According to data from the International Union of Telecommunications, at the closing of December 2014, Cuba was in the 44th position worldwide in the matter of abilities in the use of technologies; however, it is in the 160 position in respect to infrastructure.
While deepening inside on the importance to computerize the Cuban society and place it in the same position of knowledge – promoted after the triumph of the Revolution – the university professor Carlos del Porto explained the country counts on a million graduated of this level, which is a force to make the necessary jump in the development and massive use of the new technologies of informatics and communications (TIC).
Without computerization the contemporaneous society has no sense – explained to Trabajadores Newspaper in the first National Workshop of Computerization and Cyber-Security that was recently held. We cannot talk today of any productive or service process if it is not computerized and we can take as example something so simple like the own house.
“The television, although a Panda model, “is a computer to see a program. If you are lucky to have a microwave, you have a computer that cooks, and if you have a washing machine, more or less of the kind which are the most advanced, you are the owner of a computer that does other things. It means everything is computerized.”
He noted Cuba at present has the knowledge consolidated and it is necessary to use it in the adequate way by computerization, which could make easier the job and the citizens can undergo several procedures. That is a better way of life.
“Why does a specialist of high performance has to fulfil eight hours in a workplace and take a bus if his job can be done at home? The worker of the port cannot do that, but there are jobs that can do it,” Del Porto said.
Full access to technologies
The head of the Automation Center of the General Customs of the Republic, Carlos Anasagasti gives a similar vision of the matter.
“I believe that for the first time, he said, there is a real will to select the process of computerization of the Cuban society which is a matter of urgency. As it was said, there is talent accumulated for years, but they haven’t been able to put them into practice for that purpose.
“It is indispensable that the Cuban citizen has full access to technologies.”
He commented that in the institutional level, Customs, since the end of the 1990s, had bet for that, so today is completely computerized and in conditions – for many years a go – to offer services to other national and international institutions.
In respect to the role of education to achieve this goal, he said they count on the collaboration of the Informatics Sciences University (UCI) that had supported telecommunications, that is to say, give the great masses the best lecturers, professors and didactic materials.
Anasagasti did not skip over the topic of the free software and noted that Customs totally migrated to this platform of open codes, which works on the basis of collaborative principles, which permit give the rest of the users, experiences and possible solutions.
In this sense, they are very important, above all in the course of the normalization of the relations between Cuba and the United States, if we take into consideration the payment of the licenses to several owners of that country for their computer products, like the case of Microsoft.
He informed that in relation to the foundation of the Union of Informatics in Cuba, “it is a debt” with the professionals of this branch, because the society of the 21st century is supported on the TIC.
