Really? Where/how exactly did you read that in the article? All I could find that is slightly related to your comment is this:
"Although some U.S. companies, including Google, seem eager to help Cuba build up its Internet capabilities, the government still hasn't tipped its hand on how much help it wants from the United States."
I'm pretty sure Cubans don't care who's setting things up as long as they get connected at last. To me the article seems to focus on the OMG-I-AM-ONLINE aspect of things, reporting people trying to make video calls for the first time and such. That's special and that's about technology enabling people, not much about politics at this point IMHO.
I agree, OMG-I-AM-ONLINE, is pretty much the only good thing about it.
I'm cuban, I haven't lived there for a few years now. My wife and her family have been able to speak using video. I have also heard stories of people have been able to see they loved ones after many years.
Other than that, cuban internet is horrible. I have had all kinds. I worked in a 300 employees company where our internet was 196kbs. After that I worked in another with 2 mbps, but this one had more than 4000 employees across the country, so after 5 pm the internet was awesome, not so much on office hours. I never had internet at home until I quit my job to work as freelancer, then I had to pay 60 usd for 80 hrs a month on a commuted connection, which never when above 40kbps.
All of that happened after 2005. And btw, that commuted connection, was because my grandmother was born in Spain, so she had the right to have internet, I was lucky. Other cubans need to use more irregular methods.
Today it's not much better, yes, you can have internet on the park, but it is still very hard to actually use it to get work done. For that, you still need to leave the country.
Cuba has been technically "connected" for years. The question is how widespread internet data connections are among people in the country. When I've been there Internet access has been virtually non-existent and when I did try to access the internet over wifi, the bandwidth was abysmal. (i.e. < dialup)
"Although some U.S. companies, including Google, seem eager to help Cuba build up its Internet capabilities, the government still hasn't tipped its hand on how much help it wants from the United States."
I'm pretty sure Cubans don't care who's setting things up as long as they get connected at last. To me the article seems to focus on the OMG-I-AM-ONLINE aspect of things, reporting people trying to make video calls for the first time and such. That's special and that's about technology enabling people, not much about politics at this point IMHO.