Cubans Swarm to Cell Phones
Posted on April 28, 2008 by Cami Martin
Photo: voxphoto (flickr)
In a span of just ten days, 7,400 Cubans signed new mobile phone contracts. On April 14, President Raul Castro lifted a ban restricting ordinary citizens from purchasing personal cell phones. The number of contracts is impressive, the BBC reports, considering that a cell phone in Cuba costs six times the average monthly salary.
Under Raul's brother Fidel, only government officials and people working for foreign firms were allowed to own cell phones. In addition to lifting the ban on personal cell phones, Raul Castro has lifted restrictions on DVDs, car rentals and other goods.
What more changes in Raul Castro's Cuba lie ahead?
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NYT: 'Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?'
The New York Times' Sara Corbett wrote a fascinating piece exploring the transformative potential of cell phones in a recent Sunday Magazine profile of a Nokia "human-behavior researcher" who wanders less-developed countries looking for design insights.
Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.
The article goes on to talk about the economic advantage of cellphone owners, its representation of "bottom-up economic development" and the potential of mobile-phone banking to revolutionize the industry. It's well worth a read.
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