CENIAI staff photo taken in 1990

CENIAI -- The Center for Automatic Interchange of Information -- was Cuba's networking link to the Soviet bloc during the pre-Internet days. The CENIAI staff understood the potential importance of networking for Cuba and were enthusiastic members of the international networking community.

This photo, showing many members of the CENIAI staff, was taken on the malecón in Havana in 1990 by Oscar Visiedo who was director of CENIAI at the time. You can see Oscar's proud comments and the names of the people by following this link to Oscar Visiedo's Facebook page. (Jesus Martinez, who was CENIAI Director six years later when Cuba connected to the Internet, is second from the left in the back row).

This was taken six years before CENIAI got their first IP connection to the Internet.

These were the Cuban Internet pioneers.

US Army jeep at the Bay of Pigs and networking pioneers in Cuba

I have done several studies of the Cuban Internet over the years, and my colleague Joel Snyder just found a bunch of pictures he took during a 1992 trip. Here are two -- more later.

We took a couple days off from interviews and presentations and went to the Bay of Pigs. Some folks were driving around in a jeep that had been abandoned by the US invaders. That is me standing in the back.

The second picture shows some of the people at CENIAI, the Cuban organization that, at the time, was responsible for pre-Internet connectivity to other Soviet block nations. They were the networking pioneers in Cuba and, in 1996, established an IP link to the Internet. Oscar Visideo has provided the names of some of the people here.

If you are curious to read more about the history of the Internet in Cuba, click here.