Cuba Tuesday launched the ECURED, its own Wikipedia-style open online encyclopedia with 19,345 items of reference articles, biographies and academic works.

The new site (www.ecured.cu) is operated by the Youth Computer Club, an affiliate of the Communist Youth Union that runs more than 600 facilities nationwide to offer free computer classes, officials said.

The ECURED said it is "collaborative and supportive," and a "relatively unique encyclopedia with the desire to create and disseminate knowledge from a standpoint of decolonization, objectivity and truth."

Iroel Sanchez, an official at the Office for the Computerization of Society told Xinhua that the website is a "Cultural Revolution" for the country, and that thousands of young people are working all over the island nation for the first time to research and write about the history, geography and society of their birth-place.

ECURED also has a portable, easy to update version that will be used for schools and other institutions not connected to the Internet.

Currently only 2.9 percent of Cubans have Internet access, but the country is building a undersea cable network with Venezuelan support in a bid to make the data, images and voice transmission "three thousand times faster".

VietNamNet/Xinhuanet