Cuba's Potential Tech Boom

by Clive Thompson

Wired Magazine: 17.07 - June 22, 2009

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-07/st_thompson

    "In sheer human potential, Cuba is an economic

    and technological miracle waiting to happen."

Back in the '80s, Ireland was one of the poorest

countries in Western Europe, with unemployment as high

as 17 percent. But the scrappy nation had one

advantage: It always invested in education, so while

the Irish were poor, they were smart.

American tech companies like Dell and Intel eventually

realized the island was full of underemployed brainiacs

and opened up offices there. The Irish were soon

performing tasks such as developing software and

working in pharmaceutical manufacturing and research.

By the late '90s, the influx of jobs turned the country

around: Ireland was filled with people who were smart

and also wealthy, among the richest in Europe. The

Celtic Tiger was born.

Is there another country today with the same potential,

one that could erupt in an intelligence-driven boom?

Yep, though it's probably not one you'd expect: Cuba.

I visited Cuba a few years ago and was surprised at how

much it reminded me of Ireland. Everyone was smart,

skilled, and seemed hungry for opportunities to improve

their lives - perhaps even more so than the Irish had

been back in the '80s, because they'd spent decades

under Fidel Castro's human-rights-crushing thumb. Now

that President Obama is talking about opening up trade,

Cuba experts predict that the country could explode

with creativity and entrepreneurial innovation.

"There's tremendous potential," says Gustav Ranis, an

economic-development expert at Yale.

Like the '80s Irish, Cubans are eerily well educated,

particularly for such an impoverished people. Education

is one thing Castro has done right: 99.8 percent of

adults are literate, and nearly a third have graduated

from high school, many with the sort of vocational

training in mechanics and farming the US foolishly let

slip a generation ago. Based on UN statistics, one out

of five young adults in Cuba graduates college.

Cubans also have a hacker mindset. They've needed it to

handle the constant privation. They keep 50-year-old

cars running with cobbled-together parts. They cadge

gray-market Internet access by making friends with

local officials - among the anointed few the government

allows online. When Soviet food supplies vanished,

Cubans turned to urban gardening.

If the US embargo ends, Cuba could become an Ireland-

like high tech outsourcing resource. "They've got all

the skills you need for software programming," says

Kenneth Flamm, professor of international affairs at

the University of Texas at Austin. Cubans, many of whom

study English in school, would be particularly good at

"localizing" US software for Latin American markets,

Flamm says. Plus, Havana is only an hour's flight from

Miami, making it convenient for offshoring.

Medicine would be another potential area of growth.

Cuban health care, particularly preventive care, has

been amazingly good; Cuban life expectancy is on a par

with that of the US. The country has poured millions

into biotech, creating vaccines for meningitis B and

hepatitis B. "Biotech and health tourism have really

serious potential," says Vicki Huddleston, a Brookings

Institute expert on Cuba.

Mind you, white-collar jobs aren't enough. Cuba has

more than 11 million people, and gainfully employing

that many requires tons of jobs in textiles, light

industry, and agriculture. Organic farming,

interestingly, could be big: Because the embargo has

made it hard to get pesticides, Cuba has used

comparatively little of them, which means much of the

island is organic-ready, so long as it avoids the

"resource curse" and stays away from too much mining

and oil drilling. Retaining the social welfare net

would also be crucial.

Obviously, this is blue-sky thinking. To really open up

trade, the Castros will have to liberalize their

repressive regime. (An independent journalist I met

while visiting in January 2003 was arrested two months

later.) There's no telling if or when that will happen.

But let's hope it does. In sheer human potential, Cuba

is an economic and technological miracle waiting to

happen.

[Clive Thompson writes about science and technology

regularly for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and

New York magazine. He is the video-game columnist for

Slate, and covers finance for Details, the men's

magazine. He also regularly comments on the cultural

impact of science and technology for NPR, CNN, the

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and many other media

outlets. He publishes the blog collisiondetection.net,

and is a two-time National Magazine Award winner in

Canada. In 2002/2003, he was Knight Science Journalism

Fellow at MIT. His writing has been widely

anthologized, including in the 2003 Best American

Science Writing.]