In Cuba, Cellphone Calls Go Unanswered

A woman speaks on her cellphone, a luxury for most Cubans, who use the devices to page and text, but not to talk. (By Ramon Espinosa -- Associated Press)

"It is a very expensive habit for a Cuban," said Philip Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., who writes a blog called the Cuban Triangle. Peters said he doubted the Castro government feared that texting and paging Cubans would use the phones to organize against the state.

Standing in a two-hour line at the ETECSA shop at the Miramar Trade Center, a young woman said the Samsung cellphone she has had for more than a year was a gift from an aunt who lives in Spain. "I used it as an alarm clock," she explained, "while I saved my money to activate the line."

As every cellphone owner learns, the price of minutes in Cuba is cruel. Local calls between cellphones cost 65 cents a minute. Cellphone calls to a land line are slightly more. Calls abroad? Ordinary Cubans interviewed for this article laughed. No one calls abroad. Dialing the United States costs $2.70 a minute. Europe will set a caller back $5.85.

A couple of younger Cubans waiting in line to open an account said they have friends who have never spoken on their cellphones. But texting, at 17 cents a message, is popular.

To use their cells, Cubans purchase prepaid cards; the most common denomination is 10 convertible pesos. Several Cubans said they learned to limit their calls by buying only one prepaid card a month. There is no credit in Cuba.

And although some plugged-in sophisticates in Havana have BlackBerrys, there is no Web surfing, no YouTube watching, no e-mailing on cellphones. The bandwidth is not available for them. Cuba connects to the digital world via Italian satellite. Because of the U.S. trade embargo, there is no undersea fiber-optic cable connecting the island to Florida.

Until the changes announced by Raúl Castro last year, ordinary Cubans were not permitted to open cellphone accounts. But foreigners could -- so many of the first Cubans to have and use the devices were top government officials, special workers for foreign companies, and the hotel hustlers and street prostitutes, girlfriends and boyfriends of foreign visitors, who were given or sometimes sold a phone and an account number.

Cubans speak some of the highest-speed Spanish in Latin America, but even that cannot save them from the ticking clock and cost of cell minutes. Many Cubans don't like to give out their cellphone numbers, for fear they will be called -- and have to answer a number they don't recognize. They never use voice mail.

A Cuban with a BlackBerry explained that like the United States and Europe, Cuban society will be changed by the cellphone. "We will be reachable," said the man, who was sharing a glass of homemade wine with friends on New Year's Eve. "But we don't want to answer."