Failing internet and fandom turned Cuban kids into fake spies

polygon.com:

For many years in Cuba, getting online to watch a show or to download the latest game meant using tools and methods reminiscent of spycraft and espionage. It went a bit like this: An information broker known as a paquetero sits in his cramped, street-facing office, surrounded by monolithic PC towers, kept cool by a couple of overworked desk fans. He looks up as the PC in front of him pings, alerting him that a 1 TB data file called a paquete has finished downloading. He pops a thumb drive into the PC’s USB slot and begins copying over the paquete’s contents. In a desk drawer, dozens of dozens more hard drives sit, waiting to be formatted, filled with the paquete’s data and doled out.

Just as the copy completes, the office door opens and a middle-aged woman walks in, a shopping bag full of the day’s groceries slung over one shoulder. The paquetero barely glances up as he snatches the freshly copied thumb drive and hands it over to the woman, who exchanges it for a small bundle of bills. The exchange is wordless, perfunctory. The woman hefts her bag slightly higher on her shoulder before turning and walking out into the blinding sunlight and sounds of the street. Later, maybe after dinner, she uploads the paquete to her pillar, the central node of her local network. From a Wi-Fi transponder strapped to a pole 15 feet above the roof of her local network administrator, the paquete unspools the lengthy list of contents out into the neighborhood, its terabyte of pure data floating invisibly out, ready to be plucked.

Somewhere within that invisible net, perhaps in an apartment a few blocks away, a teenager excuses himself from the dinner table and makes his way into his bedroom. There, he hops down in front of his PC and logs