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be able to satisfactorily use the Internet and
World Wide Web. Many governments have developed plans aimed at decreasing the digital divide in collaboration with the private sector.
Thus, not only the need for access has been suggested; so has use and the appropriateness of
these new technologies, because they can indeed
impact development processes and combat underlying the other lacunae.
Support for developing and using freeware is essential for helping decrease the digital divide. Information Technologies require that everyone can
provide a place for encounter, a new public sphere
where civil society can define and understand itself in its diversity, and where political structures
are subject to public debate and can be evaluated
for their actions. This would guarantee the participation of people in the most excluded social categories with their gender, regional and social perspectives.
In the Cuban case, this divide has a number of
unique characteristics. All political systems exist
with inequalities and some level of backwardness, but the Cuban one creates these and concomitantly solidifies its power and mechanisms
of domination precisely through those inequalities and disadvantages.

Drawing by Yasser

Technological backwardness is one with the system, because it constrains and atrophies possibilities for individual and societal development. Excessive control, paternalism, and the State’s monopoly on information, services and other spaces
for social or economic development result in
enormous difficulties and lack of access or use of

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new technologies and their cultural, economic
and social benefits.
As is always the case, the Cuban government presents itself as the guardian of personal and social
development. Yet, all it does is activate mechanisms and designs to affirm and strengthen its
control and hegemony. It is conscious of the fact
that an informed and connected person is a much
freer one.
Thus, the design of all mass technology and communications education in the island’s educations
system, social access through so-called Young
Computing and Electronics Clubs, and the training of high-level specialists in new technologies
are nothing more than new propaganda glitz that
in no way can combat the backwardness and inequality from which we suffer in this area.
Broad, dispossessed and socially vulnerable population groups in Cuba are hopeless victims of the
digital divide, which is combined with the enormous economic shortages and vicissitudes they
face, and in a society with the lowest level of real
connectivity, access and coverage via landline
and mobile telephony in the western world and
many developing countries.
These realities led our brother Rafel Campoamor
to create the NGO EmpoderaCuba. As an information systems specialist with a number of years
of work experience in important, European companies and corporations, Campoamor traveled
three continents taking knowledge of the new
technologies to the most remote communities and
saw the enormous value they have for promoting
socio-cultural development and the insertion of
marginalized groups in economic progress and
modernity.
Sensitive to the reality that the hegemony and intolerance of the Cuban authorities condemn Cuban society, in general, and the most marginalized
communities, in particular, to unprecedented
backwardness and difference, Campoamor proposed to himself the creation of a institution that
could activate more efficient mechanisms and designs for the technological empowerment of all
Cubans, without distinction, from within and
from without the island. The conditions for this
would include respect for individual freedoms
and universally acknowledged rights. This should