Well, that was the first thing I could think of. You could confirm that the celery parts are found on your python path by running python interactively and manually trying
from celery import task
But come to think of it, if that were the problem you would already have seen something blow up.
Hm, what version of the celery library do you have installed? When I look at my lib/python/site-packages over here I've got django_celery-3.0.11-py2.7 and celery-3.0.11-py2.7. On my Ubuntu system, the version of celery I can install with apt-get is quite a bit older - 2.4.2 - and if that's what you have, that may be the source of the difference.
If so, you could try simply removing the parentheses from next to the @task decorator so that it says
@task
instead of saying
@task()
and see if that makes it start to work. That may not be an ideal solution, though, since we don't know what else may be different from one version of celery to the next.
If your version of celery is much older than 3.0, my guess is that that's the problem an that you'll need to update with a more recent one, either from pip or from a custom Debian repository.
(By the way, pip can fetch packages over HTTP, which usually passes through firewalls OK. You should be able to apt-get install python-pip to get it from the debian repository, and then use pip search and pip install to get other Python packages.)
I hope something there helps,
Joe