In response to Withow's comments about whether "Cuba's dictator allows" Cubans to use the internet....
Jeez, Louise, have you been eating too much granola lately? I'm a vegetarian, too, but I still know that Cubans don't spend quality time in chat rooms because
1) the U.S. blocks sales of computers to the island, even those intended solely for medical use, because they might communicate dangerous secrets to, uh, all those other communist nations out there (yes, that's my point--there AREN'T any). If you look into any of the attempts by Lucius Walter and Pastors for Peace to take medicine and medical computers over the U.S. border to Cuba, you'll get a better idea of this;
2) the few computers they can afford are not p.c.'s as we know them, i.e. PERSONAL computers--that's a luxury only some of us in the bourgie North can afford. Rather, they are collectively used--a.k.a. shared--and therefore no one is able to surf the net, or exchange chit-chat with bored consumers of software and tofu in the U.S. For example, I regularly communicate via e-mail with a colleague at the university of Havana. These messages arrive at the ONE terminal shared by the entire faculty and staff of the Faculty of Philosophy, History and Social Science. She responds to me within a day or two, usually, but it's clear there is always a line of people waiting to use the terminals, which are often down because of
3) the fact that there are often power outages in Havana and the rest of the island because the U.S. embargo has made it necessary to conserve energy resources. This is also why relatively few people have phone lines, and why those who do share them with those in the neighborhood who don't have phones (not unlike what is often necessary in those cushy ghettos you seem to know so much about--you might also want to check out the latest report on internet access within the U.S., compiled by the U.S. gov't, no less, which confirms that African-Americans still have the least access to the internet in no small part because they have the least regular access to telephone service).
The Cuban national media offices, which have set up online editions of Radio Havana Cuba and the PCC weekly Granma, operate world-wide from a small and often stiflingly hot office with a total of five computers in it.
In other words, whatever Fidel might or might not think about chat rooms will be irrelevant until we in the U.S. do what is necessary to stop the blockade of goods and services far more essential to the maintenance of a decent quality of life than chat-room access.
Jamie