used to export beef to for goodness sakes, so.

so what it was replaced it seems to me with a communist, stalinist system of economics where it controls all the means of production, from your corner barber shop, until, the highest, you know, biggest sugar mill is controlled by the government, with a few farmers exceptions. how do you see the cuban government changing that around? because there are no technocrats that have traveled to poland and yugoslavia and to all the soviet bloc countries that have fallen. and is there any indication that they want to democratize the system at all that you see? it still continues to be a dictatorship but, you know, a pretty good because the cubans kind of, you know, make do with what they can

but you live there a month, i'm sure you couldn't take for 50 years. you know? it's okay for us who live over here but for them, they have been, you know, when you were there part of sds, students at the universities in cuba were protesting invasion of czech czech. -- czechoslovakia. they were being sent to angola, for christ's sakes. students were over there were pretty active but not for very long. went directly to jail, do not pass go. >> you raised quite a few points. >> yeah. i'm trying to figure out is anything there? the change has to come from there? >> that's absolutely true. >> the united states has always putting in their -- they say but the change has to come from there. >> yeah. >> is there any indication? >> there will be debate, not so much when fidel dies but

after raul dies, i think there will be a debate within the communist party and within the society broader how many, how much economic reforms to make. and stemming from that political reforms as well. but i don't think it will go in -- >> [inaudible] >> some people think you can, i'm predicting there will be a bigger debate about that and that the minute you have a debate about economic reform, if you're having the debate, it imprice room for debate which means that is relatively political more freedom. i think what's impossible, i think, the press is example i write about it in the book, it's horrible. it so bad it is unreadable. i've been in a lot of countries with unreadable press and cuba ranks up there in the top of the world having a horrible press. they could be doing things like investigative reporting and uncovering ineptitude and corruption and all that kind of stuff if someone

gave okey-doke to do that. i would like to see that. maybe you can invite me back after raul dices and we'll continue the conversation because i think at this point it very hard to know how much the change will come. thank you all very, very much for having me. [applause] >> reese erlich reports regularly for national public radio, latino usa and other outlets. he is the author of, the iran today and coauthor of target iraq. for more on reese erlich and his work visit p3books.com, "dateline havana". >> here is look at upcoming book fairs and festivals over the next few months.

>> william andrews, english professor at the university of north carolina, and regina,on