Video game developed by the Youth Computer Club

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro have inspired a Cuban shooter game, Gesta Final

Gesta Final is a keyboard operated game developed by a 12-person team directed by Haylin Corujo, head of video game studies for Cuba's Youth Computer Club.

It is intended to teach history as well as entertain and will be sold on the island, which means it will be relatively cheap. We have suggested that Cuba could exploit the ALBA-1 cable to serve Spanish language education -- could Cuba become a game exporter?

Has there been any reverse piracy yet -- have copies turned up in the US?

Fidel likes the Internet, but does that matter?

A recent story on Fidel Castro's 87th birthday calls him a "soldier of ideas on the Internet," who, according to his biographer and book editor, Katuiska White, surfs the Internet for "personality profiles, maps, monographs, data, anecdotes and recollection of events."

This took me back to the early Internet days, when the role of the Internet was being debated in Cuba. What was Fidel's view of the Internet?

One clue is his support of the formation of the Youth Computer Clubs (YCC), several of which had email and Usenet access in the pre-Internet days. This article recounts his financial and policy support of the clubs. As shown below, he expressed his envy of the young people at the dedication of the YCC headquarters, which occupied what had been the Sears store in Havana.

Fidel Castro dedicates the YCC headquarters

This post by Omar Pérez Salomón includes several other quotes and actions indicating that Fidel continued to favor education in computer science and the use of information technology (though perhaps not the Internet).

On the other hand, government leaders like Raúl Castro and Ramiro Valdés have warned of dangers the Internet poses.

Raúl Castro and Ramiro Valdés

The state of the Internet in Cuba today leads one to conclude that, whatever Fidel may say or believe, widespread access of the citizens to the Internet has not been a priority of the government.

Anne Nelson's visit to Havana

Anne Nelson, who teaches New Media and Development Communication at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs has described her experience with the Internet during a trip to Havana.

The post is quite interesting. She talks with a lot of young people about the Internet, accessing the Internet from hotels, Cuban policy and more. Her post also includes pictures she took, like this one of the Youth Computer Club headquarters building.

I was struck by the contrast between her visit there and mine nearly twenty years ago, when the Internet was fresh and the networking community optimistic. She was turned away at the door -- no foreigners were allowed in and no photographs. When I visited one evening, I was welcomed. I spent a couple hours hanging out and had a long meeting with the director. I also recall watching US satellite TV on one of those old RGB TV projectors and snapped this photo of a framed note from Fidel, written when he dedicated the Youth Computer Clubs in 1991.

I came back later during the day and watched kids -- mostly playing computer games -- and computer classes in progress. I also recall a warm reception at the Youth Computer Club booth at the Informatica conference and exposition:

Times have changed :-(. Check out Anne's post -- you'll like it.

Guest post on learning about computers in Cuba

This 1991 note, in which Fidel Castro writes that he feels envy, hangs in a frame on the wall of the Youth Computer Club (YCC) headquarters in the one-time Sears building in Havana. Fidel dedicated the headquarters and supported the Youth Computer Clubs, where kids could play games, take classes and send domestic email. The YCCs are now in 611 locations around the island and have produced over 2.25 million course graduates (adults and kids).

Alberto, who was one of the kids at the YCC in Havana, recently left a comment on the About post for this blog. Since it gives us a picture of a young person's access to computing a decade ago, I asked if I could copy it as a post and he said "yes." Here it is:

"I lived in Old Havana until 2001 – at the time, I was starting High School and recall that during my last year there my school managed to get their hands on a handful of desktop computers. Of course, internet connectivity was unheard of, but people were highly fascinated with the prospects of technology.

Access to those computers was extremely restricted, even though one couldn’t do much with them (or knew what to do with them). The room they were in seemed more like a small fortress than a computer lab – doors were locked from the outside with heavy chains and windows blocked with metal bars (despite being on the third floor of the building). Fascinating times.

Through a family friend I managed to land a basic “computer science” class at a center in Old Havana – the name of the institution escapes me, but I clearly recall it was one of those rare buildings with blasting air conditioning. That aspect alone was worth the 15-blocks walk from my apartment to the center. The class tried to teach the very basic functionalities of Windows – right & left clicks, creating a new folder, word documents, etc. I can’t say I learned much.

I did have a friend whose father was a college professor who had some engagement with Etecsa. They somehow managed to get a personal computer into their house, with dialup internet access and everything. It was indeed a very well kept secret. Sadly, most of the time was spent trying to reconnect to the internet as the connection was extremely unreliable. He went on to study computer science in Havana and today works in the field there. From what he tells me, his job is now a large waste of resources. As he describes it, “they pretend to pay me and I pretend to do work.”

On my side, it wasn’t until I arrived to the states that I truly learned to use a computer. Two years after my arrival (while still learning English), I was doing web development and running a local site centered around education and social gatherings. Two years later, I went off to the University of Chicago for Economics and continued to work on web ventures while there. To date I’ve worked on many web projects, mostly in the entertainment space and other more serious ones: hello.webicator.com (current project, under development). This service may be of interest to readers of this blog, LP.

Today I work with a group of economists at a bank in New York, but follow the topic of internet penetration closely, not only in Cuba, but in Latin America as a whole. Data from the World Bank suggest that Latam is today where the US was at the end of the 1990s in terms of internet penetration. However, the pace of growth appears to be greater than it was in the US, which makes sense intuitively given that the technology already exists – now it only needs to become cheaper and for countries to obtain the infrastructure to sustain it.

Cuba is sadly a very different story since politics plays such a large role. I suspect that the spread of internet, when it comes, could potentially lead to a shift in mentality – with a greater sense of awareness about life outside of Cuba, will arguably emerge a greater desire for change. When the day comes, I am sure tighter content filters will be implemented, but individuals will always find ways to circumvent them, as they do in China. Indeed a very sensitive topic."

If you are or were a student in Cuba, was Alberto's experience similar to yours?