Ramón Díaz-Marzo
HAVANA, July - Recently I went to the Palace of Computation in Havana with
high hopes.
When the Revolution, a word often used here as a synonym for the Cuban
government, decided that informatics was of crucial importance for the
development of the country, it established the Palace as the center of the
national information revolution. For all intents and purposes, as I discovered,
the Palace and the project have been abandoned since the last decade of the last
century.
Yet, when I went in, I was sure I could find a dictionary of synonyms, and a
regular Spanish dictionary, on 3.5 inch diskettes.
I told the young woman sitting behind a table by the door what I wanted. She
picked up the phone and said: "There was a comrade here who wanted..."
"Not was, is," I corrected her gently.
She told me the comrade who takes care of the library was fulfilling her
lunch schedule.
"Could I perhaps go wait in the library?"
She looked at me doubtfully, and finally decided I could go up.
"Where?
"Up the stairs, first floor, first door on the left."
The library at the Palace of Computation, at the corner of Reina and Amistad
Streets, in central Havana, does not have a data bank. In the mostly empty
shelves, there were three or four books, in English. Nothing else.
The employees I talked to told me the library was bare. "We haven't
received any donations in the last few years. The only information we have is
stored in 5.25 inch disks, which are no longer used. We would have to tranfer it
to 3.5 inch diskettes, but the only computer we have that can handle 5.25 inch
disks is broken," said one.
As I left I saw several people, young and old, in front of the computers in
the ground floor hall. I headed to the Computer Club in Old Havana.
There I was told they don't have the dictionary I was looking for, or 3.5
inch diskettes, or a word processing program, for that matter. In any case, the
machines had collectively collapsed as a result of a virus brought in by some
user.
I just heard the news that in a few months, the government will inaugurate a
highly sophisticated computation center in the priviledged educational enclave
at Cubanacán, where specially selected youths will receive instruction in
all aspects of computation.
Versión
original en español
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