How communism turned Cuba into an island of hackers and DIY engineers

How communism turned Cuba into an island of hackers and DIY engineers
BY JENNY MARDER January 7, 2015 at 5:04 PM EST

A fan made from a boat propeller, an old washing machine motor and
welded steel rods in El Gabriel, Cuba. Photo by Edel Rodriguez. See more
photos of Cuban inventions here.

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.

"The Cuban home became a laboratory for inventions and survival."So
Cubans learned to make do. When something breaks, they patch it up. When
something doesn't work, they fix it. And when something is altogether
lost, they invent it. They grill meat on metal chairs. They seal the
bottoms of cars, transforming them into boats. From the suffering of 30
years of isolation has sprung a generation of amateur engineers,
inventors and welders.
"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. "It's 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, weren't 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 they'd 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."

Washing machine motors were especially sought after. With the warm
weather in Cuba, people could do without the dryers. So they found other
uses. These motors powered fans, lawnmowers, shoe repair tools and key
copiers.

They were used to chop vegetables and, below, to shred coconut.

In 1992, The Cuban military issued a book called "Con Nuestros Propios
Esfuerzos" (With Our Own Efforts) that detailed crowdsourced ideas on
manipulating, repairing or reusing everyday objects. Among them was a
recipe to turn grapefruit rind into a "steak" by marinating it with
lemon juice, onion and garlic and frying it up on a pan.

With rations so scarce, much of the average Cuban day is spent hunting
for the basics, said Rodriguez, who has returned several times since he
left to visit family in Cuba.

"You get up at 7 in the morning, and say, 'Where is there bread? Where
do you get milk? Do you know anyone who has this?' There's no food in
the government stores. Everything has to be hustled by connection, by
someone you know or farmers. And most of it can't be had by legal means."

Cars, buses and other transportation vehicles are also scarce, and many
Cubans illegally convert bicycles into makeshift motorcycles called
rikimbilis by attaching small motors. The bikes make a "deafening
noise," Oroza said, and riders seek alternative routes through cities to
avoid traffic police. Large boxes welded to trucks become buses and the
bottoms of old cars are sealed shut and refashioned as boats, used by
defectors.

Parents also reinvent old plastic containers as toys like helicopters,
cars and puppets.

"These are people that live with objects that are always disemboweled,
the electronic guts exposed, while others keep things as if they were
palimpsests, scraped clean of their prior functions," Oroza said. "And
both of these practices essentially lead to a dismantling of the
object's identity."

Source: How communism turned Cuba into an island of hackers and DIY
engineers | PBS NewsHour -
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/isolation-generation-master-inventors-cuba/