Cuba Libre to Software Libre: How will the Cuban people and Cuba’s socialist revolutionary spirit be impacted by the hegemony of internet culture?

The United States government–imposed economic and commercial embargo on Cuba has cost the island more than $750 billion dollars since 1960. On December 17, 2014, nearly fifty years after formal US relations with Cuba were severed, the Obama administration announced the resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba. It is clear that this decision was not based on the acceptance of the island nation’s right to sovereignty, but on an understanding that US businesses had also lost billions of dollars per year because of the aggressive economic attacks on and isolation of the island. Since the 2014 announcement, an enormous number of US corporations, big and small, have traveled to Cuba, seeking to set up business ventures.

In December 2016, Cuba made a deal with Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which seeks to strengthen internet access on the socialist island. Cuba’s internet is known as one of the slowest connections in the world. Unlike global internet connections that run through satellite networks, Cuba’s connection runs through an undersea fiber-optic cable between the island and Venezuela. In addition to the slow connection, the cost of getting online is $2 an hour, which is very costly for people earning a $20 to $30 monthly. Slow and expensive internet connection has stunted Cubans’ ability to connect and collaborate online, which is why many of them are excited about the partnership with Alphabet's Google. Despite this excitement, Cubans are also treading with caution. Since its inception, the internet has been dominated by the language and culture of the United States and other imperialist countries of the Western hemisphere.

CubaConf 2016, Cuba’s first international open source conference, was created as a starting point in addressing the contradictions of Cuba’s access to the internet, bridging the connection with technologists on an international scale, and exploring solutions around the needs of poor and dispossessed communities in relations to the internet and tech. Between April 25 and 27, 2016, more than 200 participants from seventeen countries met in Havana, Cuba, to discuss technology and its social uses.

As Cuba opens its doors to Google — the world’s largest information empire — and other technology and internet-based companies, the open source community that organized CubaConf 2016 raises an important question: How will the Cuban people and Cuba’s socialist revolutionary spirit be impacted by the hegemony of internet culture?

Understanding Cultural Hegemony as a Weapon

“La cultura es un arma de la Revolución,” declared Hamlet López Garcias from the Cuban Institute of Cultural Research at Juan Marinello, in his opening keynote speech. To talk about “culture as a weapon in the revolution” is to understand the significant role culture plays in creating, shifting, and promoting values in a society. It is also to understand that culture has both political and economic dimensions. So, how is culture relevant to conversations around internet access and usage? To hold dominance over culture — as the United States does in so many dimensions, including the internet — is to promote the values and ideas of the system in power: capitalism. This dominance is cultural hegemony.

Cultural hegemony is a concept that was developed by Antonio Gramsci, an activist, Marxist theorist, and founder of the Italian Communist Party. In any struggle, force and violence are not the only — or even the most powerful — weapon of the elites. Rulers seek the occupation and control of the mental terrain of those to be controlled, exploited, and oppressed, hoping the subjugated classes will accept their condition and promote, consciously or unconsciously, the values and instruments of their oppressor. Religious institutions, educational systems, and mass media all play a role in maintaining such hegemony. An important part of Fidel Castro’s investment in strengthening Cuba’s culture was to ensure that the Cuban people would never accept an imperialist agenda.

Lopez, a researcher and professor in social and community psychology, shared his concerns about the impact technology will have on the Cuban culture and resistance. For example, most countries and users of software tools see programmers and software written in English as more valuable because it is the world’s dominant language. Conference attendees spoke about the importance of building programming languages that do not use English, so youth and people in their community can more readily learn and use them, instead of always having to rely on the North American market for software and tools.

Global South vs Global North Technology

From the keynote speech to the location of this public conference, the organizers of CubaConf 2016 were very intentional about the political message they wanted to set with the conference. Tech conferences normally take place in rich countries, but the organizers of the event hosted it in Old Havana, Cuba. Having the conference in a poor country with limited access to internet and old hardware really pushed the technologists in the room to step away from the traditional tech culture of showing off the latest tools and focused on the needs of the people.

The conference continued to be a space for bold conversations about the digital colonization of the internet, the monopolization of Silicon Valley, and data mining for social control. People spoke negatively about U.S. companies creating community tech spaces and learning centers advertising words like “revolutionary” and “democracy,” while at the same time their business model is based on building data monopolies. Other attendees spoke about developing tools to counter digital surveillance. One young open source enthusiast observed, “The United States is waging a digital war on Cuba and all we have are pebbles to defend ourselves. We do not have twenty-first century tools to protect ourselves from what’s coming and it is causing a huge divide amongst our youth already.”

ThoughtWorkers discussed how we use open source technology to create software tools to improve the way doctors and hospitals collect, store, and use health care documents as a way to improve health outcomes. We also heard from indigenous computer programmers who have helped people in their communities to digitize their stories, music, and other practices to help preserve their culture and history for future generations. Each session shared powerful stories of how people in the Global South are using technology to advance social development aligned with their socialist and communist values.

As a delegation coming from the United States and other countries of the Global North, we had our preconceptions of Cuba. Our delegation was surprised at the layers of misconception we had as a collective. We found that, despite the harsh economic blockade on the island, Cuba is thriving with innovation. Cuba has hospitals and medical centers in every neighborhood, students attend college for free, and the island is not isolated but has strong relationships to the international world, in part because the Cuban Revolution has served as an inspiration for many revolutions and movements around the world.

A Closer Look at Internet Usage in Cuba

To date only 34 percent of Cubans, roughly 3.5 million people, have access to the internet, despite the country commemorating its twentieth anniversary of internet connectivity in September 2016. There are several reasons why access to the internet has not expanded in Cuba. The U.S. trade embargo is a major obstacle to the development of the internet. In addition, the country experienced a severe economic depression after the fall of the Soviet Union. And since 1996, when it first connected to the internet, Cuba’s many communication lines have been bombarded with anti-government propaganda by the United States, leading the Cuban government to limit the media access individuals have over the internet.

As of September 2016, there were 1,006 access points to the internet in Cuba, of which 200 were wifi access points in public areas. Cuba plans to add eighty more wifi access points in early 2017. The

Takeaways From CubaConf 2016

Technologists in Cuba are both excited and concerned with the United States opening up to Cuba. They feel that being able to freely access and stay up to date with current technology trends is really important. The Cuban people firmly believe in open source software and criticize intellectual property (IP) and copyrights. Furthermore, when Cuban technologists talked about becoming tech entrepreneurs, they didn’t mean enriching themselves, but being able as individuals to solve problems in a creative and cost-effective way.

At the end of the conference, the technologists who attended wrote a manifesto affirming the work we want to support:

“CubaConf 2016 was born with the idea of teaching the experiences of those who work with Free Software in Cuba, between the experiences of old hardware technologies and limited broadband Internet. It was conceived as a space to discuss how we can help the Free Software in developing countries. But we found much more. 

For Cuba, CubaConf is relevant because it is in full context of complex transformations in the middle of a history of over 15 years of Latin American public policies on free software, showing the need to see technology from collaborative context, cooperation and the public. 

In three days we were able to successfully complete intense activity, collaborative spaces, lectures, and workshops around free geomatics, free hardware, education, health, community, the importance of women in technology and privacy issues. 

During the development of activities that were part of CubaConf 2016 to have exchanges of ideas on how free software is linked to social and political processes in technological practice. 

As a result of the changes that have occurred in various activities, it is concluded that there is need to strengthen free process technology from communities and social movements.”

This conference affirmed our belief in the important role technologists can play in the liberation of oppressed people everywhere. We must commit to study and critique our own industry and support humanity, rather than exploitation, digital colonization, inequality, and cultural hegemony.