Cuban innovation ready to explode into tech world
Cubans on the island are bristling with underused skills, innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit that could burst into the tech world if given the right tools and political climate, a South by Southwest panel said Monday.
Trade with Cuba could reach $13 billion a year if restrictions between the two countries are lifted, including the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and greatly expand the island’s outdated tech sector, according to a report led by J. Walter Intelligence, a global research group, which was released at the panel. The group spent nine months interviewing economists, industry leaders and journalists about the evolution of the Cuban economy and the prospect of business dealings with the U.S.
In January, a team of five researchers spent 10 days on the island interviewing more than 40 Cubans on a range of topics including economy, tourism and the island’s fledgling tech sector.
Improving trade with Cuba and upgrading its online and Wi-Fi capabilities will be a key topic of discussion when President Obama visits the island next week. It’ll mark the first time a sitting U.S. president visited the communist island since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
“There seems to be this enormous pent-up innovation there,” said Todd Copilevitz, director of communications strategy at J. Walter Thompson Atlanta and co-author of the study. “The Cuban government has tried so hard to not allow things to be Americanized. But now you have these 20-somethings who want to model their business on e-Bay or Yelp.”
Journalist and videographer Johnny Harris, who has traveled to Cuba to produce videos for Vox.com, said he marveled at the innovations Cubans use to stay connected with the world, even though less than 5% of the is- land’s population have access to the Internet at home. The Internet in Cuba is heavily regulated and censored by its communist government.
Facing that lack of access, Cubans have created networks known as “street nets,” where they run Ethernet cables from one home to the next, creating a matrix that’s connected not to the World Wide Web, but to personal servers and each other, he said.
“It’s this idea that they will make do even if they’re dealing with scraps and bootlegging scraps,” Harris said. “It’s really fascinating.”
Another common technique is the spread of paquete semanal, or “weekly package,” that are essentially thumb drives passed from person to person that contain the latest movies, news and Netflix offerings. This could one day make Cubans open to U.S. culture and brands should trade between the countries improve, Copilevitz said.
“They’ve had access to American culture,” he said. “They know (the Netflix series) House of
Cards, they know all the series we watch, they know all the brands.”
Cuba’s high literacy percentage — around 99.8% — and abundance of trained engineers would make it an ideal place for tech innovation to flourish, according to the report. That’s highly contingent on whether the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba is lifted, panelists said.
U.S. sentiment on the embargo is evolving, they said. A Pew Research Center survey released in July showed 72% of Americans — including 55% of conservative Republicans — favor ending it.
For the Cuba study, researchers interviewed several entrepreneurs on the island, including Robin Pedraja, who has created an online magazine, Vistar, without the government’s consent.
Vistar is seen by Cubans via thumb drives and has picked up a global following of thousands of online readers, becoming one of Cuba’s most popular online magazines, Harris said.
Pedraja runs the magazine out his home, Harris said.
“Even under these harsh conditions for businesses, (Cubans) are so used to the mechanics of making business happen,” he said. “Once that oppression is lifted, I can’t imagine what they’re going to think up.”
“The Cuban government has tried so hard to not allow things to be Americanized. But now you have these 20-somethings who want to model their business on e-Bay or Yelp.” Todd Copilevitz, director of communications strategy at J. Walter Thompson Atlanta