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Facing the Challenge of
New Tecnologies in Cuba

class and gender in Cuba and the world

Sander Alexei Álvarez Matute
Computing specialist
Havana, Cuba

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espite the Cuban population’s impressive, increasing, intellectual potential,
our country is suffering from a lamentable gap and lack of progress regarding worldwide
technological advancement. This is due to the impediments and obstacles resulting from the
State’s monopoly and strict control over information and modern technology. This model has
made Cuba the Western country with the lowest
level of development and access to more advanced technologies, which seriously jeopardizes
its economic and cultural future.
This absolute disconnect with reality was overtly
revealed in a presentation about this important

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topic made by economist and scholar Juan Triana
Cordoví to officials at the Interior Ministry.
Triana Cordoví made reference to the different
economic realities affecting the country yet, when
touching upon the subject of computing, he
sounded totally unfamiliar with the fact that the
government’s prevailing interests include dominating and politically controlling access to technology.
This “specialist’s” idealized perspective when
speaking to those whose function it is to control
access to information, confirms many of the reasons why Cuba endures—and is the victim of—
modernity’s great contradiction. In talking about