Cuba: Punishes Students For Internet Usage

Apparently enterprising students ran chat rooms and sold internet access to fellow students, so the Castroite computer police suspended them for five years. Story Here

Five Cuban university students were suspended for up to five years for violations that their information technology school deemed ''very grave'': running chat rooms and using school servers to sell Internet access to others.

Cuba's Internet police, the Office of Information Security, caught the students at the University of Information Sciences (UCI) using school property to charge $30 a month for stolen Internet passwords, according to a video of a campus meeting, smuggled out of the island.

Critics of Fidel Castro's government say the video illustrates the lengths to which young Cubans are willing to go to access information in a place where the government tightly controls all information. A university whose dean says in the video is aimed at ''training the guerrillas of the new era'' instead found its students using their skills to hack their way to the outside world.