A specialized ship has arrived in Venezuela carrying enough fiber optic cable to connect the South American country to Cuba, and will soon begin laying the cable along the sea floor to establish a link expected to dramatically improve telephone and Internet service for Cubans.

The ship Ile de Batz was anchored on the Venezuelan coast and will begin rolling out the cable across the Caribbean Sea in the coming days, said Jose Ignacio Quintero, a manager for Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent SA, which is carrying out the project.

He said in a telephone interview Tuesday that the ship brought the cable from the French port of Calais, and reached Venezuela on Sunday. He said the cable is scheduled to be in operation in July, and will span about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from Camuri in Venezuela to Siboney in eastern Cuba.

Cuba is the only nation in the Western Hemisphere that is not linked to the outside world by fiber optics. Instead, it relies on slow, expensive satellite links because the U.S. government's embargo has prevented most trade between the island and the United States and has made companies in other countries shy away from doing business with Cuba.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a staunch supporter of Cuba's communist government, has said he plans to be there to inaugurate the project, which is one in a growing list of joint efforts by the two countries. The cable is dubbed "ALBA 1," after the Bolivarian Alternative bloc that includes Venezuela, Cuba and other left-leaning allies.

In a speech on Saturday, Chavez called the telecommunications link a step toward greater independence, and he condemned the U.S. government's sanctions against the island nation.

Quintero said no U.S. entities or American citizens are participating in Alcatel-Lucent's project so that they would not be "exposed in any way to any type of sanction."

The company's China-based subsidiary Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell signed the contract to do the work for Telecomunicaciones Gran Caribe, a Cuban-Venezuelan joint venture owned by the countries' state telecommunications companies, Quintero said.

Cuban officials have said the project is expected to cost about $70 million. Quintero declined to comment on the projected cost.

After the cable reaches Cuba, an extension is to run from Cuba to nearby Jamaica.

The cable's takeoff point on Venezuela's coast is at a crossroads for other international telecommunications cables, including one that stretches from Brazil to Florida, Quintero said.

Alcatel-Lucent, which has experience installing similar lines in many parts of the world, will lay the optical fiber over varying terrain including an area off the Cuban coast that drops to a depth of about 19,000 feet (5,800 meters), Quintero said.

When finished, the cable will have a maximum capacity of handling about 80 million simultaneous phone calls, though some of that bandwidth will serve the Internet, Quintero said.

Having the connection will mean that callers dialing out of Cuba _ or dialing to Cuba from Venezuela _ will no longer have to wait for an available line, he said. "Users are going to have a much better experience than they have today."

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Associated Press writer Andrea Rodriguez in Havana contributed to this report.