The United States government–imposed economic and commercial embargo on Cuba has cost the island more than $750 billion dollars since 1960. On December 17, 2014, nearly fifty years after formal US relations with Cuba were severed, the Obama administration announced the resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba. It is clear that this decision was not based on the acceptance of the island nation’s right to sovereignty, but on an understanding that US businesses had also lost billions of dollars per year because of the aggressive economic attacks on and isolation of the island. Since the 2014 announcement, an enormous number of US corporations, big and small, have traveled to Cuba, seeking to set up business ventures. In December 2016, Cuba made a deal with Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which seeks to strengthen internet access on the socialist island. Cuba’s internet is known as one of the slowest connections in the world. Unlike global internet connections that run through s
The ongoing fight Apple is waging to protect its customer’s privacy from government overreach has reignited an important cultural debate in our country. Although privacy and surveillance are buzzwords in today’s current news headlines, for many of us from poor communities, privacy is a right that is consistently violated and surveillance is something we know too much about. We feel it when we walk home in our own neighborhoods, where dormant corners are saturated with CCTV cameras and police stay parked just waiting for one of us to do something wrong. We feel it when we walk into stores. Eyes follow us. Waiting for trouble. Waiting to ask us to leave as if we don’t belong. Surveillance has a different meaning to me, an Afro-Latina woman from a poor neighborhood who has experienced intimidation, harassment and aggressive law enforcement since I was a young child. As a Black Puerto Rican woman, raised in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States, I have seen injustice fi