martes, 23 de junio de 2009

Clive Thompson on Cuba's Potential Tech Boom

Clive Thompson on Cuba's Potential Tech Boom
By Clive Thompson Email 15 hours ago

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.

Email clive@clivethompson.net

Clive Thompson on Cuba's Potential Tech Boom (23 June 2009)
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-07/st_thompson

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