>>Castro's speech at Monterrey
>>
>>March 22, 2002 (From Granma Online)
>>
>>The rich world should condone their foreign debt and grant them fresh soft
>>credits to finance development
>>
>>SPEECH BY HIS EXCELLENCY DR. FIDEL CASTRO RUZ, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF
>>CUBA, AT THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FINANCING FOR DEVELOPMENT, IN
>>MONTERREY, MARCH 21, 2002, YEAR OF THE HEROES IMPRISONED BY THE U.S. EMPIRE
>
>Ah. Granma Online...
>
>Am I the only one to find this sickly hilarious in view of:
>
>
>Cuba Bans PC Sales to Public
>By Julia Scheeres
>
>2:00 a.m. March 25, 2002 PST
>
>The Cuban government has quietly banned the sale of computers and
>computer accessories to the public, except in cases where the items
>are "indispensable" and the purchase is authorized by the Ministry
>of Internal Commerce.
>
>News of the ban was first reported by CubaNet, an anti-Castro site
>based in Miami. According to the organization's correspondent in
>Havana, the merchandise -- which had been sold freely in the capital
>since mid-2001-- was yanked off store shelves in January.
I don't know if the Wired news of the ban is true, but a ban on the sale of personal computers could hardly affect ordinary Cubans, in that they couldn't afford one -- much less one plugged into the Internet -- with or without a ban. To begin with, Cubans have poor access to phone lines:
***** The [Cuban] government blames the controls on economic limitations, not politics.
"Technologically it is impossible to connect all those who are interested," said Sergio Perez, director of the government office that maintains the country's official Web site, in a rare interview.
Although Cuba has used foreign investment to expand and modernize its antiquated telecommunications grid, it still had just 4.4 phones per 100 people in 2000, half as many as Mexico.
<http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-000021532mar25.story?coll=la-headlines-technology> *****
As Cuba is unable to invest enough into modernizing its telecom grid, etc., to make the ownership of home phones & wired personal computers universal, it is approaching computing in a good old collectivist fashion:
***** They have established a nationwide organization of Youth Computer Clubs (YCCs). In February, 1992 there were YCCs in over 130 cities. They are reminiscent of Bob Albrecht's People's Computer Company (PCC) and similar experiments dating back to the 1960s in the United States. Like the PCC, they have computers running games, drawing programs, and other software, which the children may use in a relatively unstructured manner. Additionally, the YCCs offer classes on using professional application packages and programming. Advanced classes cover sophisticated topics such as C++.
The Cuban YCCs also operate a network using a 386-based PC with a 2400-baud modem running Unix in their headquarters in Havana. Over 30 of their locations now have computers with modems, which are used to dial Havana to send and receive mail. The YCC computer in Havana transfers their mail to another PC in Havana which exchanges mail daily with Canada. Thus children and adults in rural Cuba can exchange email with people throughout the world.
<http://som.csudh.edu/faculty/cis/lpress/ieee.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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