How communism turned Cuba into an island of hackers and DIY engineers
Just outside Havana, in the childhood bedroom of illustrator Edel Rodriguez, a washing machine engine welded to a boat propeller has become a makeshift fan. This kind of cobbled-together contraption is common in Cuba. So are stoves that run on diesel from trucks, satellite dishes made of garbage can lids and lunch trays, and taxi signs consisting of old fuel canisters.
Cubans are masters of invention. They have to be. In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower slapped the first trade embargo on the country, and in 1961, just before leaving office, he broke off diplomatic relations. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the loss of oil imports, shortages got worse. The country lost about 80 percent of its imports, and the economy shrank by 34 percent.
A market started with people who can rig things up, said Rodriguez, who was born and raised in the small Cuban farm town, El Gabriel. In 1980, at age 9, he fled to Miami with his family on the Mariel boatlift, and he now lives in New Jersey. Its what Cubans have been in the last 60 years just really inventive with things.
Ernesto Oroza, a Cuban-born designer who now lives in Miami, said several factors played a role in the DIY phenomenon. A high percentage of Cubans had engineering degrees, thanks to a system of free education. Many became intimately familiar with the mechanics of the standardized socialist products found in most homes the Soviet-designed Aurika washing machine, for example, and the Orbita fan. Plus, no one was untouched by the crisis.
Musicians, medical doctors, workers, homemakers, athletes and architects all had to dedicate themselves to making their own things and meeting the emerging needs of the family, Oroza wrote over email in Spanish. The Cuban home became a laboratory for inventions and survival.
Oroza, who has spent decades collecting, studying and writing about these objects, has a name for the phenomenon: technological disobedience. Cubans, he said, werent deterred by complexity or scale, and they learned to disrespect the authority of objects. That meant rethinking their original purpose and life cycle.
People scoured the city for plastic objects and industrial discards and swiped garbage from city dumpsters, which theyd grind up and inject into molds to make toys, dishes, electrical switches and footwear. The magazine Popular Mechanics was a hot commodity on the island.
Industrial products were tinkered with and examined by hand, Oroza said. Cubans dissected the industrial culture, opening everything up, repairing and altering every type of object.
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How communism turned Cuba into an island of hackers and DIY engineers