Cuba report

Here are two excellent articles about Cuba. The first one ran in the Sun-Sentinel today. It's about Fidel Castro's Internet revolution. Castro has built about 600 computer school around the country trying to spark ab information industry.

The Youth Club reflects the complexities of Cuba's technology policy. The government is not only trying to teach basic computing as part of an overall push on education, but also wants to develop a formidable software industry.

For most Cubans, however, the ambitious tech plans stop at the Internet. Cubans are allowed to use e-mail and an intranet of government Web sites on topics from the weather to literature, but access is expensive for the average worker. Typically the government approves Internet access only for foreigners and a select group of Cubans. These include certain officials, academics, journalists and employees of foreign companies -- though some people use the accounts of friends or relatives.

At a March ceremony in Havana marking the 15th anniversary of a national computer education center, Castro said Cuba needs to get used to a "new world that keeps changing around us." At the same event he promoted the idea of grooming software developers at the University of Computer Sciences, a campus about 50 miles south of Havana that aims to attract the country's brightest tech students and teachers.

It's almost amusing to watch totalitarian regimes join the modern world without making consessions on the thing that keeps them behind, their politics. Castro, try as he might, will never accomplish a software industry if he keeps access to the internet restricted. Cubans can't access the internet, only an intranet with information about the island and similar inoffensive stuff. Most ironic is that the internet could actually transcend the embargo, since even the United States can't sanction it, but Castro is too afraid of its freedoms to take advantage of the benefits.

The second was in the Herald yesterday, I think. It's a good account of the children of Cuban elites and the lives they make outside the country.

They are known as quedaditos, which means ''those who stayed'' but implies the under-the-radar lives they lead to avoid the whiff of dissidence that might stick to their decision to live outside the communist system.

''If you say something here, over there in Cuba they'll find out and you'll never see your family again,'' said a Cuban lawyer in her 30s who lives in Madrid. 'For example, if you put in the newspaper my name and quote me saying, `Cuba is a load of crap,' if that's published, they'll say: 'You said what? You're never going back to Cuba again.' ''

So the quedaditos try to live quiet lives and remain largely unknown outside the close-knit group of Cubans in their same situation.

Cross posted from my blog.