My parents are in Cuba and I tried calling them on the phone but it didn’t connect. So I started wondering: can one call Cuba from the US? And are we going to get a black mark against us in some DofD file for trying to call, in case one of us applies for US citizenship in two years?
By the way, my parents wrote in an email that the Internet connection in Cuba is as slow and expensive as it was 10 years ago.
Some things don’t change.
I am pretty sure you can call Cuba from the US, but it may be quite expensive. You also probably will get a mark in some dossier, but I wouldn’t worry about it.
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This forum run by Lonely Planet has some discussions for options to call Cuba from the US. It looks like you have to be careful, but it should be easy to route a call through Canada to Cuba.
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Why risk calling it at all? I would understand it only if, heaven forbid, parents had been in a very dangerous situation. You will have plenty of time to talk with them later to endanger entire US citizenship for X minutes of can-wait-for-later conversation.
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But I really like talking to my parents.
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Now you and N may not need citizenship too much, but things change and, who knows, in Y years you may sorely need it.
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N does need it because renewing a Russian passport requires inhuman resilience and is quite impossible if one has a job.
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I can’t imagine how calling your parents would make any difference to any government acting on any kind of rational princip…… oh my god, you’re screwed……
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Yes, I just tried explaining to my students why the embargo still existed in spite of costing between 1,5 and 4,8 billion to the US. I also had to explain why the only 2 nations voting for the embargo at the UN against the other 188 nations are the US and Israel. This took the whole class into a very different direction.
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Which embargo?
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Clarissa, I just looked at rates on a VoIP provider based in Montréal, and they do show calling rates to Cuba, but they are ghastly expensive.
They are showing calling rates of USD 0.8831 per minute. This is incredibly high for VoIP — I could call a mobile in Norway on VoIP.ms for a quarter of the price.
However, if you can figure out how to make VoIP work for you, especially “bring your own device” kinds of VoIP, it should be possible to make those calls to Cuba, but I would keep in mind that you’ll be spending just short of 1 USD/minute for those calls.
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Also, while I’m thinking of it, they offer points of presence in Canada, so if you are worried about the packet switched telephone network (PSTN) traces within the US pointing to a call going from the US to Cuba, simply set your PoP on the provider to somewhere in Canada. I believe this VoIP operator specifically offers Montréal and Toronto as options.
Your UDP/IP Internet packets would traverse the Internet from the US to Canada, but the call itself would originate from telephone network equipment in Canada. While the Five Eyes could spy on your call, US regulations would prohibit monitoring calls of “US Persons”, although I think Fort Meade doesn’t give much of a toss about the actual laws of the land these days …
Best of luck getting it all to work out.
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Wow, this is really expensive. Of course, calling from Cuba is even worse. I remember a very short conversation with Canada costing me $32! That was really shocking.
Thank you for researching this for me.
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Canada calls are about 0.01 to 0.02 USD/minute with most VoIP operators — making North American VoIP calls isn’t expensive.
Calling anywhere outside the States on a normal American landline or, heaven forbid, a US-based mobile is pricey because the telecoms want blood out of stones.
This is really another version of “You’re crazy enough to pay retail?” 🙂
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I’m now really glad the calls on my mobile didn’t go through. I don’t even want to imagine how much they could have cost.
And I really prefer saying “mobile” to “cell phone.”
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